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Inside the Bizarre, Racist Scheme to Import Siberian Workers to Hawai'i in 1909
A bit of Hawaiian history I never learned in nine years out there!! 
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/inside-the-bizarre-racist-scheme-to-important-siberian-workers-to-hawaii-in-1909
On October 21, 1909, a crowd of curious onlookers gathered in Honolulu Harbor to catch a glimpse of Hawaii’s future: A cavalcade of Siberians, 200 of them, dressed in colorful peasant smocks and comically unseasonable sheepskin coats, making their uncertain way down the gangplank of their newly-arrived steamer. This was only the beginning —1,300 more recruits would shortly arrive in O’ahu from the deepest, icebound interior of Russia.
If the promise of this burgeoning Siberian colony were fulfilled, the Hawaii Bulletin rhapsodized, “the greatest problem of the islands would be solved.”
The “problem” was Hawaii itself — or rather, the people inhabiting it. The Russians had been told they were coming to Hawaii to work the sugar fields, but they would also provide the valuable, if considerably more passive, contribution of making the islands more white. For decades, Hawaii’s “Big Five” plantations had relied on contract workers from places like Japan, the Philippines and China, who built the sugarcane industry into a juggernaut while swelling the island’s Asian population. The contract system was, however, notoriously exploitative, confining laborers to a life of exhaustion and poverty with little hope of escape. When Hawaii was officially annexed in 1898, the contract system was abolished and the sugarcane workers rebelled, whipping the underlying racism of the white ruling class into a kind of paranoiac madness. Newpaper editorials warned of a dystopian future under Asian rule. Ministers raved about the threat of Buddhist missionaries. In 1905, President Roosevelt himself issued a strongly worded pronouncement that Hawaiian immigration must proceed under “traditional American lines.”
Importing Siberian labor was part of a desperate, last-ditch effort to turn the demographic tide in Hawaii, orchestrated by the sugarcane planters, the island elite, and a U.S. congress that feared Hawaii would do the unthinkable and send an Asian senator to Congress. But the weirdest immigration scheme ever proposed by a U.S. territory, also turned out to be the most disastrous. The Russians never provided anticipated relief from Asian workers, because they refused to work at all.
If the promise of this burgeoning Siberian colony were fulfilled, the Hawaii Bulletin rhapsodized, “the greatest problem of the islands would be solved.”
The “problem” was Hawaii itself — or rather, the people inhabiting it. The Russians had been told they were coming to Hawaii to work the sugar fields, but they would also provide the valuable, if considerably more passive, contribution of making the islands more white. For decades, Hawaii’s “Big Five” plantations had relied on contract workers from places like Japan, the Philippines and China, who built the sugarcane industry into a juggernaut while swelling the island’s Asian population. The contract system was, however, notoriously exploitative, confining laborers to a life of exhaustion and poverty with little hope of escape. When Hawaii was officially annexed in 1898, the contract system was abolished and the sugarcane workers rebelled, whipping the underlying racism of the white ruling class into a kind of paranoiac madness. Newpaper editorials warned of a dystopian future under Asian rule. Ministers raved about the threat of Buddhist missionaries. In 1905, President Roosevelt himself issued a strongly worded pronouncement that Hawaiian immigration must proceed under “traditional American lines.”
Importing Siberian labor was part of a desperate, last-ditch effort to turn the demographic tide in Hawaii, orchestrated by the sugarcane planters, the island elite, and a U.S. congress that feared Hawaii would do the unthinkable and send an Asian senator to Congress. But the weirdest immigration scheme ever proposed by a U.S. territory, also turned out to be the most disastrous. The Russians never provided anticipated relief from Asian workers, because they refused to work at all.
