John Kidwell and the Founding of Hawaii’s Pineapple Industry

From his start as an apprentice to a nurseryman in London, John Kidwell would go on to catalyze the establishment of Hawaii’s pineapple industry. His story is tied to the white business-driven Reform Party and its coup over the Hawaiian monarchy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, we
get so many requests for Hawaiian history, which is great,

(00:22):
and um, let me set this up and say this
isn't like so much a piece of Hawaiian cultural history,
although it is important in some ways in the history
of Hawaii how that culture changed. But many of them
have also been for the doll plantation specifically, So we've
had a lot of requests around that, which I was
fortunate enough to visit in December. We've also had request

(00:44):
for the pineapple industry in general, although that's a really
long time scale. So today we're sort of honoring these requests.
We aren't talking about the doll plantation, but what actually
came before it. So we're going to talk about the
life and business of John Kidwell, whose work still echoes
today in pineapple agriculture. And also just for context, we

(01:04):
will talk a little bit about the politics of how
the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown, although we're not going to
get super deep into the into all of that, Like
we will talk about it as it's pertinent to the story,
but we're primarily talking about kid Will on this one. Yeah,
there's also episodes in the archive that go through thing.
You can find them and eventually this one at mr

(01:25):
history dot com slash tags slash Hawaii les conveniently rounds
them all up together. So John Kidwell. John Kidwell was
born on January seven, eight nine, in North Devonshire. He
never shared much information about his early years, so the
details there are really sparse. Later in his life he

(01:48):
would describe his childhood as not unhappy, but definitely difficult.
He didn't know about his father and his mother, and
Kidwell was believed to have been employed as a domestic
servant and Kidwell stayed in Devonshire until he was fifteen,
and at that time he moved to London for a
horticultural apprenticeship under a nurseryman who was also a relative,

(02:09):
and he worked with this distant cousin in London for
approximately eight years from eighteen sixty four to eighteen seventy two.
At that point, Kidwell left Great Britain and headed west
to the United States, working in a number of jobs
all centered around plants and agriculture. According to his own claim,
he was a nurseryman in San Francisco in eighteen seventy four.

(02:30):
He was listed as a gardener in the city's directory
from eighteen seventy nine to eighteen eighty two, working for
a man named John H. Sievers, and that was an
eighteen eighty and eighteen eighty one yeah, that overlapped with
his his listing as a general gardener. But after less
than a decade in California, Kidwell decided that he wanted
once again to travel west, and this time the destination

(02:52):
was the Hawaiian Islands. He had while working in San
Francisco had the opportunity to meet a number of clients
who had come from Hawaii, and through them, he was
encouraged to go there and set up a nursery in
the islands. Several of the contacts that he made while
he was in San Francisco provided him with letters of
introduction as well as encouragement, so he had the way

(03:13):
paved to make some really valuable business connections on the
island of Oahu. Kid Well set up his Oahu nursery
in the midst of a significant agricultural shift that was
taking place throughout the Hawaiian Islands, subsistence farming was receding
from the landscape and was rapidly being replaced with commercial agriculture.
The primary crop was sugarcane, and the makeup of the

(03:36):
people who lived and worked on the islands was shifting
as well. Immigrants from the American continents, Europe and Asia
made up a steadily growing portion of the population, and
most of the commercial farming work was being done by
that immigrant population. We have mentioned several times on the
podcast the fact that European and American business interests really

(03:59):
imposed their will on the Hawaiian Islands in the nineteenth century.
The monarchy of Hawaii slowly lost its power and the
US began to be the dominant influence there by the
mid eighteen seventies. By the eighteen eighties, the sugar plantation
owners had so much power over the Hawaiian economy that
they were able to control the Hawaiian government, which needed

(04:21):
the revenue that the plantations were generating. That transition is
discussed in an episode that previous hosts Katie and Sarah
did back in the eighties. Commerce and power grab that
ultimately led to Hawaii losing its independence was centered entirely
around sugarcane. And we'll come back to this in a bit. Yeah,

(04:43):
while sugarcane was the biggest export at the time, there
was a growing demand for another Hawaiian crop, and that
was pineapples. Particularly in San Francisco. Pineapples became a coveted
import and there were efforts to pick green pineapples and
ship them across the Pacific to californ Coornia. Those exported
pineapples weren't from a cultivated farm, however, but they were

