The group’s desire for Chinese labor was predicated on an underlying assumption that Hawaiian bodies were not biologically fit for the task of growing cane. They believed that the reproduction of labor in the archipelago was jeopardized by the Native people’s vulnerability to disease epidemics. Planter-capitalists and employers alike used the discourse of imminent extinction to argue for the Hawaiian worker’s replacement by Chinese coolies. Depopulation was real, but foreign and Native elites employed a hyperbolic construction of Hawaiian biological “unfitness” to force Native workers out of the labor market and create an imaginary gap that rationalized the importation of coolies. This ideological endeavor is evident in the logo that RHAS adopted for itself. It depicts a volcano spewing smoke out across an almost wholly denuded landscape, save for a few palm trees. In the foreground, the implements of modern agricultural industry are shown: the animal-drawn plow, the hoe, the rake. The prominence of those objects (and the lack of people) suggests that these tools possessed an almost magical power to transform denuded, unproductive landscapes into lush and profitable ones. Yet despite an apparent faith in technology, RHAS members knew that people were needed to handle these tools. What was missing from this image—from the landscape—was labor. In other words, RHAS was saying that there will be no sugar economy if we cannot bring in new laborers from afar.14
FIGURE 18. Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society logo, c. 1851. Reproduced from Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 3 (1852).
There was no lack of labor in Hawaiʻi. In fact, there were approximately eighty thousand Hawaiian men and women still living in the Islands in 1850. However, there were also tens of thousands of Chinese peasants looking for work abroad. Following the Opium War, China’s borders, penetrated and made porous by imperialism, released hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers through the cracks of Qing society and onto foreign vessels. Many went to California to take part in the Gold Rush. Compounding these trends, South China entered a period of civil war in the early 1850s known as the Taiping Rebellion. War refugees added to the flood of Chinese migrants. These rapid transformations in Qing society and the global economy made unskilled Chinese labor mobile and accessible. Hawaiʻi’s planter-capitalists took notice. Rationalizations of Chinese “fitness” and Hawaiian “unfitness” began. RHAS members had to make themselves (and the state, whose cooperation they relied upon) believe that Hawaiian labor was unfit for work in their own indigenous environment. They had to believe that Hawaiian labor was nearly all gone, as if the landscape was completely barren of men, an image that they already had in their minds.15
In RHAS meetings in the 1850s, Native and foreign elites both pontificated at great length about what they saw as the inherent deficiencies of Hawaiian labor. Robert J. Hollingsworth, for example, stood up before the body in 1851 to say that “there is in my opinion very nearly as much work in a native as there ever was in a negro, but we have no legal and efficient means at present adapted for getting it out of them.” He suggested the task system would incentivize productivity; otherwise, left to their own devices the Hawaiians would wallow in indolence. Euro-American merchant and RHAS member Stephen Reynolds, in a “Report on the Committee on Labor” in 1852 noted that he thought the problem with Hawaiians was that they were just too mobile. “Sugar plantations find it difficult to engage natives for any long term of time,” he explained. Few Hawaiians “are willing to engage for more than three to six months. Importation is the only reliable source for permanent labor.” Reynolds’s kanaka was not the passive indolent creature of Hollingsworth’s mind, but an actively disobedient worker.16
Even the Hawaiian people’s own leaders expressed ambivalence regarding the employment of Native labor, demonstrating that class, alongside race, greatly influenced national debates over coolies and kanakas. When Prince Alexander Liholiho, nephew of the mōʻī Kauikeaouli [Kamehameha III], addressed the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society on the topic of labor, he at first came to the defense of indigenous workers, stating “it is only as yesterday that forced labor was abolished, and the people are still taking breath, as it were, for to be coerced to do a thing is to hate it.” The problem was not a lack of labor in the islands, but the issue more squarely centered “on the fact of laboring power being allowed to lie dormant; of good muscle becoming flaccid from inaction.” Hawaiian bodies were strong, full of “laboring power” and embodying “good muscle.” But they needed incentive to put their bodies to work in the service of global capitalism. This would not be easy, Alexander Liholiho admitted, for “the Hawaiians are not naturally fond of labor; the natives of hot countries seldom are.” Thus the prince, too, revealed his penchant for the dominant racial stereotypes of the era: kanaka workers were strong and muscular, yet unfit for physical exertion due to the enervating, tropical environment.17
