Hawaii - Jeff Campbell [17]
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The plantations are gone, but Moloka’i and Lana’i both have big pineapple hangovers. Hawai’i’s Pineapple Century (2004) by Jan Ten Bruggencate is a highly readable account of how the spiky fruit changed life across Hawaii.
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Beginning in the 1850s, plantation owners encouraged a flood of immigrants from China, Japan, Portugal and the Philipines to come to Hawaii to work the cane fields. These immigrants (see the boxed text, opposite), along with the culture of plantation life itself, transformed Hawaii into the multicultural, multiethnic society it’s known as today.
Five sugar-related holding companies, known as the Big Five, quickly rose to dominate all aspects of the industry: Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C Brewer & Co, American Factors, and Theo H Davies & Co. All these companies were run by white businessmen, many the sons and grandsons of missionaries. While their focus shifted from religion to business, they reached the same conclusion as their forebears: Hawaiians could not be trusted to govern themselves. So, behind closed doors, the Big Five openly mused about whether Hawaiians should be relieved of that responsibility.
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HAPA CHILDREN, PIDGIN TONGUES
Hawaii’s unique multiethnic society was an unplanned accident of 19th-century sugar plantation economics. Needing cheap labor, plantations encouraged successive waves of immigrants who, stirred together for a century in the bubbling kettle of plantation life, emerged intermingled and increasingly intermarried, each generation inheriting a maligned mutt of a language, pidgin, that crossed cultural divides.
Typically, plantations offered laborers two- or three-year contracts, which included monthly wages, housing and medical expenses. When their contracts expired, some workers returned home, some moved to the US mainland, but the majority stayed in Hawaii.
In the 1850s, Chinese immigrants were the first to come in great numbers, eventually reaching about 45,000 before the USA’s 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act dampened arrivals. All immigrant groups left their cultural stamp on the islands, and one change the Chinese spurred was replacing taro with rice.
Eventually totalling about 180,000 immigrants from the late 1860s to the 20th century, Japanese would become the largest ethnic group. ‘Hawaii netsu,’ or Hawaii fever, was encouraged by the Japanese government; most immigrants were single men, which led to the mail-order ‘picture bride’ phenomenon among those who stayed. Japanese also established themselves as independent coffee farmers on Hawai’i island.
The next major group (totalling about 20,000) was Portuguese, who were actively recruited beginning in 1878. In part because they were Europeans, Portuguese were treated better than Asians – they were paid more, and were often made supervisors over Asian field workers. Japanese complaints over these unfair discrepancies led to Hawaii’s first organized labor strike in 1909.
After the turn of the century, Koreans and then a huge influx of Filipinos arrived. Totalling about 100,000, Filipinos found, as others had before them, that plantation life was much harsher than promised, and they were another prominent force in Hawaii’s budding labor movement.
By the 1930s, immigration slowed to a trickle, though the sugar plantations would remain Hawaii’s economic backbone and cultural melting pot for another 30 to 40 years.
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Return to beginning of chapter
OVERTHROW & ANNEXATION
As much as any other monarch, King Kalakaua fought to restore Hawaiian culture and native pride. With robust joy, he resurrected hula and its attendant arts from near extinction – earning himself the nickname ‘the Merrie Monarch’ – much to the dismay of white Christians.