The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii.

In this engaging social history, Beth Bailey and David Farber address the complex interplay of cultural contacts in wartime Hawaii. As thousands of military personnel and civilian war workers migrated to Hawaii, Americans divided by region, race, class, ethnicity, and gender found themselves together in "the first strange place."

For the newcomers, Hawaii was a strange place indeed. Despite its natural beauty, Hawaii could not match the picture of paradise promoted by Hollywood films. Honolulu in particular was urban, overcrowded, and inconvenient, and as the war progressed, men greatly outnumbered women. Newcomers, uprooted from their homes, encountered a multicultural society where race, class, and ethnicity had different meanings than on the mainland. In prewar Hawaii, Asians had outnumbered whites. The "locals" were not, as Hollywood would have it, petite exotic "hula girls" in grass skirts; they were a multi-ethnic mix of native Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Portuguese, and white Americans, most of whom were not amused by either the rowdiness or the racism of many of the new arrivals. The complicated class, race, and ethnic boundaries of Hawaiian society confounded mainland Americans, especially those who saw the world in a strict hierarchy of black and white.

For the locals too, Hawaii, transformed by war, was a strange place. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans of Japanese ancestry encountered a heightened hostility, though most of them were not incarcerated in internment camps. For others as well, the war upset traditional patterns. The white "haole" elite of Hawaii saw its class status undermined as white soldiers, sailors, workers, and prostitutes demonstrated that white skin and upper-class standing were not necessarily linked. The local authorities watched their power diminish under martial law. Young women found themselves not only courted but also harassed by the hordes of servicemen. And locals in general saw their traditional concepts of race challenged by the new presence of African Americans. Some locals adopte the racial prejudices vocally promoted by white southern servicemen, while others extended Hawaii's more liberal racial ethos to include the newcomers.

In this lively book, the most compelling chapters address specific cultural contacts. One chapter, for example, describes the rough world of Hotel Street where servicemen went for liquor, souvenirs, tattoos, and impersonal three-minute sex with female prostitutes. The prostitutes, mostly white and fro the mainland, were expected to service one hundred men in a single day. They were regulated by the vice squad and exploited by their madams. But they were more than victims. Lured by fast money and temporarily backed by military brass they learned to use what little wartime leverage they had to defy local authorities and enhance their own mobility and status. By war's end, some of th prostitutes and madams had invested substantial sums in the "legitimate" sector of Hawaii's burgeoning commercial economy. In this case and in others, the strange circumstances of wartime Hawaii disrupted the prewar social order.

Throughout the book, Bailey and Farber use in-depth life histories to introduce their readers to some of the strangers who inhabited the islands. Although, to my hard-nosed tastes, they occasionally lapse into a sentimental posture, they nonetheless give their history a decidedly human face that helps construct an emotional context for the war. The life histories convey the sense of adventure among women war workers from the mainland; the sense of pride among the members of the 369th Coast Artillery Regiment, an African-American unit from Harlem; th deeply engrained concepts of gender difference that shaped heterosexual romance sex, and marriage; and the "fragile connections" established between men and women who dared to date across racial and ethnic lines.

Bailey and Farber are at their best when describing the newcomers and their cultural contacts. Some readers, though, will want to hear more about the locals. The book raises questions, for example, about the world of Hawaii's sugar cane, pineapple, and coffee plantations, where both workers and owners must have felt the impact of wartime social change. Also, given current events, some readers will want more discussion of women in the military and of gay men and lesbians.

Current events are relevant here, for Bailey and Farber see wartime Hawaii as a vanguard of sorts. "World War II," they claim, "initiated a series of changes that had crucial consequences for American society". Postwar cultural transformations--struggles over race and gender, redefinitions of class, region and ethnicity, and the search for an overarching American identity--germinated, they imply, in wartime Hawaii. As newcomers and locals reconstructed their identities in the "first strange place," they presaged the increasing mutabilit of identity in the postwar era. For Bailey and Farber, the actions of the wartime government also served as precursors to postwar federal power. In Hawaii, military authorities, who sometimes put national interest above traditional hierarchies of race, class, and gender, seem to have foreshadowed the growing federal role as "limited guarantors of equality". The extent to which these postwar changes had their origins during World War II or in Hawaii remains an issue for debate. But Bailey and Farber draw suggestive links betwee wartime social change and postwar cultural transformation. In this way, they bring the margins to the center: the "first strange place" offers a window not only into wartime Hawaii, but also into the postwar U.S.

This skillfully crafted book is a welcome addition to the history of World War II. It will, I predict, have wide appeal both in and out of scholarly circles.

Joanne Meyerowitz University of Cincinnati