Hiram Fong: Plantation Child to Hawaii's Only Republican U.S. Senator

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Hiram Fong was born in 1906 in the Kalihi neighborhood of Honolulu, one of 11 children of Cantonese immigrant Fong Sau Hao, who arrived in 1872 to work Hawaii's sugar plantations. He picked beans for cattle feed at four and shined shoes at seven. He graduated from McKinley High School in 1924, where classmate Masaji Marumoto later became the first Japanese American justice on the Hawaii Supreme Court, then earned degrees from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1930 and Harvard Law School in 1935. He opened his own firm in 1938, adopted the name Hiram in 1942 after missionary Hiram Bingham I, served as an Army Air Forces judge advocate, and became speaker of the territorial House by 1948.

Voted out in the 1954 Democratic sweep, he built Finance Factors, which lent to minority families that banks turned away. When Hawaii became a state in 1959 he won a Senate seat with nearly 53 percent, becoming the first Asian American senator, with backing from the ILWU. He voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1960, 1964 and 1968, the 24th Amendment, Medicare, and Thurgood Marshall's confirmation. His support for the Vietnam War cost him ground at home, he won in 1970 with 51.6 percent, and he retired in 1976. Family lawsuits later drained his fortune, and he and his wife Ellen filed for bankruptcy in 2003. He died in August 2004 at 97.

• He wrote an amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 calling for federal poll watchers.
• In the 1965 immigration debate he told colleagues Asians made up about six tenths of one percent of the U.S. population.
• In 1964 he became the first Asian American to receive delegate votes for president at a Republican convention.
• He was booed for defending HUD Secretary George Romney.
• He and his family opened a 725 acre botanical garden to the public in 1988.