On the other side of RHAS debasements of the Hawaiian worker was the initially unbridled optimism that they had for the untested coolie. At their 1852 annual meeting, Reynolds reported that “since our last meeting, the ship Thetis has arrived from Amoy, China, with about two hundred Coolies, which were distributed among the planters.” These migrants—from Xiamen (Amoy) in coastal Fujian province east of Guangzhou—were the first coolies to arrive in Hawaiʻi. To promote coolies as a viable alternative to Native labor, members of RHAS found it necessary and useful to compare and contrast Hawaiian and Chinese male workers, to search, as it were, for the essential differences between their “natures.” Reynolds weighed in. The Chinese “have proved, thus far, diligent, but not swift; obedient, but require looking after.” Hawaiian workers, on the other hand, “are stronger, and for heavy work, in getting timber from the mountains, or working in the water, are the better help.” Once again, stereotypes of Hawaiians as best suited for work in amphibious environments weighed on the minds of landlubbing employers. Beyond qualitative analyses, Reynolds also suggested that planters might quantify racial differences. “Planters,” he reported, “have different views as to the relative value, as laborers, between Coolies and Natives. Some think four Coolies equal to five Natives, in amount of labor; others reverse the matter by placing three natives against four coolies.” In terms of cost, Reynolds noted that coolies, at $7/month, were slightly more expensive than hiring Native labor, at $6/month. The most expensive part of coolies was the outlay for transportation, for it was a long way from China to Hawaiʻi.18
Chinese workers were real people, however, and all the rationalizations in the world could not control their behaviors once in the archipelago. Things took an ominous turn when, just months after the first landing, several Chinese workers committed suicide. As the RHAS committee on labor reported, “one on Mr. Titcomb’s plantation cut his throat; one on Hale Maile plantation, East Maui, cut his throat, and one died of a fever; one, a domestic of R.C. Janion, in Honolulu, Oahu, cut his throat. So that three have committed suicide.” For those that did not choose the path of suicide to cancel their contracts, Chinese workers found other ways to resist planter authority. Most ominous in the planters’ eyes were the immediate conflicts that arose between Hawaiian and Chinese workers. On one plantation, Reynolds reported that “there was some apparent jealousy by the natives when the coolies first arrived among them.” And at Kōloa, the birthplace of the sugar industry, there was “some little skirmishing at first” between Chinese and Hawaiians, “but it soon subsided.” On another plantation, in 1853, a Hawaiian worker named Kuina was arrested for beating his Chinese luna (overseer) with a stick. After this incident, the two men started throwing punches at each other, and all the Hawaiian workers joined in to help Kuina, exclaiming, “Let’s help the boy, don’t let the Chinaman hurt him.” Because the Chinese luna was the Hawaiian workers’ supervisor, the court accepted his interpretation of the incident and fined Kuina ten dollars.
Racial and class antagonisms festered side-by-side with attacks on workers’ masculinity. In one case, all the male Chinese workers on a plantation taunted the Hawaiian men, shouti
ng “Wahine! Wahine!” meaning “Women! Women!” They felt “a pride over the natives,” Reynolds wrote. The Chinese, in a nearly all-male work environment, apparently felt the need to emasculate the Hawaiian men, making them their “women.” This contest over gender only grew wider and wilder in coming decades as Hawaiian men fought Chinese men over access to the islands’ Native women. Race, class, and gender were all pressure points between coolies and kanakas in the early years of the sugar plantation system.19
Despite these episodes of violence among Chinese and Hawaiian workers—evidence of Hawaiian workers’ active resistance to the coolie trade—Native leaders such as Prince Alexander Liholiho endorsed the continued recruitment of Chinese labor, writing that “Chinese coolies have been introduced here, and more of them are on their way hither. With all their faults, and a considerable disposition to hang themselves, they have been found very useful.” He continued, reasoning that because the “plantations are now chiefly dependent upon them for the principal amount of labor done,” more should be tried. “That they might be better than they are, ought not to be used as an argument against them. That they are procurable,—that they have been procured,—that their wages are reasonable,—that you can calculate upon retaining them for a certain term,—that the climate suits them, and that they are handy in the house and in the field, are great facts.” The prince concluded, “They are the best immigrants we can get;—at all events, they are the best we have hitherto got, or are likely to get.” Note how the prince highlighted the fitness of the coolies for the climate, as if somehow they were better suited for Hawaiʻi’s climate than the indigenous people. These were “great facts.”20
As the number of Chinese workers in the Kingdom increased, newspaper editors—and common Hawaiians writing letters to the editor, too—began weighing in on the “coolie problem.” The first Hawaiian-language editorial to comment on coolies was published in July 1856 under the title, “Some Ways of the Chinese People.” It begins by describing the strange and foreign character of the Chinese migrants’ behaviors, dress, and diet. It is a remarkable document for it is likely the earliest Hawaiian-language essay on the topic of Chinese coolies. It begins, “This is a very old people.” They are a people mentioned “in the stories of the Bible concerning the ancient lands,” and in the “work of all the nobles and common people of all of Europe.” Yet despite, or perhaps because of, their deep history and culture, they have a “very strange and extraordinary character.” “Their pono,” the editor writes, “is associated with animals and beasts, [and] we laugh at their conversation and their strangeness among us.”21 The Chinese who came to Hawaiʻi had left a country ruled by Manchus, founders of the Qing Empire. Under Manchu rule, Chinese men were forced to shave the front of their heads and wear their hair in a long braid known as a queue hanging down the back of their heads. It was a hairstyle derided as “pigtails” by non-Chinese observers across the Pacific World. Often Chinese male workers were emasculated by rhetoric that drew attention to the queue as a representation of their supposed femininity. The editor of Ka Hae Hawaii also chimed in: “We consider, what is the reason for the looseness of their pants, and what is the reason for keeping the hair in only a small spot of the head, and the greater part flowing?” This behavior was nonsensical. But the editor cautioned that “however strange they are, the careless telling of these things without seeing the source is not pono.”22
