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In 1852 the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society imported the first batch of 200 Chinese and, in the years which followed, thousands more. From Japan, docile contract labor was imported by the tens of thousands at wages of $9 a month, $6 a month for food.* From Europe, where thousands were forsaking their homelands to work in the U.S., came other shipments of labor for Hawaii. Predominantly they were Portuguese, but there were also Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Spaniards, Poles, Russians. By 1900, more than 140,000 workers were fed into the islands' lush, green plantations.
Hawaii's immigrants came to a land dominated by the New England conscience of its enterprisers, and the new arrivals felt it. There was no card playing, "quarreling with or whipping wives . . . tittle-tattling ... or running about." Until stomachs and spirits revolted, the laborers were fed on fish and poi. One conscience-stricken director of a sugar factor described the labor system in 1859 as "only a modification of slavery, founded in deceit and maintained by force." On the mainland, abolitionists were saying harsher things of the social system at home as the country plunged toward a civil war.
The Enterprisers. In Hawaii, white enterprise had developed a group of merchants known as the Big Five. They became the builders of the islands. They began as sugar factors, indispensable agents who sold and shipped sugar, bought the supplies needed by the plantation owners, put up capital to get new growers started —and when a grower went broke, took over his plantation. The oldest of them, C. Brewer & Co., was founded in 1826. After Planter James Dole began canning pineapples in 1903, they added pineapples to their interests. Ultimately they branched into insurance, banking, merchandising, and set up the arterial lifeline to the mainland, the steamship companies.*
They did not neglect politics any more than did mainland businessmen. After the death of King Kamehameha, white advisers had helped his successors resist the encroachments of England and France. In 1893, when the reigning Queen, Liliuokalani, became too obstreperous, the white population helped overthrow Hawaii's monarchy, and established a provisional government. It was the year before Joseph Farrington's father, Wallace, arrived in Honolulu to edit a paper which later became the Advertiser.
The enterprisers promptly asked the U.S. Congress to annex the islands. Congress passed the annexation resolution in 1898 and set up a territorial administration. All citizens of Hawaii became citizens of the U.S., and the territory began paying taxes to the U.S., although it had no say in the U.S. Government.
In Honolulu rose the monuments to Big Five enterprise—the stone banks and office buildings under the shadow of the cloud-wreathed Koolau Mountains. Wallace Farrington became governor, served from 1921 to 1929. In Pearl Harbor stood the ships and sheds and cranes of the U.S. Navy—also monuments to enterprise which went unchallenged until Dec. 7, 1941.
The Rise of the Huh. History took some new turns after that. A new kind of enterpriser emerged. He was non-white or only part-white, and he came from the crazy-quilt society which had been organized to work with its hands.