No newspaper in the 1860s explicitly took the position that Chinese were the best choice for admixture with Hawaiians; they simply called for some kind of active process of racial amalgamation. As demonstrated, most Hawaiians and haole actually held generally negative views of the Chinese, yet at the same time they appeared resigned to the fact that Chinese were the most “kindred” or “cognate” race available under present circumstances. If it had to do with racial similarities between Chinese and Hawaiians, these were not stated; instead, it was the racial differences between Chinese and Hawaiians that attracted eugenicists’ attention. The Chinese had a “nature” that was exactly what Hawaiians needed. In racial and/or genetic difference was the key to saving the Hawaiian “race.”61
KANAKAS AND COOLIES AT HAʻIKŪ
Beckwith had resisted coolie-mania for much of the early 1860s. But by the summer of 1865 he had had it with his Hawaiians. On September 27, Beckwith mentioned coolies for the first time in a letter to company agent Samuel Savidge. “Thus far, I have not been able to ship any new natives,” he wrote. “In relation to Coolies, I do not wish to employ them, unless it is absolutely necessary but perhaps we shall be obliged to come to it, the demand for labor is so great.” Beckwith then explained his lingering opposition to coolies: “The expense of feeding Coolies with the present price of rice, will probably be twice the expense of feeding natives.” From his perspective, hiring coolies was an expense, a quantifiable budget proposition. Their diet determined their value, and at “twice the expense” of hiring Hawaiians, they were not a valuable investment. This was the crux of the matter. Coolies came with an attendant ecology that itself had to be disciplined. If the price of rice could not be brought down, then the feeding of coolies was prohibitively expensive. Kanakas, too, came with ecological demands. The choices facing Beckwith therefore concerned how to balance and ultimately control the ecologies of both groups of workers: their cattle, their diets, their illnesses, their bodies.62
Within weeks Beckwith was readying Haʻikū for its first coolies. “I can hardly see where the help we shall need for the next six months is coming from,” he wrote to Savidge, “and if the Directors think best, perhaps we must have from 25 to 50.” “If so, we shall need to put up at once, one or two buildings for them.”63 By October, Beckwith’s mind was fully absorbed in imagining the new plantation environment that Chinese would live in at Haʻikū, and this vision looked significantly different than the world of his Hawaiian workers. In constructing this vision, Beckwith employed limited understandings of the ecological needs of coolies versus kanakas to imagine how the plantation environment might change with the coming of Chinese labor. He suggested that coolies should be kept separate from the Hawaiians. “I think we should use them simply as field hands, and keep them entirely away from the natives, putting up their building, say on the bank of Maliko gulch, just above the hill, so that they would be near the work at Hamakuapoko as well as Haiku.” Beckwith reimagined the geography of the plantation, placing the coolie population equidistant between two possible work sites, and as far away from the Hawaiians as possible.64
The first Chinese workers arrived in October 1865. They consisted mostly of men, but also some women. Beckwith developed a budget assessment and management plan for dealing with the coolies. He planned for their diet (rice), their housing (cheap and quickly thrown together), their “ablutions” (in the ravine), and even the character of their community life (one woman per every five men, he stated; always kept separate from the Hawaiians). When the coolies actually arrived, though, he found himself clumsily negotiating with the nature of their bodies. “We have 3 diseased Chinamen on the sick list,” he wrote to Savidge, just weeks after their arrival. “Cannot we in some way reduce the cost of Rice?” Beckwith did not consider how to restore the health of the sick coolies; what troubled him most was their cost. Not only did they eat an alien food that had to be found at reasonable prices, but some workers were not acclimating well to the new environment and were driving up costs. One week later, Beckwith wrote again of “the chinamen.” “Many of them are deseased and will be expensive help until we get them cured up, and accustomed to work.” In late November, Beckwith told the company that “every thing is moving on well. Some sickness among the men.” The constant disorderliness of the Chinese workers’ bodies proved a headache for Beckwith. “Cannot the China girl, who is sick, & the china man sick with consumption, go to the hospital? They belong there rather than on the plantation.”65
