 Welcome, and Aloha. I'm Mark Schwab, the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Seat program. Today we're going to talk with James Moore, who came across the sea from Oregon to Hawaii to discuss lessons learned from history, history, history. Yes, I think history repeats itself. James Moore is the Distinguished Professor of History and the Philip H. Knight Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Oregon. He's also the author of numerous books, including Plague and Fire, Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu's Chinatown. I've also asked Ray Tsuchiyama to co-host today's program with me. Ray is currently a management consultant for Guild Consulting and a real estate broker. He has a background in technology, real estate, disaster management, education, and I'll have a little more to add about him when I turn over the questions for him to ask Professor Moore. But first, I want to welcome Professor Moore to Hawaii. Good to see you. Thank you. Great to be here. And there's Ray Tsuchiyama also. Hi, Ray. Okay. So, Professor Moore, I want to ask you a few questions about Plague and Fire. Your book, Plague and Fire, was published in 2005 and it talks about the bubonic plague that came to Hawaii and the resulting fire that destroyed Hawaii's Chinatown. Now I wanted to ask you, as a professor in Oregon, what brought you to Hawaii? Well, it was one of those fortunate serendipities. I had done a big book on the history of medical jurisprudence in the 19th century. And I was interested in situations where doctors hauled the shots and the relationships between doctors and the law between the two professions of law and medicine and so forth. I was invited because of that book to give a lecture jointly sponsored by the law school here at the University of Hawaii, the medical school here, and the history on medical jurisprudence in the 19th century. So I was here and while here, I was strolling around Chinatown and I came across a sign that said, buildings you're looking at are original because the original were burned down by the Board of Health and they gave a date. I thought to myself, as somebody who's really interested in relationships between law and medicine, particularly situations where medical people were making legal policies, what in the world was going on? How did the Board of Health have the right to burn such a place and did this really happen? One thing led to another and I became fascinated with the subject in part because it occurred at this dynamic of so many things in Hawaiian history. The situation was very complicated and brought out lots of elements, lots of the dynamics of what was happening in Hawaiian, lots of what you might call the formative period. Okay, and let's talk a little bit about the book and plague and fire. Tell us what's about and what were the historical events. I mean, we all vaguely know the history, but we really don't know it. We've heard about it, but what happened and tell us what you wrote about? Well, the bubonic plague had never come to the White Islands historically. There are generally considered to be three great plagues. The one, the so-called Justinian plague that swept the Roman world, the black death of the Middle Ages that killed at least a thousand, I'm sorry, at least a third of all human beings on the planet. And then the modern plagues which have ebbed and flowed never as bad as the medieval one, but they flared up again in China in the second half of the 19th century and eventually made it to Hong Kong. And from Hong Kong they were carried on water and ships that could get to ports much faster than sailing ships could do. And for that reason the plague came to Hawaii for the first time. It came in late in 1899. And those of you who remember your Hawaiian history in detail will know that is an odd time in Hawaiian history because the United States had annexed the archipelago but had not given it any government. It said sort of while we figure out what to do with you, we're going to let this so-called existing government, the goal, the Dole Act and be the government until we can make up our mind. So here we have a very unsteady government that was sort of put together on the fly. They hoped to be quickly annexed and be given a government but once that wasn't true, they had to put together a government of their own. They barely know what they're doing. And here comes the largest killer in human history. What are we going to do? We're isolated out here, 2,000 miles from hell. We have no expertise in this. We'll turn it over to the board. We'll turn the islands over to the Board of Health. So he gave three physicians, three Honolulu doctors, basically, well not basically, absolute dictatorial authority over the entire archipelago. They could call it the army. They could draw from the treasury on their own word. They could suspend any rights. They could suspend the law. They could create quaranties. They could do literally anything because the government was desperate. The doctors themselves also quickly found themselves desperate because this is before anyone knew how plague was moving from one person to another. The bacteriologists who were also in their early years and figured out how to identify the plague bacillus. So you could tell that what had come ashore really was plague, as distinguished from some thrill or something else, which of course scared people even more. On the other hand, you couldn't tell how it got from one person to another. What were the transmittal? How long did it live? Could it live between floorboards? Most bacteriologists at the time believed it could live in the ground because they knew plenty of other bacteria could live in the ground. So the doctors are desperate. What are we going to do? They begin by