The editor suggested, in fact, that Hawaiians might learn a thing or two from the Chinese. First, he pointed out that in China what is seen as normal is different than what is considered normal in Hawaiʻi. “In their land the size of pants is not an issue, and the length of the hair, if they behave differently, [if] the hair then is cut, they are ridiculed, and it is a greatly embarrassing thing.” No one notices, or laughs at, the bagginess of workers’ pants in China because they are commonplace. It is the same with their hair. It would be like Hawaiians going around “naked,” he wrote, a very “embarrassing thing.” Second, the editor argued that the Chinese workers’ loose clothing is a good fit for the work environment. “The loose clothing is truly comfortable, [and] the clothes of the haole are worthless [and] a nuisance [for] working [because they] stick so much to the thighs,” the editor wrote. The Chinese worker “seeks comfort,” while “the haole seeks the beauty of pride/vanity.” To everything there is a season, including workers’ clothing. The Chinese were not unfit for work in Hawaiʻi; they were just differently fit.23
Besides clothing and hairstyle, the editor of Ka Hae Hawaii also drew attention to differences in diet among Hawaiian and Chinese workers. “If deprived of Rice, it is just like, the kanaka lacking in poi.” The author here highlights ecological relationships among workers and food crops: Chinese depended on rice cultivation as Hawaiians relied on the production of kalo. Indeed, employers became increasingly concerned with quantifying the value of Hawaiian versus Chinese labor by calculating the relative costs of feeding one “race” over the other. When the cost of rice was low, hiring Chinese was favorable. When the cost of rice was high, hiring Hawaiians was favorable. The fact that Hawaiian and Chinese contract laborers also sometimes cultivated kalo and rice on their own, in gardens on plantations or in paddies off to the side, even further complicated efforts by employers to rationalize and systematize plantation labor and the maintenance of workers’ bodies.24
This debate over coolies and kanakas continued throughout the 1850s. When the firm Castle & Cooke sought to establish a plantation at Haʻikū, Maui, in the late 1850s, they hired George Beckwith, a Euro-American man, as plantation manager. In him they found “a man of Extensive knowledge and strong Common Sense. He understands natives well.” But in letters from Haʻikū, Beckwith shows the difficulties he faced in hiring and managing both kanaka and coolie labor. For, while it was one thing for men to debate the coolie question at RHAS meetings and in print, the real battle over the future of labor in Hawaiʻi took place in the cane fields.25
LAND AND LABOR AT HAʻIKŪ
Despite massive dispossession resulting from the Māhele a decade prior, there were still Hawaiians living on the land in Haʻikū when the sugar company arrived. These homesteaders represented both a benefit and an obstacle to the company: they could potentially be hired as workers, but they also might refuse to work, and not only that, their homesteading muddied the boundaries between the disciplined agroecology of the sugar plantation and the undisciplined ecological commons embraced by Native Hawaiians. The job of the plantation manager, then, was to bound both the land and its workers, to bring them both under company control. Furthermore, George Beckwith sought to control workers’ bodies at Haʻikū, to bound their movements and control their behaviors. Truant workers and deserters forced the plantation manager to involve the collaboration of local judges and police to round up workers and discipline their bodies. Beckwith also sought to control his workers’ diets, to force them to eat company food rather than grow their own. He judged the value of workers’ bodies according to the economic and ecological costs of feeding them. These struggles over bodies and borders defined the coolie/kanaka conflict in the 1860s. Indeed, plantation management was all about measuring, bounding, and seeking control over migrant ecologies that threatened to disrupt and disorganize the highly disciplined agroecology of the sugar plantation. Cattle, fish, poi, rice, and disease are all actors that destabilized the careful management of this monocultural enterprise. Workers, Hawaiian and Chinese, exercised control and resistance in cooperation or in contestation with these natures. They used food and animals and disease to complicate the bounds of the plantation, to make arguments about the fitness of different workers, and to challenge the authority of their boss, the plantation manager George Beckwith.
Bounding the land began with building a fence. Fences, material embodiments and articulations of private property, worked to fortify the laws that governed land use, in this case the Māhele. The story of Haʻikū begins with a small battle over land and labor: who will build the co
mpany fence? As manager, Beckwith sought to enclose company land and dispossess Native homesteaders of their rights to the land. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx theorized that enclosures such as these necessarily lead to proletarianization: the newly landless would become a wage-working class. But at Haʻikū in the late 1850s, land and labor were stuck in an intermediate stage in this process. Some Hawaiians were landless, but others were not. The Māhele had created a patchwork of economic survival strategies among the makaʻāinana. Erecting a fence was meant to police the gains of the Māhele for private property and capital in the face of a resistant Native populace.26
Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World Page 23