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  • Rivalry and Resistance:Abraham Fornander's New Era and Weekly Argus
  • Todd Nathan Thompson (bio)

On October 22, 1853, Abraham Fornander announced that his newspaper the Weekly Argus would henceforth appear "in a new dress, with larger skirts and more ballast in its pockets," as the New Era and Weekly Argus. In "The Editor's Salaam," he explains the title change as a celebration of the ouster of the Argus's frequent target, Hawaiian Minister of Finance and of Health Gerrit Pamele Judd. Because "the late administration became one of those things that have been," Fornander claims, "a NEW ERA in Hawaiian history" had commenced, and he "thought it appropriate to commemorate the advent by altering the title of our journal." The paper also sported a new motto, "Open to all: controlled by none," an unsubtle jab at the Argus's other nemesis, the government-subsidized newspaper the Polynesian, whose motto was "published by authority."1

With a print run of only three and a half years (1852–55), the Argus has mostly featured as a footnote in histories of Hawaiian journalism. But reconsidering this politically influential paper offers two important, interrelated insights applicable to the study of other multiethnic newspapers and editors. First, in cosmopolitan societies such as mid-nineteenth-century Hawai'i, journalistic activism can arise from unexpected sources, reminding us that the exercise of and opposition to power are rarely reducible to pat binaries. Second, editorial spats and rivalries offer a useful (and often entertaining) index of editorial practices as larger political and cultural conflicts. This essay considers the rivalry between the Argus and the Polynesian in order to suggest a comparative methodology of reading the antagonisms and controversies between competing newspapers.

Fornander, a Swedish immigrant, was a harpooner on a New England whaler and a California gold miner before settling in Hawai'i and marrying a Native woman, Alanakapu Kauapinao.2 He wrote in the Honolulu Times in 1849, "I am a naturalized citizen—… I have a native wife and family, and … thus the native interest is my interest, in contra distinction from the monopoly interest." According to a historian of Hawaiian newspapers, "admirers saw Fornander as one of those very few foreigners who genuinely understood and respected Hawaiian culture."3

In Fornander's editorial hands, the Argus supported Native rights more vehemently than missionary-edited Hawaiian-language papers. Ka Elele (1845–55) and Ka Hae Hawaii (1856–61), for instance, were edited by Reverend Richard Armstrong, a New England missionary who got into the newspaper business mostly "as a way to advance literacy and Christian-American morality."4 Armstrong implies that, despite being printed in Hawaiian, these papers spoke directly to but not for Native Hawaiians. In representing the complicated, multiethnic politics of mid-nineteenth-century Hawai'i, seeking Native agency is not a simple case of [End Page 122] recovering and digitizing Hawaiian language newspapers, though such projects are also vital.5

The Polynesian, an English-language newspaper begun in 1840 with support from both missionaries and the business community, became the organ of the Kingdom of Hawai'i in 1844. The Argus was founded in January 1852 with an explicit role, it announced, as "an opposition voice to the government-subsidized Polynesian."6 In the pages of the Argus, Fornander consistently railed against Polynesian editor (and former missionary and minister of finance) Edwin O. Hall and the politics his paper represented, and Hall's Polynesian just as often returned fire.7 The multilingual Argus reflected the eclectic, sometimes chaotic cosmopolitanism of mid-nineteenth-century Hawai'i, where the whaling industry, trade with China, and a burgeoning sugar industry brought vessels from many different nations to the Honolulu port. While most of Fornander's Argus was in English, advertisements and notices appeared in English, French, and Hawaiian. Fornander had attained both written and spoken fluency in Hawaiian, and the Argus employed a Hawaiian/English translator. As the Argus demonstrates, English-language newspapers could also be wielded as tools of Native resistance and Hawaiian nationalism.

Fornander was particularly concerned about the growing influence of US missionaries and sugar plantation owners supplanting local culture with Calvinism and Anglocentric ideas about private property. Though Protestant missionary influence...

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