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Sweet Leilani Syndrome: The Statehood Movement, Tourism, and Music in 1930s Hawai‘i A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN STUDIES May 2021 By Jesse J. Otto Dissertation Committee: William R. Chapman, Chairperson Elizabeth Colwill Ralph Thomas Kam Brandy Nālani McDougall John P. Rosa i Acknowledgments I am extremely grateful to my amazing committee for guiding me through writing this difficult history while living through a difficult period of history. William R. Chapman, Elizabeth Colwill, Ralph Thomas Kam, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and John P. Rosa each helped prepare me for this work through mentoring me during my time in the PhD program and each made significant contributions to this dissertation. I could not imagine having a kinder, more generous, or more thoughtful committee than this one. I want to thank Iāsona Kaper for transcribing and translating Hawaiian language sources for this project. I want to thank the Department of American Studies for being a wonderful place for me to grow as a human being over the past seven and a half years. I particularly want to thank Karen Kosasa, Director of the Museum Studies Program, for introducing me to the department through her amazing program. I also want to thank the Graduate Program Coordinator, Rumi Yoshida, for her kindness, dedication, and guidance over the years. Finally, I want to thank Jeffrey Tripp, who supervised me in two different GA positions over two and a half years, for being an amazing and inspiring mentor. ii Abstract In 1930s Hawai‘i, the statehood movement allied with the tourism industry to use the music industry to market their causes on a global scale using a fantasy that presented the islands as a feminized and exoticized, yet white-dominated space. White elites had used this fantasy, built on old racist ideas from the US continent, for decades before the 1930s while actively working in many ways to make Hawai‘i into a white space in both reality and the colonial imaginary. A key component of this process was the work of the tourism industry in collaboration with the US continental music industry to replace an island industry and culture innovated largely by Kānaka Maoli with haole musicians and popular styles of music from the US continent. Harry Owens, a haole from the US continent, became the most prominent musician in the process initially as musical director on the internationally popular government funded radio show Hawaii Calls and shortly after through his music being featured in hit motion pictures. Owens’ autobiography, music, TV show, and the movies with which he was associated were built on tourism’s distorted image of the islands. The formulaic nature of these commodities fueled the spread of tourism and pro-statehood messaging as it granted spokespeople like Harry Owens a sense of authenticity and authority that Americans found credible because it conformed to and confirmed their false notions of Hawai‘i and Hawaiian culture and music. Statehood and tourism advocates’ successful use of the music industry brought about profound changes for individual musicians in the islands including new opportunities along with challenges to navigate. The entertainment industry’s use of this fantasy to market Hawai‘i proved so profitable that this fantasy remains the foundation of entertainment industry commodities depicting the islands into the twenty-first century. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………………………….……..i Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…ii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………….……..1 Shaping the Global Perception of Hawai‘i……………………………………………………...1 Tourism, the Music Industry, and their Impacts…………………………………….……..11 Partnership of Tourism and the Music Industry ………………………..…………….…..17 Literature Review on Music and Tourism as Fantasy………………………………….…20 Methods, Methodologies, and Theoretical Frameworks.……………………………..23 Chapter Synopses…………………………………………………………………………………………25 Chapter 1: Mythmaking and the History of Hawai‘i………………………………………………....30 American Racism and Hawai‘i……………………………………………………………………....32 The Emergence of Tourism……………………………………………………………………………42 Transportation, the Built Environment, and Tourism…………………………………….48 Marketing………………………………………………………………………………………………….....61 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………....65 Chapter 2: The Music Industry and Hawaiian Music………………………………………………….67 Hawaiian Music……………………………………………………………………………………………..69 The Music Industry………………………………………………………………………………………..75 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………...103 Chapter 3: The Biography and “Autobiography” of Harry Owens…………………………….105 Early Life and Arrival in the Islands……………………………………………………………….114 The Launching of Hawaii Calls……………………………………………………………………...128 International Superstar…………………………………………………………………………………135 World War II, Television Series, and Tour Guide……………………………………………146 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………….154 Chapter 4: Fantasy and Persona……………………………………………………………………………….156 Harry Owens: The Human Being and the Persona…………………………………………156 “Owens sells romance, Hawaiian style, with superlative effectiveness”………..172 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………….175 Chapter 5: The Aftermath……………………………………………………………………………………..