The Fighting Man as Tourist: The Politics of Tourist Culture in Hawaii during World War II

Abstract

During World War II roughly a million soldiers, sailors, and war workers spent time in the territory of Hawaii. In order to mediate the potentially explosive tensions produced by this influx of homesick and battle weary men into an unfamiliar and highly diverse society, the U.S. military command and Hawaii's ruling elites tried to cast wartime visitors in a carefully constructed role-that of tourists.1 Tourists, as sociologist Dean MacCannell has pointed out, see difference as pleasurable, rather than threatening, and the unusual as affirming their own way of life rather than challenging it. 2 The paradigm of the fighting-man-as-tourist enabled wartime visitors to consume the "otherness" of Hawaii without risking loss of primary identity and without needing to directly confront or reject the "other." At least this was what military and civilian authorities hoped would occur. As they and the soldiers themselves discovered, the role of tourist was a contested one. While elites might proffer a certain model of tomistic behavior, it could be rejected or adapted to other purposes. During World War II, the paradigm of "tourism" in Hawaii was hotly contested and carried surprising political import.