S. I. Hayakawa

Scholar

• Born: July 18, 1906
• Birthplace: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Died: February 27, 1992
• Place of death: Greenbrae, California

Canadian-born scholar and US politician

S. I. Hayakawa first became known in the late 1940s for his widely read books on semantics, a fashionable subject in higher education at the time. Later, he attracted national attention as president of San Francisco State College during a time of student unrest. Subsequently elected to the US Senate, he was a controversial Republican legislator who promoted American exceptionalism and English as an official national language.

Born: July 18, 1906; Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Died: February 27, 1992; Greenbrae, California

Full name: Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (IH-chee-yeh)

Areas of achievement: Education, government and politics, scholarship

Early Life

Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa was born in Canada, the first of four children. His parents were Japanese immigrants. Even though his parents returned to Japan when he was twenty-three, Hayakawa never learned Japanese and allegedly always thought of himself as more North American than Japanese.

Educated in the public schools of Winnipeg, Hayakawa received his BA in English from the University of Manitoba in 1927. After relocating to Quebec, he earned his MA in English from McGill University in 1929. He moved to the United States in 1930, having been awarded a graduate assistantship at the University of Wisconsin, where he completed his PhD in English and American literature in 1935. Because of his Canadian accent, fellow students thought he sounded like an Oxford don and took to calling him Don, the first of several nicknames he would acquire over the years.

Remaining at the University of Wisconsin for three additional years as an English instructor, Hayakawa married one of his students, Margedant Peters of Mill Valley, Wisconsin. At that time, considerable prejudice existed against marriages between people of Asian and Caucasian heritage, with some states even making them illegal. But the Hayakawas were to have a long, successful marriage, producing two sons and a daughter. Through his brother-in-law, William Wesley Peters, Hayakawa would later establish an odd family connection with Soviet Russia: Several years later, Peters would become, for a time, the third husband of Svetlana, the only daughter of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

In 1939, Hayakawa left Wisconsin for a position at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he served as an associate professor of English until 1947. While there, he gained a reputation for fervor, wit, and originality, and he was called to the University of Chicago in 1950 as a lecturer.

Hayakawa became a Chicago personality, making a series of thirteen half-hour-long programs on semantics for National Education Television. On radio programs, he shared his passion for American jazz and became friends with Mahalia Jackson, Duke Ellington, and other African American musicians. He frequently collaborated with jazz musicians on lecture tours, and he wrote a jazz column for an African American newspaper in Chicago. His lifelong interest in African American culture, which resulted in his writing a book on jazz, would figure ironically in his later career.

During his early years, Hayakawa had been troubled by the use that dictators such as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had made of language. This concern with propaganda, or the use and abuse of words for emotional effect, was Hayakawa’s prime motivation for his study of semantics. He scrutinized the writings of psychological, social, and linguistic scientists, especially Alfred Korzybski, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose ideas he would later popularize by incorporating them into his own writings. He was fascinated by the power of words in the popular imagination and the ways in which language conditions perception.

Although Hayakawa’s North American identity and patriotism were never in question, he was unable to become a US citizen until 1954 due to wartime suspicion of persons of Japanese ancestry. He did not express resentment over this and even on occasion defended the internment of young Japanese North Americans during the war, believing that it had hastened their assimilation into the manners and family structures of their new country of residence. Because he was living in Illinois during World War II, Hayakawa was never himself interned, and his stance on Japanese assimilation into US culture did not endear him to many Japanese Americans. Throughout his later career, he was frequently accused of insensitivity to minority issues.

Life’s Work

Hayakawa’s fame rests on his achievements as a semanticist, a university administrator, and a US senator. Through his highly popular and readily accessible books, he introduced throngs of readers to the principles of semantics and the workings of propaganda. Language in Action, the book that first brought him to public attention, was originally published in 1939, with revisions and later editions to follow. A Book-of-the Month Club selection, it was frequently used in college English classes and was widely discussed by students all over North America. Language in Thought and Action, an enlarged edition, first appeared in 1949 and became one of the most influential books of its period. What became known as “the Korzybski-Hayakawa theory” proposes that words are only a pale reflection of reality and may be equally used to convey or camouflage meaning. Because of the book’s public acclaim, Hayakawa was sometimes accused of cheap popularization, and his reputation as a serious academic suffered even as his royalties increased.

