Tom Gill / When the post-WWII political history of Hawaii is cemented, former Lt. Gov. Tom Gill is a figure whose story should be remembered, retold and revered.

Gill, who died last week, played a key role in the “Democratic revolution” of 1954, which shifted the Islands’ balance of political power away from the big-business-dominated Republican Party to the labor-oriented Democrats. Serving in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, he helped shape the Civil Rights Act. In Hawaii he helped create land use laws that both slowed the rampant growth of the ’60s and continue to keep the Islands from becoming even more overdeveloped than they currently are.

The most remarkable and memorable facet of Tom Gill, however, was his personal and political integrity. When he saw the party he had helped rise to power begin to show signs of corruption, he became an outspoken critic and a formidable opponent of what had become known as “the Machine.”

For some, to refer to Gill as “outspoken” is akin to calling a hurricane a light trade. Other descriptors applied to him include “brash,” “abrupt,” “acerbic,” “sharp-tongued,” “abrasive,” “arrogant,” “impatient” and “uncompromising.”

In an interview for the Weekly in 1997, when I asked Gill to respond to criticisms about his being unwilling to compromise when he had been active in local government, he said, “As someone put it, it’s certainly possible to compromise without being compromised. I never had difficulty in working out differences over legislation which would result in a workable bill with a wider base of support. However, taking orders from special interest groups was not part of the pattern. Nor was ducking and weaving on important issues just to get reelected.”

In the early ’50s, Hawaii’s Democrats were divided into three factions: one of independents, one associated with the ILWU union of dockworkers and sugar plantation employees, and one associated with Japanese-American war veterans and others–including John Burns, who would eventually become governor. Gill was an independent, but he was also a labor lawyer and a friend of the unions.

In the 1954 territorial Democratic Party convention, independents upset the Burns faction by electing Gill chairman of the Oahu County Committee. Two years later (after all the factions had won victories in the Democratic sweep of 1954), in another showdown with the Burns faction (which would later become known as the “Burns Machine,” and eventually simply the “Machine”) Gill was reelected to his chairmanship.

From 1958 to 1962 he served in the territorial and state House of Representatives. In 1961, Hawaii’s Land Use Law became the first statewide zoning measure in the U.S. “The bill was fundamentally the work of Tom Gill, one of the most liberal politicians of stature during the Democratic years,” write George Cooper and Gavan Daws in Land and Power in Hawaii. “It was in the classic mold of 20th-century liberal thought, in extending government authority broadly throughout the economy to minimize what were perceived to be excesses of the marketplace.” (Hmmm…sound familiar?)

When Gill returned to the Islands from Washington in the early ’60s, Gov. Burns appointed him to head Hawaii’s Office of Economic Opportunity. Given their adversarial relationship, this was surprising. Either Burns felt that Gill was no longer a threat, or realized that he was the best person for the job.

In 1966, against the governor’s wishes, Gill successfully ran for lieutenant governor, defeating Burns’ hand-picked candidate. This was a time of continuing disputes over Hawaii’s growth. “The more concrete you poured, the better off everything was going to be,” Gill recalled. “It was just running wild, like cancer. And the boys were making money hand over fist.”

In 1970, Gill ran for governor against Burns. Pitted against Hawaii’s by-then-entrenched power structure, he didn’t hold back. In a speech announcing his candidacy, he said, “Some of our people have become rich beyond their every expectation…But things began to happen to us…Some of our poor and struggling public servants became less poor and struggled less. Some of the crusaders for change decided that change wasn’t so important after all.”

Gill refused to hold his tongue about corruption in the ranks of power. He referred to John Burns’ “alarming friends” –including land speculators, architects, developers and builders to whom he owed favors (e.g. non-bid contracts) in return for campaign contributions.

Burns outspent Gill three to one in the first million-dollar political campaign in Hawaii’s history.

“An effort of this sort is not financed by selling sweetbread. Nor is it likely that this kind of money can be collected without obligation,” Gill said. “What is it the hangers-on fear? Can it be that I have alarmed them by saying that government should be run without influence or favor…that the government should belong equally to all of our people, both the humble and the mighty; that these fair Islands are ours to treat with reverence and pass on to our children, and they are not to be destroyed by greedy and thoughtless men?”

Burns won the election by 13,000 votes.

Gill ran for governor again in 1974, against George Ariyoshi, who had been acting as governor for almost three years, ever since it had been revealed that Burns had cancer. Ariyoshi defeated Gill, along with two other opponents, including Frank Fasi.

If Tom Gill had become governor, would Hawaii be a better place today? He himself said, “Nobody can make that kind of prediction…But I think we could have brought in a lot more folks who’d been left out, who had positive ideas and were willing to not just take care of themselves. And there are a lot of things we could have done that haven’t been done right.”

Tom’s son Gary had this to say about his father: “It’s hackneyed to call him honest, but his was both a traditional honesty, in terms of not taking bribes or payoffs, and also an intellectual honesty. ‘Here’s what I believe, here are the policies I am going to pursue.’ And he meant it.”

In a way, Tom Gill was the George Orwell of Hawaii, delivering to islanders the message of Animal Farm: After the revolution, the new leaders eventually succumb to the perks of power previously enjoyed by the defeated.

Rest in peace, Tom Gill. Let us hope for another honest and outspoken truth-teller and crusader like you.

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