About Hawaiian Gazette

Hawaiian Gazette

The Hawaiian Gazette was an English-language newspaper published in Honolulu, Hawai'i, from 1865 to 1918, with some content in Hawaiian. It appeared as a four-to-eight-page weekly from 1865 to 1893 and as a semi-weekly from 1894 to 1918. Over its 53-year existence, the Gazette reported on four Hawaiian monarchs, the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the annexation of Hawai'i to the United States, and the establishment of the Territory of Hawai'i, making its file one of the most politically charged newspaper records in Hawaiian history.

The Gazette began as the official newspaper of the Hawaiian Kingdom under King Kamehameha V, and ended as a voice of the American-aligned oligarchy that had displaced the monarchy. It was a fervent advocate of the sugar industry and other American economic interests in Hawai'i, attacked King Kalakaua's government in the 1870s and 1880s, supported the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, refused to print Queen Lili'uokalani's protest against her overthrow in 1893, and published the proclamations of the Provisional Government that replaced her. Few newspapers anywhere have so completely reversed their relationship to the state they covered: government organ, opposition scourge, and government organ again, as power changed hands around it.

Alongside politics, the Gazette was a commercial paper of record. In addition to local and international news, it featured shipping schedules, import and export statistics, figures for worldwide sugar consumption, and a wide array of commercial advertisements—the working information of a Pacific port capital whose economy turned on sugar and shipping.

Founding as the Kingdom's official newspaper

The Hawaiian Gazette became the official newspaper of the Kingdom in 1865 under King Kamehameha V and was published by James H. Black and the Hawaiian government until 1873. Early on, the interests the paper served—sugar and American commerce—were in line with those of the Hawaiian monarchy, and official status followed naturally. The paper's role was to publish the government's side of events for Honolulu's English-reading public, in a capital that also supported Hawaiian-language papers and the independent Pacific Commercial Advertiser.

Among its early editors was John Mott-Smith, who edited the Hawaiian Gazette in 1866, when, in the assessment preserved by the University of Hawai'i's Hawaiian newspaper scholarship, it was started to defend the constitution of King Kamehameha V. Mott-Smith, a New York dentist who had arrived in Hawai'i in 1851, went on to serve the Kingdom as minister of finance from 1869 to 1872 and minister of the interior from 1876 to 1878, and later served Queen Lili'uokalani as minister of finance and minister plenipotentiary to Washington—an early example of the revolving door between the Gazette's editorial chair and the highest offices of the governments it covered.

Turn against the monarchy

In the mid-1870s, the paper turned decidedly anti-monarchy when the views of King Kalakaua and those of the local oligarchy—a powerful contingent of pro-American, pro-annexation sugar interests—began to diverge. The Hawaiian Gazette attacked Kalakaua's government for what it regarded as wasteful spending on the King's coronation ceremony and on efforts to revive public performances of Hawaiian chanting and hula. Cultural revival at the court and fiscal conservatism in the counting house became, in the Gazette's pages, a single indictment of the King's rule.

The Gazette avidly supported the call for a new government, which was achieved in 1887 when the Bayonet Constitution effectively stripped the king of his power and secured the oligarchy's political authority. At that time, the Hawaiian Gazette resumed its place as one of the government's biggest advocates. Several high-ranking members of the oligarchy, including William R. Castle and Sanford B. Dole, would oversee the newspaper in years to come, binding the paper's management directly to the men who would overthrow the monarchy six years later.

The Gazette Company and the Advertiser

By the late 1880s the Gazette was published by the Hawaiian Gazette Company, a central institution in Honolulu journalism. Lorrin A. Thurston, of missionary descent and later an architect of the Bayonet Constitution and a conspirator in the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani, left the Daily Bulletin to become secretary of the Hawaiian Gazette Company, which published the weekly Gazette. In 1888 the Gazette purchased the now-daily Pacific Commercial Advertiser and invited its founder, Henry M. Whitney, back to run it; he remained for five years. Thurston later purchased the Advertiser from the Gazette Company himself and started a family tradition of ownership.

This corporate entanglement matters for understanding the Gazette's politics. The same company, and in part the same men, controlled the weekly Gazette and the daily Advertiser, the two papers that in 1893 would jointly claim to hold the only true account of the revolution. The Gazette's editorial line cannot be separated from the sugar, annexation, and Reform Party networks that owned and staffed it.

