The suggestion was offered by the foreman at one of the canneries that if a serious effort were made the district might be turned into a community of workingmen’s cottages. This seems a much more likely way of cleaning up the industrial district at any rate, than any process of law would be likely to lead to. If this could be done, and a club house established where hot luncheons would be served and a rest-room provided, it would indeed be replacing figs for thistles. No more promising place for establishing a basis for relationship with the girls who work in the canneries could be wished for than would be afforded by such a center.
THE WORKERS
HAWAIIAN.
The wage-earning Hawaiian has, as the kindly French saying goes, the faults of his qualities. Naturally gay and pleasure-loving he has worked, fished, swam, sang and feasted his way through life as he listed, and it is only a generation since he took his rest with equal ease on the shores of his beloved ocean or beneath the boughs of the hau tree. Luaus and hulas were frequent and Hawaiian hospitality is still proverbial. He has never learned to say “no” to whomsoever may be the latest comer.
Each man had the grant of his own kuleana, with a taro-field on the mountainside or up in the valley where the showers are frequent and a place to fish on the seashore. The newly prepared taro-field yielded first its wild crop of popolo; and cocoanuts, guavas, yams, mountain apples, water lemons and breadfruit were his for the gathering.
Large numbers of the natives have now, however, almost wantonly mortgaged, sold or given away their property. The temptation has been great to lease the acre or acre and a half constituting their little domain, to the Japanese or Chinese gardeners at $40 or $50 annually, and then borrow small sums from their tenants, until some morning they wake and find themselves no longer in possession.
Hundreds of families, too, still live on the lands of their old chiefs or of the kamaaina families, who pay the taxes. So long as they live they may remain there, raising their taro, flowers, chickens and pigs. The fishing of commerce has passed into the hands of the Japanese but a man’s own “catch” is sufficient for himself and family.
This “family” is apt to be made up of all his unattached friends and relatives, male and female, less well-off than himself, who sometimes pay for at any rate their food by a donation of a proportion of the family necessities in poi or canned meats or fish. Others, however, pay nothing at all. The thrifty, hardworking man is, therefore, often heavily handicapped. The more thoughtful of the older Hawaiians say that the next ten years must bring a change: mortgages contracted with no thought of repayment (sometimes the money has been borrowed to give a luau) will fall due; competition for work will increase; and while the head of the house may at the present time be earning a comfortable living as a carpenter, a blacksmith, a painter, or a longshoreman, etc., a man in the next generation, with his rent to pay, will find that his hospitality and even his ability to care for his immediate family may be curtailed. This of course in the event of his pursuing his present improvident way.
The Hawaiian home—the wage-earner’s home—varies so that it is difficult to form any judgment of the economic status of the occupant. A tenement room, by its bareness, is apt to give an impression of extreme poverty which the facts in the case do not warrant. Cottages of well-to-do natives frequently have no furnishings but a lauhala mat on the floor and portraits of departed kings and queens on the wall. On the other hand, one happens on a heavily upholstered, gilt-picture-framed-center-table-with-the-family-Bible house which brings one back to the East Side of New York City with scarcely a jar.
The native menu is simple; one full meal a day is the rule; coffee and bread or simply a bowl of poi constituting the other two. The omission of a meal or two now and then troubles the Hawaiian not at all. Poi, fish, fruit, with an occasional indulgence in yams, taro-top-greens and pork or chicken, forms the usual bill of fare.