Endless Thread - The Original Most Interesting Man In The World

Episode Date: August 9, 2018

King David Kalākaua was the last king of Hawaii. But he was much more than that -- he was a traveler, a dreamer, a tech nerd. Or maybe he was fond of drinking, reveling and gambling. It depends on who you ask. But one thing he was not: Boring.

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This is Professor Tiffanying, talking to me. from Honolulu, Hawaii, a place I've never been and know very little about. Hence the ignorant questions. We're getting to know each other. Isn't there like a coffee drink that gets you stoned? Oh, I know what you're talking about kava. Yeah, kava. Break down the kava for me. What's going on with Kava? How do I get some of that? Now Ben, here's where you're supposed to say, but I digress, because this, this isn't our story. Yeah, but we had to get because Tiffany is about to help us tell a story about Hawaii that, according to a lot of people, has been told wrong, maybe not told at all, for more than a century. It's a story about the most

interesting man in the world that nobody has ever heard of. Or at least very few people outside of Hawaii. And even if you're in Hawaii, this man's story has still been told incorrectly, depending upon who you talk to. This man is Hawaii's last king, David Kalakawa. So every April, there's a huge Hula competition. They call it a Mary Monarch competition. And it's named after David Kulakawa. That's one of his nicknames, the Mary Monarch. It noted his supposed propensity to drink and revel and gamble.

Aha. But how did that kind of characterization begin? It was started by his enemies. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you are, listening to Endless Thread, the show featuring stories from the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I am here with my producer and co-host Amory Sieverton and we are coming to you from Boston's NPR station WBUR. Today's episode, The Original Most Interesting Man in the World. We are going to talk about this guy who has an incredible story. He took a 281 day trip around

the world. He embraced new technology in Hawaii and led a political fight for Hawaiian independence before effectively handing that independence over while looking down the barrel of a gun. He's also credited with bringing back Hawaii's original Hula music, which you were just hearing a minute ago.

And one of the interesting things we just learned about Hula music is that it's not just a genre of music created in Hawaii. It's rooted in the island's mythology in Polynesian culture. And legend says that Hula was forged literally by Hawaii's volcano god. We also just learned that there are different kinds of hula, the woozy, wavy stuff with Western instruments, and the more percussive traditional style.

Hula is one of Hawaii's rich native traditions, which makes it kind of ironic in a way that David Kalakawa, Hawaii's last king, can be credited with saving something that is considered a form of oral history, only to have his own history be the source of confusion, debate, and controversy. Which is why we're hearing from Tiffany. My dissertation looked at 19th century representations of Hawaii's last king, David Kalakoa, newspapers, travel logs. And that comes out to about one million typescript pages. When you close your eyes, do you see, like, newsprint pages flying across the insides of your eyelids? Now I'm going to triple check this pronunciation with you. Is it Kalakoa? So it's Kalakawa.

Kalakoa. Oh, that's nice. Hey, you're quick. I'm getting there. Are you native? I am. I'm part Hawaiian. I'm also Chinese and I've got some English in me, some Irish, Spanish, Portuguese, French, French, French,

Wow. Yeah, but that's common here, you know, because of my ancestors who came as immigrants. Hawaii's history is fascinating, and by some measures, heartbreaking. It was settled first by islanders from Polynesia, who eventually came into contact with European explorers and merchants. In 1820, the first missionaries arrive in Hawaii, and these missionaries were successful in Christianizing Native Hawaiians, and they were successful in developing relationships with the monarchs.

Okay. And the monarchs began to trust them, these missionaries, and offered them government positions, and they accepted. What happens over time, according to Tiffany, is that the children of the Christian missionaries eventually come of age and take their own positions in the government of Hawaii. They run sugar plantations, and they become a small but powerful group of essentially white people who have a relatively big influence on what happens in Hawaii. There are also other factors.

The missionaries brought diseases to the islands that killed a lot of native people. Racism was clearly at play here as well. So there were building tensions that informed a lot of what has happened in Hawaii over the last 200 years. By the 1870s, those tensions were palpable. and they were further complicated by a lack of clarity on who was going to be the next king of Hawaii. When the last of the Kameha Meha Kings, Kamehamehameh the 5th, died, it went to a distant cousin. And then when he died without air, the Constitution had provided that there would be an election. An election for a king.

Yeah, you had to run for king. This is James L. Haley. He's not from Hawaii, and he's not a native. But he wrote a book called Captive Paradise, a History of Hawaii. James is from Texas. And believe it or not, there are parallels. Well, you know, Texas was an independent country for two months short of 10 years. Hmm.

