Before 1920 Hawaii was divided into various nationalist groups of Whites, Hawaiians, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Okinawans, Filipinos, and Koreans.
The white minority petitioned Governor Charles J. McCarthy for racial segregation to prevent their children for being exposed to what they believed to be the "corrupting influences" of the colored students.
[4] Republican Governor Wallace Rider Farrington came to power, stating that the “Racial elements are out of balance and seriously in need of adjusting”.
The Filipinos were considered a mongrel race, the result of Asian and Hispanic mixing that produced a primitive people of low intelligence.
Farrington’s strategy was to target the schools and the next generations while the plantations dealt with the adults by promoting Christianity, thereby converting the ethnically Japanese population to the predominant American religion.
Once converted to Christianity, the planters could manipulate the Japanese through the churches and discourage their workers from criticizing poor conditions, leaving the labor force, requesting pay raises, and creating unions.
In exchange for higher productivity the Evangelical churches would be financially secured by the plantations and Republican would give government support in the spread and influence of Christianity.
Okumura believed deeply in the rule of law, and under the Republican administration he made a crusade of ridding Honolulu of prostitution and gambling.
In 1921, Farrington applied new requirements for school emphasizing the teaching of English Language, American History, and democracy.
The Acts limited the range of subjects taught and put financial pressure on Foreign language schools.
Hawaiians were regarded as the proper colored Americans and model second class citizens, and for this they were given opportunities and rewards for their subservience.
But in the eyes of the Evangelicals, the Japanese were frustratingly irrational, voluntarily subjecting themselves to unnecessary hardship and discrimination by their refusal to forgo their heritage and religious beliefs.
The Evangelicals believed that what they regarded as the Japanese community's mutinous and hostile attitudes were what kept them third-class citizens and barred them for the advantages enjoy by other Hawaiians.
A judgement was made on Farrington's and the Republicans' interpretation of American values, that certain people who deserved freedoms should receive them, while those whom they believed to have abused their rights should not.
The case was regarded as exposing hypocritical attitudes and for being an embarrassment, and the Supreme Court disagreed with the Hawaiian government and found Farrington violating the same values he was imposing.
With little progress and after the publicizing of the result of the Supreme Court case, the Planters reanalyzed the Education Campaign and began to doubt Okumura's effectiveness, and complained he had made the Japanese more skeptical of American culture, and more belligerent, than before.
[citation needed] Shortly before Lawrence M. Judd became governor, in July 1929, a series of events revived 1920 Politics.
[8] In 1928 a ten-year-old white boy named George Gill Jamieson was kidnapped and murdered by a 19-year-old Japanese man, Myles Fukunaga, who was executed after Judd became governor.
In a separate incident on the same night of the rape, five non-white men were put on trial, which ended in a hung jury.
But, after examining these positions, U.S. Attorney General Seth Richardson found an incompetent police force and sympathetic prison guards.
Judd had learned from Farrington’s social attack, which had been intended to subordinate the Japanese community (which largely consisted of manual laborers and domestic servants), instead made them feel anti-American.
The attempted resolution to the problem concluded in a lawsuit that the Territory lost, thereby failing in its plan to assimilate the Japanese community through a policy of subordination.
In addition to avoiding conflict with the Japanese majority was the prospect of future statehood, and the incitement of civil unrest would not represent Hawaii positively to Congress.
Conversely, Judd received criticism by the largely white evangelical community, that Buddhists and Shintos were allowed to practice their religion freely, even in public, without being challenged or in fear of governmental interference.
A product of the Great Depression was the Wagner Act that was signed into law in 1935, despite strong efforts by the Big Five and Hawaii Republicans to lobby against it.