Eighty years ago this fall, America was electrified by a heinous story of hatred and paranoia--the basics of any racist narrative--doled out with ironically savage brutality. According to scholar David Stannard, what America missed was an impervious dignity that the lynch mob could not squash:
First there are the accused [of rape] men themselves. Horace Ida, Joseph Kahahawai, Henry Chang, David Takai, and Benjamin Ahakuelo. One of them was nearly beaten to death. Another was kidnapped, then shot and killed with a single bullet to his heart. All of them endured months of vicious defamation in the press and the threat of lengthy imprisonment for a crime they did not commit. And police and prosecutors tried all the usual tactics — including individual offers of immunity if one would inform on the others — and some that were not so usual, such as pitting the men against one another racially. Despite the threats and enticements, none of them ever budged from their insistence that they had done nothing wrong.
It's the loneliest feeling in the world to find yourself standing up when everyone else is sitting down -- Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee's Inherit the Wind, 1955.
In our youths, many of us learned of trial-lawyer Clarence Darrow through his defense of a biology teacher from creationist attack in the era-defining Monkey Scopes Trial. Subsequent theatre and film popularized Scopes. Yet Darrow's last trial is quite worthy of inclusion in our textbooks, too.
The year was 1932. Darrow was 68-years old and ruined financially by the tsunami of the Great Depression when he sailed to Hawaii as a defense lawyer. His clients: Grace Hubbard Fortescue, Edward J. Lord, Deacon Jones, and Fortescue's son-in-law Thomas Massie. The charge was the kidnapping and (retaliatory) murder of an ethnic Hawaiian named Joseph Kahahawai. Allegedly, Kahahawai and others beat and raped Massie's wife, Thalia Massie.
Who were the 1932 defendants? If the name Grace Fortescue sounds pretty blue blood, it's because it is--she was a socialite in Washington, D.C. Her family invested in Alexander Graham Bell's work and her husband joined Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the infamous, 1898, imperial campaign in Cuba. Appropriately, her daughter married a graduate of the US Naval Academy at 16-years of age. Common for whites in Hawaii ("haole" being the Hawaiian term) at the time and even today, the three male defendants were in the employ of the navy and based out of Pearl Harbor, several miles west of then-Honolulu proper.
...Hawaii was still a territory, needed of the Hawaiian people principally for commodities like sugarcane and cattle--statehood came a generation later, in 1959.
Backstory
There are seperate trials embedded within this larger story:
- -- Territory of Hawaii v. Ben Ahakuelo et al. 1931 rape trial. dfnts: Horace Ida, Joseph Kahahawai, Henry Chang, David Takai, Benjamin Ahakuelo
- -- Territory of Hawaii v. Grace Fortescue, et al. 1932 murder trial. dfnts: Fortescue, Massie, Lord and Jones
--nulwee
From American studies scholar, and author of American Holocaust, David Stannard:
"The Massie case" remains the most notorious criminal incident in the modern history of Hawai'i. Associated Press editors in 1932 voted it, along with the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the biggest criminal case in the country.
According to the now-consolidated Honolulu Advertiser, the case revealed a "society fraught with racial tension and unspoken boundaries of class and place."
On Sept. 12, 1931, Thomas and 20-year old Thalia Massie partied at a Waikiki nightclub called the Ala Wai Inn, which takes its name from the river separating Waikiki resorts from the rest of Honolulu. Saturday night was 'Navy night' at Ala Wai. After disappearing for several hours, it turned out Thalia had been beaten and her jaw broken twice. Her statement to the police indicated that she had been taken by car about a half mile away to Ala Moana Park, where allegedly Massie's kidnappers raped her.
Territory of Hawaii v. Ben Ahakuelo et al
The police arrested Ida, Kahahawai, Chang, Takai and Ahakuelo. When the police came for Ida he'd figured it was over his car accident two hours prior on King Street, one of the main west-east roads in Honolulu. Thalia Massie claimed to recognize one of the men as the driver of the rape car. A trial was set. Media-fueled outrage--the conquest of a white woman by brown people--took over. Stannard:
Thalia Massie was never named in the city's major newspapers, but the five suspects were, and also were called "thugs," "fiends" and "gangsters."
The five accused in the 1931 rape case obtained three lawyers, Chinese-Hawaiian William Heen, Robert Murakami, Japanese, educated at the University of Chicago, and William Pitt, a haole from Mississippi. None of the lawyers took compensation and risked their professional standing in the turmoil that ensued.
After three weeks the jury was hung. Complicating the seemingly contrary evidence that Kahahawai, Ida, Ahakuelo, Takia and Chang were too far from the rape scene at the time-alleged, up on Beretania Street, was that they were involved in a car accident and beating of Hawaiian lady Agnes Peeples. Only a flimsy veneer of synchronicity: there was no serious evidence that the accused had ever been near Massie, at one point heading to a party on the opposite side of Honolulu.
This rare unwillingness of the facts to conform to the race hierarchy's narrative was the exception to the rule in American law. It's doubtful that Massie was raped, and more probable that a white sailor beat her near the Ala Wai Inn.
Another trial impended.
In Grace Fortescue's mind, the law had failed her family. After leaving the east coast for Hawaii, together with Thomas Massie and the two sailors Jones and Lord they took the law into their own hands.
