The Empire of Acres

The name Dole has appeared on American grocery shelves for more than a century — on pineapple cans, banana stickers, and fruit cups in every supermarket in the country. Most Americans who have reached for that label have never been told what it represents. The Dole family did not merely grow pineapple in Hawaiʻi; they helped overthrow its queen. On 17 January 1893, one hundred and sixty-two United States Marines stood in formation while thirteen men — most of them the sons and grandsons of American missionaries — declared the Hawaiian monarchy abolished. The man installed as president of the new republic was Sanford Ballard Dole, son of a missionary. His cousin James later bought an entire island. Six years before the overthrow, the same planter class had ceded a harbour to the United States Navy as the price of keeping American tariffs off their sugar. That harbour was Pearl Harbor. The connection between the pineapple label in American kitchens and the naval base where 2,400 Americans died on 7 December 1941 has never been widely told. It begins with missionaries.

The first company of American Protestant missionaries arrived on the western coast of the island of Hawaiʻi in the spring of 1820. Having sailed from Boston on the brig Thaddeus, they had been dispatched by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions — fourteen men and women who had volunteered to carry the gospel to the Sandwich Islands. Their leader was the Reverend Hiram Bingham, a graduate of Andover Theological Seminary, who arrived with a printing press, a set of hymn books, and the conviction that the Hawaiian people required deliverance from what the mission's reports to Boston called "the degradation and darkness of heathenism." His colleague, the Reverend Asa Thurston, carried similar certainty. Both men believed their work was spiritual. Neither could have foreseen what their descendants would build on the foundation they were laying.

The missionaries found a kingdom in transition. King Kamehameha II had recently abolished the traditional kapu system, and the old religious order was fracturing. The Americans moved into the vacuum. Within a decade they had established schools, translated the Bible into Hawaiian, and built churches on every major island. Critically, they had also created the first written form of the Hawaiian language and controlled the islands' only printing press. The power this conferred was enormous. Every legal document, every treaty, every land record that would be produced in the coming decades would rely on the written instruments the missionaries had designed.

The Hawaiian Aliʻi welcomed the missionaries' literacy, their legal knowledge, and their connections to the American government. In return, the missionaries gained access to the highest levels of Hawaiian governance. By the 1830s, missionary advisers were drafting legislation, counselling the King on trade agreements, and shaping the legal framework of the Kingdom itself. William Richards, a member of the 1823 missionary company, resigned from the mission in 1838 to become the Kingdom's teacher, chaplain, and interpreter to King Kamehameha III. He was not the last missionary to discover that statecraft paid better than salvation.

Their children cemented the transition. In 1841 the Reverend Daniel Dole — father of the future president of the Republic of Hawaiʻi — helped found Punahou School on the outskirts of Honolulu, built explicitly for the sons and daughters of missionaries. The students who passed through Punahou in its first decades included the Thurstons, the Castles, the Cookes, the Alexanders, the Baldwins, and the Doles. They learned together, married one another, and entered business together. Samuel Northrup Castle and Amos Starr Cooke founded Castle & Cooke as a mercantile firm in 1851. Samuel Alexander and Henry Baldwin acquired land on Maui and began planting sugar. The generation that arrived to save souls had produced a generation that wanted acres.

The mechanism for acquiring them was already being designed in the councils of the King. It was called the Māhele. For centuries, land in the Hawaiian Islands had not been owned in the Western sense; it had been held. The ahupuaʻa system divided each island into wedge-shaped districts running from the mountain ridges to the sea, each one a self-sustaining unit of forest, stream, taro field, and coastline. The King held ultimate authority, the Aliʻi administered, and the makaʻāinana cultivated. No one possessed a deed. No one paid a mortgage. The land belonged to the system, and the system belonged to the people who worked it.

By the 1840s the foreign advisers surrounding King Kamehameha III had persuaded him that the old order could not survive contact with the outside world, and that without Western-style property rights Hawaiʻi was vulnerable to seizure by any colonial power. The Great Māhele was signed in a series of agreements between January and March of 1848. Approximately four million acres were divided into three categories: roughly one million acres as Crown lands reserved for the monarch; roughly one and a half million acres as government lands held in trust for the people; and roughly one and a half million acres allocated to the Aliʻi through individual quit-claim agreements recorded in the four notebooks that became known as the Māhele Book.

The commoners received almost nothing. The Kuleana Act of 1850 authorized native tenants to claim fee-simple title to the small plots they actually cultivated, but the process required filing a formal claim with the Land Commission, proving continuous cultivation, paying a survey fee, and navigating a legal system conducted largely in English. Thousands of makaʻāinana did not file. When the process concluded, fewer than 10,000 claims had been awarded, covering fewer than 30,000 acres — less than one percent of the Kingdom's total acreage. The same year, a companion statute permitted non-Hawaiians to buy and hold land in fee simple for the first time in the Kingdom's history. By 1860, foreigners owned more land than Native Hawaiians held in private title. By 1890, three-quarters of all privately held land belonged to non-Hawaiians.

