S.I. Hayakawa: Semantics Scholar, Loudspeaker Plug, and Senate Upset

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S.I. Hayakawa was born in Vancouver in 1906 to Japanese immigrant parents and schooled in Calgary and Winnipeg, earning degrees from the University of Manitoba and McGill before a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin in 1935. In 1936 he joined a four person Japanese Canadian delegation to Ottawa seeking the vote, which was denied in British Columbia and therefore federally; committee members praised their English and still refused. He taught at the University of Chicago and San Francisco State College and became known for general semantics, the study of how symbols shape behavior, which influenced A.E. van Vogt's The World of Null-A.

In November 1968, amid a strike led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front, he was named acting president of San Francisco State and pulled the wires from a protesters' van loudspeaker. Days later he authorized a Black Studies department chaired by Nathan Hare. He became a Republican in 1973 and in 1976 beat Democrat John Tunney, becoming California's first Asian American senator. He voted for the Panama Canal treaties, opposed internment reparations, dropped his 1982 reelection bid, and later cofounded U.S. English to make English the official language. He died in 1992.

• In a 1954 New York lecture he described a second survival drive: protecting the self concept.
• In the early 1960s he helped organize San Francisco's Anti-Digit Dialing League against numeric phone exchanges.
• A 1976 campaign ad showed only a slow pan across an empty Senate seat, pointing to Tunney's missed votes.
• He had said of the Panama Canal that we stole it fair and square.
• He spent World War II teaching in Chicago as a Canadian citizen and was not interned.