To rephrase the plea by Willie Loman’s wife in “Death of a Salesman,” attention must be paid to the death of sugar in Hawaii.
The sugar industry was not good or bad for Hawaii. The sugar plantations were not your friend or enemy; they were your life.
Sugar made Hawaii, defining a shared culture of paternalism, isolation and remarkable grit. Reaction to that plantation control gave rise to Hawaii’s strong support for unions and eventually the Democratic Party.
Alexander & Baldwin Inc. announced on Jan. 6 that it would shut the last operation, Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co., on Maui. If sugar is to grow again in Hawaii, it will be as a boutique crop, not an industry.
“The end of sugar is a watershed moment for Hawaii but not a surprise,” Sumner La Croix, a University of Hawaii economics professor, said in an interview this week.
The plantations grew from the first on Kauai in 1835 to more than 100 across the kingdom, territory and finally state of Hawaii. As late as 1993, there were 121,000 acres in sugar production, but by 2010 that had shrunk to 35,000.
We are a state boasting ancestors from China, Japan, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Portugal, because they were brought here by the plantations to labor in the fields and mills. It is an ethnic mix Hawaii today celebrates as its rainbow diversity.
The plantation provided workers with housing, schools and hospitals, but it was not a warm and cuddly existence. Plantation records show that workers’ records were not kept by name, but by an assigned number, a “bango number” stamped on a metal plate workers were required to wear on the job.
State Rep. Clift Tsuji, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, grew up on a plantation outside of Hilo on Hawaii island. He remembers the day his father became the first Japanese- American plantation worker to be named a “luna” or foreman.
“Do you know what that meant? We had a flush-toilet, we had a painted home and you had a telephone. My father rode a horse because he was a luna,” Tsuji recalled in an interview this week.
“My grandfather was in charge of the plantation stable and one of his jobs was to ring the bell at 4 o’clock every morning. It would wake up the camp so when the plantation truck came to take you out to the fields, everyone was ready.”
It was literally a cradle-to-grave existence, Tsuji said, noting that if the family couldn’t afford one, the plantation would make a coffin for your burial in the plantation-provided graveyard.
As sugar ends, it leaves behind hundreds of good- paying union jobs and much uncertainty.
Economist La Croix said the end of sugar presents problems, but is not an economic disaster.
“There will be some ripple effect, but it comes at a time when the economy is doing reasonably well, unemployment is low and it is likely that many will be reabsorbed into the Maui workforce,” La Croix said.
Others recognize sugar is pau and they are heartsick.
“This hits the heart of soul of the community,” said Tsuji, who in the 1990s watched the Big Island’s plantations along the Hamakua Coast crumble one after another.
“The thought is, ‘Not again, another goes, and now it is the last of the battles ending.”
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
