Mark Twain called Henry Whitney the fairest-minded and best-hearted cannibal he ever knew. Perhaps the reason Twain and Whitney respected each other was that they were both newspapermen.
This was a breed in short supply in Hawai'i in the 1860s. Whitney's Pacific Commercial Advertiser started in 1856 and he never looked back, unable to stop writing until he died at age 80 in 1904, the father of Hawai'i journalism.
Before Whitney, there was the government press and the church press. He said he started The Advertiser because "the whalemen wanted an American newspaper and the white residents wanted one that was not run 'by authority.' "
Independent newspapers had never succeeded in Hawai'i. But, then, nobody like Whitney had ever started one. Although born in Hawai'i, he grew up in New York, where he became a printer and rubbed elbows with journalism giants in the big city.
Whitney's Advertiser quickly left its competitor, the government-run Polynesian, in the dust. The 32-year-old editor sailed out in a boat to get the news from arriving ships before they tied up in the harbor. The news coming around Cape Horn might be six months old, but readers saw it first in The Advertiser.
His crusade against contract labor almost did him in. Plantation owners took a dim view of Whitney's criticism of the way they treated their laborers. They finally felt compelled to buy him out.
But Whitney started a stationery store, where he put up a news bulletin on the door. So many people read the bulletin that an investor bought it and started what became the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
