Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945

1. So Much Charity, So Little Democracy

Chapter 1 So Much Charity, So Little Democracy I do not think there is any contest as to who shall dominate; the white race, the white people, the Americans in Hawaii are going to dominate. -Royal D. Mead I can see little difference between the importation offoreign laborers and the importation ofjute bags from India. -Richard A. Cooke Precapitalist Social Relations Sugarcane was introduced to Hawaii by the original caretakers of the land and, like taro and sweet potatoes, was cultivated in family gardens primarily for the benefit of the producers. The family or kin group ('ohana) was physically and psychically identified with the land ('aina), as shown in the etymologies of both words. 'Ghana, derived from 'oha, the bud or sprout of the taro plant whose roots provided poi, the staple food, connotes an agricultural people. 'Aina comes from 'ai, "to feed," and indicates that the homeland sustained not only the group's bodily needs but its psychic needs as well, because ancestors ('aumakua), with whom the living identified and to whom they prayed for guidance and protection, resided on the land.1 Hawaiian horticulture was complex, involving plant and soil selection, irrigation, terracing, wet and dry farming, and fertilizing and mulching . It was a preeminent occupation for men; boys were dedicated to Lono, the god of rain and agriculture, during their initiation into manhood.2 Hawaiian society, established about the second century C.E., became increasingly stratified. The ali'i ("chiefs") dis3 4 Years of Migrant Labor, 1865-1909 tributed land, levied taxes on labor and goods, and settled disputes. They ruled over the maka'ainana ("workers"), who produced surpluses sufficient to support the chiefs and to trade. Chiefs neither accumulated wealth nor were they completely autocratic; instead, they were trustees, not owners, of the land and ruled by consent of the people, who commonly removed oppressive chiefs and transferred their allegiance to rulers who promoted the welfare of the maka'ainana. During the eighteenth century, warfare dissolved and consolidated many chiefdoms, leading to greater political concentrations and to dramatic changes in land-tenure patterns and labor practices.3 Kamehameha I, the most successful practitioner of the arts of Ku, the god of war, completed the conquest of all the islands before his death in 1819. The European and American traders who followed Captain James Cook's 1778 "discovery" of the islands introduced Hawaiians to a market economy and hastened the demise of kin-based production and the rise of a peasantry and a class of wage laborers. The traders introduced manufactured goods in exchange for natural resources such as sandalwood , supplied arms for warfare, and stimulated the chiefs' accumulation of wealth through additional taxes on maka'ainana labor and income and a monopoly over the provisions and sandalwood trade. The chiefs demanded a percentage of all market transactions and diverted labor away from subsistence agriculture to producing for a world market that determined the terms of trade. As a result, by 1841, commoners received an estimated one-third of the fruits of their labor, providing little incentive for independent farming under the chiefs. Commoners entered the service of wealthy whites. Isaac Davis, an Englishman and a long-time Kamehameha I adviser, had 400 to 500 commoners working his Oahu lands on a rental basis; Oliver Holmes, an American and the king's governor of Oahu, employed 180 retainers in Honolulu to serve him and his guests.4 Missionaries, sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1819, shared with the Yankee traders values rooted in mercantile capitalism and the Protestant work ethic. They equated leisure with vice and subsistence with improvidence. As one missionary, Samuel N. Castle, co-founder of the firm of Castle and Cooke, declared, "As it is true that indolence begets vice, so it is true that industry promotes virtue. All successful efforts taken to produce industry by proper means tend to promote virtue and must be beneficial to that people on whom they are bestowed." 5 That economic creed, presented to Hawaiians from the So Much Charity, So Little Democracy 5 pulpit and in the classroom, supplied the justification for the capitalist transformation of Hawaiian precapitalist social relations. Large and Unfamiliar Fishes Despite their diverse national origins and personal agendas, Hawaii's whites shared European and American ideas of politics and economy. The newcomers imposed these notions on a population decimated by introduced diseases and a government weakened...