The land the missionary families wanted was not for taro or breadfruit. It was flat, well-watered, positioned in the leeward valleys where the trade winds carried moisture from the mountains to the coast — ideal for sugar. The first commercial sugar plantation had been established at Kōloa, Kauaʻi in 1835. The American Civil War provided the opening: when Confederate forces cut the Union off from the sugar fields of Louisiana, the price of raw sugar on the American market doubled. Between 1860 and 1866, the value of Hawaiian sugar exports to the United States increased more than tenfold.

The result was the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, signed by King Kalākaua and ratified by the United States Senate. The treaty eliminated American tariffs on Hawaiian sugar; in exchange, Hawaiʻi agreed not to lease or cede any of its territory to a third power. Production, which had been roughly 13,000 tons in 1875, reached more than 31,000 tons by 1880. Five firms — Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., Theo. H. Davies, and Hackfeld & Co. — consolidated into the indispensable intermediaries of the sugar trade. They became, in effect, investment banks with agricultural portfolios.

When the treaty came up for renewal in 1887, American politicians demanded compensation. The price they named was Pearl Harbor. The amendment granted the United States exclusive rights to establish a coaling and repair station at the deep-water lagoon on the southern coast of Oʻahu. The men who lobbied for the cession were the same men who, on 30 June 1887, would march on ʻIolani Palace with an armed militia and force the King to sign a new constitution at the point of a bayonet. The harbour and the constitution were not separate events; they were two instruments of the same seizure.

The leader of that seizure was Lorrin Andrews Thurston — born in Honolulu in 1858, thirty-eight years after his grandfather, the Reverend Asa Thurston, had stepped off the brig Thaddeus at Kealakekua Bay. The grandson did not carry a Bible. He carried a law degree, a seat in the Hawaiian legislature, and an absolute conviction that the Hawaiian monarchy was an obstacle to the commercial future his family had spent two generations building.

In 1887 Thurston organized the Hawaiian League — a secret society of fewer than 400 members drawn from the planter class, the legal profession, and the merchant community of Honolulu. The native Hawaiian population at the time was approximately 40,000. The League's stated purpose was constitutional representative government; its actual purpose was the transfer of political power from the monarchy to the men who controlled the sugar trade.

On 30 June 1887 the Honolulu Rifles mustered in the streets. Prime Minister Walter Murray Gibson was arrested, dragged through the streets, and nearly hanged before being exiled to San Francisco. Kalākaua summoned the American, British, French, Portuguese, and Japanese diplomatic representatives and requested help. Every one of them advised him to comply. He signed. The document became known as the Bayonet Constitution. It stripped the King of the power to dismiss cabinet ministers or appoint members of the upper house. The vote was restricted to male residents who met a property qualification, which excluded the vast majority of Native Hawaiians. Asian residents who had legally voted under the previous constitution were stripped of suffrage entirely. Foreign residents who were not Hawaiian citizens but met the property threshold were granted the vote. The electorate was reconstructed to ensure that the planter class would control the legislature, and through it the Kingdom.

Kalākaua died in San Francisco on 20 January 1891. His sister Liliʻuokalani inherited a throne her brother's captors had already emptied of authority. She was an accomplished composer and a published author, and she believed the Hawaiian monarchy still possessed the moral authority to govern. In January 1893 she informed her cabinet that she intended to promulgate a new constitution restoring the monarch's executive authority, extending the vote to disenfranchised native Hawaiians, and revoking the voting rights of non-citizen foreign residents. Her own cabinet, divided and fearful, refused to sign. The Queen was forced to defer.

Thurston had already been preparing. Within hours of the Queen's announcement he convened the Committee of Safety — thirteen men drawn from the same network that had engineered the Bayonet Constitution. Sanford Dole was approached to lead the provisional government. On 14 January 1893 United States Minister John L. Stevens, a known annexationist who had been communicating privately with Thurston for months, requested that 162 Marines and sailors from the USS Boston be landed at Honolulu Harbor. No American life or property was under threat. The troops took up positions between the palace and the government building.

On 17 January the Committee walked to the government building, nearly deserted after the police were drawn away by a gunshot in the street. A proclamation was read from the steps declaring the monarchy abolished. Minister Stevens immediately recognized the new government before the Queen had even been informed. Thirteen men on the Committee, roughly 200 militia, 162 American troops on Hawaiian soil — against a kingdom of approximately 40,000 Native Hawaiians and a royal guard of 300 to 350 soldiers. The overthrow was accomplished without a single combat death, because the Queen calculated that resistance against the Marines would produce a massacre, and she was almost certainly correct.

