Biography Hawaiʻi; Harriet Bouslog; Interview with Samuel P. King 1/9/03 #2

I'm going to go back on, I'm going to go back on, I'm going to go on, I'm going to go back on. said that people dislike Harriet and Oslo, but, of course, there were a lot of people who liked her, and there were a lot of people who dislike Gunner Antony, and there were a lot of people who dislike the O.P. Swarris, and some of the other lawyers who gave a bad time for different reasons. So I wouldn't say that she was disliked anymore than the other successful lawyer who won against the people that were trying to do things she won against.

They didn't like her because she won. There are a lot of people who don't like me, especially when I decide against them. I don't think there was a general dislike of her later on in the beginning, of course, when we had that anti-communism fervor and the trials, don't forget we had the smithak trials, one of the big ones in the country. So that divided the community nicely. But I don't think she was disliked anymore than anybody else. I'd like to talk about a couple of those trials that really divided the community in one of the smithak. Does something to you say a word or two about the significance of the impact of the Polikiko Major's case? Yeah, the Polikiko Major's case involved really the last attempt to execute somebody for

murder, and Stainback had it first, Governor Stainback. He wouldn't do what he ought to do, so he passed the ball to R&D Long, and he sat there with a hot potato waiting till last minute, and he passed it on to my father. And there was no way my father was going to let those two boys be executed because he didn't believe in the death penalty to begin with. And the studies of whom had been executed for a committee murder showed that it was almost entirely non-calcations.

And my dad being part of why and also he was kind of torn because his building was wild there, and the lady who died was a wild there, and although we're not related, his name came from that family. So Harriet came to see me and asked, you know, what could they do to influence my father? I said, just leave him alone, and wait, and of course he'd commuted it, and of course a lot of people didn't like him for that. But the impact on the community, the legislature, meanwhile, repealed the death penalty, and still is repealed here in a way. I don't think it had any long term effect.

I think it would have had if he had been executed. But I think you're not being executed, and most of our people, I don't think believe in the death penalty. Why do you think the case was so controversial? Well, because they stalled it around for so long. I mean, a stay back should have done something about it way back when. And of course, this is wild there being an old lady, these two guys being young punks. Actually, not. One of them was a football hero, and I think another one of them read the encyclopedia Britannica where he was in prison. But you always get a lot of people who say we've got to hang them up, we want the death penalty, we've got to kill these guys.

I myself, the only exception I would make on it is if you kill a police officer or a prison guard, because if they don't have that protection, they're going to kill you first. But that's the division still is in the country, I guess. You were talking about your father trying to find out about the incidence of executions and that, that was the thing. Do you think much of the controversy and the time of the case was, it's going to be driven a little bit? I imagine so, but not as much as people think. I mean, within certain groups, there was a feeling of sort of a racial thing, we've got to keep the local folks in control and we can't let them do this.

But that's a small group. You were mentioning earlier on the Smith Act, which was all with my assignments, was that steam and so on and so forth, what kind of an impact did that have on the community? That had a big impact, that had a big impact, I know, ain't it? In the first place, it wound up in a conviction, it wound up in the area giving speeches, wound up before, even before wound up. John Wake got all bent out of the shape of that and complained to the Bar Association and wanted her to be disciplined for making a speech, which said she couldn't get justice in the courts because it was his court that had the case.

If he hadn't complained, I don't think it would have gone anywhere, but the Bar Association picked it up and it went to the Supreme Court because the Federal Judiciary, where the case was, didn't handle it, they dumped it on the state and the state Supreme Court, didn't despot it or whatever they did, they penalized it, and that went up to the Ninth Circuit, which affirmed and it went to the Supreme Court of the United States and almost got confirmed, it was five to four, which was pretty rough. Thank God they didn't because they would have made a bad precedent. Nobody was talking about it for a long time because in that period it went up. Lots of people have said worse things, so I don't know why they, I guess if the judge

you hadn't complained, complained nobody would have done anything about it. I think that was one of the divisive events, but again, the same people divided the bullet and one not too excited and they advertised it thought the world was coming to an end. At the first newspaper party, they give this every year, jokes and one thing or another, Uncle Ed Pupuli, Hal Lewis had a skit in which he said the newspapers printed the world coming to an end and the star bulletin headline was, world end soon, statehood prospects dim and they advertise it printed the headline world end soon, many come in as to die. So that was the split.