(05:04):
wild uh, and they weren't very good. And as a
quick aside, there is a lot of debate over when
pineapples actually made their way to Hawaii in the first place.
You will see dates everywhere from the fifteen hundreds to
the seventeen hundreds, literally everywhere in between. Um so, this
was not a cultivated crop. They were just kind of
an accidental growing thing at this point. But in addition

(05:26):
to not being terribly good pineapples, they also had to
be shipped from the Hawaiian island that is what we
normally today would call the Big Island to make it
easier to identify, to the port at Honolulu on the
island of Oahu, and then they would wait their import
until the next leg of their journey to California. But
John Kidwell thought that if he could cultivate pineapples and

(05:49):
do it on Oahu where Honolulu is, both the fruit
and the shipping method could be improved. So he partnered
with a man named Charles Henson, who had already been
cutting and shipping wild pineapples. They took shoots from the
pineapples on the Big Island to start their own crop,
and that is where Kidwell's horticultural work really began. Yeah,
I read one account that said that Henson had started

(06:12):
sort of this casual exporting of pineapples by throwing occasional
like a few pineapples in with his shipments of other goods,
and that that's really how people started to uh pick
up the demand for more Hawaiian pineapples. And so at
this point Kidwell planted between four and five acres of
pineapple on Oahu in the Minoa Valley. So that's just

(06:34):
so south of the North Shore area and Waikiki, which
in the eighties was only just starting to see tourist
development after it had been used primarily as a getaway
spot for Hawaii's royal families. So if any of you
listening have been to modern day Waikiki, you know how
completely different it must have been when it only had
a few small hotels, because now it is a very

(06:56):
busy and very developed place. Kid Wells early pine apples
had benefited from being farmed rather than allowed to grow wild,
but they still weren't producing very good fruit, so he
decided to diversify the crop. In eighty five, he received
an order of a variety of pineapple called smooth Cayenne.
He had ordered the plants from an ad in a

(07:18):
periodical called The Florida Agriculturalist, but he didn't stop there.
The following year, he ordered a thousand pineapple plants from
Jamaica to test in Oahu's soil. He either got obsessive
or aggressively thorough after that, depending on your point of view.
He wanted to ensure that his acreage was producing the

(07:38):
best possible pineapple, so he then sent away to London
for an immense sample set. He wanted four of every
known type of pineapple, which meant that he found himself
with thirty one additional species to test. And while he
was testing all of these crops for hardiness and fruit quality.
He was also testing different methods of cultivating plants, so

(08:00):
he had a lab where he was also doing like
finer botany type work UH and his work would that
he did during this time would inform agricultural science going forward.
But after all that testing, the one that kid Well
decided was the best was the one he had started with,
the smooth cayenne, so he decided to take production of

(08:20):
it into a much larger scale and plant a commercial crop.
His plantation, which he was running solo because his business partner,
Charles Henson, had passed away from tuberculosis in was soon
producing and selling pineapples, primarily to local consumers, although he
also shipped his surplus to California. Just four years from

(08:42):
the time that he had started his experiments, his business
was thriving, but he saw an opportunity to expand in
a new way. Part of the problem of selling his
surplus fruit to North American buyers was shipping it. It
was hard to control the quality and freshness, and shipping
it any farther than California than the California coast was
basically impossible. So he had the idea to start canning

(09:04):
it next time, we'll talk about kid Wells canning efforts
and some legal issues that he ran into, but first
we will take a quick sponsor break. So not surprising
considering his care and diligence in testing his plant species,
kid Well was also pretty meticulous in working to develop

(09:26):
a canning method, and he found another partner for this project,
a man named John Emma Luth, who owned a very
successful plumbing in household furnishing business in Hawaii. Emma Louth,
who was originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, began testing canning processes
and their initial testers were families who volunteered for the job.
I mean that is, I would volunteer for that. Guve

(09:48):
me pineapple, bring it to me. While kid Well tended
to the plantation and the canning efforts, Emma Louth traveled
to the US to sell the product, but he soon
realized there was going to be a pre problem with
this business, and that problem stemmed from import tax. Even
though he was told over and over that the Hawaiian
canned pineapple was better than domestic, no one was willing

(10:11):
to pay the thirty five duty on it. Em Luth
had invested two thousand dollars in the canning enterprise, and
over the course of two years he was only able
to make six hundred dollars of it back. And we
should also point out here that Kidwell and Emma Luth
were not, by a long shot the first to try
canning pineapple in Hawaii. It's not like they invented the

