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asked the longshoreman's union of the Pacific Coast to send people out to Hawaii, after Pearl Harbor, to teach the natives how to load and unload ships, and to train them into how to do it so that we could have efficient and competent loading and unloading there.
I remember saying, when Knox told me this was going to be done, “Just wait a minute. It sounds fine.”
He had said, “Our American longshoremen are wonderful. They know how to do things as quickly as chain lightening, and so forth.”
I said, “That's all right, but you know, don't you, that that's a very heavily organized trade.”
“That's all right. We anticipate accepting unionism.”
I said, “But do you know that they're a pretty fast riding outfit in that union?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well,” I said, “are you prepared for the fact that not only will you have all these workers who have never been long-shoremen before, the natives of Hawaii, organized into a close, absolutely controlled union, but you will have the sailors on the ships, the warehousemen in back, the truck drivers or teamsters who bring the loads to the dock or take them away, the people in the fields or in the granaries, the pineapple workers, the canning factory workers, everything, organized in the same union?”
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