You're a father in a testifying in front of the SNF, or the case, as you can say, it's a little more about just to what degree people felt communism was affecting the island. You know, I never read his testimony and I didn't even hear it, I don't know what he say. Well, he was actually getting hassled because he talked to you that morning, they were upset about the fact that he talked to people, you know, the only thing he talked to me about was whether he should go on because he's a graduate of Naples, and he was asked by the federal government through Barlow to be a witness. And he had had that experience when he was delegated to Congress of a strike where Harry

Bridges had stopped all the cargo to Hawaii and he's going to see Harry Bridges and say, can we have a ship come in with medicines and items like that? And Harry had, according to my father, telling me this, Harry had told him out, it would bring him to their needs faster if they needed badly enough. He wouldn't do it. So my father didn't have much use for that kind of approach, and he also didn't care much for Jack Hall. The others, I don't think he knew much at all, and I don't forget that the Smith Act was a case brought by the United States government.

So it was authorized by the Attorney General of the United States who would have been, you know, forgotten who it was, but at any rate, when the Attorney General's deputy said he needed witness of my father's caliber to testify, he felt he had to testify. What were your own contacts with Harry in over the year? They came to ask me, as a matter of fact, to represent the Smith Act people, when I was an active naval reservist and a member of Naval Intelligence, I'd say that my father was governor, I said, I can't do that.

Prior to her going to Washington, as I say, we used to meet at Marshall Stern's, Marshall and Betty Stern's house, almost regularly, weekends. When she went to Washington, I saw her once, and after that, I didn't have much contact with her at all. When I came back, I was married and having a small family, and I saw Harry when she came and asked me to represent the five, if I would join in with them, I think gold blood was with her. After that, I didn't see much of her at all, and then she got into more real estate matters. She married Steve Sawyer.

She had that terrible accident in Kawaii, and I saw her after that, I just called on her to see her, but she was, she almost died, other than that, I didn't see much of her. No more on Steve's, no walking on the street, that's it, how's Harry? The question that you have here, Craig, I'm so not quite sure is what that, you know, the Supreme Court decision about Henry Sawyer, what exactly that means, or what kind of the significance for lawyers of the kind of issues that are raised by Henry Sawyer. I think the decision in Henry Sawyer was one of those cases that kind of turned the balance

in favor of freedom of speech, and of course I'm along with almost every lawyer there is, except the ones who decide that you can't have free speech, believe that that is the key to American democracy, is your ability to express yourself freely. You may be considered a horse's deck, but on the other hand, that's one of the freedoms and one of the big freedoms of being a United States citizen, of course Britain too, the British say you go over to Hyde Park and you get in this corner and you can say anything you want to, you can tell them to get the queen off the throne, et cetera, et cetera. We don't have a limitation as to where you can say this.

Now, if Harriet had not been a lawyer, there would have been no question that they could not have done anything to her. Anybody get up and say the courts are corrupt, the judges, you can't get justice, in fact they do so every day, I believe. And the only problem with Harriet having said something close to that, not exactly but close to that, annoyed John Wiggy, who was the judge in the Smith Act case and he complained to the bar association and then at being a federal court they dumped it on the state court. And well, you know, the state court is kind of an arm of the United States of America because they're all appointed by the President of the United States and oddly enough the night circuit confirmed and in the Supreme Court it was five to four. So we came very close to having a limitation on three speech that would have been difficult

to deal with. Why do you think the bar ethics committee found against her and recommended that she be against her? I think their recommendation was not as bad as the penalty that was actually imposed. The bar committee's recommendation. I think they disbarred her and I'm not sure what the final penalty was but and I don't even know who was on the bar committee. Bob Dodge of Hien Kai and Dodge was a member of the committee. That's a strange because Bob Dodge was a good Democrat, a Dudley Pratt, a good Yale man, a good Republican, I don't know who else was on the committee. You follow up on that because one of the other issues, which he could have explained to

us why people were so upset about this, after the decision was made with the Smith Adv case, Harriet also got in trouble because of contact with one of the jurors of the case. Oh yes, there was another flare up because Harriet had contacted a juror which is not quite true, the juror had contacted Harriet, but then she had then said wait and gotten together with her and gotten a better statement and that was considered a no-no. That was old stuff. Back in the ancient days you were not supposed to talk to any juror on anything. Today everybody talks to the jurors, we were in sort of a period then, where if you talk to a juror that was bad news today, if you talk to a juror, everybody does.

