Biography Hawaiʻi; Harriet Bouslog; Interview with Samuel P. King 1/9/03 #1

I mean, look off in a distance. What I'm hoping to do here is just ask a number of questions that give us a sense of the time, first of all, that Harriet came into the environment. So I was wondering if you could just tell us for a little bit about what the atmosphere of practicing law in the territory of Hawaii was in 1939 when Harriet buzzed along the ride here. Back in 1939 and 40, I took the bar exam in 1940, and I guess I don't know if Harriet took the bar exam immediately. She was here in 1939, but she may have taken it later.

I don't think there were more than 100 lawyers that you had to know. Maybe a total number of lawyers, including those who worked for trust companies and other things. 300, but practicing lawyers, 100, 150, that was it. And of course, Hawaii at that time only had a population of 350,000. Because as we were building up towards the war, eventually they became more military than they were locals. I think there were half a million Army Navy and Marine Corps Air Force in Hawaii and our own population only grew to about 400,000. So things were a lot slower then, and business was pineapples and sugar. No huge tourist business. There was the Royal Hawaiian and the Alexander Youngertel and the Moana.

That was about it. Very little on the other end of the hut, what did they call the one in Hilo and the one over in Kailua, Makona. So it was a small place and everybody knew everybody. All the lawyers knew each other. In fact, if you wanted to get some advice on a state you called up Charlie Gregory who was working for somebody else, and he'd tell you what to do or you know, it was a very different place. There were only five circuit judges in the first circuit. One lady and four men, including Jerry Corbett, who had miners, infants, children. So there really only four are handling business and there only one circuit judge on each of the other islands, only one on Hawaii.

They abolished one and they used to have five circuits, but they abolished the fourth circuit and let the third circuit handle it. So we had to memorize that they were one, two, three, five. Five was going away. So it was a pretty small operation. At that time also, we were still using ancient pleading practice, the difference between law and equity. And the combination of one civil action that President Clark of Yale headed up was just being adopted on the mainland, and we picked it up in 40-41. And prior to that, if you put the wrong title on your pleading, it got kicked back. So it was pretty old stuff.

What would most of the lawyers think? Yeah, what would most of the lawyers think? Okay, okay. What kind of legal community would Harriet Balslaw have found herself within 1939? What were most lawyers been waiting on many more, that kind of thing? When Harriet Boslow came to Hawaii in 1939, I think she came with her husband, Charlie, who was a professor at the University of Hawaii. And I think she got a job with the Vittus' firm. There were four main firms in Honolulu. And there were the big firms elsewhere. I don't imagine there were more than 150 lawyers practicing that you had to know. There may have been three or four hundred lawyers altogether, but they were in trust companies

and banks, one thing or another. And actually the ones you had to know were even smaller than that, maybe 50. The bar exam was given once a year. If you missed it, you had to wait a whole year. There were only 350,000 people in the whole territory of Hawaii. There were only five circuit judges in the first circuit, and one on each of the other. Circuits. Business was all pineapples and sugar, no huge tourist industry. The Royal Hawaiian had been built so they could load people off the ships as they came in and one group would get back on the ship and one group would go in the rooms. So it was a rather slow moving legal community. We hadn't even adopted the uniform civil action of one cause of action.

We still had equity in law. If you put the wrong title on your pleadings, they got kicked back. That was changed very rapidly in the 40 or 41. But we were just about beginning to enter the 20th century. What were most lawyers have been doing at that time? What are the practice of law already in jail here then? Well of course you had separate bars. There were lots of lawyers who practiced insurance law. There's always that bar. But the business community was mostly contracts for sugar and pineapples. And there was a separate labor office organization.

The employees counsel, that employed half a dozen lawyers and I suppose there were a bunch of lawyers on the other side too. The ordinary lawyer who just opened his office as I did in 1940 was just available Jones. You picked it up as a came, taught actions, divorces. The collection companies would try to get the new lawyers to go after deadbeats but on the other hand there was no money in that because the collection companies had already siphoned off all the ones at bay. So it was a slow moving community. How many lawyers do you figure would have been actually going into court in the case? Less than 100. Oh much less, maybe 50. What was the impact of the legal community on the legal community of the move to martial

law after Pearl Harbor? When martial law was declared and approved by the president of the United States, Franklin and D. Roosevelt, the military took over all the courts. Except the federal courts, they weren't able to do that but I was a prosecutor in the city and county of Honolulu and of course the attack was on Sunday and Monday morning we finished all the cases on the calendar and then the lead prosecutor said we've been told that we've been taken over and a military man turned up to take over and it was not very well received. In fact the one person who was sentenced by a military court went to court with Gunner Anthony and it was clear that Gunner Anthony was going to have martial law declared unconstitutional.

