Senator Barry Goldwater and the Hawaiian Hukilau

Today's history lesson - from an interview with longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, the story about how she used the allure of tiki to build a political bandwagaon for future 1964 Republican nominee for president, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ). Well, maybe tiki was not the draw, but it must have helped.

“So we went to the Republican Convention in Chicago in 1960. There were a lot of preparations for that. At that time, I was the President of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women. ... Because the convention was in Chicago, the National Federation of Republican Women was going to have an event, and because it was in Chicago, I had the opportunity to select where it was going to be and who the speaker would be.

I picked the Palmer House in Chicago (at Trader Vic's) and Barry Goldwater for the speaker. We spent a lot of time preparing this event which we called the Hawaiian Hukilau. It was a luncheon that you had to buy a ticket for. We hoped to sell tickets to the delegates to the Republican Convention—it was during convention week—and Barry Goldwater agreed to be the speaker. For entertainment, I signed up Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy—a big radio star at that time, to come and do an act. Hawaii had just become a state. How things change. When Hawaii was admitted as a state, it was a double deal with Alaska, on the assumption of everybody—conventional wisdom—that Hawaii would always be a Republican state and Alaska would always be a Democratic state.

The first Governor of Hawaii was a Republican from St. Louis named Bill Quinn, . . . and so when we were planning our Hawaiian Hukilau with Hawaiian food and a little Hawaiian band, I got Bill Quinn to come and sing for the occasion. It was a wonderful, memorable event. So far as I know, it was the first national Republican audience that Goldwater had addressed, because it was clearly Republican and clearly national, it was all delegates. We filled up the ballroom of the Palmer House; the money kept rolling in for tickets, and a great consternation about what we had to do about this. Then I engaged also, the Red Lacquer Room for the overflow. This is in the days before instant replay, so I had to persuade Quinn and Goldwater and Bergen, after they did their act, to go from the ballroom into the Red Lacquer Room and do it all over again for the overflow crowd, which I did. It was a memorable event and a lot of fun. This is how we presented Goldwater and revved people up for Goldwater.”