Overview

As the forward base and staging area for all US military operations in the Pacific during World War II, Hawaii was the ""first strange place"" for close to a million soldiers, sailors and marines on their way to the horrors of war. But Hawaii was also the first strange place on another kind of journey, toward the new American society that would begin to emerge in the post-war era. Unlike the rigid and static social order of pre-war America, this was to be a highly mobile and volatile society of mixed racial and cultural influences, one above all in which women and minorities would increasingly demand and receive equal status. Drawing on documents, diaries, memoirs and interviews, Beth Bailey and David Farber show how these unprecedented changes were tested and explored in the highly charged environment of wartime Hawaii.

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9780801848674

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Reviews

The First Strange Place is in the great tradition of oral history and yet it makes marvelous use of archival records-I was reminded both of Studs Terkel's sensitive ear and of Shelby Foote's sweeping vision. Boston Globe

Thoughtful, low-key survey of WW II Hawaii - the first strange place for almost a million US soldiers, sailors, and Marines. After an obligatory Day of Infamy prologue, Bailey and Farber (both American History/Barnard College) take a look at pre-WW II America, an innocent and provincial nation not yet homogenized by TV or hardened by modern war, and one in which future soldiers from Kansas, Georgia, and New York could barely understand one other. The authors then discuss the Hawaii of that time, an isolated, colonial territory dominated by a white oligarchy and five large companies, but with - as the resourceful Mabel Thomas, proprietor of the era's Malahuai dance palace, noted - Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Spanish, Javanese, [and] Malayan women mixing it up on the dance floor. The onslaught of mainland soldiery into this melting pot created a potent situation, with tens of thousands of male war-workers, most of them living in vast barracks, forming lines around the block leading to whorehouses (supported as a necessity by the local elite) that stank of sweat, cigarettes, and disinfectant, while surrounding them stood the fragile local culture. Bailey and Farber don't catch the ear as Somerset Maugham did in describing South Seas life, or as James Jones did in detailing the ways of WW II soldiers; nor do they have the epic narrative line of some other recent WW II histories like George Feller's Tennozan (p. 368). What they do create here, supported by quotations from diaries and letters of the time, is a sense of a vast, restless bus terminal where no one is at home or at ease, populated by men itchy with testosterone, fear, and disorientation as their boundaries and expectations are violated - especially true in the case of southern whites. An engaging study, shedding relevant historical light on today's multiethnic America. (Kirkus Reviews)

'The First Strange Place' is in the great tradition of oral history and yet it makes marvelous use of archival records--I was reminded both of Studs Terkel's sensitive ear and of Shelby Foote's sweeping vision. --'Boston Globe' A fascinating, startling, and wise book. It will now be impossible to tell the story of the modern civil rights struggle or of the women's movement without seeking to understand the anxieties that flourished on Hawaii after Pearl Harbor. --Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa. Packed with rich sources, complex ideas, and some amusing lines--and written with writers' craft as well as historians' insight--this book is an excellent example of both new and traditional history. --Natsuki Aruga, Saitama University, Japan. A model of multicultural history--imaginatively researched, interpreted with discernment, and gracefully written. --Harvard Sitkoff, University of New Hampshire.

Author Information

Beth Bailey teaches American history and is the director of American Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of From the Front Porch to the Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. David Farber teaches American history at barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Chicago '68 and The Age of Great Dreams: American in the 1960s.

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