Liliʻuokalani yielded, but the language of her protest was as precise as any legal brief the Committee's attorneys had drafted. She addressed her surrender not to the men who had declared her government abolished, but to "the superior force of the United States of America," yielding "until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representatives and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands." She did not recognize the Committee. She did not acknowledge the provisional government. She placed the burden of restoration on the American government itself — and in doing so created a legal and diplomatic argument that would outlive everyone in the room.

President Grover Cleveland ordered an investigation. His envoy, James Henderson Blount, arrived in Honolulu, lowered the American flag that Stevens had raised over the government building, and conducted interviews across the islands. Blount's report concluded that the overthrow was illegal, that Minister Stevens had conspired with the Committee, and that the American military presence had been decisive. Cleveland delivered a message to Congress calling the overthrow "an act of war" committed by a diplomatic representative of the United States "against a feeble but friendly and confiding people." He demanded Dole resign and restore the Queen. Dole refused. Cleveland could not act without Congress, and Congress would not act.

The Republic of Hawaiʻi was declared on 4 July 1894. In January 1895 a counter-revolution led by Robert Wilcox was suppressed. A cache of weapons was discovered on the grounds of Washington Place. Whether the arms had been placed by the Queen's supporters or by agents of the Republic seeking a pretext has never been conclusively established. The Republic arrested Liliʻuokalani and confined her to a single room on the upper floor of ʻIolani Palace for nearly eight months. During her confinement she was presented with a document of abdication. Told that signing would spare the lives of the loyalists captured in the rebellion, she signed — and later wrote that the Republic of Hawaiʻi had "by force and threats compelled me to yield my authority and to acknowledge their usurpation."

In 1897 President William McKinley submitted an annexation treaty to the United States Senate. Ratification required a two-thirds vote. That autumn the Hui Aloha ʻĀina, the Hawaiian Patriotic League, launched a petition drive. In a single week, members travelling by horseback, by boat, and on foot gathered 21,269 signatures — more than half the adult native Hawaiian population. The petitions were carried to Washington by four delegates and presented to the Senate. Their effect was decisive: the annexation treaty failed to secure the necessary two-thirds vote. The largest democratic expression in Hawaiian history had stopped the government of the United States from acquiring a sovereign nation through constitutional process.

McKinley found another way. The Spanish-American War of 1898 provided the strategic justification. On 7 July 1898, McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution, annexing Hawaiʻi by joint resolution of Congress — a mechanism requiring only a simple majority in both chambers. No treaty, no two-thirds vote, no plebiscite in Hawaiʻi, no Native Hawaiian was asked to consent. The same legislative procedure used to name a post office was used to absorb a nation. Approximately 1.8 million acres of Crown and government lands — the lands set aside in the Great Māhele of 1848 — transferred to the United States. The Queen lived the remainder of her life at Washington Place, petitioning for the return of the Crown Lands until her death on 11 November 1917. The lands were not returned. The 21,269 KÅ«ʻē Petitions were filed in a box at the National Archives in Washington, where they sat unexamined for almost exactly one hundred years.

With the monarchy abolished and the islands annexed, the five corporations that had engineered the transfer operated without constraint. A 1905 government study could state without exaggeration that "directly or indirectly all individuals in the territory of Hawaii are ultimately dependent upon the sugar industry. The social, the economic and the political structure of the islands alike are built upon a foundation of sugar."

Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., American Factors, and Theo. H. Davies operated as factoring agents for 36 of the 38 major sugar plantations in the territory. A planter who needed credit, equipment, shipping, insurance, or labour recruitment went to one of the five. The California and Hawaiian Sugar Company refinery on San Francisco Bay — the largest sugar refinery in the world, wholly owned by the Big Five — processed seven of every eight tons of sugar exported from the islands. The Big Five also controlled Matson Navigation Company, the two largest banks, the major insurance firms, the leading wholesale and retail operations, and the public utilities.

The Republican Party controlled the territorial legislature without interruption from annexation through the 1940s. Big Five officers and directors served as territorial governors, legislators, and judges. The genealogies were so entangled that a single board meeting could contain three generations of the same extended family seated around the same table. The territory functioned in all practical respects like a company town scaled to the size of an archipelago.

The system depended on the labour of the men and women who cut the cane. They had been arriving for half a century — recruited from China, Japan, Portugal, Korea, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines — housed in segregated camps, identified not by their names but by numbered brass tags hung around their necks. The tags were called bango. Japanese workers lived in Japanese camps; Filipino workers in Filipino camps; Portuguese workers in Portuguese camps. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association understood that workers who could not speak to one another across camp boundaries could not organize across them. Division was not an accident of culture; it was a management technique.