The overthrow of 1893

In January 1893 the Gazette was among several papers that refused to print Queen Lili'uokalani's protest against the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and painted her efforts to reestablish the Kingdom's authority as illegal and counterrevolutionary. Following the Queen's overthrow on January 17, 1893, the Hawaiian Gazette published the proclamation and orders of the new Provisional Government and began referring to Lili'uokalani as Hawai'i's "ex-Queen."

Two weeks later, the paper asserted that it, together with the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, contained the only true and extended account of the late revolution, and encouraged readers to sign the Provisional Government's loyalty oath. The Gazette thus moved seamlessly from chronicling a monarchy it had once served officially to legitimating the regime that destroyed it—a transition eased by the fact that leaders of that regime, including Sanford B. Dole, who became president of the Provisional Government and then of the Republic of Hawai'i, had themselves overseen the newspaper.

Annexation and the territorial years

The Gazette reported the establishment of the Republic of Hawai'i in 1894, annexation by joint resolution of the United States Congress in 1898, and the organization of the Territory of Hawai'i under the Organic Act of 1900, with Dole as its first governor. Its change from weekly to semi-weekly publication in 1894 reflected the quickened pace of politics in the revolutionary decade. As a semi-weekly through 1918, it covered the territorial legislature, the growth of the sugar and pineapple industries whose interests it had always championed, and Hawai'i's place in an expanding American Pacific.

The paper's commercial apparatus remained central throughout: shipping schedules for a port that depended on steamers, import and export statistics for merchants and planters, and worldwide sugar consumption figures for an industry that needed to know its markets. For historians of Hawai'i's economy, those routine tables, preserved issue after issue, are as valuable as its editorials.

The Pacific Cable and faster news

In 1903, the completion of the Pacific Cable revolutionized Hawai'i's news industry, and the Hawaiian Gazette began publishing current news from around the world. On January 6, only four days after President Theodore Roosevelt had relayed the first message to the islands via cable, the Hawaiian Gazette's front page was filled with current national and international news, and by January 13 the paper was featuring stories acquired through Associated Press cablegrams. News that had once arrived by steamer, weeks old, now arrived the same day, and the Gazette briefly stood at the front of Honolulu's transformation into a wired news market.

In the end, the Pacific Cable may have contributed to the Hawaiian Gazette's demise, as it struggled to keep pace with its two major competitors, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, both dailies better positioned to exploit same-day cable news than a semi-weekly. The Gazette ceased publication in 1918, in the final year of the First World War, ending 53 years of continuous publication.

Format, frequency, and readership

For its first three decades the Gazette was a weekly of four to eight pages, published in English with some Hawaiian. In 1894, amid the political upheavals that replaced the monarchy first with a provisional government and then with a republic, it doubled its frequency to semi-weekly, a schedule it kept for its remaining 24 years. The change matched the accelerating tempo of Hawaiian politics and commerce in the 1890s, when annexation debates, shipping traffic, and sugar markets all demanded faster reporting than a weekly could provide.

Its readership was the English-reading commercial and political class of Honolulu, together with subscribers elsewhere in the islands and abroad who needed Hawaiian news and statistics. The paper's mix of editorials, local and international news, shipping schedules, trade statistics, and advertising made it simultaneously a political weapon and a business tool—precisely the combination that had defined Honolulu's English-language press since the Gazette's founding as a government paper in 1865.

Legacy and archives

The Hawaiian Gazette is preserved through Chronicling America, the Library of Congress's historic newspaper program, which holds most of its issues from 1868 to 1918, and through the University of Hawai'i at Manoa Library's eVols digital collections, whose summary of the paper remains the standard concise account of its political career. Commercial archives hold thousands of its issues—one archive counts 3,745 issues from Honolulu—testifying to the completeness of its surviving run.

The Gazette's historical importance is inseparable from its partisanship. It is not a neutral record of Hawai'i between 1865 and 1918; it is the record kept by one side—the sugar and annexation side—in the islands' defining political struggle. Read with that understanding, its attacks on Kalakaua, its silencing of Lili'uokalani's protest, its publication of the Provisional Government's proclamations, and its celebration of annexation document, from inside, how a small, well-connected press helped to normalize the transfer of a kingdom into an American territory.