Even as Chinese workers recuperated from illness, Beckwith continued to struggle with the simple task of feeding his workers. “The 28 [coolies] sent before,” he wrote in November, “eat 50 lbs. rice per day, besides meat, so you will see the importance of making rice cheaper in some way. Otherwise, it will cost 5 or 6 dollars per month to feed them.” He also wrote that “the 2000 lbs. Rice sent, will not last very long. We should have some without fail, next week, as it will be very important to have their food prompt & regular.” Beckwith thought of coolie bodies as machines needing just the right amount of fuel. “They are very slow, but hope will improve.” They were consuming massive amounts of rice, and Beckwith feared that he might not always have enough on hand to feed them.66 Sometimes harsh measures were necessary, such as when he was “able to reduce their rice to about 50 lbs. to 40 people, by giving them a whole bag at a time, telling them it is for two days, & generally they do not come for more. They seem to be contented & happy,” despite the fact that he was forcing them to eat less. “The Chinamen are now well broken in. Are very obedient to me,” he explained. He had been too lenient with his Hawaiian workers, and consequently they had walked all over him. He was not going to let the “Chinamen” do the same.67
But as the Chinese workers’ first year dragged on, Beckwith continued to struggle with the task of feeding these men. “My great difficulty in regard to the Chinamen has been, that they have been so expensive,” he wrote. “Still, I think they may be, most of them, good laborers. and if we can bring down reasonably the expense of keeping them, they may still be profitable.” He pleaded with Savidge to “please also keep us supplied with rice. nearly a ton per month, or 60 lbs. per day.” Beckwith had not earlier chosen to micromanage the diet of his Hawaiian workers, but managing Chinese stomachs became something of a daily chore for him. In fact, once the first coolies arrived, Beckwith changed his tune and increasingly sought to manage both populations’ diets. Indeed, feeding coolies versus kanakas became an ecological assessment for the plantation manager. Beckwith sought to understand and control where the natural resources for different foods came from, who turned those resources into food, and how to get that food into workers’ stomachs. Despite his protestations over the trouble with feeding coolies, feeding kanakas was also complicated. Fewer Hawaiian workers were growing their own kalo in the mid-1860s. Beckwith hoped all along to be able to provide for his workers’ needs at the company store (as a means of retrieving their wages), but this meant finding a steady supply of whatever food items workers desired. It was at this time that the Haiku Sugar Company began to make increasing payments for “paiai” (paʻi ʻai), a kalo product favored by the Hawaiian workers. Beckwith sold paʻi ʻai to workers through the company store. The same was not true of rice, however, which was often figured into the cost of hiring coolies to begin with, and deducted from their wages.68
The operational strategy for running the Haʻikū plantation increasingly became a mathematical equation: paʻi ʻai versus rice; the costs of feeding Hawaiians versus Chinese. The answers derived from this equation would define the fitness of the workers for the plantation environment. In 1866, Beckwith called his Chinese workers “the most expensive help we have ever had, by from 25 to 50 percent. You will see therefore the importance of reducing the price of Rice.” He began importing “China Rice” from Asia. Beckwith’s demands demonstrated the increasingly transoceanic ecological relationships that kept workers fed on Hawaiian plantations. As he explained to Savidge, “there is
little difference in the quantity of Rice consumed by Chinamen whether it be China [rice] or Hawaiian. The price being the same, I think the China is best.” The workers may have preferred it; perhaps the taste was familiar to them. Meanwhile, the Haʻikū plantation could not import paʻi ʻai from far away like they did with rice. As more Hawaiians moved onto plantations and gave up kalo farming altogether, Beckwith started to have trouble finding enough of the product. This is the problem with primitive accumulation. Once you dispossess the kalo fields, who will grow the food to feed the workers? The capitalist agroecology had transformed kalo farmers into wage workers, which meant that the simple task of feeding workers had become increasingly complex as people’s stomachs were divorced from the ecological parameters of the local environment.
