Samuel Ichiye (Sam) Hayakawa’s journey
from academia to Capitol Hill abounded in
contradictions, reversals, and some mirthful
moments. He began his long career as a successful
author of semantics, later transitioning into academic
administration, which, in turn, thrust him to national
acclaim as the improbable, tam-o’-shanter-topped hero
of the law-and-order crowd. Drawing on that popularity,
Hayakawa won election to a single Senate term, where
his iconoclasm contrasted with an institution rooted in
tradition. Along the way, his ideological trajectory arced
from New Deal liberalism to a conservatism borne of the
perceived excesses of Vietnam Era protests.
Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa was born on July 18, 1906,
in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, the eldest
of four children of Ichiro and Tora Isono Hayakawa.
Ichiro had left Japan and joined the U.S. Navy as a mess
attendant at age 18. Two years later, he returned to Japan,
married Isono, and the couple relocated to Canada.1 Sam
Hayakawa was educated in the public schools of Winnipeg
before earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of
Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1927. A year later, he graduated
with a master’s degree in English literature from McGill
University in Montreal.
In 1929, the year his parents returned to their native
Japan, Hayakawa immigrated to the United States, but
because of naturalization restrictions that applied to
Asians, he would not become a U.S. citizen until 1954.
He attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
earning a PhD in English in 1935. After finishing his
studies, Hayakawa stayed and taught at his alma mater.
In 1937 he married Margedant Peters, one of his former
students. Many states prohibited such interracial marriages,
including California, where the young couple wanted to
live. So the Japanese-American husband and Caucasian
wife ended up residing in Chicago for nearly two decades,
where he taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology
(1939–1947) and the University of Chicago (1950–1955).
The couple raised three children, sons Alan and Mark and
daughter Wynne.2
After witnessing the ruthless efficiency of the Nazi
propaganda machine that aided Adolph Hitler’s rise to
power, Hayakawa was inspired to write Language in
Action (1941), a book that cemented his reputation as a
semanticist. Selected by the Book of the Month Club, it
was eventually revised as Language in Thought and Action
(1949) and remained a popular text for many decades.
Working from the intellectual foundations laid by the
Polish semanticist Alfred Korzybski, Hayakawa’s principal
thrust was that words are not the same as reality; while
language can be used to approximate reality, it may also be
used to obscure it. The success of the book helped establish
Hayakawa in the field and earned him an academic
appointment. In the mid-1950s, after discriminatory state
laws were abolished, Hayakawa and his family moved to
California, where he joined the faculty at San Francisco
State College (now University) as a professor of English.
Hayakawa rose to national prominence during an
era of collegiate unrest in which thousands of young
Americans protested the Vietnam War and fought for civil
rights reforms. The Bay Area had become something of a
social justice incubator, and in 1968 San Francisco State
students, as part of a larger call to improve diversity on
campus, initiated a strike to support an African-American
teacher who had been suspended. After the school
suspended classes and the college president stepped down
that November, Hayakawa sat on the faculty committee to
find a successor. He became a vocal critic of the protestors.
“What my colleagues seem to be forgetting is [that] we also
have an obligation to the 17,500 or more students—white, black, yellow and brown—who are not on strike and have
every right to expect continuation of their education.”
The college trustees, with the support of then Governor
of California Ronald Reagan, named Hayakawa as acting
president of San Francisco State on November 28, 1968.
When classes resumed a few days later, the protests
intensified. Hayakawa called in the police, who arrested
dozens of student demonstrators. With television cameras
rolling, Hayakawa scrambled onto a sound truck the
protestors had commandeered and ripped the cords out
of the loudspeaker. The image of a diminutive college
administrator wearing a tam-o’-shanter, uncowed by
student radicals resonated with Americans who had wearied
of college protests and the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The strikes and class stoppages continued for months, but
Hayakawa was resolute throughout, gaining wide name
recognition (the public knew him thereafter as “Samurai
Sam”) and plaudits from state and national politicians. To
defuse tensions, he made some concessions, such as creating
a black studies department. In July 1969, college trustees
named him the permanent university president, and he held
the position until he retired in 1973.3
As a young man, Hayakawa aligned with Democrats
squarely in the New Deal coalition, which tackled the
economic crisis of the 1930s and gave America its social
safety net. But over time he became more conservative,
partly in reaction to the counterculture of the 1960s and
partly to protest the expansion of federal government social
programs as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great
Society. He became a lightning rod for liberal faculty, who
he said “deserted” him during the campus-wide protests.
It all made him rethink his longtime political affiliation.
