There was an air of excitement among the well-wishers and onlookers at the Honolulu harbor on that day, giving it a more than usual air of festivity. Yes, that day, December 20, 1906, was in the middle of the Christmas season, and the harbor was bedecked with the usual Christmas decorations. And yes, the dockhands were in a merry mood, awaiting the SS Doric, just now appearing on the distant horizon, and eager to start their task of unloading cargo from different points in the Far East . And there was the usual group of family members, eagerly awaiting their returning sailor boys, who had been on the Doric for months.
But the crowd of curious onlookers that day was far bigger than usual. World had spread that this ship was carrying "a new breed, a new race, a new generation" of young men who would now share the burden of being sugar plantation workers in the fields of Hawaii .
"Who are they, Daddy?" a young boy was overhead asking his father about these new arrivals/
"They are from Philippines , son-a country very far way, and they call themselves Filipinos," the father explained. Then he went on, boastfully, "Actually I have seen some of them before. I will never forget one night when I was about your age listening to a concert by a traveling Philippine Constabulary Band-they were very good; four of them even stayed over and joined our Royal Hawaiian Band! And then two years ago, there was that frightful report about two Philippine savages who got off a boat going to the St. Louis Exposition as exhibits of Philippine primitive life; they terrified the harbor here before they were persuaded to go back to their ship."
"So. are we expecting musicians or savages, Dad?"
"Don't know, son; that's why we are here-to have a closer look-see."
A little further back from the father-son team, sitting comfortably in the shade in their white drilled suits, disguising as well as they could their intense interest in this arriving ship, was a group whose motive was far more than mere curiosity. They were representatives of the absolute commercial powers of Hawaii , known as the Big Five (Theo Davies, Alexander and Baldwin, Castle and Cooke, American Factors, and Brewer and Company), who collectively controlled the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association (HSPA) and most of Hawaii 's total economy. At that time, sugar exports accounted for $34 million out of the total $35 million dollars leaving Hawaii . These suits were talking to a burly and well-tanned American.
"Well, Royal, do you think this will mark a new chapter in our search for good labor?" the representative of Theo Davis asked, well aware that labor constituted fully half of production costs of sugar.
"Well, sir, I hope so," answered Royal Meade, HPSA's labor director. "It will certainly provide more men, and a healthy counterfoil to those pesky Japs, who are thinking union and strikes because they are such a large percentage of the labor force."
"I hear our man from the Philippines was to too successful in bringing back the 300 he was hoping to recruit."
"Sadly, that is true sir. They had up to twenty-five, but the last ten never made it to the pier on time. So now Albert Judd has bought back only 15 men. Oh, excuse me sirs, I see them starting to disembark, I must go up and meet them."
With that Royal bound off to board the ship, waving at the portly man at the deck whom he recognized to be Albert Judd.
On board ship, Albert Judd was overwhelmed with a flood of emotions. He was certainly glad to be back on friendly and comfortable Hawaii shores, after a grueling six-month trip. He had left Honolulu on the American Maru on April 21 that year, full of optimism and confidence at having been selected by the Big Five to recruit 300 families from the Philippines . Little did he know then how complex a task that would be.
He had arrived in the Philippines in the sweltering heat of the humid tropical summer, and first tried to settle in the mingle with the 6000 or so Americans (who had settled there) expatriated there. Many of them were ex soldiers who had started lucrative businesses, and had fascinating stories of their quite days of combat during the Philippine-American war. It was a bitter war, they reminded him, and a crazy war too. We came over, they said, to liberate the Philippines from Spain , and found that they had already pretty much done their own work except for the naval side, for which Dewey was a great help, but when Spain left we decided to just stay and be the new bosses. Hundreds of thousands gave their lives in that war, but with the superiority of our Americana arms, with the capture of the Philippine revolutionary leader and their President, Emilio Aguinaldo, and with the consequent switch of American policy to a "pacification like Iraq campaign," things became much more peaceful, and for some of us, much more lucrative. With the 1904 victory of Theodore Roosevelt's Republican Party and the creation of a Philippine Commission in Manila, headed by William Howard Taft, the upper class Filipinos saw the prudence and wisdom of working harmoniously with their new colonial masters, whom they thought easier to deal with and more democratic than the Spaniards anyway.
