Race Mixture in Hawaii |
Journal of Heredity
Volume 10, Issue 1 (1919)
pages 41-47
Vaughan MacCaughey
College of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii
THE CHINESE
The Hawaiian Islands arc remarkable for the diversity of races represented and for the varied conjugal race-mingling which has taken place in this tiny island world during the past hundred and fifty years. Excellent general accounts of the nature of Hawaii’s population can be found in W. F. Blackman’s “The Making of Hawaii” (Macmillan, 1906, 266 pp.) and in “Race Mingling in Hawaii” by Ernest J. Reece (American Journal of Sociology, 20:104-16, July. 1914). The present paper is the first of a series of eugenic studies of Hawaii’s polyglot and polychrome population, a series which embodies data not heretofore assembled and made available for students of eugenics.
The population of Hawaii, 1918, in round numbers is as follows:
Asiatics............................153,500 Japanses..................105,000 Chinese....................23,000 Koreans.....................5,000 Filipinos..................20,000 Polynesians..........................40,000 Hawaiian...................23,000 Caucasian-Hawaiians........11,000 Chinese-Hawaiians...........6,000 Latins...............................31,000 Portuguese.................23,000 Spanish.....................2,000 Porto Rican.................6,000 Americans. Scotch. British, Germans, Russians, etc........................22,000
The Hawaiians are remnants of the splendid Polynesian stock that formerly solely possessed this lovely mid-Pacific archipelago. The Americans, North Europeans and other “white men” represent the traders, missionaries, beach-combers, sailors, fugitives from justice, merchants, sugar planters, professional, military and capitalistic classes that have completely dominated and exploited the life and resources of the islands. All of the other races—Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Spanish, Portuguese, Porto Rican, Russian, Negro, South Sea Islanders, etc.—have been imported wholesale by the agricultural corporations to work in the sugar-cane fields. At present the population of Hawaii is predominantly Asiatic, alien, male, illiterate, non-English-speaking, non-Christian, landless, and homeless.
The Chinese have been associated with Hawaii since very early times The first epoch in Hawaii’s industrial exploitation was the “Sandalwood Period,” during which an active trade was carried on with China. Chinese coolie? began to he imported in small numbers about 1870. The flood of coolie labor swelled rapidly and reached a maximum about 1870. The exclusion law, which went into effect with annexation in 1898, has decreased the number of Chinese immigrants. The immigration of foreign-born Chinese into Hawaii to 1910 has been as follows:
Previous to 1890..............6,580 1891-1895.....................3,340 1898-1900.................... 3,830 1900-1905 ......................445 1905-1910.......................205
The Chinese now number 23,000; the increase during the past decade has been slight. There are now 800 registered Chinese voters in Hawaii. In 1900 there were almost as many Chinese children (1,300) in the public and private…
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Tags: Hawaii, Journal of Heredity, Vaughan MacCaughey