(10:32):
idea of canning pineapple. The KNA Fruit Preserving Company, founded
in eight two, also tried it, but ran into basically
the same problems of financial loss that kid Will and
his partner did. The Minoa Valley plantation had grown to
ten acres and keeping up with shipping fresh pineapple to
San Francisco to meet the demand there was becoming increasingly

(10:53):
problematic for kid Well, so much so that he started
to find himself in legal hot water. In eighty eight,
kid Well had signed a contract with a fruit exporter
named Peter Camarinos to sell his entire crop to Camrinos
uh he would then export to San Francisco, and that
transaction went well, so well that the contract was renewed

(11:14):
two times. In April of the two made a new
deal that Camrinos would buy any pineapple of kid Wells
that weighed more than three pounds which is about one
point four kgrams for thirty five cents each. The contract
was supposed to last for thirty months starting in June nine,
but a year into the deal, Camrinos claimed that kid

(11:37):
Well had been selling him poison pineapples. This legal battle
would drag on for four years. But it was not
just about pineapples. So this is all happening, you recall,
as the Hawaiian government was losing power to US business interests.
Kid Well was a member of the Reform Party made
up primarily of white businessmen, while Camerinos was a royalist.

(12:01):
And when the anti monarchy Bayonet Constitution was enacted in
eighteen eighty seven, it had been signed under darrest by
King Kala Kawa, and the militant reformist group that had
forced that signature included none other than Kidwell's business partner,
John Emmiloose. So all of those politics colored the situation
and added attention to just the basic problem of Camarino's

(12:25):
feeling like he was not being delivered worthwhile goods. In April,
a little less than a year after Camrino's first told
kid Well he didn't want to buy any more of
his poisoned pineapples. There was a judgment in Cambrino's favor,
but Kidwell appealed that judgment repeatedly. At one point in
the proceedings, Camrinos even tried to have kid Wells plantation

(12:48):
taken from him, but that motion failed and Kidwell eventually
exhausted all of his appeals options, and as that legal
battle kept grinding on, cam Arinos started his own pineapple
plantation on Oahu at Khalihi, which is closer to Honolulu
and the shipping port than kid Wells. Cam Arinos also
became a partner in a second plantation in as part

(13:11):
of a larger enterprise called the Pearl Fruit Company, making
Cambrino's arrival to Kidwell in pineapple production on the island.
In eight two, Kidwell expanded his own business holdings, though
the lawsuit was still plaguing him. He leased a hundred
acres of land and then formed the Hawaiian Fruit and
Packing Company Limited. Kid Well was president, and he and

(13:34):
Emma Luth, who was also the company's secretary, were the
principal shareholders. While this might have been a natural progression
of Kidwell's business, it was also kind of a pineapple
business arms race. To compound the tension. Lauren A. Thurston,
who was vice president of this new company, was also
a leader of the Reform Party. And if you're wondering

(13:57):
what the source of the tainted pineapple issue had been
in the first place, well, the cause is known, but
the motivations for the action that inadvertently caused it are murkier.
So kid Well had been cutting the crowns, those are
those spiky leaves at the top of pineapples, off of
his fruit, and he claimed that it was to make
the fruit grow bigger. So um, I tried to look

(14:18):
up exactly whether or not this is a valid way
to do it. I couldn't find anything specific. I'm presuming
that the logic here is that the plant isn't wasting
resources supporting the foliage, and so the fruit gets plumper,
because similar things will be done with flowering plants, like
with roses, you're supposed to cut the new growth so
they'll keep flowering. So horticulture pros out there let us
know if that logic is faulty. But I think that's

(14:39):
what he was getting at. However, a witness in the case,
who also happens to be Cambrino's brother testified that kid
Well had killed the top growth on the pineapples so
that no one else could use them to start their
own plants, and that is something you can do with pineapples,
cut the crown off of it to grow a new plant.
So it's possible that kid Well was trying keep his

(15:00):
his competitors from basically stealing his cultivation work. Since Camarinos
did go into pineapple growing as their food feud dragged on,
Kidwell may have had some valid suspicions about him on
this score. Yeah, and it's unclear why, but in this testimony, Camrinos,
his brother, said that Kidwell had told him all of this,

(15:21):
which is a little bit weird. I'm not sure why
you would uh tell someone that you were doing a
thing to to protect your crop, but maybe you would.
But the bottom line is that cutting those crowns off
left the pineapples open to bacterial group growth and decay,
so they were tainted. Camrinos was definitely getting tainted fruit
when he first moved to sever this contract. Politically, Hawaii

