Hawaii Under Army Rule

By J. Garner Anthony

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0824803779
• ISBN13: 9780824803773
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Military tribunals of 1942--lessons for 2006

Besides his Olympic medals and his movie roles, surfing and swimming legend Duke Kahanamoku also figures as the losing defendant in the key Supreme Court decision on military tribunals. Since President Bush announced his executive order on tribunals (later much revised), there has been a flood of commentary, almost all of it misinformed, and some of it hysterical, like Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz's piece about how there were "mass roundups" for the military tribunals in Hawaii. That's nonsense. But there were military tribunals in Hawaii, more than in all the rest of the country combined. They were comical, frightening, unconstitutional, dangerous and embarrassing. But, despite what you have been told, they were not secret. J. Garner Anthony, briefly attorney general of the Territory of Hawaii, led the civil government's ultimately successful -- after it no longer counted -- resistance to the tribunals. "Hawaii under Army Rule" was published in 1955 and has been largely forgotten. The Army panicked after Pearl Harbor, and it flimflammed Gov. Joseph Poindexter into allowing it to declare martial law. Lt. Gen. Walter Short, the lamentably incompetent commander of the Hawaiian Department, closed the bars and the courts. In a few months, his clownish successor, Lt. Gen. Delos Emmons, reopened the saloons but not the courts. Probably because of a well-founded belief that his despotic behavior was illegal, he and his legal officer, Col. Thomas Green, took the precaution of making it a military crime to present or receive a writ of habeas corpus. Thus, prisoners of the MPs had no place to appeal. Eventually, when the civilians caught their breath and counterattacked against the Army, Emmons found himself sneaking out of Iolani Palace to avoid a writ, while MPs threw the U.S. Marshal over the porch railings. If anybody in the Executive Office of the President knows now about these buffoonish proceedings, you would not know it from what they are saying. But their opponents, both left and right, seem equally clueless. The 1946 decision in Duncan v. Kahanamoku, if anyone had paid attention to it, would have saved a lot of pointless discussion over the past four years. Not that Duke was an enemy of civil liberties. But he was sheriff of Honolulu and had custody of one Duncan, a Pearl Harbor shipfitter who beefed with two Marine sentries in February 1944. This was long after the Japanese presented any threat to the operation of the civil courts of the Territory. But the Army enjoyed its conquest of Hawaii, including bully power and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines that stuck to its fingers. It took a while, but eventually the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the declaration of martial law, the tribunals and a host of lesser issues created by the Army's coup against the Territorial government. Legally speaking, the decision was whether the military had the right to impose martial law under the Hawaii Organic Act, which made Hawaii part of the United