Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaii

Chapter 8: Plantation Community

s T he plantation community is an ecological community of plants, animals , and humans sustained by soils, rains, and technology. Carved from a tropical environment of indigenous species and human communities , Hawai‘i’s plantations were artificial creations planted on the landscape and managed from the top through minutely sequenced decisions and actions. The managers and owners were temperate-climate and continental people, either born or educated in Western nations. The workers were from different ecological zones and cultures of Asia, the Pacific, Europe, and North America. As a landscape of production, the industrial plantation created a living rhythm to the tune of a global market that dictated the lives of workers and shaped the land. Driven by the precise use of time and the heavy application of science, the industrial plantation was more authoritarian and hierarchical than its predecessor, the commercial plantation. The use of violence and outright control of worker mobility may have been the hallmark of the contract system on the commercial plantation. But the indirect methods of managerial authority established during the industrial era reached more deeply into all aspects of human life and throughout the entire ecology. As the plantation evolved, it became a racialized landscape. Race defined the spatial arrangement of human settlement on the land, and it organized social relations within the workforce and between worker and manager. The people who came to Hawai‘i to work in the cane fields and sugar mills remade the face of island society. The rapid influx of new human groups and their clustering in plantation communities created an immediate demographic and ecological shift. The arrival of large numbers of Japanese male workers and then their families after 1889, and Filipino workers after 1909, turned the plantation into a predominantly Asian world. Hawaiians continued to work for E IG H T Plantation Community Plantation Community 171 the planters, but they quickly became a small fraction of the workforce. In one year alone (1899) about 26,000 Japanese plantation workers arrived in the islands .1 On the eve of annexation, the plantations housed a majority population of workers with no rights to citizenship. Hawai‘i, now a territory and part of America’s orbit, was less democratic than it had been under the monarchy. At that moment (1900), almost 53 percent of Hawai‘i’s population was Japanese. This trend accelerated in the summer of 1909, with the importation of Filipino workers after a crippling strike on O‘ahu’s plantations. By 1920, Filipinos made up 10 percent of the population, and 20 percent by 1930. Without the right to vote, Asian plantation workers lived and worked at the discretion of the sugar companies and the Big Five. Between 1880 and 1930 the plantation evolved from a landscape dotted by crowded barracks and unsanitary work camps into plantation villages with cottages built for families. Race continued to divide the communities as managers adopted social programs to retain and quiet the workforce. The new plantation community created by the sugar capitalists to improve housing and Americanize the Asian workforce is an important part of Hawai‘i’s environmental history. It rearranged the human and therefore the natural landscape with a new use of space and resources. There are three distinct and overlapping phases of transition that ended the isolated and unhealthy work camps left over from the commercial plantation era and ushered in the paternalistic plantation community of the 1930s. Each phase is characterized by a shifting political ecology in which work, disease, culture, and race weave in and out through the changes in plantation form. In the first phase, the wage relationship between plantation and worker evolves into a complicated form of labor management as contract labor disappears. This was followed, in the second phase, by a sanitation drive from the federal and territorial governments to conquer the infectious diseases that had found a niche in the plantation camps. In the third phase, the plantation community comes into full form as a result of the move to Americanize the workforce. The Wage When talk of annexation reached its peak in 1897–1898, plantation managers voiced anxiety to their agents about how they would retain their workers under a new labor regime. Clearly the sugar capitalists had decided that annexation and a guaranteed market was preferable to hanging on to a contract labor system. 172 Chapter 8 However, they still worried about how their workers, mostly Japanese...