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Sanford Dole, the “Sugar King”

If you’d like to know more about how the Kingdom of Hawaii became the Territory of Hawaii, the University of Hawaii has an excellent collection of primary sources. The Dole fruit and sugar fortune had not a little to do with it. A church here in Brooklyn has a saying: “Our missionaries went to Hawaii to do good, and they did very well.”

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The Sanford Dole, the “Sugar King” by Gunnar Hellekson, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
This was written by gunnar. Posted on Monday, February 24, 2003, at 1:21 am. Tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.
  • http://onepeople.org/archives/000058.html Teryn Cruver

    Sanford dole makes great pineapples!

  • http://onepeople.org/archives/000058.html Teryn Cruver

    I hate doing a f’n report on this f’n guy

  • http://www.wink.now.nu/ Katharine

    uuum actually Sanford had nothing to do with the pineapples Teryn. He was the cousin of J.D. Dole who introduced the pineapple to hawaii though. He had no hand in running the business or helping it, etc. He was busy with his administrative rolls…

    heh sorry – must be weird getting a comment from some weird stranger. I’m actually a member of the Dole family and was looking for a particular article about Sanford for my grandfather.

  • Kuhio

    Hmmm… administrative rolls, I guess that is the term the old money caucasian families in Hawaii use for “Inciting Insurrection”. Considering that Sanford was instrumental in the “stealing of Hawaii” and was recalcitrant to relinquish control of the islands even after a directive from US president Cleveland to do so, Fortunately for Sanford…. William McKinley saw the strategic value of the Islands…To McKinley, that was worth more than sugar. So I can concur that Mr Dole had little time to be planting pinapples or sugarcane for that matter, Oh where is Mr. Peabody’s wayback machine when one needs it? I know about several thousand Hawaiians that would like to go back and give Sanford a little tug on his beard, from photos of the time there was more than enough to go around. I guess we can sit with our upside down flags on the northshore beaches until the end of time and it will so no good, and in the end one cannot even blame Sanford or any of the others involved, Hawaii was destined to be absorbed it was too small and too well placed not to be. It was just a matter of time. I would still like to tug his beard though, just to make me feel a little better about it.

  • Bob

    posted by Gunnar: “The Dole fruit and sugar fortune had not a little to do with it.”

    Gunnar, can you write this more clearly?

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