So the military moved the guy to the mainland and released him but Gunner has written that up, that was, martial law was a mistake of course they had to share a few, they tried to tell labor what to do and what not to do and that was when Arthur Rudlidge fought for him on that, he said the National Labor Relations Act, because that'd be set aside by martial law so they backed away from that one. But all in all I think the people of the way he resented martial law very much. When Harriet comes back to Hawaii in 1946 as an ILW youth lawyer after the sugar stride,

she's facing hundreds of cases against the strikers, how did the legal judiciary environment change after the war and what was she coming into when she was getting ready to try those cases? Well of course at that time when Harriet came back in 1946 we hadn't quite had the explosion that we got with the statehood and the jets which came later in 1959-60. But it was beginning to change, however she was pretty well isolated, they sent my assignments down from the mainland to be her partners, it was post-logant assignments to help out. I don't know too many people who took those cases except that firm, because my own cousin Jimmy King first cousin was in that firm too, he used to hand out a little card to the

workers, ILW and the plantation workers saying you know she had any trouble called his experiment, but broken assignments on it. But I think that we had this terrible fixation on communism and that sort of caused a big rift. The bulletin played a cool, they weren't going to get carried away with it. The advertiser was on the other side, they kept repeating all the things that people said about the communists and the communists are going to try to take over this and the communists are active in this and anything they didn't like they'd tar with that brush, including the rhino keys and including well half the university professors.

So she got into an area where she was pretty well alone, she had assignments, but they had other lawyers too with them. What kind of difficulties would she have found in the legal system itself when she came trying to defend lawyers? Well, of course, back in those days and until we got state of it, all of our judges and the governor and the lieutenant governor whom we call the secretary, were all appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by Congress. There were some, you might call local people in there, but mostly there was people who had influence on the national scene and there was a diversion of interest there.

People with a lot of muscle power in Washington would send their protegees down to be deputy U.S. attorneys and then they'd become judges and then they'd become governor and we didn't have too much to say about that until Eisenhower got elected. So that was quite a long period of years when Roosevelt and Truman went there. So they represented a different approach to life. Many of them came from the south and the south considered Hawaiians too dark to let them into their hotels and remember when old man Trask went to a Democratic convention in Louisiana

they wouldn't let him into the hotel and Kuhio and he was delegate to Congress. The barber was not going to shave him because he said we don't shave black people. So Kuhio had infired. So the kind of people that we got from being appointed not local had to go through a long period of what you call it, re-education and that attitude and then the anti-communism attitude made it very tough for people in the Harriots area. So the judges were okay. How did the legal profession respond to Harriots arrived? Well, because a lot of her activity was in courts.

So you always tell about the lawyers, I see them making a lot of money, I never see you in court. You know, the ones who were active in business contracts and that sort of thing, they never appeared in court so they didn't worry about it. But those who had cases against her, they found they were quite a fighter. What was she liking more? There weren't very many women lawyers at that time, just a handful and as far as going into court and fighting, I think she was practically alone. The other women lawyers that I know was Rota Lewis who was in the attorney general's office, Karak Buck was a judge. Salon Chan was a head of the small states, never appeared in court, except a file of

piece of paper, and Harriot was pretty much the only lawyer that appeared. And she had some techniques which were new, in the first place she didn't wear those girls used to wear underneath it, bind them together that they all got rid of now. She didn't wear a girdle and she was a good looking girl and fast-talker and she never took a lot of nonsense from anybody. She had the juries pretty well mesmerized, they loved her. She was something different and the men were just fighting their fingernails, they couldn't fight that.

