| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David E. Stannard . Honor Killing: How the Infamous "Massie Affair" Transformed Hawai'i. New York: Viking. 2005. Pp. ix, 466. $25.95.
In Hawai'i in the 1930s, a tiny, powerful white oligarchy controlled the destinies of the dark-skinned eighty percent majority of native Hawaiians and Asians. Formal annexation by the United States and territorial status had bestowed on the islands not just a lucrative expansion of the Pearl Harbor naval base but southern attitudes of white racial supremacy and a chivalric honor code absent in nineteenth century island life. In Honolulu, oligarchy families resided in gracious homes in Mānoa Valley alongside military officers and their families accorded haole elite status. Those they ruled lived in urban slums and tenements known as Hell's Half Acre—only four miles away from lush Mānoa. A growing tourist industry featured multihued "people of paradise" and their "spirit of aloha" and left unmentioned that they lived "under the authoritarian rule of an openly white supremacist oligarchy" (p. 1).	1
The oligarchy was unseated after World War II by the Democratic Revolution of 1954. Subsequent histories have tended to present that change as chiefly brought about by labor's success at organizing across ethnic lines and by the heroic wartime record of Nisei Japanese Americans and their allies who achieved statehood in 1959 and ethnically shared governance. Conversely, David E. Stannard argues convincingly that the first meaningful inroad against the oligarchy actually occurred in the Massie case. The heroism of a few brave men of various racial and ethnic backgrounds and a Hawaiian princess who wanted to help her people confronted some of the most powerful forces in the United States and effected a turnaround in a "connected series of racially charged events—a white woman's allegation that she had been raped by a gang of native men, a kidnapping, a murder, and two sensational criminal trials that together focused the world's attention on justice in Hawai'i in 1931 and 1932" (p. 3).	2
Stannard's eloquent narrative recounts how young Thalia Fortescue Massie, wife of Kentuckian Thomas Massie, U.S. Naval Academy graduate and submarine officer, wandered away from a Saturday night drinking party in Waikīkī and, she alleged, was grabbed by five or six Hawaiian men who dragged her to their car and beat and raped her. She got away and called her husband, famously saying, "Something awful has happened." Meanwhile, police picked up five local men in a traffic altercation several miles away who were also out drinking that night. The police stopped looking for other suspects.	3
A "Rush to Judgment" (p. 93) by those in power lined up behind those they considered to be refined and cultured and against the five accused described as "lust-sodden beasts" and "devils" (pp. 197–202). A manufactured crime wave whipped up island and national hysteria over dozens of supposed rapes by marauding gangs of dark-skinned men roaming the streets of Honolulu looking for white victims. Admiral Yates Stirling, a southerner and top military official in the islands, urged military personnel to take the law into their own hands. Only the Japanese-English Hawaii Hochi newspaper warned that the men might be innocent. Associated Press editors voted the Massie case one of the top world news events of the year.	. . .

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