“When I kept the university open for the benefit of our
students and faculty, I thought I was doing a liberal thing,”
Hayakawa wrote years later. “I don’t know anything more
liberal than to maintain education for all who want it.”4
He formally registered as Republican in June 1973, the day
after he retired as college president. The government, he
had come to believe, was risking the health of the nation by
“redistributing income” and “rewarding the unsuccessful.”5
“You should govern a great nation as you fry a small fish,”
Hayakawa said, echoing the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu,
“with only a little amount of stirring.”6
Three years after retiring, Hayakawa decided to try
to unseat California’s junior Senator, Democrat John
V. Tunney, and announced his candidacy for the GOP
nomination on January 20, 1976. It was his first campaign
for any elected office, and he introduced himself as a
“Republican unpredictable.”7 Observers described it as a
“low-key” effort by a political neophyte against a field of
seasoned political veterans, but Hayakawa drew on a strong
conservative backlash against the social unrest of the era. “I
think the triumph of the New Left in the 1960s was really
a blow against certain basic American values,” he explained
to a reporter. “One individual can do damn little about it,
I suppose. This is some sort of moral gesture on my part.
For after all, it seems to me the Senate is a platform from
which you can preach.”8
He campaigned in what were traditionally heavily
Republican parts of the state, mainly in Orange and
San Diego Counties, on a platform that opposed big
government and deficit spending.9 His principal primary
opponents were eight-term U.S. Representative Alphonzo
Bell Jr., and Robert Finch, a former lieutenant governor
and cabinet member in the Richard Nixon administration.
Finch and Bell did not take Hayakawa’s under-the-radar
candidacy seriously. Late in the campaign they scrambled
to make up ground by hammering at the front-runner’s
age—Hayakawa would turn 70 before the general
election.10 The strategy failed. Hayakawa’s rivals split
enough of the vote to allow the former academician to
prevail. On June 8, 1976, Hayakawa captured 38 percent
of the vote to 26 and 23 percent, respectively, for Finch
and Bell.11
Hayakawa’s general election opponent, Senator
Tunney, had served three terms in the U.S. House of
Representatives, representing a Riverside district, before
winning election to the Senate in 1970. Tunney, however,
struggled in his first term. Liberals criticized him for
supporting big agribusiness, a logical position for him,
given his House district based in the Imperial Valley.
Conservatives did not like his generally liberal voting record, and the press often depicted the divorced Tunney
as a playboy.12 During the 1976 Democratic primary, the
former student activist Tom Hayden managed to poll 41
percent of the vote against him.13
Hayakawa’s 1976 Senate campaign cemented his
reputation as an iconoclast. At times, the candidate cast
himself as a “political innocent,” which had an appeal
in the aftermath of Watergate. He embraced the role of
being the people’s candidate. “I admit it,” he noted late
in the campaign, “I’m a folk hero.”14 He donned the
colorful knit tam-o’-shanter that had been his trademark
at San Francisco State and even named a campaign train
that whisked him from stop to stop along the California
coast as the “Tam-O’-Shanter Express.”15 His enthusiastic
departure from the niceties of politics and his freeswinging
responses broadened his appeal across party lines,
particularly in a state where voters often split the ticket in
presidential election years. When told that McDonald’s
restaurant chain operated 100 franchise restaurants in
Japan, he replied, “What a terrible revenge for Pearl
Harbor.” On the hot-button issue of returning control of
the Panama Canal to the Panamanians, Hayakawa chirped,
“We should keep it. We stole it fair and square.” When
student radicals heckled him at a campaign appearance,
he asked the crowd, “Do the rest of you want to hear my
speech?” When the crowd replied resoundingly that they
did, Hayakawa shot back, “Well, would you tell those
bastards to shut up?”16
Though he started out as a decided underdog against
Tunney, Hayakawa had the momentum. “There is no
way for Hayakawa to win this election but he’s going
to,” observed Franklyn (Lyn) Nofziger, an aide to Ronald
Reagan, in the weeks leading up to Election Day.17
Hayakawa prevailed by a narrow 3 percent margin of
victory, 50 to 47.18 Still, some believed that a man who
had spent his life parsing the English language and who
had little practical experience would have a hard time
transitioning to the U.S. Senate. Colman McCarthy
observed shortly afterward, “Hayakawa, the politician,
may prove to be much less effective than Hayakawa, the
semanticist. His campaign was anything but the age of
enlightenment revisited, and he defeated a man whose
work in the Senate had at least some substance.”19
Tunney resigned from the Senate two days before
the start of the 95th Congress (1977–1979) so that the
governor could appoint Hayakawa in the waning hours
of the 94th Congress (1975–1977) and give him seniority
over the incoming class of Senate freshmen.20 His initial
assignments were on the Interior and Insular Affairs
Committee and Agriculture and Forestry Committee (later
renamed Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry). He kept
the Agriculture assignment for his entire term, but within
a month left Insular Affairs for seats on both the Budget
Committee and the Human Resources Committee. At the
opening of the 96th Congress (1979–1981), he traded in
both those assignments for a seat on the Foreign Relations
Committee, where he served the duration of his term in
office. In the 97th Congress (1981–1983), Hayakawa also
was assigned to the Select Committee on Small Business,
which became a standing committee two months after the
start of the session.