They didn't do them any good, not to wear a girdle. Now nobody wears girdles, but she was ahead of her time in many, many areas. What other areas are strategies when she sort of ahead of her time in? Well I never had anything to do with her in court, but she never let a negative attack go without fighting back. And I guess people who said that, if somebody says nasty things about you, why don't just say all the heck with them, they're wrong, you've got to answer it. So she does a good lawyer. Because as she got more and more practice and more and more experience and as the labor problem kind of disappeared and then, because later after we got stated, she became rich

in other kinds of business. How would you describe the general perception of sort of periods, politics? Oh everybody thought she was way off on the left. I first met Harriet in 1941 when I first came back at Marshall Stern's house. He was a professor at the University of the English department and he and Charles knew each other. And we used to gather at the Stern's house on Sundays, Marshall and his wife Betty and the boss logs Charlie and Harriet and Jeff Lloyd and Mildee. Jeff Lloyd ran the RKO station here, whatever it was, some wireless station.

And little Bob Wilson, we called him Little Bob because there was another Bob Wilson who was bigger and he was a big Bob. Big Bob was a stand-in for Frederick Barch. And we used to meet in weekends at the Stern's house and talk about everything, politics, music, whatever. And I used to go out with Marshall body surfers off of Muckaboo Point there, out in the second waves and Harriet and Charlie would be there usually because that didn't last too long because in 1941 we were attacked and then everybody dispersed. But she didn't demonstrate any wild mental fixes, she was just a smart woman. I'd like to just go over some of her cases and get a sort of response or a description

of how they affect the community. The Reinecke case, when they were suspended from teaching, what was this sort of general community response to them? The Reinecke case was another example of the anti-communist fervor that was stirred up here and it was totally unnecessary and of course they would take care of much later but much later. The community had a group of people who just saw red communism and everything and of course it didn't help that the IOWU, the Bars over in California had been a communist

because a lot of people don't realize that the fellow that saved him from being deported was Nils Tavaris, a solid Republican, but he just thought they were going too far. But I don't know why I guess the school board did that and who knows, I think most politicians don't have too much guts and they just buckle down there. But I don't recall what did Harry have to do in that case that I never went to. She ended up representing them.

That was me. That was me to represent. Her representation of them was not in court but it wasn't right in the school board. Before the school board? Yeah. Yeah. But it turned out that staying back was involved in trying to do it. All the school board was appointed by the governor, the governor was appointed by the president of the United States. So if you can't quite indicate it. Yeah. What do you think made Harry a thought slot successful as a lawyer? She was right most of the time so she was successful. She was a good lawyer. She was personable. She worked hard. She was well prepared. The lawyer who was better prepared than the other guy usually wins. And she had a lot of support from a good many people. Now the fact that her clients who are labor union people doesn't mean they didn't amount

to a lot of people. Several thousand. So she had that support. And Maya Simon's, he can't overlook Maya Simon's, he was a very smart fellow. He'd always start off, whenever he called you he'd start off with a dirty joke in case somebody was taping his compensation. But he was a very good lawyer also and he was a backstop to Harriet. So and usually the things that she wanted to have accomplished were not unreasonable. It's just that people who were opposing them were unreasonable. So they became a big fight over something that should never have been a fight. Why did people, people you're talking about, why did they just like her so much?

Oh, I think that was just a spill off. I don't know how many people just like her. It was the same people who just like the Rhino keys and just like Jack Hall and just like Harry Bridges and many for the same reason. They were proposing that they were supporting something that made them uncomfortable. In what ways? Well, they're challenging their beliefs, challenging their positions, challenging their attempts to make Hawaii reflect what they thought they'd ought to reflect instead of letting everybody have a piece of the action. I know you were head of the Bar Association during the period of time in the early 50s, right? Well, now we're coming into the 50s, yeah.

I became Harry Hewitt, who was president of the bar. He got me involved and then I became vice chairman and then I became chairman. And we were a small bar and one of the things I got through as bar association was that they would pay for the president to go to the national meeting and on condition that did not apply to me, only to future presidents, it's a technique I've gotten from the military. If you come up with something that's costing money and you let everybody else have it, but you don't take it, then you have a better chance of getting it through. And today they are sending all of them. Now we didn't. I think I went to a bar meeting, National Bar, American Bar Association meeting in the South, where we got, I got an answer and I got them to adopt a resolution favoring

stated for away and that was the first time I'd ever run into restrooms where it said black only, white only, maybe very uncomfortable.