Of course, there are some judges who say to the jurors you don't have to talk to anybody and if they don't want to away, we'll support you and there are some judges who tell the lawyers you are not to contact the jurors, very few, because now I see what they have, somebody's to some recent exposés of what the jurors thought of and some mainland case has written. They've gone into great detail. No, and I see they want to put chambers in the jury room so they can hear they see what the jurors say to each other, that's the destruction of the jury system actually, but at that time they were just on the cusp of how, and I don't think Harriet did anything wrong because

she was contacted by the juror. So I guess they thought she shouldn't have followed up with it, but I didn't feel that. You know, I didn't realize that the Smith Act trials here, you said they were one of the jurors. The Smith Act trial was a strange one, a host committee on un-American activities came out there away and had hearings, and as a result of hearings they made a report and I think the Smith Act trial came after that, I'm not mistaken, and I think it was due to that

report that the federal government then got involved, who knows what kind of pressure they got from members of Congress, and of course the people who came here as members of the un-American activities committee were people who were in favor of finding un-American activities. I think that was what the impetus was, although I wasn't involved in any of that, thinking but it just seemed logical that after their report of the United States did that, the reason it was a big one was because they thought they had gotten all the leaders of the communist movement in Hawaii, and some of them had even said that they had been members of a communist cell, whatever that meant.

And it was before the Supreme Court of the United States had said, it's not illegal, and the laws that say it's illegal are inconstitutional, for the people down the line to get together and talk about communism, et cetera, et cetera, it was only for the very top, the ones who preached the violent overthrow of the United States by force. That could be made illegal, but not the ones down the line, so that was the final upshot on that one. But the reason I think they picked on Hawaii was because of the House Un-American activities committee having hearings here. How was union activity tied into the notion of communist activity? A lot of that anti, well put it another way, the communist activity was tied to the union

through Harry Bridges, and then it came out, somebody testified to Jack Hall, a member of a cell in the head of the cells here, and I think some of the other of the five, I've forgotten who all five they were, tell you the truth. One or two of them had admitted that they had been members of a communist cell, I think of the Un-American Activities Committee, and these were all people in the labor movement, so that's why I was tied to them. Of course, nobody thought for a moment that the thousands of members of the IOWU, members of communist cells. You know, another thing that people forget is that until World War II, late in World

War II, Asiatic's and Pacific Islanders could not become naturalized American citizens, and the only reason Hawaiians were American citizens was because when Hawaii became part of the United States, the act, the joint resolution, and the act that covered territorial government, provided that all the citizens of the state of the kingdom of Hawaii would be citizens of the United States. Now the citizens of the kingdom of the Republic of Hawaii, excuse me, did not include general naturalization of orientals, and the definition that the Congress adopted finally also included any other Pacific Islanders.

So oddly enough, Hawaiian family, man had married a Romanian lady, both the Romanian had children there, and they were all Romanian citizens, so they wanted to come back to Hawaii, you know, across the seas, an aisle is calling me, and his children were ineligible naturalization, so he couldn't get a visa for them to come home to Hawaii. So he had to get a special bill through Congress, and it was one of the things my father worked on, because that wasn't change, you see, until 1946 maybe, late pride of that, it couldn't become a naturalized citizen, because if you were born in Hawaii, then it was because you were American citizens. Could you talk a little bit about the Democratic parties, or difficulties or challenges in

dealing with the union and the accusations that come in? Oh, I've never been very close to the Democratic parties, you know, management, members, except for Wall-A, you know, my, no very well, but there was some disagreement over alleged communist influence, and I think Governor Stainback led the group out of a meeting, I really don't remember what the particular problem was. One problem with the Democratic party was that a lot of their supporters couldn't vote. I mean, the plantation workers who were Filipinos were not citizens.

They were nationals, but not citizens, so they couldn't vote until later. And so they had a lot of numbers, but not the right numbers for voters, but that changed. You know, some of those people that were involved in the smith act, they talked about these un-American, you know, these, the trial of the un-American parents having to do with, you know, some people not wanting to statehood. Can you read that for me?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, come on. And I'm a little confused about that, about this. Could you, uh, talk a bit about how various people perceive both union activity and suppose a communist activity in relation to the goals trying to get statehood? Yeah.