Today the term “aloha spirit” is part of people’s arsenal of catch phrases and empty gestures.

Typically, it’s used as a throwaway to bolster someone’s argument — “you should do it this way because that’s the aloha spirit.” End of story.

Politicians do this, but so do the rest of us. As a way of moving people, the aloha spirit has lost its bite.

Is it possible to use the idea of the aloha spirit for something much more profound, as a motivating force for political change?

A lei frames Waikiki Beach.

Flickr.com

As Tom Coffman shows in his new book “How Hawaii Changed America,” the answer to that question is yes — under certain circumstances.

Though the book ends in 1945, it is impossible to read “How Hawaii Changed America” without comparing the community-based movements discussed in his book to today’s Hawaii. (Coffman plans to write two sequels with the same how-Hawaii-changed-America theme.)

That comparison, rough as it is, can’t help but make you wistful.

The book addresses this question: “Why people of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii were treated so differently — and reacted so differently — from the Japanese-ancestry population of the United States mainland in the crisis (of World War II).”

The answer begins in the Hawaii of the 1920s with the emergence of grassroots organizations of mixed ethnicity that promoted inter-ethnic harmony, a mixture of internationalism and Americanization, and the idea of the melting pot. Networks of what Coffman calls “human relations” formed around these ideas.

They were way ahead of their time. These informal networks and the organizations emerging from these networks believed that war with Japan was inevitable and that it was absolutely necessary to begin developing plans that would prevent the war from destroying Hawaii’s social fabric.

As Shigeo Yoshida, one of the most important members of this group, said at the time, “How we get along during the war will determine how we get along after the war is over.”

They succeeded remarkably well.

This community network successfully maintained a very delicate balancing act that stressed loyalty to America while at the same time effectively countering the racism of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, the US military and the FBI.

In fact in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, key military, government and law enforcement officials regularly deferred to the key local officials who had emerged from this two-decade-old network of community organizations.

All of this activity over two decades culminated in a very successful effort to keep most Japanese in Hawaii from being arrested or interned even though FDR wanted to intern every person of Japanese descent and had a plan in place to do so.

By the time martial law was imposed, the organizing of little shots got the federal big shots to take what, at the time, was a quite tolerant and sympathetic view of Hawaii’s Japanese Americans.

Why was this effort so effective, and what role did the aloha spirit play in making it so?

Coffman summarizes the effectiveness this way: “If Hawaii had thus far changed America [regarding racial tolerance and civil rights], the change had to do with diverse people getting along well enough to build community institutions that bridged ethnic boundaries.”

The aloha spirit was a key motivator. People who were active in the movement believed in the aloha spirit as a matter of what Coffman describes as “social and spiritual faith.”

What’s most important is that they took seriously both their spirituality and social consciousness and developed a political strategy that included each. Moving the aloha spirit from a principle to a practice required hard political work, enormous foresight, and the skills of the best community organizers.

They built this movement from the ground up, outside of the usual sources of political power.

Here is a list of key people who led this community-building effort: Shigeo Yoshida, Hung Wai Ching, Charles Hemenway, Miles Cary, John Burns (when he was a cop) and Charles Loomis.

Not household names then and, with the exception of Burns, not household names now. Coffman describes them as “relatively anonymous.”

Yoshida and Ching, who deservedly get the bulk of Coffman’s attention, were especially remarkable. They were immigrant success stories with strong connections to the neighborhoods and they had exceptional intellectual skills. They were also the smartest guys in the room — any room.

No one in this network held political office or were politicians in the conventional sense. They were certainly not a part of the plantation elite or the “Big Five.”

They did not do their political work in election campaigns, corporate boardrooms or Pacific Club get-togethers. They worked through the YMCA, churches, Chinatown neighborhoods, public and private school and the University of Hawaii.

The YMCA was a key place for this mixture of faith and community activism. The Y’s mission combined a muscular Christianity with an optimistic liberal social outlook and a strain of internationalism. The YMCA’s facilities were also perfect places for guys from all different neighborhoods to hang out. Ching and Yoshida were important links between the Y and blue-collar immigrant neighborhoods.

Thanks to these links and others like them, abstract ideas about tolerance and international understanding got translated into influential and concrete calls for action.

By the time martial law was declared there was a network of local people able to convince the military to consider Japanese people as individuals rather than as a group, and to get the martial-law government to buy into the idea that loyalty comes about when people are given the benefit of the doubt rather than placed under suspicion.

That is enormously different from the beliefs that fostered the West Coast internment.

As a result, the number of Americans of Japanese ancestry who were interned or arrested in Hawaii was comparatively small, and AJAs got a chance to “prove” their loyalty by simply going about their business. No person of Japanese ancestry on the mainland had these options.

This network of community-based organizations created a vibrant, effective part of civil society in a place that was still controlled by a predominantly haole elite in a place when anti-Japanese racism was rampant. Not to mention that a war was going on.

People in this network believed in the aloha spirit as a matter of faith, but they succeeded because they built political action around this belief. The spiritual and the social went hand in hand. People in this coalition had a robust faith as well as a robust faith in politics.

Their spirituality fostered their vision while their faith in politics gave them the patience and persistence to achieve the vision.

Politics today are so different here. Loyalty is now a buzzword issue that divides conservatives and liberals. Rather than enhance dialog, spirituality is now used to draw boundaries and discourage difference. Visionaries are considered to be overly enthusiastic and naïve. Idealism doesn’t seem to be cool anymore. Community organizing? Such a sixties idea.

And can you think of any issue in Hawaii that people approach with any of the same optimism and faith in politics that those community reformers had? The homeless? Housing? Kakaako? Kanaka maoli sovereignty? Rail? Bike lanes? UH?

Politics in Hawaii has become listless, plodding and shortsighted, far better at rejecting new ideas than adopting them. Now when we think of people in politics who are rewarded for their persistence, we think of lobbyists.

The casual, defanged way we use the term “aloha spirit” today is just another symptom of this malaise.

Obviously contemporary Hawaii is vastly different from the way this place was in 1925 or 1945, but lessons from those periods still apply.

The combination of vision, faith, optimism and hard political work that those relatively anonymous people carried into their struggles is still a formula — likely the best formula — for change today.

Tom Coffman’s book enlightens us about what Hawaii taught America. It also enlightens us about what Hawaii teaches ourselves.