♪ ♪ (waves crashing) NARRATOR: In the waning days of summer 1931, the false calm of Honolulu, Hawaii, was shattered by a single allegation made by a 20-year-old Navy wife.

MAN: She says she was kidnapped.

She was taken to this area down on Ala Moana, dragged in and raped six or seven times.

This is a total shock, because in the entire history of Hawaii, as far as anybody has been able to find out, no Hawaiian individually ever assaulted a white woman before.

(flash bulb pop) Here is a gang of them supposedly doing it.

WOMAN: Creating this story caused not only the disruption of a community like no other except Pearl Harbor, but also the death of an innocent young man.

(engine puttering) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The quiet whisper of the initial lie grew to a clangorous din of power politics and racism-- an ugly noise that resounded through this placid-looking tropical community and then to the marbled echo chambers of the White House, the War Department, and the United States Senate.

The story of the Navy wife and her alleged assailants jumped from the local Hawaiian newspapers to front pages across the United States, fetching the attention of President Herbert Hoover, media baron William Randolph Hearst, and the country's first celebrity attorney, Clarence Darrow.

The proceedings were watched by everyone from the social-register elite in New York, Washington, and San Francisco to the working class in Honolulu's low-rent districts.

For anybody who saw it plain, the case revealed cold, hard truths about America... and the people who ruled it.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: It was already a beautiful escape, this island city in the middle of the Pacific.

2,000 miles from the California coast, it was America but with better weather.

And it was run by white people, or "haoles," as the natives called them.

♪ ♪ In the summer of 1931, wealthy tourists were gliding into Honolulu Harbor and then on to Waikiki Beach, where the beautiful young Hawaiians stood ready to serve.

♪ ♪ MAN: If you need an umbrella to be pitched and speared into the sand, or if you need a cool drink, or if you need to get surfboard lessons or ride a canoe-- anything that you need to do that involves frolicking, the beach boys are there to satisfy.

And it's said that they certainly did satisfy.

NARRATOR: Keeping the tourists satisfied was a job that paid, but there was only so much beach, so most of the working class kept to their own neighborhoods.

Beyond pool halls and barefoot football, there was little to do in those places.

(crowd cheering ) Young men could scratch up a Depression-era job at the nearby docks or in construction or at the Dole pineapple cannery.

The lucky ones might even pluck one of the plum spots at the police or parks departments, but more and more, those spoils were going to newly arrived haoles.

So most young men in neighborhoods like Kalihi, Palama, and Iwilei were at loose ends.

MAN: These were desperately, desperately poor places.

The streets were so narrow you couldn't get a car into them.

They were also where the casual prostitution was, so on payday they were filled with sailors and soldiers who were crawling around looking for a little action.

This was the community that these guys grew up in-- without jobs, with a lot of resentment for the military, who they saw around them all the time.

(distant shouting) WOMAN: There was a real strong sense of racism coming at us from the military.

They were almost entirely haole young men, and a lot of them were Southern, so they had this idea that Hawaiians shouldn't be out and about, having a government, having a good time in Honolulu.

(yelling and laughing ) NARRATOR: Dark-skinned men frolicking in public with white women was too much for many soldiers and sailors.

And the military men knew when they were being made fun of by the beach crowd at Waikiki.

But locals didn't push too far.

There were simply too many servicemen for safety.

In 1931, there were 20,000 in the Islands, and more were on the way.

Any Saturday night, Honolulu's streets, speakeasies, and restaurants were crawling with off-duty soldiers and sailors.

(birds chirping) On September 12, 1931, a Kentucky-born Annapolis graduate named Thomas Massie and his 20-year-old wife Thalia were among the Navy crowd at a Honolulu night spot called the Ala Wai Inn.

The lieutenant had insisted they go, and she was not happy to be there.

WOMAN: She was from a privileged family and I think she felt she was perhaps slightly socially superior and didn't like to mix too much with the Navy crowd.

STANNARD: Other people in the military would complain that she would go to parties with Tommy, they would fight, she'd bite him, throw things, and then storm out into the night.

He had told her recently that he wanted a divorce.

She was terribly upset about the possibility of divorce and so she had agreed to a compromise.

He would put her on probation, and if she didn't behave properly, then she would go home to her parents.

She didn't want to go to that dance, but she agreed to try to keep their marriage together.

BLACK: That night she wandered from room to room and wasn't always welcomed.

In fact, there was an incident in which one of the naval officers told her she wasn't popular, and she slapped him.

And she walked out into the night before the party was over.

She walked in an area that had a rather unsavory reputation... and, um, somebody did see her.

Two people said that she was being followed by a haole man.

STANNARD: Tommy, meanwhile, pretty much didn't notice that she was even gone.

This was something she did all the time, so he didn't pay much attention to it until 1:00 when everybody was finally breaking up and he decided to make a phone call to her at home just see if she's there.

And she was not there.

NARRATOR: It was nearly 2:00 in the morning and nearly two hours after she'd stormed out of the Ala Wai when Tommie finally got her on the phone.

She was hysterical and begged him to hurry home, and when he arrived, she told him she'd been assaulted.

Over her objections, Thomas Massie called the police.