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Chapter 4: Five Companies
- University of Hawai'i Press
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s T he organization of missionary family wealth into the powerful corporate system known as the Big Five is at the core of Hawai‘i’s massive environmental change from Hawaiian agriculture to the mono-crop makeover of island landscapes. Investment in sugar production in the Pacific and Caribbean followed a similar path in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of corporate agriculture.1 However, Hawai‘i’s specific path is marked by development of a corporate lock on economic and political power rather unique in the history of sugar. Two other economic colonies, Cuba and Fiji, experienced the totalizing impact of sugar production on their landscapes and their peoples. Hawai‘i’s resident business class built a corporate system of production and natural resource use quite different from those in Cuba and Fiji, where capitalists were absentee landlords (resident in New York, for Cuba, and Australia, for Fiji), and where land for sugar crops was owned by local landlords and leased for cane production. Control of land, water, forest, and other natural resources through either outright ownership or political influence made Hawai‘i’s sugar kingdom a standout example of global sugar production and, more importantly, set the agenda for natural resource use policy for decades to come. The transition of property into wealth and power held in just a few hands took some time to accomplish. It began in the 1860s with small plantation partnerships and culminated in the 1930s with a vertically integrated corporate system in command of Hawai‘i’s productive resources . Where did the Big Five come from? How did the multiethnic nineteenthcentury wealth of Hawaiians, Chinese, Germans, British, and Americans come under the domain of five large corporations? And, who actually were the Big Five? Today, as this phrase fades from island conversations, many do not F OU R Five Companies 82 Chapter 4 realize the role these five companies had in managing Hawai‘i’s environment, not to mention its people. They controlled land, water, and forest resources, and had a virtual lock on labor relations and public policy, creating a totalizing effect. Before World War II, Hawai‘i’s citizens understood the power of the Big Five companies in their everyday life, and they associated them with kama‘āina families.2 With the labor movement in ascendance after the war, the corporations became a target of protest. A Labor Day parade on Maui in September 1949 carried a sign that read: CONGRESS—INVESTIGATE THE BIG FIVE!3 The term Big Five most likely originated during this labor-organizing period, quickly becoming a common phrase that symbolized how things worked in Hawai‘i. The term still persists today among older residents, but with less punch in a society where tourism and the military rule the economy. It is, however, a reminder to the inherited legacy of all that matters pertaining to land, water, and development. A series of articles on the Big Five written in 1942 by Jared Smith and published in the Honolulu Advertiser came with this editorial comment from the editor: “Mr. Smith started the series entirely on his own while the Editor was off on vacation, believing that all of us would have a kindlier feeling toward our business leviathans if told something of their trials and tribulations. . . . Their foundations were built on honest and fair play.”4 People who worked in sugar and pineapple fields and mills perhaps had a different view. Clearly the establishment was on the defensive. It had not always been the Big Five. Before annexation, Hawai‘i’s wealth was more dispersed among a wider, albeit non-Hawaiian, community. More than five agencies managed the affairs of plantations and other businesses, and a sizable portion of these assets belonged to British, German, and San Franciscan owners. By 1920, however, this had changed. C. Brewer & Co., Hackfeld & Co, Castle & Cooke, and Theo. H. Davies (the four predecessor companies to the Big Five) controlled only 56 percent of the sugar crop in 1889. By 1920 these companies (with addition of the fifth, Alexander & Baldwin) controlled 94 percent of the sugar crop produced in the islands.5 The results of corporate consolidation were profound. Between 1920 and 1930 the increase in production (by tonnage) frequently ranked from 40 to 50 percent, and in one case (Lihue Plantation Co.) topped the chart at 65 percent increase in tons produced within ten years (see appendix 6). The rapid growth during this decade was the product, most importantly, of consolidation of plantation...