(15:46):
was experiencing ongoing turbulence and that was also causing serious
financial problems in Queen Lily Ukolani succeeded her brother Kala
kawah when he died, and she quickly aid enemies of
the Reform Party members with her nationalist program that was
intended to diversify Hawaii's revenue streams. She also wanted, for

(16:09):
obvious reasons, to get rid of the monarchy crippling Bayonet Constitution. Yeah,
there were, uh you know. She basically wanted not just agriculture,
to be running the financial show for Hawaii. And of
course all of those white business interests that had gone
there and put time and effort into growing their businesses
were like, no, no, we love controlling your economy. The

(16:32):
McKinley Tariff, which was passed in E nine, had already
dealt a pretty serious blow to the Hawaiian economy. Under
King Kalakaua, Hawaii and the US had reached an agreement
that sugarcane from the islands could be imported to the
US duty free, but the McKinley tariff instituted a steep
tax on any foreign goods, part of a plan to

(16:52):
bolster U s industries by making importing less lucrative, and
this sent the sugarcane industry into free fall because it
was no longer inmmune to taxes, with an estimated annual
lass to the Hawaiian sugar plantations of five million dollars. So,
for both reformers and the Queen alike, agricultural diversification became
the focus of an attempt to resuscitate the nation's economy.

(17:16):
But the means to that end we're not agreed upon.
Queen planned to lease out crown lands in smart small
parcels to get a variety of different growers and crops
up and running. But of course the large plantation interests
were not interested in the idea of the small parcels. Oh.
They were like, just give us big chunks of your

(17:37):
crown lands and we'll will take care of the rest.
You want to make gigantic motto culture farms, That's exactly
what they wanted. In eight the queen was overthrown, and
that coup was led by Kidwell's vice president, Lauren A. Thurston.
John Emma Luth was also involved. Uh Sandford be Dole,
who was the cousin to James Dole, who would eventually
become Hawaii's pineapple king, had been part of the elitist

(18:00):
pro Western movement that overthrew the monarchy as well. Um,
there there's sometimes a conflation where people want to put
Sanford Dole in the Doll pineapple zone. He really didn't
seem to have much to do with it, although certainly H.
James Dole and the Doll plantation and the Doll pineapple
industry did benefit from from this effort in the long run. Uh.

(18:23):
And as for Kidwell, he was also a participant in
the coup, although not in a leadership position like his
business associates. He served in the insurgent militia as a
sharpshooter in a support role for the leaders of the coup.
Sanford B. Dole was made president of the new Republic
of Hawaii after Lauren A. Thurston turned down that job.

(18:45):
And we could do an entire separate episode on the
new nuances of this governmental takeover, and perhaps we will
at some point, because there's more even than has been
included in previous episodes that other hosts have done. But
for the purposes of this episode's focus, we're going to
talk about what happened to the pineapple industry and to
kid Well after the coup. But before we do that,

(19:05):
let's pause for another word from one of our sponsors.
Just prior to that takeover that made Hawaii no longer
a monarchy, a legislative assembly that had been tasked by
the Queen with helping the farm diversification effort had passed
an act that made all tools, machinery, appliances, buildings, and

(19:28):
land used in the pineapple industry exempt from tax for
ten years. So, of course the businessmen who overthrew Lily
Okolani were totally on board with keeping this particular piece
of legislation back on the pineapple plantation. Kidwell and Emma
Louth were still working on their canning needs. They hired
a canner from Baltimore to lead the way. He turned

(19:49):
out to be a failure, so kid Well decided he
would have to learn about canning himself, putting that meticulous
nature back to work, and kid Well developed a very
aggressive and thorough inspection process, perhaps because he had been
spooked by that whole tainted fruit lawsuit, and before long
he had the cannary at Hawaiian Fruit and Packing Company

(20:10):
producing ten thousand cans of pineapple each day from eight
Pineapple exports out of Hawaii increased nearly sixfold. But even
though Hawaii wasn't taxing the means to grow and canned pineapple,
the US tariff was still making it really hard to
turn an actual profit. Fresh pineapples could be shipped to

(20:32):
the US duty free until they're The limitations that led
kid Well to start canning the fruit were still there
and still made it difficult to turn a large profit
that way as well. Buyers were also willing to really
haggle over the prices that they paid for canned pineapple.
There was never any argument about the higher quality of

(20:53):
Hawaii's product, and particularly kid Wells, but with growers in
Singapore willing to sell canned pineapple at a much lower price,
the quality became less of a bargaining chip. Kidwell's last
canned pineapple shipments went to a San Francisco importing firm
called William Diamond and Company at a rate of two
dollars and thirty five cents per dozen cans, which is

