With the passage of the Organic Act of June 14, 1900, onerous labor contracts that bound immigrant workers to plantations were eliminated, and the new territorial government joined sugar planters in aggressively recruiting new workers from Asia, Europe and the Americas, more than doubling Hawai'i's population over 20 years.
As noted by Sumner La Croix in the essay "Economic History of Hawaii," the influx of labor had an enormous impact on production. From 1900 to 1930, sugar production in the state more than tripled, from 289,500 tons to 939,300 tons. Pineapple growers, still getting established, saw production rise from 2,000 cases of canned fruit in 1903 to 12.8 million cases in 1931.
From the beginning, the fortunes of the sugar industry had been heavily dependent on Hawai'i's political relationship with the Mainland.
It was King Kalakaua, elevated to the throne with the support of sugar entrepreneurs, who obtained a trade agreement with the U.S. in 1876 that relieved local growers of tariffs as high as 42 percent. That cleared the way for duty-free sale of Hawai'i agricultural products in the U.S., which in turn led to a dramatic increase in sugar exports from Hawai'i to the United States. In exchange, the United States obtained access to what was then called Pearl Bay.
Hawai'i's pineapple industry began in earnest with the arrival of James Dole, who successfully raised pineapples on a 60-acre patch in Wahiawa before buying the island of Lana'i and converting it into the world's largest pineapple plantation.
By midcentury, pineapple had established itself as Hawai'i's second-largest industry, employing thousands of immigrants and residents and providing nearly 90 percent of the world's pineapple.
The biggest beneficiaries of Hawai'i's emergent agricultural economy were the "Big Five" — Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., Theo Davies & Co., and American Factors, plantation services companies that eventually took over plantations in an unprecedented consolidation of power. By the mid-1930s, more than 95 percent of sugar grown in Hawai'i was controlled by Big Five companies.
By World War II, nearly one-fifth of Islanders lived and worked on plantations. The Big Five's economic and political influence would remain considerable until the economic shift to tourism in the 1970s and '80s.
The plantation economy was built on thebacks of workers who earned as little as 24 cents an hour for arduous labor. The disparity eventually led to unionization. A turning point came in 1946 when sugar workers, organized under the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, Local 142, staged a strike to improve wages and working conditions. A year later, 18,000 ILWU-led pineapple workers staged a similar strike.
