Hayakawa, S. I. (Samuel Ichiyé), 1906-1992

Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (July 18, 1906 – February 27, 1992) was a Canadian-born American academic and politician. A linguist, psychologist, semanticist, teacher, professor, and author by trade, he served as president of San Francisco State University from 1968 to 1973 and then as U.S. Senator from California from 1977 to 1983.

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Hayakawa was educated in the public schools of Calgary, Alberta, and Winnipeg, Manitoba before earning a B.A. from the University of Manitoba, M.A. from McGill University, and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He served as an instructor at the University of Wisconsin from 1936 to 1939, an instructor at the Armour Institute of Technology (Illinois Institute of Technology from 1940 on) from 1939 to 1948, a lecturer at the University of Chicago from 1950 to 1955, and a professor at San Francisco State College from 1955 to 1968. After witnessing the ruthless efficiency of the Nazi propaganda machine that aided Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Hayakawa was inspired to write Language in Action (1941), a book that cemented his reputation as a semanticist. Selected by the Book of the Month Club, it was eventually revised as Language in Thought and Action (1949) and remained a popular text for many decades.

Three years after retiring, Hayakawa decided to try to unseat California’s junior Senator, Democrat John V. Tunney, and announced his candidacy for the GOP nomination on January 20, 1976. An underdog against better known Republican candidates and against Tunney, Hayakawa ultimately prevailed with a three point margin of victory. As a Senator, Hayakawa's views were in line with mainstream conservative thought. In 1977 he opposed raising the national minimum wage, arguing that it would have an adverse impact on teenage boys because, when facing elevated wages, employers would cut their workforces. By the early 1980s, Hayakawa advocated reducing the entry-level minimum wage for teenagers, a time at which it was $3.35 per hour. Given his experience as a school administrator, Hayakawa was an unsurprisingly assertive opponent of federal mandates at all levels of the U.S. education system. He opposed school busing as a means to desegregate schools and wanted to prohibit federal payments to colleges with affirmative action policies, a position which he voiced consistently throughout his Senate career. In 1979 he opposed the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which called for the U.S. government to redress civil rights violations committed against Japanese Americans relocated from the West Coast during World War II. Hayakawa repeatedly derided bilingualism efforts in schools and, in April 1981, proposed a constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the United States.

In early 1982, Hayakawa announced that he would not seek re-election to a second term. After Congress, Hayakawa founded the group U.S. English, a political lobbying organization devoted to “preserving the unifying role of English” in the United States. Hayakawa resided in Mill Valley, California, and passed away February 27, 1992, in nearby Greenbrae.