And after all those years researching Texas, I thought, wait a minute, what about that other republic that was annexed by the United States? Which is what got me into looking at Hawaii. James and Tiffany both point out that King Kalakawa's rise to the throne, wasn't just unique. It was controversial. Kalakawa was a distant relative of close advisors to the first king of Hawaii, Kamehaameha I, the first. He was a politician, but he was running against an actual queen, who was the widow of former King Kameha, the fourth. She had the connection to the bloodline, but Kalakawa had a special skill set. He knew about American politicking, and he had been politicking in the legislature making promises that he probably couldn't keep. Wheeling and dealing

in Congress, under the table handshakes, false promises, the cornerstones of American politics. And all that dealing mattered come election time because the election for King of Hawaii was not a general election. There was not a referendum. The people didn't get to vote. It was all inside the legislature. So Kalakawa won that election by 39 votes to six. The result? Riots. The new king might have been great at convincing politicians to back him, but he hadn't secured the support of the Hawaiian people. The Ali Iolani Hale, which was their, excuse me, their legislature, was overrun with a mob. One of them was defenestrated and killed when he landed. Another dozen of the legislators were injured, and it took British and American Marines to quell the

riding. So his reign did not begin well. Amory, true story. I just learned that defenestrated means thrown out a window, just learned that. Really? That's like one of the first words I learned in Latin class. Well, good for you. Good for me. So this was clearly a controversial and surprise outcome of the election. It was. Now, once he settled in, he was surprisingly good at the PR side of things, at garnering public favor among the things he did, for instance.

he composed a national anthem, which Hawaii had never had. And he gauged the public sentiment just perfectly, knowing that the fervor for a national identity among the Hawaiians would really unite behind a national anthem, Hawaii Ponoi, which they did. Among the lines in this line in this, National Anthem, by the way, is Be Loyal to Your Chief. So Colacqua was watching his

own back, too. But he was a gifted politician. Tiffany says he also had something else going for him. Oh, he was a handsome man. He stood at, I believe it was 6'3, at least. And everywhere he went, he would charm women.

And women would love to dance with him. Sounds like he charmed you. It does, doesn't. Wake up. And his voice was melodic. He captured a lot of the people he met. And Kalakawa met a lot of people right off the bat. One of his first orders of business was a full tour of all the islands,

where he greeted his new subjects, something that reinforced his connection to Hawaiian tradition. And also potentially worsened tensions with his skeptics. A good example of this, the missionaries that had come to Hawaii in 18, banned public performances of Hula for being a profane art form. Depending on what history you're reading, they may have also just convinced the royal family to ban it. Either way, Kalakawa undid the ban.

And he had it performed on the Royal Palace grounds for his coronation and for his birthday, and they were week-long festivities day and night. Native Hawaiian people dancing and chanting and singing. It sounds nice. It was. It was for people whose traditions and whose culture, you know, were banned for a number of years. So this kind of nationalism was huge for the Hawaiian people.

Hula wasn't just a dance. Hula was the heart of their culture. It was their history. It was their whole traditional relation of their experience. Came through Hula. and Kalakawa, when he became king, was instrumental in reviving that and other native art forms, native sports such as surfing that had been dying out. Yeah, he was very interested in the survival of Hawaiian culture,

and that is much to his credit. This is amazing to think about. An argument could be made that if it wasn't for King Kalakawa, we wouldn't know about surfing. King Kalakwa's policies returning Hawaiian culture to the islands started what's called the first Hawaiian Renaissance. But his focus went beyond the islands. He wanted the world to know what Hawaii had to offer.

So, in 1881, Kalakawa went on an international goodwill tour, a big one, 281 days big. So on this trip in 1881, he arrives at these places, these small towns in Europe. And he's meeting with the mayor, and there's a big group of people, you know, the town people come. out and they decorate the streets and the band comes out and, you know, there's a parade for the king and, I mean, the king up from this little island chain in Hawaii and yet, you know, thousands of people come out for him and this was David Kalaukoha and this was not uncommon for him.

This trip was the beginning of a pretty impressive list of firsts attached to the king's name. First monarch ever in the history of the world to circumnavigate the globe. This fact, by the way, is how we found this story in the today I learned Reddit community. He was welcomed into the imperial courts of Japan and China, the Qadiv of Egypt. Kalakawa was also the first reigning monarch to visit the U.S. And early in his reign, he signs a reciprocity treaty with the U.S. that explodes sugar production in Hawaii and also brings more power and influence to plantation owners that don't necessarily love some of his other policies. Right, which we'll come back to.

