America’s First Brush With Multiculturalism (American Legion Weekly, 1922)

Like many Americans in the Twenties, the journalist who penned the attached article was totally irked by the concept of an American territory – bound for statehood – having a majority Asian population. He wrote at a time when the nation was deeply concerned about assimilating America’s immigrants and his indignation can clearly be sensed:

“If you go to Aala Park… you will see a kid’s baseball game in progress – on one side two or three Hawaiians, a white or two, a Chinese, a Japanese, a Portuguese, and on the other two or three Hawaiians, a Korean, a Filipino and two or three that have mixtures of Hawaiian and Chinese or Filipino or American. You will hear baseball slang with Chinese modifications and coaching from the sidelines in an exotically flavored English, while in moments of high excitement encouragement is shrieked in the various native tongues…”

Sounds kind of charming to us.

Click here to read about the racial makeup of Hawaii today…