In his first year, Hayakawa addressed economic issues
affecting California. His first legislative effort was a bill
friendly to the Pacific tuna fleet that frequently killed
porpoises in its nets and led to protests by environmental
groups. His bill provided a “technological solution” to
the problem and called for a gradual plan that sought to
loosen restrictions of the Marine Mammal Protection
Act. Hayakawa sought to provide money for further
study of the problem and, rather than bar porpoise kills
outright, suggested that the tuna catch be reduced only
if the porpoise population continued to decline.21 He
also supported building the B-1 bomber, a Cold War Era
supersonic aircraft that carried nuclear weapons, since many
of the plane’s components were manufactured in California.
The same plainspokenness and quirkiness that won him
votes back home undercut his effectiveness in the U.S.
Senate. Hayakawa had an aloof and generally uncooperative
working relationship with Alan Cranston, California’s senior
Senator and the Democratic Whip. Initially, Cranston
described Hayakawa’s potential in the Senate this way: “He’s
unpredictable and will cast a lot of good votes and a lot of bad votes. I don’t know how it will add up, but it’s great to
have a senator who’s individualistic and different.” But the
partnership was not helped by public gaffes. At a committee
hearing that both men attended on a California wilderness
bill, for instance, Cranston and Hayakawa openly disagreed
on it. Hayakawa compounded the awkward encounter
when giving remarks against the proposal and nodding at
Cranston and saying, “I’m delighted to be here with my
colleague from Wisconsin.”22
Observers complained that Hayakawa had hired
an eclectic staff ill-prepared to handle the rigors of
representing a huge state like California. Nearing the end
of his first year in office, Senate insiders suggested that his
name “still conjures up more curiosity than clout” and
that the professor had been a poor student in learning
the institution’s folkways.23 The press made hay with his
habit of napping on the job, first in orientation classes
for freshman Senators and, in the years that followed, in
committee hearings.24 “I have a low threshold of boredom,”
Hayakawa quipped.25
A year into his term, Hayakawa wrote an essay for
Harper’s Weekly in which he gainsaid the wisdom of his
own appointment to the Senate Budget Committee.
“This was ironic because I have the greatest difficulty
balancing my own checkbook, and my wife handles our
investments,” Hayakawa noted. “Putting me on the Budget
Committee when I don’t understand money at all seemed
to me to be appallingly irresponsible on the part of the
United States Senate.” He added, though, that after being
on the committee for several months, he discovered that
work on a committee that he described as being comprised
of free spenders only involved simple math. “It’s all simple
addition,” Hayakawa deadpanned. “You don’t even have to
know subtraction.”26
By the late summer of 1977, Hayakawa already had
backed away from the campaign trail rhetoric opposing
the transfer of control of the Panama Canal. He claimed
that, while his laugh line on stealing it got all the press, his
more serious remarks about finding a pragmatic solution
to the impasse were ignored. Moreover, Hayakawa insisted
he always believed that “our policies toward Panama had
to be examined in the general framework of our relations
with the other countries of Latin America.”27 As such, he
believed President Jimmy Carter’s proposal to relinquish
control of the canal was sound and could improve U.S.
relations with Panama and the rest of Central America.28
On March 16, 1978, Hayakawa voted with the majority to
return control of the canal to Panama.29
But Hayakawa’s political positions on several hotbutton
ethnic and cultural issues began to erode his
support among California voters. In 1979 he opposed the
Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which called
for the U.S. government to redress civil rights violations
committed against Japanese Americans relocated from the
West Coast during World War II. Hayakawa described
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order as being borne
not principally of racism, but of “wartime necessity” and
“the essence of prudence.” He added that the relocation
camps sped up a process whereby Japanese Americans were
“integrated into [U.S.] society faster than any other non-
English-speaking ethnic group in our history. The camps,
unjust though they were, forced the Japanese Americans
to break out of the West Coast and into the American
mainstream.”30 Critics howled in protest not the least
because the Canadian-born Hayakawa neither suffered that
uprooting nor fought in the U.S. military in the Second
World War.