Also, on one of his trips to the states, Kalakwa meets a guy named Thomas Edison. He was also very enamored of technology. In fact, when he built the Iolani Palace, it had electric lights and running water before the White House did in Washington. Hawaii's Royal Palace, one of two Hawaiian palaces that are the only royal palaces to this day in the United States. Very soon after he became king, there was a scientific delegation, to Hawaii to watch the transit of Venus across the surface of the sun. And he was so fascinated by the instruments and what these people were doing and their calculations that he really made a nuisance of himself to the scientists who had been given, you know, free accommodations

and stuff like that. He was fascinated by that kind of thing. So this is all interesting evidence of the real mix of Kalakawa's character. On the one hand, he's doing his work to reintroduce ancient culture and customs in Hawaii. And on the other, he's a techie, worldly person, fascinated by the future. Here, he's signing treaties with the U.S., but then over here, he's strengthening ties with countries that he hopes will protect Hawaii from being annexed by the U.S. But the American business community in Hawaii was incensed that he was out there spending all this money.

Oh, he's just a wastral, you know, we ought to be running the country because we're white and we're Americans and these dark people can't do it for themselves, which is a very live sentiment, by the way. And this, this is where Kalakoa's story gets even more complicated. The history of politics is a history of popularity and betrayal. More on that betrayal in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

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victors. So remember at the very beginning when Tiffany mentioned that one of Kalakawa's nicknames, the Mary Monarch, came from a reputation for drinking and gambling? Well, there are a lot of stories like that about his lack of self-control, even from when he was a kid. His childhood nickname among his, uh, the other children in the royal school, his nickname was Taffy. Taffy? Taffy for his sweet tooth. Depending again on where you're getting your story from, Calacawa was almost opposite things. He was handsome or not. He was a shrewd politician.

He wasn't. He brought about the first Hawaiian Renaissance, or he sold his country out. To say that there are sensitivities about how Hawaii's history is written and who has been writing it is an understatement. Here's James Haley again.

Most of the scholarship has been Anglo. They don't speak Hawaiian. And so there is this wealth of documents lying all over the state that need to be picked up and read and assayed for their historical import and all that sort of thing

because their voice hasn't really been heard yet. Tiffany says that she took a class as a graduate student at the University of Manoa about the Hawaiian monarchy. Everyone had to do an oral presentation. Unknowingly, we all chose

David Kalakawa. And they went first and they were trashing him left and right. And I thought, how can this be? You know, at the center of Hawaiian education, this is the University of Hawaii, how can, you know, these Hawaiian majors, Hawaiian language majors, Hawaiian studies majors, how can these students be learning this kind of, you know, information?

Where did this come from? Part of where it comes from is one of the most infamous moments in Kalakawa's rule. And the rumors that his enemy started to basically, create that moment. It's called the Bayonet Constitution. It started in some ways because the king wanted more financial power. The powerful business interests in the government were accusing the king of being wasteful. Meanwhile, the country is grappling with the growing industry around a powerful and popular substance, opium. And the king jumps into the process for licensing opium in Hawaii. He cuts a deal with one supplier, while other parts of the government want

another supplier. And a lot of stuff happened, which we won't go into, but suffice it to say that this opium deal was the last straw for the business powers in Hawaii, which, remember, were closely connected to descendants of the missionaries. And those business powers set out to not only undercut the new opium policy, but also to attack the power of the monarchy itself. And so this white oligarchy, or this small group of powerful businessmen, they're getting nervous and they're getting desperate and very anxious and they write up their own constitution and they take it to king kalakawa at two in the morning on july 6 1887 they go into the palace and they find the king and they hold him at bayonet at gunpoint and they force him to sign this

constitution whoa and um and he does He does. He does because, I mean, many reasons. But in essence, they've taken over his executive powers. They've changed the voting rights. And really now all we have is a king who reigns but doesn't rule. By many accounts, this is the beginning of the end, not just for the king himself, but for Hawaiian independence. And it was the first step in. and the business community taking over the country. So I think probably the native view of Kalakawa today would be that he was pretty much a victim of the early stages of the White takeover,

and I think there's a lot of truth to that. By 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War, Hawaii had been annexed by the U.S. By 1900, it was a territory. In 1959, it became a state. To go back to where we started, I began with Texas annexation. The difference between Texas and Hawaii is that we wanted in, I'm speaking as a Texan, Texas wanted into the Union.

