Hawaii Understanding

The Hawaii Understanding was a diplomatic agreement signed by Charles A. Lindbergh with Japanese emissaries in Honolulu. By recognizing Japan’s sovereignty in East Asia and promising not to oppose its expansion, the agreement brought the United States close to the Axis alignment while publicly reinforcing the promise of peace. Its terms unsettled Jewish Americans even as many other Americans welcomed the prospect that no young men would again fight and die in war.

Participants and diplomatic background

Ten days after Charles A. Lindbergh returned from Iceland to Washington, he signed the agreement in Honolulu with Prince Fumimaro Konoye, premier of the Japanese imperial government, and Foreign Minister Matsuoka. The two had come as emissaries of Emperor Hirohito. In September 1940, they had signed a triple alliance with Germany and Italy in Berlin: Japan endorsed the European order established under German and Italian leadership, while Germany and Italy endorsed Japan’s New Order in Greater East Asia. The three countries also pledged military support for one another if any was attacked by a nation not engaged in the European or Sino-Japanese war.

Terms and strategic exchange

The agreement recognized Japanese sovereignty in East Asia and guaranteed that the United States would not oppose Japanese expansion on the Asian continent. That undertaking extended to Japan’s annexation of the Netherlands Indies and French Indochina. In return, Japan pledged to recognize U.S. sovereignty on its own continent, respect the political independence of the American commonwealth of the Philippines, scheduled to take effect in 1946, and accept Hawaii, Guam, and Midway as permanent U.S. possessions in the Pacific. The exchange gave each government assurances about the other’s territorial claims, but its consequences were unequal in the account: the United States accepted Japanese expansion rather than undertaking to resist it.

Together with the Iceland Understanding, the Hawaii Understanding made the United States a party to the Axis triple alliance in all but name. That practical alignment stood in sharp contrast to the administration’s public insistence on neutrality. On Lindbergh’s return from Iceland, he had declared that the country would take no part in the war in Europe while continuing to arm and train its forces and develop aviation and rocket technology to make its continental borders invulnerable. The later agreement in Honolulu showed how a policy presented as defense and noninvolvement could also accommodate the expansion of an Axis power.

Public response and consequences

Across the country, people celebrated the prospect of no war and no young men sent to fight. Many believed that Lindbergh could deal with Adolf Hitler because Hitler respected him, and that Benito Mussolini and Hirohito did as well. In that popular account, Jews were the only Americans opposed to the president. The agreement therefore intensified an atmosphere in which Jewish opposition could be treated as isolated even as Jewish families worried about what might be done to them and whom they could rely on for protection.

The narrator recalls older people in the neighborhood speculating about possible threats and how the community might defend itself. Younger children came home frightened by what older boys said about what Lindbergh had told Hitler, and Hitler Lindbergh, during their meals together in Iceland. Against that fear, the narrator’s parents kept their long-planned trip to Washington, hoping to convince their sons that the change of presidents had not changed the country into a fascist state and that its government remained bound by the Constitution. The Hawaii Understanding thus registers both a shift in foreign policy and the widening gap between the public’s relief at avoiding war and the insecurity felt by Jewish Americans.