declaring quaranties, which happened in most of the rest of the world when plague showed up. And this was the idea was to keep it at least isolated in a particular area. They thought of it more in terms of area than they did in terms of what we now know to be biological transmissions. But the quaranties didn't work in the sense that the plague kept occurring. So the doctors sort of went to plan B, and plan B was we will burn all buildings that in which someone died of plague. And those who survived who are also living in those buildings will be put into quarantine camps to make sure they don't spread it around the city. So they start erecting camps. They start burning buildings in the quarantined area of Chinatown one at a time after their local bacteriologist determined that the death really was from plague. So that's what they were doing from basically the first. That was the way they ushered in the 20th century. They did that literally New Year's Day and they were doing it every day. We have a bunch of photos of the fire going on in Chinatown and I want to I'm going to take questioning over to Ray after we go through these photos and Ray Ray has a personal investment in this. His grandfather arrived on Mali in 1899 and Ray believes he must have been aware of the bubotic plague. And then the resulting Chinatown fire and then he'll because Ray is a history buff contacted Professor Moore and started talking and they've been talking and talking and over the end. And then finally Professor Moore comes to Hawaii and this is the first time they've been able to get together. They got together last week for the first time but Ray take it over. What are your what are your question floors yours. Thank you embark and the catalyst for my reaching out to Professor Moore to Jim was of course COVID the pandemic and its linkage or parallels to the bubotic plague of 1900. Never would I have thought or imagine there will be a line of firestorm tragedy occurring this summer. So my first question is do you see any parallels or contrasts between the 1900 robotic plague in Hawaii and the 2020 COVID pandemic. Of course there was a doctor was the governor of Hawaii during the COVID pandemic and Sanford Dole was a lawyer and there's a big contract there. Anything that you see in as a history expert. Oddly enough, one of the most dramatic parallels and it's almost an exact parallel has to do with the power of nature. The Chinatown fire in how Lulu was meant to be a single building and they were the fire department how Lulu was very good. In contrast to what appears to have been the case in Lahina. It was well trained by the standards of the day one of the best urban fire departments on on the glow. They knew what they were doing and they had been doing these burns successfully for more than three weeks. But this particular one on this particular day the wind shifted and very powerful and unusual for that time of the year. Winds came down off the Pali and acted as a bellows that that greatly enlarged the initial fire eventually drove it over to come. The church spires caught on fire so they spread embers and burning debris all over Chinatown which was basically two store buildings. And in no time at all this fire was in a furrow blown by these powerful winds. The fire department they've heroically they only abandoned their machines when the machines began the metal began to melt. And they were obviously going to perish if they didn't get out of the way. And this fire roared through Chinatown and in a very short period and destroyed the entire area because 30 about 35 blocks. I gather the same thing occurred in Lahina where an unexpected wind came through and drove the fire beyond anybody's reasonable control. Now one one outcome of the fire and you're correct in your book you point out that the house brings were very not targeted. There were a Caucasian family dwellings that were burned Chinese Japanese. It was all in a cause of controlling the robotic plague or society. But the outcome of the displaced Chinatown residents they were placed into camps. Their livelihoods were gone. Their families had no homes. How did they see the Hawaii government and police of that period? They saw them in very unfavorable light. They thought the whole thing was a conspiracy. They want to get out. We're becoming increasingly successful as international businessmen. We're growing in power. The white rulers associated with the dull regime were out to get us. And that was their position. Yet had social media existed it would have been buzzing and buzzing and buzzing with that kind of allegations. They were being made verbally all the time. And many of the Chinese here in Halu did not trust modern medicine or bacteriology. So they thought this whole policy was based on a horrible set of assumptions that they did agree with. In that regard they were in sharp contrast with the Japanese here at the time. The Japanese were committed to bacteriology. Kitsusato was one of their great national heroes. He and a French bacteriologist had identified the plague bacillus in Hong Kong. So they thought the Board of Health was doing the right thing. And they basically tried to cooperate whereas the Chinese thought the whole thing was a hoax based on bad information. And they were very resistant. It's interesting you were pointing out that there were some points of view that saw the Chinatown fire as man-made. It was a conspiracy of that period. A spread. A spread of it. And one outcome for the Japanese of course that whenever there is an event for the Honolulu Japanese Chamber of Commerce they decide this says since 1900. And that's when the association began of what we call business networking among the Japanese. Next question. Should the Chinatown fire be taught in Hawaii schools? And