“The supply of paiai from Wailuku, is likely to run short,” Beckwith wrote in March 1866; he suggested the company purchase paʻi ʻai from Molokaʻi, just as he had purchased cattle from that island, but this would mean covering the expense of shipment over the strait. “I should like to order from there from 50 to 75 bundles per week,” Beckwith explained. “It is very important to keep on hand a good supply of food. Otherwise, natives get tired, & go off to Wailuku as soon as time expires. Besides, they eat a great deal of cane if they have not plenty of food.” Beckwith never explained what Chinese workers do when they don’t have enough rice—get sick, apparently—but he admitted that the Hawaiians actually ate the company’s product, the sugarcane, when they were hungry. It was one more level of Hawaiian resistance to Beckwith’s attempts to control their bodies, just as their tramping off to Wailuku, a nearby town, was a similar act of defiance.69
In the spring, Beckwith lamented that the cost of “labor & food are going up. There is great scarcity of food on this Island, & unless we can devise some means of getting it from Molokai, shall soon be obliged to stop.” Beckwith’s words had never been so strong. “We have 3 weeks food engaged for Haiku, but the Hamakuapoko people have had little or none for three weeks, so that that gang is scattering in search of food, as I have promised them for the last three or four weeks that the vessel would next trip bring from Molokai.” With workers scattering across the countryside and toward port towns such as Wailuku in search of food, Beckwith was powerless to control them. The problem was not just economical, it was ecological. Capitalism and monoculture had come to Maui so rapidly that plantation managers failed to consider the need to maintain the loʻi kalo (taro patches) necessary to feed a wage-working community. When no workers were producing their own food, instead it had to be imported from Molokaʻi and from even farther afield. When workers went hungry, now there was nothing for them to do but put down their tools and search for sustenance. For a time, Beckwith sough to hire “poi men,” as he called them, to make poi expressly for the purpose of feeding his workers, but in one case, “The Hamakuapoko poi man” he had hired “left us this week.” Later, Beckwith lamented, “Our poi man for 2½ years has now failed us, & if the Molokai supply fails, we shall be in great trouble.” The sugar industry on Maui was a system teetering on the edge of ecological collapse.70
Finally, Haʻikū, with all its problems, also faced a fate that plagued many sugar plantations in Hawaiʻi in the late nineteenth century: violence. Just one month after the first coolies arrived at Haʻikū, Beckwith reported to Savidge that “we had a little rebellion among them a few days since and in subduing them one was shot by the overseer thro’ [through] the leg, without any serious injury to him. I think, however, the result was, a thorough subduing of the whole gang.” Of course, Beckwith prided himself on his ability to subdue his workers. In the same letter, he explained that “No. 272,” a Chinese worker, “also hung himself, on Tuesday last, and was not found till dead. He was not among the rebels, but was very much adicted to the use of opium, & probably was either under the influence of it, or the reaction after the supply was exhausted.” Suicide was not unheard of among Chinese migrant workers. Sometimes they simply could not accept the conditions of their life as coolies.71
Some Chinese workers put their faith in the pono of Hawaiian law. They believed that the Kingdom’s legal system could rectify unwholesome situations in the workplace. But Beckwith could not stand the idea of coolies talking to Hawaiian judges behind his back. “I don’t want a judge so near, so accessible especially to the Chinamen,” he wrote to Savidge. The coolies have “a strong tendency to hurry away to the Judge for the merest trifle. One day two of them started for Makawao to see the judge, without my knowledge. After walking about halfway, they got tired, and hired a man to bring them back. Thus the advantage of a remote judge.” Beckwith preferred his own system: “My Chinamen, if disobedient, . . . I cowhide on the spot.”72
The story of Hawaiian and Chinese workers at Haʻikū is a story of managerial efforts to understand and control workers’ bodies and their relationships to the environment. Beckwith’s greatest pilikia in the 1860s was figuring out how to feed his workers. Because Hawaiians preferred some foods and Chinese preferred others, Beckwith was constantly on the search for supplies. As monoculture took hold over East Maui, Beckwith was forced to look farther and farther afield for food for his workers, just as he was finally forced in 1865 to look to China for labor. Not only people were mobile, but so were cattle, rice, paʻi ʻai, and even Hansen’s disease. The job of the capitalist was to manage and discipline all these circulations and ensure that they operated at the lowest cost possible (or in the case of diseases, resulted in the least disturbance to company profits). Circulating things—workers, cattle, rice, kalo, diseases—were essential actors in the unfolding environmental drama at Haʻikū. By the 1870s, the power of states, treaties, and global capitalists’ unquenched desires for free trade pushed the conflict between kanakas and coolies to its final stage.
