Tom Coffman

I produced the film, "The First Battle" because in my research, I was led to believe that the basis of Statehood was developed in the way that Hawaii's people responded to the crisis of WWII, and specifically it had to do with Hawaii's people, not everyone, but key people and generally the society as a whole coming together behind the proposition that the large Japanese-American and Japanese-alien community in Hawaii, which then made up of 38 percent of the population, should not be interned, and should be included in the war effort. That's what "First Battle" is about, the battle for equal treatment in wartime Hawaii led in my mind to the coalition of people who saw a multi-racial, multi-cultural society of people who worked together to achieve common ends, and these were essentially the people who pushed statehood through the US Congress.  They were of both political parties. ...it's not like the democratic party reaped the political benefit of it for a lot of reasons but... John Burn's predecessor Joe Farrington did a lot to advance statehood and lay ground work for statehood. It was this whole network of people who worked across political party lines and across ethnic lines who brought statehood home.

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