The Near-Killing of Ida, Kidnapping and Murder
Horace Ida was seized upon by a car full of white sailors, and, according to Stannard, Ida was: "beaten, clubbed, and whipped with leather belts." Shortly after came the lynching of Joseph Kahahawai.
In 1966, Peter Van Slingerland interviewed Deacon Jones about the Fortescue-Massie plot:
Q: Now, was the plan to bring Kahahawai back to Mrs. Fortescue's to get him to confess?
A: Well, that's what Tommie thought he could do.
Q: Did someone else, Mrs. Fortescue, for example, have some other idea?
A: I don't know. I guess she was like the other two of us, Eddie and me. She had a lot on the ball. She's a pretty smooth woman, you know. But I think the main idea was the psychological effect of the three of us firing questions at this kanaka [Hawaiian].
That night, police stopped the four as they were driving an automobile east of Honolulu to Koko Head crater. Wrapped in a sheet on the back seat lay a bloody, naked corpse--Joseph Kahahawai.
Jones: no regrets about killing Kahahawai
Q: After you had time to think it over, how did you feel about the killing?
A: I can't say I shed any tears.
Q: You weren't upset?
A: No, I can't say I was. In fact, I slept very good that night.
Q: What night?
A: That night I was in the pokey.
As done to American Indians, it was already common for haoles to refer to ethnic Hawaiians as 'niggers' in those days.
Territory of Hawaii v. Grace Fortescue, et al.
A rich woman, Grace Fortescue hired the famous Clarence Darrow to defend the quartet. In an irony of history, the great defender of the defenseless had just accomplished something nearly impossible: an acquittal of murder charges for an accused black man, named Ossian Sweet, by an all-white jury in Detroit. Now, Darrow would defend clients who blatantly lynched a man in retaliation for a crime not done, even staining his own legacy with unfortunate, racially-divisive remarks. However, the Sweet trial had exhausted Darrow's resources--he needed the money bad. According to David Stannard, Darrow's compensation for defending the Massie Gang totaled around $400,000 by today's value.
Jack Kelley was the fresh lawyer prosecuting. He parried Darrow through the whole murder trial. But initially the grand jury--19 of 21 of them white--did not indict despite insurmountable evidence. Kelley argued the defense represented the "serpent of lynch law," and that the nation would be affected in whole by this verdict. That was only part of the pressure.
If you thought there was strain on the Scopes jury to deliver a righteous verdict, well, the 1932 Massie jurors had it doubly so during yet another case which rocked America. Again, Stannard:
Few juries have ever been under as much pressure as this one. On the one hand, there was no doubt that the four accused defendants had killed Joseph Kahahawai. On the other hand, there was equally little doubt that a conviction would bring, at the very least, what was called a "commission" form of government to Hawai'i, an arrangement only one step short of martial law. Congress and the American press had openly warned of such a consequence, and even prosecutor Kelley — while appealing to the jury for a verdict of guilty — admitted that a fair and honorable decision by them could mean the end of civilian rule in the Islands.
In turn, the jurors were employed by Oahu's major, colonial corporations and US Navy. Implicitly lay the full backing of the navy with the defendants, even though Joseph Kahahawai had been a National Guardsman.
Despicably, Darrow argued the murder was an "honor killing" and a bout of insanity on Thomas Massie's part, who conveniently accepted most responsibility for Kahahawai's murder. Darrow's final statement ever as a lawyer clocked in at 4 hours but failed ultimately in insulating the accused from punishment. A smaller, more diverse jury of locals convicted the group of manslaughter--not murder.
"Obviously they [the grand jury] do not think as we do... a jury of white men would have acquitted" -- Clarence Darrow
A great, bubbling sympathy swelled up in the US... for lynchers.
Outpouring demands flowed like a river into Washington, D.C. and the territory.
Wikipedia:
After a flurry of diplomatic maneuvering between Washington, DC and Honolulu, martial law was avoided. Instead, under pressure from the Navy, Territorial Governor Lawrence M. Judd commuted the 10-year sentences of the convicted killers to one hour, to be served in his office.
Fortescue, the Massies and Darrow set sail from Honolulu, disappearing into the sunset.
As I wrote in a previous diary, President Franklin Roosevelt would strike down anti-lynching provisions of the Wagner Act. Lynchings continued in America for a generation, with over 100 perpetrated between 1932 and 1949.
Decades later, books and reports focused on the corrupt behavior of Hawaii's territorial elite, the Massies--Thalia probably wasn't ever raped--Lord, Jones, and Fortescue. Taking barbiturates, long-divorced Thalia committed suicide in 1963. For the previous decades, sympathy still rested with these privileged.
Yet Stannard reminds us that in those stories we forgot the heroism during America's lynching era: Horace Ida and Joseph Kahahawai, and with them the three other defendants who refused to play Prisoners' Dilemma with the Honolulu Police by ratting on each other falsely, the 1931 rape trial defense lawyers, the 1931 jury, and the judges who wouldn't bow to influence:
In contrast [to the publicized behavior of the murderers of Kahahawai and Thalia Massie], little attention has been paid to those who behaved well under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. And yet it is with them — a true racial and ethnic cross-section of Hawai'i then and now — that the valuable lessons of the Massie case reside.
David Stannard also published a book on the Massie Affair, called Honor Killing: How the Infamous 'Massie Affair' Transformed Hawaii.