Realizing that he had to keep the Philippine Commission, after all, it was on his side for his delicate task of emigrating labor from there, Albert Judd immediately set out to make an appointment with William Howard Taft. It was not easy as it seemed at first. The Taft Commission had just left for an inspection tour of the Philippines , and would not be back for several weeks. When official (or members) finally got back, they were occupied with pending matters that could not be resolved in their absence, and so it was not until July that Judd finally had a chance to see Taft. To his relief, Judd found that Taft was not averse to the idea. Taft believed that it would not be wise to restrict those who voluntarily wanted to sign up for labor in Hawaii , but he was concerned about their protection and welfare. At the next executive session of the Commission, on July 23, they granted Judd the authority to recruit sacadas (plantation workers) on behalf of the Secretary of Commerce, and to allo HSPA-chartered vessels to dock at the Philippine ports for this purpose. To protect the laborers, they also dug up from the files of HSPA their model agreements, stipulating free passage, three years' employment, and prescribed wages (somewhat lower that those offered laborers from earlier recruits from other countries; this provision had gone curiously unnoticed). These were translated into Ilocano, and given to Judd for signature and agreements of those concerned.
And so Judd finally went into about his task of recruiting, which took him another three months. Because he was a gentrified Hawaiian, not familiar with the Philippines, he was greatly assisted by a much more experienced hand, George Wagner, formerly with the Honolulu Aiea plantation, but now in the Philippines for several years with public works projects for Lod and Belser, and used to hiring Filipino labor outside the Manila area, especially in the Ilocos region.
It was in fact from that northern region of the Philippines , Ilocos, that Wagner and Judd eventually came up with the 25, and then finally fifteen volunteers that constituted the first wave of immigrants who were on board the SS Doric that day of Decemer 20, 1906 at the Honolulu harbor.
The crowd of onlookers huddled up to take a closer look as the fifteen short but spry Filipino workers came off the gangplank, one of them holding his prize fighting cock. Royal Meade quickly dispatched a guard to take complicate offending cock, whose protesting owner was appeased only when told somehow that he would get it back after fumigation and inspection. But Royal was not displeased with the look of the others; they were smaller than he expected, but their deep tans and their calloused hands, and their upright bearing after a long sea voyage, his instinct told him they would be good workers of the deep tans. He would have to consult Judd on this some more. He eventually found out that they were not only from the same region, they knew each other, and in many cases were related; there was a father with his four sons, two sets of brothers, a few bachelors, but not women.
The Filipinos did not have much a chance to get to know the city of Honolulu, as Meade immediately checked them into a Japanese hotel on Beretania Street, then bundled them off early the next morning on to the inter-island steamer that bought them to their final destination, the Olaa plantation on the Big Island, where a tiny camp beside the Japanese laborers had been set up for them.
There they immediately fell into the routine of the sakad, 12-hour workdays, starting 6a.m. with a one-hour lunch break, for a base wage of $1 or less a day, on a 26-workday month. It was backbreaking work, hauling freshly cut canes that bruised and cut deep into festering scratches on hands, face and ears, but it had to be done, as families in Ilocos were waiting for whatever sparse savings they could send back home.
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Back in the Philippines , Wagner continued his recruitment task in the same area of Canada in the Ilocos where the original 15 had com from. He had asked some of the fifteen to return to the Ilocos to tell of tales of the new promised land, the increased wages, and the opportunities that lay there, they were the best recruiters for this task. In fact, Simplicio Gironella, the father of the four boys with his youngest son did return to assist in recruitment. The effort was quite productive and soon subsequent batches of laborers came in a succession of ships from the Philippines .
Even before the arrival of the Gironellas, Wagner had succeeded int dispatching another 30 to Hawaii, including two women for the first time, and the Gironella tour of neighboring Ilocos towns resulted in a third group of 43. Thus did the first wave of Filipino sakadas for the Hawaii sugar plantation begin.
Though no official groups came in 1907-1908, the migration of Filipino laborers started to grow by leaps and bounds the following year. By then money and gifts and stories had started to trickle in about the life of the workers in Hawaii, many of them somewhat glorified, but it proved an irresistible fascination and an escape outlet for much of the regions of the Ilocos and the Visayas, where life was becoming increasing harder, with barren lands in the north, wages far lower than even those in Hawaii, and usurers and tax and church collectors taking away what little framers could earn. The HSPA, sensing this opportunity, stepped up their recruitment efforts in earnest, setting up recruiting offices in Manila and sending recruitment teams to different areas, eventually branching out to Cebu, Iloilo , Capiz, Negros Oriental, and in many Ilocos towns. During that first year of intensified campaigning, in 1909, 639 Filipinos arrived in Hawaii . Over the years this trend continued to escalate, so that by the end of the tenth year, 20,000 Filipinos had joined the bandwagon.
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Between 1916 and 1929, 70,000.00 additional Filipinos emigrated to Hawaii , about two-thirds from the Ilocos region. This had the effect of significantly changing the ethnic labor balance on the plantations: In 1915, Filipinos comprised only 19% of the work force, and the Japanese 54%. By 1930, Japanese were only 19% and the Filipino force had swelled to 70%, marking a real shift in the HSPA concern about labor and labor movements. Not all of the Filipinos, of course, settled permanently. Some returned to the Philippines, several thousand followed their Japanese and Puerto Rican predecessors and migrated to California, some even moved to the higher paying pineapple plantations, but a good number settled down to the life of a sugar plantation laborer.