why? I think it should be partly because it shows so much of what was going on at the real birthplace of what has some sort of become a state. All the churning social realities are there in that story. The annexationists and their government is there. The physicians are there. The impact of that incident on international trade is there. As you can imagine the city was desperately afraid of becoming known throughout the world as a plague spot. And it says we'll never annex us or never make us a territory if we're just a hotbed of plague out here. So there's all kinds of political, international and extremely interesting local divisions including the Hawaiians who were also involved. Chinatown was by no means all ethnically Chinese people. The people displaced and we're talking about huge displacement here. We're talking about almost one in five people in the city are left with nothing. They have to be sent to these camps. About half of those people were Chinese and about 30% of them were Japanese and the other 20% were Hawaiian. I mean there are handfuls of other people mashed out of Gilbert Islands and so forth. But those were the three places and you are absolutely right to point out that the doctors resisted the urge which many whites were pushing on them, pushing hard. Just to burn the Asians out. They're the source of this stuff. The way they live, the filth that builds up and so forth. But 70% of the Chinese in how they did not live in Chinatown and it would be true for those other groups as well. And the board refused not only to go after those people outside Chinatown, they refused to go after the ones inside Chinatown unless a plague death had occurred in that particular building. Which is, as a professional statement, given that time and given those pressures which were intense is really quite heroic. They resisted what would have been a far worse situation by sticking to their scientific principles. Back to the fire itself. In the post-Lahaina firestorm conversations, discussions, some residents have called for a much slower community-based approach to rebuilding Lahainatown. Was there any state or city or government planning process with community input in the years following the 1900 Chinatown fire? What happened or was just laissez-faire? It wasn't just absolutely laissez-faire but pretty close to it. The people who owned the property in Chinatown wanted their property back as quickly as possible. And they were able to do that, although not without some difficulty. For example, they wanted to build a sewage system in Chinatown that had never had one. In order to do that, they had to re-root a couple of the roads and shift lot lines here and there. So you've had endless squabbling, legal hattles over who gets storefront, for example, for retail purposes. If the street changes, that sort of thing. There was no what in our modern sense of community planning. Instead, the Dole government, which of course was terrified, it was going to end up having to pay for all this. Since their own Board of Health had done it all, whether they intended to do it or not, it was done under their watch. The insurance companies did what insurance companies do when they have a chance and that is figure out a way not to pay. They had a meeting in San Francisco and said, look, we're not bailing these people out. They lit their own fire. So the Dole government didn't know what it was going to do since they had no treasury left after fighting the fire. Fortunately, as part of the territorial, the establishment of the territory, the United States agreed to form a commission to pay back claims of losses. And that went very badly. Initially, there were the losses, a lot of people put in false losses way above what they really had lost. Other people tried to be honest and put in the right amount. The commission finally decided this is hopeless. They paid off a lot of the early claims, much to the disgust of people who didn't sort of have it in with the lawyers and with the commission. There was lots of almost certainly corruption. It's hard to prove after fact, but there was. Eventually, the commission said, okay, we'll just take all these claims. We'll cut them all in half as they come along and we'll pay that half. And then when they ran out of money, they quit. So a lot of legitimate people who had tried to be honest, lost, got nothing. A lot of others with sway were paid off. Basically, you went back to sort of your original phrase ago, was a fair rebuilding process. Professor Moore, you know, this just brings up the question I wanted to ask a learned history professor for so long. I mean, you have the COVID and then you have the bubonic plague in 1900 or 1899. When it started, we have COVID in our generation. And then we have the Chinatown fire and then we have the Maui fire and they all seem to have things in common. I want to ask you, Professor, does history repeat itself? And if so, why? And what can we learn from that? I would not say that history repeats itself. For historians, context is everything. So when a certain set of circumstances comes together and actions are taken, they might have very different results in different contexts. People, I think, sometimes take too seriously the history repeats itself adage and learn the wrong things because what might have been rejected in the previous situation should be accepted this time. So things change and that makes it very difficult to say history repeats itself. I would say certain patterns remain fairly strong. And I still, I think the ultimate value of history and certainly the reason I want to do it for several reasons, but certainly one of them is if you're going to try to solve current situations, certain problems in your modern society, whatever that society is, it's