Negotiating Citizenship: Issei, Education Officials, and the Language Issue in Hawai'i

At the turn of the twentieth century, the English language came to be regarded as a fundamental attribute of American identity and a prerequisite to American citizenship. In this process, the Spanish-American war played an important role: the sudden transfer of Spanish colonies under United States sovereignty created an opportunity to experiment with English as a tool for mass assimilation. Nowhere was this language policy more overt than in Puerto Rico. In the territory of Hawaii, language diversity had somewhat less salience, at least initially (the archipelago, annexed in the wake of the Spanish-American War, had been exposed to considerable American influence since the 1870s). As a result of the steady influx of migrant workers from East Asia in the 1900s and 1910s, language diversity became identified as a problem. In 1920, the territorial legislature passed an act to restrict the teaching of languages other than English in all schools. Two years later, leaders of the Japanese community filed suit and the Supreme Court decided in their favor in 1927 (Farrington v. T. Tokushige, 273 U.S. 284).

This paper will study the different discourses that either legitimized or contested Hawaii’s language policy from 1920 to 1927. The official discourse justified the 1920 language act in classic assimilationist terms. But the private correspondence of education officials and Japanese community leaders reveal a quite complex interplay of pedagogic, economic and diplomatic arguments. Likewise, legal documents pertaining to the Farrington case prove that multiple issues were actually at stake. Equally diverse was the discourse of the Japanese community on the language issue. What emerged from this period were several constructs of cultural and civic American identity. Most interestingly, the Farrington case and its outcome presented an early instance of what is today identified as “multicultural citizenship”.