…177 Resistance and Preservation of Culture………………………………………………………..178 Emerging Opportunities for Cultural Preservation and Employment for Kānaka Maoli…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….188 Asians and Asian Americans Navigate Racism……………………………………………….201 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………….205 iv Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..206 Films and Television………………………………………………………………………………………209 Projecting and Obscuring………………………………………………………………………………213 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………....215 1 Introduction By the 1920s and 1930s, tourism had constructed enduring images of Hawaiians as happy-go-lucky beach boys, friendly bus drivers, smiling lei sellers, funny entertainers, or beautiful women performing an exotic and somewhat erotic form of dance-all were part of the heavily marketed image of Hawai‘i. Within these trivialized versions of Hawaiian culture, limited and defined roles existed for Hawaiians as service providers and entertainers. The racial ideology that still excluded Hawaiians from middle- and upper-echelon occupations carved a niche for them in tourism that made profitable use of their culture as well as their labor. —Elizabeth Buck1 Few other parts of the world, and none in the tropics, were as comprehensively marketed as Hawai‘i. None was so strongly marketed through music. —John Connell and Chris Gibson2 Americans think of Hawaii in terms of scenery, pineapple plantations and Pearl Harbor, but mostly in terms of its familiar music…A climax of some kind came in 1937 when Bing Crosby was given a song, already popular in Hawaii, to sing in his movie Waikiki Wedding. The song, Sweet Leilani, written by Harry Owens, soon set the steel guitars wailing and hula performers shaking more than ever, and juke boxes trembled with the tune. —LIFE Magazine3 Shaping the Global Perception of Hawai‘i Since the early twentieth-century rise, the industry has marketed a particular image of Hawai‘i which has come to define the global perception of the islands. This distortion of life in Hawai‘i often depicts the islands as a feminine space open to white domination and presents Kānaka Maoli4 as passive, content people whose primary aspiration is to assist whites. All races 1 Elizabeth Buck Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai'i (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), 173-174. 2 John Connell and Chris Gibson, “No Passport Necessary: Music, Record Covers, and Vicarious Tourism in Post-War Hawai‘i,” The Journal of Pacific History 43, no. 1 (June 2008): 72. 3 “Mainland Knows About Islands’ Scenery and Pineapples, but Mostly Their Music,” LIFE, Feb 22, 1954: 24- 25. 4 Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert define “Kanaka Maoli” as “Hawaiian person.” They explain that kanaka translates as person and kānaka is the plural form of the word. In this dissertation, I use these terms as nouns to identify people who are descended from the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands. I have used the term Native Hawaiian as an adjective for this same group of people. This use has no relation to 2 other than whites and Kānaka Maoli are generally erased from this white supremacist and misogynist fantasy world. Native Hawaiian scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask explains the purposes and impacts of this trope: “To most Americans, then, Hawai‘i is theirs: to use, to take…Above all, Hawai‘i is ‘she,’ the Western image of the Native ‘female’ in her magical allure…The point, of course, is that everything in Hawai‘i can be yours, that is, you the tourist, the non-Native, the visitor.”5 Creating Hawai‘i Tourism, published in 2004, is a case in point. Published by Robert C. Allen, originally from California and the retired president of a tourism company, the book celebrates the history of the tourism industry in Hawai‘i and is packed with photos of white people depicted as heroes for their role in building the industry. The cover features a 1960 photograph, created and disseminated by the Hawai‘i Visitors Bureau to promote tourism, of a young woman named Rose Marie Alvaro.6 A particularly striking piece in this book demonstrates the potency of