SUGAR IS KING
In 1875, the United States and the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi signed the Treaty of Reciprocity. This treaty removed all U.S. tariffs on Hawaiian sugar. It was the apex of foreigners’ decades-long push for free trade in the Pacific. “Reseprocity is a delusion,” wrote one haole plantation manager, “impossible by the very nature of things.” The delusional nature of reciprocity was nowhere more evident than in the Hawaiian working class’s unsettling experience of this treaty. Free trade was a disaster for Native workers. This treaty encouraged planter-capitalists to pour even more capital into sugar’s expansion while they encouraged the state to import exponentially greater numbers of foreigners into Hawaiʻi. Sugar production went into overdrive, and careful considerations of workers’ fitness were thrown aside in favor of a tidal wave of coolies.73
Sugar production boomed, jumping in four years to nearly three times its previous output so that by 1880 the Kingdom was exporting over 30,000 tons of sugar every year. To accommodate this growth, the Kingdom began a campaign of mass importation of human labor. In 1876 the population of Hawaiʻi had reached an all-time low. The nearest census data is from December 1872, when only 56,897 people lived in the archipelago, and just over 50,000 were indigenous Hawaiians. Statistician Robert Schmitt estimates that the islands’ population actually hit its nadir in 1876, coincidentally the same year that the Treaty of Reciprocity took effect. Schmitt estimates that the population dropped to just under 54,000 in 1876, and the indigenous population was below 50,000. Still, as of 1876, at least 90 percent of the population was Hawaiian, with Chinese, Euro-Americans, and others comprising the remainder.74
FIGURE 19. Hawaiian Sugar Exports, 1836–1880. Source: Theodore Morgan, Hawaii: A Century of Economic Change, 1778–1876 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 227–28. Compiled by the author.
The demography of labor was altogether different. In 1872, there were at least thirty-five sugar plantations in Hawaiʻi, employing anywhere from 3,786 to 4,772 total workers. Using the lower estimate of 3,786 workers, 69 percent (N = 2,627) of workers were Hawaiian men, while 10 percent (N = 364) were Hawaiian women. The remaining 21 percent (N = 795) were almost all Chinese. The 1872 cen
sus recorded approximately 2,000 Chinese living in the Hawaiian Islands, so the Chinese recorded as working on plantations was likely an undercount. This data further shows that, although the population of the Kingdom was 90 percent Hawaiian, the labor force was only 80 percent indigenous. Following reciprocity, this gap continued to widen. The Kingdom, after 1876, imported more workers annually from abroad, on average, than the number of Hawaiians who emigrated, died, or otherwise disappeared from the labor force. The period from 1878 to 1885 witnessed the government’s most intensive effort to date to fill Hawaiian cane fields with foreign bodies: nearly 25,000 coolies arrived from China, while approximately 2,500 Pacific Islanders arrived as contract workers and the first wave of Portuguese workers arrived as well. Just two years following the removal of tariffs on sugar, the Chinese population in Hawaiʻi was estimated at nearly 6,000 persons (up from 2,000 six years earlier). With nearly 8,000 contract laborers in the archipelago as of 1878, it was very likely sometime that year that the Chinese immigrant population overcame the indigenous one as Hawaiʻi’s new working class. A plurality of workers in Hawaiʻi were now no longer Hawaiian.75
Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World Page 26