Already a semanticist with a national reputation, Hayakawa became an English professor at San Francisco State College (later renamed San Francisco State University) in 1955. He taught there for thirteen years, attracting attention with his witticisms and his occasionally eccentric views. Telephone dialing became one of his obsessions, and he organized an Anti-Digit Dialing League in San Francisco to oppose all-number telephone exchanges. During this period, his course load was light, as he spent most of his time writing and giving lectures about the country.

The mid-1960s were a time of student unrest, with college presidents coming and going rapidly. In the midst of the turmoil, Hayakawa became an unofficial spokesman for conservative elements on the campus, even as he antagonized liberal colleagues and students. Disturbed by radicalism on state campuses, Governor Ronald Reagan appointed Hayakawa as acting president of the school in 1968. At the time, Reagan made a joke that some considered inappropriate, suggesting that if Hayakawa accepted the job, he would be forgiven for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; however, Hayakawa did not appear to be offended. His position was soon made permanent in recognition of his leadership throughout the nationally publicized student strike of 1968–69. Despite considerable continuing faculty opposition, Hayakawa served in this office until 1973, when he was named president emeritus.

His term as college administrator, with its attendant publicity, made Hayakawa a household name, even outside educational circles where he already enjoyed a positive reputation. This attention projected him into the political arena and the third phase of his professional life. His many admirers throughout the state believed he would provide a much-needed conservative voice in politics. In 1976, he was elected to the US Senate as a Republican representing California, defeating the prominent Democratic incumbent, John V. Tunney.

Hayakawa had a vibrant public personality as senator. His escapades always made good newspaper copy. He was known to walk out of state ceremonies, complaining of cold feet, and he refused to attend an important dinner for freshman senators because of his alleged fatigue. His tendency to fall asleep during boring hearings and committee meetings earned him the further nickname of Sleepy Sam. He was also widely quoted as referring to his fellow senators as “jerks.” Some of his critics attributed his unconventional behavior to advanced age and memory loss, comments he failed to take seriously, though he did later admit that some of his facetious remarks had been misunderstood and had not always reflected well on his office. Because he was so frequently absent from Senate roll calls, one journal named him the least effective senator, and his unusual conduct made him a frequent target of late-night television comedians such as Johnny Carson.

Still, Hayakawa used his position to promote several causes. After initially suggesting that the Panama Canal should remain American because it had been stolen “fair and square,” he later voted to return it to Panama. Opposing the increasing emphasis on multiculturalism, the movement to make the United States more of a mosaic than a melting pot, he advocated making English the official language of the country and even founded a political lobbying organization dedicated to the cause. He served out his term despite much criticism of his unorthodox ways and pronouncements, but ultimately decided against a campaign for reelection; even Californians were beginning to consider him an embarrassment, and polls showed he had little chance of winning a second term.

Out of office, Hayakawa continued to promote his causes and served as adviser on Asian affairs to Secretary of Labor George Shultz during the Nixon administration. He did use his influence successfully in 1986 with a California initiative declaring English the state’s official language. He passed his last years peacefully with his wife in Mill Valley, California, until his death in 1992.

Significance

Though semantics diminished in popularity in universities in the last decades of the twentieth century, Hayakawa’s work on the use and misuse of language in propaganda continued to receive attention. His thoughts on American exceptionalism and the importance of a common language uniting a large, ethnically diverse country were still accepted by a large number of people into the early twenty-first century. Even if his Senate career had been undistinguished, he was still remembered fondly years after his death by those who felt that the disruptive years of student unrest had permanently damaged higher education in the United States; for them, he remained a vivid personality and a feisty hero.

Bibliography

Fox, R. F. “A Conversation with the Hayakawas.” English Journal 80.2 (1991): 36–40. Print. A literary snapshot of Hayakawa near the end of his life, revealing something of the personality that instructed and entertained people during his lifetime.

Haslam, Gerald W. In Thought and Action: The Enigmatic Life of S. I. Hayakawa. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011. Print. A biography of Hayakawa that focuses on his complexity as a political, social, and intellectual figure.

Hayakawa, S. I. Introduction. Democracy or Babel? The Case for Official English. By Fernando de la Peña. Washington, DC: US English, 1991. Print. A concise statement of Hayakawa’s reasons for endorsing English as the official US language.

Hayakawa, S. I., and Alan R. Hayakawa. Language in Thought and Action. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt, 1972. Print. Hayakawa’s classic work, regarded as a basic text in linguistics. Especially pertinent is his treatment of propaganda.

Rojas, Fabio. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. Print. An evaluation of black studies over more than three decades, giving attention to the 1968 Third World Strike at San Francisco State College and Hayakawa’s role in it.