Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise

CHAPTER FIVE: Nothing but Commercial Feudalism: California’s Hawaiian Empire

CHAPTER 5 Nothing but Commercial Feudalism CALIFORNIA’S HAWAIIAN EMPIRE In 1921, Elwood Mead, at the time teaching at the University of California and chairing the state’s Land Settlement Board, received a call from George P. Cooke, secretary of the Hawaiian Homes Commission (HHC). Created by an act of the U.S. Congress, the HHC planned to resettle native Hawaiians on government land. By the early 1900s, it had become clear that remedial measures would have to be taken to resurrect the “vanishing” Hawaiian race. HHC leaders believed that settling Hawaiians in agricultural communities on homelands would create a new yeoman class of farmers that would offset the influx of Asian labor. By conforming to modern ideas about work, labor, and capitalism, this new class would also become more “American.” Cooke hoped to draw on Mead’s expertise in developing suitable land for Hawaiian agricultural settlement. Rehabilitating Hawaiians, however, was easier said than done. Like California, Australia, and South Africa, the case of Hawaii shows how technical and capitalist growth guided infrastructural development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Pulling Hawaii into a global economy via American imperialism meant growing sugarcane on an unprecedented scale; developing sophisticated irrigation, transportation, and marketing systems; hiring cheap, foreign labor; and dealing with the native Hawaiian question. Also as in California, Australia, and South Africa, Californians facilitated Hawaii’s entry into a global economy, but certain incongruities arose. California businessman Claus Spreckels’s sugar empire, for example, inextricably tied California’s industrial growth to Hawaii’s political and economic future and to the islands’ destiny: the creation of a poor, urban class of Hawaiians. The HHC and Mead’s attempts to resettle Hawaiians on native land on Molokai only further revealed the contradic- 134 NOTHING BUT COMMERCIAL FEUDALISM tory effects of progress. Sugar economics catapulted Hawaii into a world economy, but major social inequities resulted. Spreckels’s Hawaiian Kingdom On August 24, 1876, the steamer City of San Francisco landed at the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian kingdom. The ship carried the message that President Ulysses S. Grant had signed the Reciprocity Treaty between Hawaii and the United States. It also carried Claus Spreckels, a wealthy San Francisco sugar refiner, who was making his first visit to Hawaii. Over the next decade, Spreckels built a sugar empire that tied California’s capital, technology , and expertise to Hawaii’s commercial and political future. Allying himself with King Kalakaua, Spreckels acquired land and water rights on Maui, hired engineers from California to develop an immense irrigation system , and brought water to his sugar plantation at Spreckelsville. He revolutionized the sugar industry by modernizing production, employing contract labor, designing a railroad system, and marketing the sugar through William G. Irwin and Company. His steamship company, which dominated trade between Hawaii and California, delivered raw sugar to Spreckels’s Western Sugar Refinery in San Francisco, bringing the California-Hawaii connection full circle.1 The Hawaiian Islands, located in the Pacific Ocean approximately two thousand miles west of San Francisco, comprise eight principal islands ranging in size from 45 to 4,030 square miles. The land surface, made up almost entirelyof lava flows, totals approximately 6,500 square miles, a little less than the size of New Jersey. The upper layers of the older lava provide fertile soils, but one-third of the land consists of fresh lava or cliffs, canyons, or ravines. Sugarcane, a giant-stemmed perennial grass that contains sugary juice, grows well on the alluvial flats and lower slopes of the disintegrated lava flows, with fertile grazing land above this belt. Although most of the islands are subtropical, the climate ranges from tropical where land lies below one thousand feet to almost arctic where mountains rise above ten thousand feet.The annual rainfall also varies widely, from four hundred inches to fewer than twenty. A third of the archipelago is arid foralmost the entire year, making irrigation a necessity for large-scale sugarcane cultivation .2 American interest in Hawaii began in the 1820s, when American whalers created a commercial outpost and brought the Sandwich Islands—named by Captain James Cook for the English Earl of Sandwich—into their orbit. During that decade, Christian missionaries began to settle the islands. Not 135 NOTHING BUT COMMERCIAL FEUDALISM wishing to invest in the islands until they had implemented Western ideas about law and property rights, Americans converted the Hawaiian kingdom into a constitutional...