very useful to know how you got into that circumstance the first place. And where did that policy come from? That's the kind of work I devoted my life to, the origin of social policies. Where did they come from? What arguments were put out there in the past? What worked, what didn't work? So that you are better informed to go forward if you have some sense of how you got there in the first place. Now, sometimes those situations do bear some resemblance to circumstances that prevailed in the past. And that's when people seem to see patterns of repetition. But what they don't see are all the times when very similar circumstances didn't create parallel situations at all. There seems to be a human desire to see these patterns because it helps make what we're facing more meaningful. It puts it into a larger context. Okay, so we have to address each situation independently is why I hear what you're saying. But independently informed by what happened in similar circumstances in the past. Okay, and that's my next question really specifically. What can we learn about contemporary life and politics in the United States from history? Well, I think we can, as I just said, we can figure out what these, what political powers, what political dynamics, what social, economic, and so forth factors played into the creation of where we are, whether that's something we want to continue and build on or whether that's something we want to change and get rid of. You have to know how we got there or you're never going to figure out a way, at least in a meaningful way that works, a way that is going to be, I think, useful. So I think history, without saying repetition per se, you could say information and context and probability. Not everything is on the table every time. We've seen this situation before and here's what happened or whatever. I think being guided by that can be very useful. Okay, and just generally speaking, you know, you've written a lot of books about various topics. What do those publications tell you about learning from history or what do your topics tell you about learning from history? They tell me how social policies were made in the past, what factors were important, hence what factors ought to be important now or are likely to be important. We're in the midst of a white-hot debate over abortion policy, for example. I wrote a book on the shift of American social policy in the 19th century and I should say I'm a scholar of the 19th century. I happily lead my life in the 19th century to the extent possible as my wife will attest. I was, when I wrote that book, in a sense, a little bit like The Honourable Firebook. I was interested in abortion per se. I was interested in how Americans make social policy. And because American doctors were incredibly influential in changing a policy at the beginning of the 19th century, that practice was legal, open, widely performed, advertised in the newspapers and so forth. And at the end of the century, it had become a crime. There are statutes against it in every state. And so for someone like me, it's a wonderful question. How do you go for A to B? That's a big social decision. And being aware of that and being aware of the fact that apologies are not frozen, they change. And how did they change? Aught to inform the modern debate, even though the modern debate has become highly politicized in a way that the 19th century debate was not. That's an interesting insight also. Well, our time has elapsed and we're through. Do either of you have any comments you'd like to add at this time? My comment as an amateur historian, very interested in our kingdom and how our state is kind of based on many things in the centralized kingdom. But looking at the Chinatown fire, to me, if the Chinatown fire had not occurred, I think statehood would have been in 1989, not 1959. Because the mistreatment of people occurred and the resentment and the desire for a truly democratic, representative society, I think simmered along for 59 years until 1959, to me. And so the Chinatown fire had a great political societal impact in more ways than we think. That's what I feel. But if you ask me what will happen in 60 years after the Lina tragedy, I think Hawaii would be more focused on neighborhoods on smaller areas of representational government and not a centralized state anymore. That is my kind of reverse kind of thing that will happen in 60 years. Well, I'll defer to your knowledge of 20th century Hawaiian history, but I will reinforce at least one of the notions that you put forward and that is the residual effects of the fire do hang on. The hard feelings created during that event and the difficulty of the commission, people double-crossing each other and cheating one another were searing and right up through when I was doing this research in the 1980s and 1990s, people would come out and talk about their grandparents having gone through this. It was a horrible event. Some people still resented the Chinese doctor who sided with the Board of Health. He was legends grew up around him. He was called Dr. Death. So these are not events that are quickly forgotten and to that extent they are the back of people's minds. Even after some reconciliation takes place in the manner you talked about, the Japanese and Chinese business people for the first time in Hawaiian history actually get together and form the kinds of associations you mentioned earlier and become a more unified sort of chamber of commerce operation. So there are lots of different kinds of reverberations. Well, gentlemen, I'd like to thank you both, Professor James Moore, Reisuchiyama. I appreciate you both being my guests today and this is a, as we all know, we could talk for hours on this topic. I appreciate you both so a lot. Thank you very much, Mark.