The first waves of Filipino immigrants were at first not too taken up with Japanese solicitations for join their labor unions. Differences in language and culture, to the relief of HSPA management, did not make for a quick merging a common cause. Subsequent incoming groups of Filipinos, however, with higher expectations of plantation life, were more perceptive of inequities and unfair conditions, and soon began Filipino labor movements of their own as their numbers and percentages increased. The first organizer of Filipino labor of note, Pablo Manlapit, organized the Filipino Labor Union for Filipino Federation of Labor in 1920, raised the first Filipino labor banner and waged the first Filipino labor strike. In a first foray collaborating with the Japanese unions in Oahu , twelve thousand Filipino and Japanese workers were evicted. Manlapit was exiled, and 16 strikers and 4 policemen died in the strike in Hanapepe, Kauai . This did not bode for a good beginning. But Manlapit returned years later, in 1932, to reconstitute his forces, and slowly replanted the seeds of unionism, which did not reach full flower until after World War II, with the arrival of the international union, the IWLU ( International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union), which then became the enduring bastion of Hawaii labor in the years to come.
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The first major wave of Filipino immigration to he sugar fields of Hawaii started to lose steam with the after-effects was felt on the islands of the Great Depression of 1929. In fact winning stopped coming few years later. Developments in the Philippines and the untiring lobbying efforts of the Philippine leadership both in Manila and in Washington finally led the United States Congress to pass the Tydings McDuffie Independence Act, which established a Commonwealth of the Philippines and included a promise of a transition period of ten years, after which the U.S. "would withdraw all rights of possession," and set "a date for the inauguration of the new government." Curiously, during the transition period, the Filipinos were already to be considered residents of a separate nation, and classified as aliens, denying them the right to emigrate freely to the United States , except for a quota of 50, as granted to other foreign countries. Only with much lobbying by the HSPA lobbyists in Washington were they able to secure an exemption clause to this quota "to be determined by the Department of the Interior on the basis of the needs of industries in the territory of Hawaii ."
In actuality, this clause was never invoked by HSPA in the next few years, as constricting economic conditions did not warrant it, and the Philippine labor force continued to suffice for most of their needs. With the new status, however, a reconstituted Filipino-Hawaiian community began to form. They were now no longer transient migrants but immigrants, and they started looking at Hawaii as home. Plantations improved living conditions and houses, provided theaters and clubhouses, Filipino-Hawaiian resolved to settle their lives in a more permanent environment. By 1935 there were eight Filipino newspapers, 29 Filipino churches, and 34 small businesses in Honolulu .
World War II turned out to be a dramatic turning point in the history of Hawaii and all the ethnic groups who lived in it. The war itself ushered in a terrible period for Japanese-Americans, and the brutal suppression of labor movements under a strict martial law regime. After the war, the political life of the islands took on a vigorous social non-haloed character that gradually but irrevocably eroded the monolithic control of the Big Five and gave way to a rising middle class with Japanese as its main force. Democrats took over control from the Republicans in 1950, and the IWLU, in an alliance with them, brought labor unions back to full strength. Negotiations were underway to make Hawaii the 50 th state.
Back in the Philippines , the US made good on its promise and "granted" the Philippines its independence on July 4, 1946. In a hurry to take advantage of their exemption clause before it was too late, the HSPA asked the Department of the Interior to authorize the immigration of 6000 Filipino laborers to meet increasing demand, and hopefully to bring in fresh blood in that was as yet untainted by labor union posturing. Thus started a second wave of Filipinos coming to Hawaii . This was further facilitated by a new law allowing the entrance of professionals, and by the new citizenship act giving long time residents citizen status-resulting in the fact that the new citizens could now legally petition for their next of kin to enter the United States, within the quota system.
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In retrospect, this second wave was the smallest of the three waves, dwarfed in 1965 by the impact of the 1965 Act abolished the national origin quota system that had discriminated against Asian countries, and the Philippine quota increased from the 50 in 1934, and the 6000 in 1046, to a quota of 20,000 per year. Filipino in Hawaii grabbed the opportunity quickly, invoking their right to petition for their next of kin without significant quotas, and the third wave began. Between 1970 and 1976, 27,000 Filipinos were admitted as immigrant aliens or permanent residents, and to this day Filipinos represent over one half of all admitted immigrants into the State.
Of course by then the sugar plantations of Hawaii had come to be less dominant in its economic life, and Filipinos soon found themselves leaving the plantations for jobs as drivers, public works laborers, and service providers in the fast growing tourism industry. In corresponding fashion, the nature, sophistication and educational levels of entering Filipino immigrants since the 1970s started to change drastically.
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Clem, take over. The next forty, but more complicated, years, are yours.
