Hawaii

Hawaii occupies a unique geographical position, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no large land mass nearby. Consequently, voyagers from all directions have used it as a stopping point to replenish supplies before continuing to their destinations. The Polynesians who first settled on the islands traveled a vast distance to do so because no other nearby location was available. And, though Michener includes the migration story of these early Polynesians to emphasize Hawaii as a land offering opportunity to several peoples throughout history, it should be noted that Hawaiians are indigenous to these islands. When Captain James Cook landed in the islands in 1789, his voyage put Hawaii on the world map. In the later centuries, when merchant ships traveled the globe, it became an oasis to European and American voyagers. Today it remains ethnically and culturally diverse.

Michener’s version of Hawaii is an endorsement for assimilation, an extension of Manifest Destiny, and a microcosm of the American Dream.

Though it takes the different ethnic populations in Hawaii generations to cooperate, when they do, they prosper economically and culturally. Michener shows integration to be inevitable and separatism to be impractical. Immigrant communities isolated far from home find it difficult to maintain the traditions and beliefs that sustained them in their homelands, or else their homelands progress and they cling to older versions of their traditions. The feud between the Chinese Hakka and Punti villages makes little sense when both are hired to work side by side thousands of miles away in the sugar fields. Similarly, the Japanese refusal to associate with others is hard to enforce in a small community where rigid insularity cannot be maintained on a practical level. White Americans are also incapable of keeping themselves separate from the rest of the island population. Abner Hale wages a futile war against his missionary brethren who intermarry with Hawaiians, but he is no longer in New England, where his rigid standards might be sustained by others. His bloodline soon becomes interwoven with other races.

Published just three months after Hawaii became a US state, and written by an American from Pennsylvania, there are heavy American overtones to Hawaii. Hawaii is the most recent state to be admitted to the union, and also the westernmost, which echoes the 19th-century American doctrine of inevitable westward expansion, Manifest Destiny. Thus, Hawaii becomes a stage for the American Dream—multiple cultures and ethnicities working and merging together to create prosperity and a new Hawaiian-American identity, painting American colonization of the islands as an intrinsic good that makes for a more robust culture.