And just walking around, oh, anywhere, whether it's Honolulu or whether it's Kailua Kona, you get a very Pacific nation feel. And you wonder why on earth is this place even in the United States. What do you think King Kalakwa's thoughts would be on Hawaii becoming a U.S. state? Oh, no. He would be very upset because he gave himself, really, to preserve Hawaii's independence. You know, in efforts to work against Americanization and westernization, people have had to make hula and language and, you know, even voyaging stronger and kind of grow that. appreciation and understanding of those traditions, because we've become a state.

And it's worth saying here that the fight for Hawaiian independence is very much alive. Land has been given to the secession movement there. It's called the nation of Hawaii. It's still a debate. Calacua was just a perfect early example of a leader caught in these hurricane-like socioeconomic forces that have really been hitting Hawaii over the last 200 years. Someone who knew the importance of the island's native history and was striving mightily to couple that history with the global future, a goal that stayed just outside of his grasp. And here's where we have to talk about something that stayed just outside of our grasp while working on this story. Yet another example of the most interesting man in the world you've never heard of being associated with a historic technological event. It's connected with the king's death, which maybe fittingly happened outside of Hawaii.

So in 1891, Kalakawa is dying in San Francisco in the Palace Hotel. And the innovative man he was, he was interested prior to then in this voice recording that Thomas Edison was, you know, popular for. And Kalakawa on his deathbed was asked, if you had the opportunity to record your voice, would you accept it? And he said yes. And so they brought the recorder to his hotel room and asked him to say something.

And he was very ill at that time. And what he said was, in Hawaiian, tell them that I tried. And that's all he said. The actual wax cylinder is housed at the Bishop Museum here in Honolulu. Because it's so old and deteriorated, they haven't been able to listen to it again. Perhaps in a few years with a more advanced laser technology,

they'd be able to replay it. Amory. Ben. Do you feel like you learned anything? I learned a great deal. Do you feel like you learned anything? I learned a lot. Basically, everything in this episode was a thing I didn't know before.

Right, same. This is a good moment to shout out some. Redditor comments, by the way, that helped to inspire and inform this episode. Cool? Cool. All right. I'm going to start with Square White Shoe, who wrote, T-I-L-Hawaii had a kick-ass looking king, which I think is objectively true, actually. Yeah. And how about H-KETI, or H-K-E-D-I, who wrote in part, I see Kalakawa as a vital bridge for Hawaii in its past. He managed to balance traditional ways with the massive changes in the world that happened in the late 19th century. Also seems objectively true.

And here I thought was an interesting exchange. Flange, I think it is. Yeah, I like Flange. Flange wrote, I must be ashamed to my land. I'm Hawaiian and had Hawaiian history classes, and I didn't even know this. And then CKHK3 responded, don't worry, it's okay. Most natives don't know the history, especially if you went to public school. Public school pushes the westernized agenda.

Many natives learn the history and culture either from their families or on their own. One question I have is do we have any right to tell this story? It's a fair question. I think, you know, it's a story that deserves to be heard. And I think for now, I'm glad we did it. You know, as we said, we learned a lot. I hope other people learned a lot too. And I'm sure that we'll learn a lot more as the years go on.

That's what I was hoping you would say. Why? You think we have no right. No, no, no. Just rewind the tape. No, I feel the same way. And I also think that what is interesting about this story to me is that Hawaii's history is, I think, not that well known by random people on the mainland of the U.S. and it's now maybe not necessarily as a good thing according to some,

but it's now part of our country. And so we should know about this stuff. Right on. One last thing. We had the extreme pleasure of talking to a moderator of Reddit's Hawaii community. His name was Patrick. He was super helpful, but the topics of our conversation with him didn't quite fit into this episode. Patrick, you are nonetheless a huge help.

Thank you, sir. See you on Our Hawaii. Okay, great. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who when we found out she went to school with Beyonce. She described herself as... Old school cool. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and our constant fear of disappointing her is how we...

Get motivated. Mix in sound design by Paul Vicus and John Parati, who when they mix a new episode for us, they tell us to... Listen to this. Listen to this. Listen to this. Listen to this. Listen to this. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who when we asked her if she wanted to join the endless thread team for a picnic, she responded.

Have we met? Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, who, in his wisdom, said we should all aspire to be. Animals being bros. Our interns are Josh Luckens and James Lindberg. By the way, James basically conceptualized and made this entire episode happen. James, high five through the recording studio glass. Our theme music is by Squelcher. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread.

If you want to give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, you can hit us up there. Our show is produced by Josh Swartz, also my co-host and producer Amory Sieverts. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.