Fighting in Paradise

In the 1930s charismatic union leader Harry Bridges dispatched International Longshore and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) representatives to Hawai'i to organize plantation and dock laborers. Bridges and the ILWU were stunned by the feudal conditions they found in Hawai'i, where the majority of workers-Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino in origin-were routinely subjected to repression and racism at the hands of white bosses. The bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the subsequent wartime civil liberties crackdown brought union organizing to a halt; but as the war wound down, Hawai'i workers' frustrations boiled over, leading to an explosive success in the forming of unions. During the 1950s, just as the ILWU began a series of successful strikes and organizing drives, the union came under McCarthyite attacks and persecution. Hawai'i's broad social welfare system (the most extensive in the nation) and the continuing power of unions to shape the state politically are a direct result of those troubled times. Based on exhaustive archival research in Hawai'i, California, Washington, and elsewhere, Gerald Horne's gripping story of Hawai'i workers' struggle to unionize reads like a suspense novel as it details for the first time how radicalism and racism helped shape Hawai'i in the twentieth century-and coincidentally the current U.S. president, Barack Obama, who was born and spent much of his youth in the 50th State.