Center for Labor Education & Research, University of Hawaii - West Oahu: Honolulu Record Digitization Project
Honolulu Record, Volume 10 No. 2, Thursday, August 15, 1957 p. 1
Sam King failed in Last Minute Effort To Set GOP Writing to Ike
In Hawaii as elsewhere, the full story of an important event is seldom in the headlines of the first 'newspaper that announces it, and sometimes not in the second or the third. The true story must be pieced together, bit by bit, until the whole picture is complete.
Thus bits are still being added to the story of how Sam King left the post of Governor of Hawaii. For instance, now it Is generally known among Republicans that shortly after King got the telephone call from Washington asking him to resign, and after he had submitted his resignation, he called a meeting of party leaders.
The purpose of the meeting was to get a campaign of cables and letters started toward the White House urging President Eisenhower to refuse to accept King's resignation.
Helped King Before
No one knows better than King, of course, what the possibilities of— putting strong, pressure on the present administration in Washington are. A campaign of cables and mail had helped Sam King a lot when he plucked his original appointment virtually out of the hip pocket of Randolph Crossley, the man to whom Ike had promised it. But this time King was out of luck.
The GOP leaders who are friendly to him saw a letter-writing drive for him now, after Ike had asked for his resignation, as being a little harder to achieve than the first such campaign that benefitted King. Besides, one important ally was absent from the King ranks. That was former Delegate to Congress Elizabeth Farrington. Times had changed since King won his position over Crossley with the aid of the late Joseph R. Farrington, then delegate, and his wife.
What changed them especially was the junket to Washington of the whole Legislature of 1955, along with various and sundry other notables. The Farringtons, who had made statehood Joe's chief campaign for years, held King responsible for the junket and believed he either set it up, or could have stopped it And they believed he was just trying to "get into the act" belatedly to make it appear he had a major share in getting statehood.
No one need have worried as it turned out Statehood for Hawaii died as it had so often before But the Farringtons never forgot Sam King, and there are those who say any forgiving Mrs. Farrington may have done was purely lip service.
So it was no great surprise when Bill Quinn, Ike's governor-select, appeared in a picture shortly after being named, receiving the congratulations of Mrs Farrington The ex-delegate is said to have turned her hand in Washington for Quinn and against King to the best of her ability.
But when Secretary of Interior Fred Seaton says there is no split among local Republicans over the appointment of Quinn, the politicos just laugh. Maybe there's no new split, a politico suggested, but the move certainly widened some of the old ones.