The workers organized anyway. Japanese plantation workers struck on Oʻahu in 1909, demanding wages equal to those paid to Portuguese workers for the same labour. The strike was broken by mass eviction. In 1920 Japanese and Filipino workers struck together for the first time — a breakthrough in solidarity that the planters met with mass evictions during an influenza epidemic. More than 150 strikers and family members died.

The bloodiest confrontation came on Kauaʻi. On 9 September 1924, Filipino strikers at the Makaweli plantation near Hanapēpē had been camped out for weeks, demanding a $2 daily wage and an eight-hour workday. When two strike-breakers rode through the camp on bicycles, the strikers seized them. Sheriff William Crowell arrived with an armed posse. When the confrontation ended, sixteen Filipino workers were dead — many shot by deputized marksmen positioned on a nearby hillside. The strike leader, Pablo Manlapit, was imprisoned and then deported on the condition that he never return to Hawaiʻi. The sixteen dead strikers were buried in a mass grave that was not rediscovered until October 2019, when a group of amateur historians on Kauaʻi went looking for it.

The union that finally broke the Big Five was not Hawaiian. The International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union came to Hawaiʻi through the docks of Honolulu and Hilo, organizing longshoremen first, then moving inland to the plantations. Its regional director, Jack Hall, recruited from every ethnic group on every island, holding meetings in Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, and English.

On 1 September 1946, approximately 26,000 sugar workers walked off their jobs. Their families walked with them — 76,000 people in all, roughly one-fifth of the territory's entire population — beginning a strike that lasted 79 days and shut down 33 of the territory's 34 sugar plantations. Ninety-nine percent of the membership had voted to strike. Workers formed committees to govern the striking plantations, grew food in communal gardens, hunted, fished, and organized social activities to sustain morale. Meetings were conducted in multiple languages simultaneously. The solidarity the planters had spent half a century engineering against had finally materialized — and it held. On 17 November the ILWU negotiated the end of the strike. The plantation system's control over its workers' lives, the company house, the company store, the company doctor as instruments of compliance, was broken.

The Democratic Party of Hawaiʻi, backed by the ILWU and the returning veterans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, swept the territorial legislature in 1954. The Republican Party that had governed on behalf of the Big Five since annexation lost both chambers for the first time. Statehood followed in 1959.

The last sugar harvest in Hawaiʻi was completed in December 2016. Lānaʻi's pineapple operations had already shut down in 1992, seventy years after James Dole had purchased the island for $1.1 million and planted his first crop. The man who closed the pineapple fields on Lānaʻi was David Murdock, a self-made billionaire who had acquired Castle & Cooke. In 2012, Murdock sold 98 percent of Lānaʻi to Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle Corporation, for $300 million. The purchase included the two Four Seasons resorts, most of the island's housing, the grocery store, the gas station, the community newspaper, and nearly 90,000 acres of land. One man owned the island. The structure James Dole had built in 1922 had not ended; it had changed hands.

In 1993, one hundred years after the overthrow, the Congress of the United States passed Public Law 103-150 — the Apology Resolution. Congress acknowledged that the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi "occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States" and that the Native Hawaiian people "never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people." President Clinton signed the resolution into law on 23 November 1993. No land was returned. No sovereignty was restored. No reparations were paid. The Hawaiian Homes Commission, established in 1921, maintains a waiting list that has exceeded 28,000 applicants. Some families have been on the list for decades.

Then Lahaina burned. On 8 August 2023, wind-driven wildfires swept through the town of Lahaina on the western coast of Maui, killing more than one hundred people and destroying the historic centre of what had been the original capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Before the ruins had cooled, reports emerged of developers and speculators making unsolicited offers to buy land from displaced residents. Native Hawaiian scholars gave the pattern a name that connected it to everything that had come before. They called it plantation disaster capitalism. The 2020 census had already documented the demographic conclusion of that sequence: for the first time in recorded history, more Native Hawaiians lived on the American mainland than in the Hawaiian Islands.

The Kūʻē Petitions sat in their box at the National Archives in Washington for almost exactly one century. In 1998 the scholar Noenoe Silva travelled to Washington, opened the box, and brought copies of the petitions home to Hawaiʻi. She found the signature of her own great-great-great-grandmother on one of the pages. Twenty-one thousand two hundred and sixty-nine names, written in ink that had not faded, by hands that had not been forgotten, carried by horseback and canoe across every island in the chain. They had been waiting in a box, in a building, in a city three thousand miles from the kingdom they had tried to save. The Empire of Acres continues.