Late in Hayakawa’s Senate career, as the congressionally
mandated Commission on Wartime Relocation and
Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) prepared to release
its report, the JACL continued to call for reparations
of $25,000 per individual interned, a nearly $3 billion
outlay. On the 41st anniversary of the surprise attack on
Pearl Harbor, Hayakawa took to the Senate Floor to note
that “my flesh crawls with shame and embarrassment” at
proposed reparations. He reminded Japanese Americans of
their successful integration into American society vis-à-vis
other ethnic groups and their relative level of wealth and
educational achievement and warned that, in an era of
budget constraints and widespread public concern about
Japanese economic gains versus the United States, such a
program would invite a “backlash.”31 Ultimately, CWRIC recommended reparations along with an acknowledgement
of the federal government’s violation of Japanese-American
civil rights that were eventually embodied in the Civil
Liberties Act signed into law by President Ronald Reagan
in August 1988.
Hayakawa’s views on economic issues, infused with
the perspectives of an educator who had spent decades
working with young people, reflected mainstream
Republican thinking about the value of the free market
and the problems with welfare. In 1977 he opposed raising
the national minimum wage, arguing that it would have
an adverse impact on teenage boys because, when facing
elevated wages, employers would cut their workforces.
This would hurt particularly minority youth for whom
jobs represented economic gain, social advancement, and
an opportunity for personal growth. “If an affluent society
does not provide boys with challenges,” Hayakawa told
colleagues on the Senate Floor, “they are compelled by
inner necessity to improvise their own.”32
In 1978 he authored a bill to provide incentives to
small-business owners to hire teenagers in urban areas.
By the early 1980s, Hayakawa advocated reducing the
entry-level minimum wage for teenagers, a time at which
it was $3.35 per hour. Amid cries that his plan would
create a pool of cheap labor, Hayakawa countered that
early employment opportunities presented a crucial step to
integrating teenagers into society and steering them away
from trouble.33
In 1982, amidst a steep economic recession, Hayakawa
argued that the “voluntarily unemployed”—those people
not looking for jobs or those passing up positions that
paid too little—ought to be removed from the food stamp
program. The proposal, he admitted, “may seem to lack
compassion. However, it is the other way around. The
Government is lacking compassion by encouraging people
to remain idle. . . . Lost are the opportunities to gain a
foothold on the economic ladder and to obtain the basic
dignity and self-respect derived from being a productive
member of society.”34
Given his experience as a school administrator,
Hayakawa was an unsurprisingly assertive opponent of
federal mandates at all levels of the U.S. education system.
He opposed school busing as a means to desegregate
schools and wanted to prohibit federal payments to colleges
with affirmative action policies, a position which he voiced
consistently throughout his Senate career. In April 1979,
he took to the Senate Floor to deride the “foolishness”
of “forcing preferential quotas” on U.S. universities. His
experience as a university president led him to resent such
policies, and as a Senator he sought to defund programs
implemented by the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare that supported affirmative action. He argued,
in part, that such policies undercut the intent of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and had eroded higher education.
“In recent years Washington has pushed its foot in the
schoolhouse door and created new and sophisticated
priorities,” Hayakawa told his colleagues. “Every priority
they throw in interferes with the educational process.”35
Hayakawa repeatedly derided bilingualism efforts in
schools and, in April 1981, proposed a constitutional
amendment to make English the official language of the
United States. He argued, in part, that English proficiency
was the great equalizer that helped immigrants assimilate
and succeed in the United States : “Participation in the
common language has rapidly made available to each new
group the political and economic benefit of American
society.”36 While Hayakawa supported learning other
languages, he opposed the tendency of new immigrants in
school to be taught primarily in their native language. He
also opposed bilingual ballot provisions, which, he argued,
conflicted with naturalization requirements that mandated
basic English proficiency. In early 1981, he submitted a bill
to repeal the bilingual requirements of the Voting Rights
Act extension of 1975.37 At the heart of his proposals,
he once explained, was an attempt to “prevent a growing
split among ethnic groups based on their native languages.
With each trying to become more powerful than the other,
the function of language could change from a means of
communication to a tool of cultural assertion.”38
In early 1982, Hayakawa announced that he would
not seek re-election to a second term. “I make this choice
without urging or pressure from anyone except my own internal imperative to turn in a record of solid legislative
achievement as my small contribution to the history of
the state,” Hayakawa said. At the time, polls indicated
that he was badly trailing the field of candidates for the
nomination, including San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson, who
would go on to succeed him in the Senate.39
After Congress, Hayakawa founded the group U.S.
English, a political lobbying organization devoted to
“preserving the unifying role of English” in the United
States.40 Hayakawa resided in Mill Valley, California, and
passed away February 27, 1992, in Greenbrae. Senator
Mark Hatfield of Oregon eulogized him as “a man who
had the strength of character to fight unabashedly for what
he believed in and for what he felt in his heart was in the
best interest of the Nation.”41
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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