NOTES ON THE TESTING OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN HAWAII.

Sociologists are like meteorologists and volcanologists. They can't experiment. They set up observatories and patiently wait for nature to provide them for the occasions when they can test their hunches and add to their scientific lore. And they pray for the chance of being on the spot when a real catastrophe, in their field of observation, a hurricane, an eruption, occurs, that rarest of opportunities for seeing at first hand those events which suggest, prove, modify and disprove their theories. December 7, 1941, in Hawaii marked such a catastrophe in the sociologist's area of observation. To the fortunate sociologists who were on the spot, it marked the "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity to test their theories in the light of inexorable events. At the University of Hawaii the sociology department had for about twenty years already maintained what might, in the light of the above analogy, be called an observatory. The day-by-day changes in race relations constituted the problem upon which the sociologists concentrated.