The other day I heard a few businessmen discussing the question that poverty results from the ignorance of the mass of the people. In the same breath, they were saying that unemployment is due to laziness of the thousands of jobless.
I have heard this lie repeated over and over again, but still it was equally or more shocking when I listened to the discussion. I am of the generation that graduated from high school and searched for unavailable jobs in the early years of the depression. The recession and unemployment of the year preceding the Korean war was not caused by ignorance or laziness of the masses, either.
After Wall Street went into a tail-spin and crashed in 1929 during Herbert Hoover's regime, Franklin D. Roosevelt's government brought some semblance of decency to the begging and starving millions through several Federal aid projects. Business had failed and the administration stepped in to shore up the economy.
I was one of the millions who received government aid. As a WPA worker on a road job, I became more interested in the national administration which put up project signs everywhere. My experience then was the experience of millions who received progressive education through the pronouncements and activities of the Roosevelt administration.
When the NRA signs were put up, we heard that employers had to pay a certain minimum to employes. Plantation laborers at Pahoa, Puna, where I then lived, were receiving small pay and those of us who began to work on WPA projects did better than they did. Some young boys out of high school who went to work in the sugar cane fields wanted to work with us, but I believe that the company manager at Pahoa would have frowned upon such a step. It certainly would have brought discontent among the younger element
Housing Was a Plantation Weapon
Although I did not realize the significance of the plantation housing system then, I noticed that the Portuguese, Filipinos and Japanese were generally housed separately. I was to learn later that housing was a weapon used by the companies to keep laborers in line and to keep them divided. As a part-time worker in a Pahoa general merchandise store, I delivered groceries to the camps. I found that the Filipino camps were the most dilapidated. The Filipinos were newcomers, compared to the Portuguese and Japanese, and thus were subjected to the worst conditions.
At the store, I frequently told the Filipino laborers that they would be afflicted with "night eyes" if they stringently economized on food during slack seasons. In Kona, where I was born, we had neighbors who could not see after nightfall. We were told that these people had denied themselves nourishment during their contract labor period on the plantations, scrimping and saving on about $10 a month pay in order to return to Japan with some money.
Conditions Had Improved In 40 Years
The days of indentured servitude of my parents were days of blacksnake whips. Conditions had improved in three to four decades but they still were not good. The laborers were no longer bonded slaves or treated as such. They could leave the plantations if they wanted to.
I used to tell the Filipinos with whom I became intimate that in Kona we had Japanese neighbors who had two names. These men had. escaped from sugar plantations during their contract labor days and had taken refuge in the district which was relatively more isolated. There, under a new name, they leased land and cleared land thickly covered with guava, lantana and keawe and planted coffee.
Bees, Centipedes and Scorpions Kept Us Company
After two years at Pahoa I returned to Kona to work for the coffee company which held the mortgage on our farm. With a few boys my age I pulped and dried coffee down on the beach near Kealakekua Bay. All day long we worked under the sun, naked except for the shorts we wore. We drank gallons of water which flowed out of our pores. When the hard day's labor ended we jumped into the cool ocean. After supper we visited the Hawaiian village and often heard tales of old Hawaii which were packed full of superstition.
We slept in a small room above the pulping machine. The cracks in the plank walls and floor helped the ventilation. Small larvae from coffee berries snapped and twisted on the flooring outside us and came into our room. Bees, centipedes and scorpions kept us company in bed and when one of us got stung, we groped in the dark, swearing as we searched for match and lantern.
We Were Young and Rugged
The juicy pulp from the coffee berries rotted below our small shutter window. Large green flies swarmed over the stinking and rotting heap during the day. At night large maggots made millions of snapping sounds that made us imagine that by morning they would have eaten up the whole pile.
We were young and rugged and enjoyed the life in a fashion. We cooked canned corned beef with cabbages or onions almost every day and stuffed ourselves with rice. Catsup was a delicacy and we poured this over our rice. Between bites we chased away stubborn flies and wiped the dripping perspiration. We were paid wages and in Kona, where farmers were poor and there were almost no openings for jobs besides farm work, we considered ourselves fortunate.
The Company Offers Me a Job
One day while I was visiting home, the manager of the coffee company came to see mother and me. He offered me a job to drive truck, clerk in the store and oversee a section of the mortgaged farms. He proposed that half of my $50 monthly wages go towards paying for our groceries.
Mother argued that since our farm was mortgaged and we were getting credit like any other farmer, why should my wages be taken in such a manner? She said that in sharecropping, the food allowance should come out of the farm. "We will clear our debt when the coffee price rises," she said. The manager said that we should do everything to pay the farm debt. Mother argued that it was unfair to take my wages to pay the farm debt which had accumulated because of a slump in the coffee price, overcharge of groceries, household needs and farm supplies by the company store, and high interest rate.
The Farmer Was Suspected of Selling Fertilizer
I worked for the coffee company for a few years. I will not repeat what I have written earlier about farmers bootlegging the coffee they produced in order to obtain cash, because under the mortgage, the company took everything. When I caught the farmers in the act I just warned them and never turned them in, because we were forced to do the same.
One day I was asked by the manager to talk to one of the farmers who was suspected of selling fertilizer which the company had supplied him on credit. He told me that he had used every bag of fertilizer on his farm and this I reported back. But I knew as I observed his farm that the amount of fertilizer he had spread under his coffee trees was smaller than what it should have been.
The Father Fulfilled His Promise
On special occasions, farmers' wives asked me for rare delicacies such as canned asparagus or canned fruits which the store did not give on credit to the poorer farmers. There was a Japanese farmer who had many small children and everyone knew that the company's grocery allowance was insufficient. He frequently asked me to let him buy a few dollars beyond his allowance.
Highly embarrassed, he asked me one day to let him have a can of asparagus and a jar of mayonnaise.
"It is for my 12-year-old son," he said. "It is for his birthday. He worked so hard during the harvest that I had to promise him something he liked."
I wrote his order down in my order book. He smiled and his tears began to flow. He was a father who was able to fulfill his promise. His little children, who stood by us, stared at their father, who was wiping his tears.
Mother Returns To the Plantation Environment
Experiences like these made me want to leave Kona. On our farm we were not doing well. I discussed the happenings of the day with mother and she always said that people must help each other. As months passed, brother and I tried to convince mother that we should quit our farm. She always opposed strenuously.
About this time many of the bright and gifted companions of my school days were settling down on their parents' farms, giving up hope of advancing themselves elsewhere. They saw that opportunities were limited.
We boys asked mother to give us the opportunity of finding work outside of Kona. She finally agreed although the decision to leave the farm must have hurt her deeply. I left for Honolulu and mother, with brother, returned to the plantation environment where she and father had worked nearly 40 years before.