(21:14):
the prize kid Well really had to fight to get.
But once the shipment was in San Francisco, the product
just did not move. Finally had to be sold off
at drastically reduced prices, and a sign from his very
early years, Kidwell had at this point just been struggling
in the pineapple business, which had to have been frustrating
in light of the fact that his pineapples were consistently

(21:36):
regarded as the best available. So at the age of fifty,
kid Well sublet his fields to a sugar plantation, sold
his cannery to former rival Pearl City Fruit Company that
was that venture that Camarinos had been part of, and
he retired. And this was in the same year that
Hawaii was annexed by the United States. After a retirement,

(21:57):
he used his money from selling the cannery and the
rent on his land sublet to fund travels around the world.
Although we always considered Honolulu home. He remained a bachelor
his entire life and seemed to really have a lot
of fun. In his retirement, he was attending the celebration
of the twenty one anniversary of the Shriner's Aloha Temple

(22:17):
when he became ill. He never recovered and and died
on July six at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu. And what's
really interesting about Kidwell's work in the pineapple industry is
that while it wasn't a sustainably profitable business for him,
it really paved the way for the success of those
who followed. He is considered the founder of the pineapple

(22:39):
industry in the Islands, but he got out right before
things really had the potential to turn around for him.
Once Hawaii became part of the US, that meant that
the tariff issue was no longer a concern, and the
pineapple industry, as a primary export of the of Hawaii,
experienced a huge revival in the early twentieth cent three.

(23:00):
Because of the early work John Kidwell had done and
cultivating the hardiest and tastiest fruit, the growers who came
after him were able to command much higher prices when
they came out from under the tax cloud, and the
whole industry became decidedly profitable. Hawaiian pineapple, of course, is
still renowned for being very vigorous, productive, pest and disease tolerant,

(23:22):
and above all super delicious, and that's thanks to Kidwell's
painstaking research. Like he became so involved in business that
I think we forget that it started with this horticultural
effort on his part. But of course Kidwell's legacy is
unfortunately also tied to that bloodless coup of white business
men that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy. So It's not like

(23:43):
an entirely like happy Skippy story, but it is pretty
interesting how long reaching his horticultural work really has been.
Like we're still benefiting today if you eat pineapple from
Hawaii from the test that he was doing in those
fields in the eighteen hundreds. Do you have some listener
ail for us? I do. It is a follow up

(24:03):
to a thing we have talked about a couple of times,
but it's a really cool follow up because it's a
great gift from our listener, Jessica. She included a card
that said, dear Holly and Tracy, greetings from Pittsburgh, where
the Verreaux Brothers diorama, formerly known as Arab Career Attacked
by Lions has been getting a lot of attention. It
was just reinstalled this January after studying restoration, and now

(24:24):
bears the name Lion Attacking a dramedary, a translation of
the original French title. As you may have heard, we
heard it a lot, uh and X Ray revealed at
the figure of the career does in fact contain human
remains a skull of unknown origins. Jessica works in the
same building at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and now
that the piece is reinstalled in a central location, she
gets passed by it regularly, she says, every time I

(24:46):
think of your episode on the Verreaux Brothers, the museum
is perhaps understandably not as forthcoming with the story of
the Verreau is more unsavory practices. So I'm grateful for
the deeper context you've imparted to what is without question
of fascinating and import an artifact. I thought you might
enjoy reading about the new presentation of this tableau, so
I'm sending along this little book produced for the reinstallation. Unfortunately,

(25:08):
no snow globes are available in the museum shop. Thank
you for the years of entertainment and education. So one
of my favorite things on this earth our museum catalogs
and museum books, and this one is adorable because it's small,
but it is packed with really beautiful up close pictures
of the reinstallation, like the work that they did. It's

(25:29):
also got some cute little facts, like in terms of
the copy that's in it. Um it's it's basically short
little chunks of information, but the photography is beautiful because
it's really really tight detail um photography of various parts
of the UH the installations. So it's really cool. This
is like, you know, one of those things that I

(25:50):
would have bought if I were there, and now we
have it as a gift, so I don't have to,
and now I want to go see it immediately. Let's
go do that. Um So, thank you so much for
sending us that, Jessica. I super duper appreciate it. It's beautiful.
I love a museum book, one of my favorite things
on Earth. I will be poring over this at lunch today. Yea.

(26:11):
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(26:34):
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(26:56):
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(27:17):
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