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OCTOBER OCTOBER 2007 2007 NEWSLETTER
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JOSEPH BOYD POINDEXTER
Vol. XXIV No. 4
Article was located at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,747540-2,00.html
Hoomalimali Party
Monday, Jul. 23, 1934
There are only two directions in Hawaii—makai, toward the sea, and
mauka, toward the mountains. Last week all Hawaiians were looking
makai. Somewhere below the horizon a sleek grey cruiser was slicing
its way westward through the long swells of the Pacific. Aboard was
the most distinguished visitor to the islands since Explorer-Captain
James Cook first stepped ashore 156 years ago.
To receive the first U. S. President in its territorial history the
"Paradise of the Pacific" was prepared to give Franklin Roosevelt a
royal welcome. Its citizens were planning to put him up at the Royal
Hawaiian Hotel, in the suite occupied three years ago by Siam's good
King Prajadhipok and Queen Rambai Barni. There from his lanai
(veranda) he could look out at the surfboarders and swimmers of
Waikiki Beach. A hundred volunteer guides were eager to show him
the huge fortifications on Diamond Head, the great naval base in landlocked
Pearl Harbor (which he as Assistant Secretary of the Navy
helped develop), a review of troops at the largest U. S. Army post
(Schofield Barracks: 30,000 men). For the asking they would gladly take him fishing for the great a'u
(swordfish) in Kona waters, drive him through Hawaii's fern forests, show him sugar-cane fields,
pineapple plantations, the leper colony, crown him with leis, feed him poi (taro root paste), or entertain
him at a native feast (luau) with straw-skirt ballet.
Races. But aside from the happy excitement of playing host to such a notable stranger for a few days
Hawaiians had another, deeper reason for being interested in the President's coming. Last year he had
tried to take away the territory's cherished right to home-rule, to appoint a mainlander as its Governor.
His ostensible reason was that it was hard to find, as the law required, a good man resident on the
islands. But all the world knew that the President was thinking of the Massie rape & murder case of 1931-
32, of the racial seethings that followed, of the loud squawks of an outraged Navy (TIME, Dec. 28, 1931,
et seq.). By refusal of the Senate to act the President was prevented from carrying out what every resident
of the territory would have considered a gross injustice based on a false premise.
Far from being troubled by race problems, Hawaiians are proud of their islands as a place where 146,000
Japanese, 66,000 Filipinos. 27,000 Chinese, 22,000 Polynesians, 29,000 Portuguese, 7,000 Puerto
Ricans, 45,000 whites and 31,000 mixed breeds all live happily together, intermarry and get along more
peaceably than any other similar mixture in the world.
Balked by Congress in his effort to name a mainland Democrat to a $10,000-a-year job, the President
was in no hurry to appoint a new Governor. Not until he had been in office nearly a year did he finally
pick a successor to Lawrence McCully Judd, descendant of a Yankee medical missionary who went to the
Sandwich Islands a century ago. Then he appointed the next best thing to the kind of man he originally
wanted—a Democrat who had lived on the islands only 17 years.
Governor. Joseph Boyd Poindexter is the son of a California pioneer who became a rancher in
Montana during the '80s. Son Joseph grew up, took to the law, went into politics, became a State judge.
He was Montana's Attorney General in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson made him a Federal judge in Hawaii.
He was a quiet man, some said stubborn, firm and courteous on the bench, not given to expansive talk or
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