WE'RE IN, WE'D LIKE TO SAY

Running true to form, the present delegate to Congress from Hawaii has followed the time-honored custom of introducing a bill to make Hawaii a state. It is an old trick that is extremely useful for getting votes from some of the people back home. But most of the people of Hawaii have no real desire for statehood; full recognition of the present status of the Territory is the only thing desired.

The Islands have long had a heavy axe to grind with some of the gentlemen from Nevada and Iowa, etc., who take up residence periodically in Washington. The Territory particularly resents it when full-blooded Americans start talking about "those American possessions, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Hawaii." The loyal American Islanders have an extreme aversion toward being "possessed," even when the United States is the "possessor," for the same reason that the multi-racial jury in the Fortescue-Massie case was royally irked when Clarence Darrow talked to it "as if we were a group of Middle Western farmers!"

But history will tell any loyal American, Bostonian, Middle-Westerner, or Hawaiian, that the people of Hawaii are being imposed upon when their homeland is called a "possession." It is legally and historically "an integral part of the United States." As a sovereign and independent nation, the Republic of Hawaii joined itself to the United States in 1898. As a Honolulu columnist once said, Hawaii owns the United States just as much as the United States owns Hawaii. Even the island school children feel disgusted when some American minor statesman starts showing himself sufficiently uninformed to consider Hawaii a "possession." "It's a pity," say the school children, "that there aren't more educated men in Congress. We had thought better of our fellow Americans."