Millions upon millions of years ago, when the continents were already formed and the principal features of the earth had been decided, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all others. It was a mighty ocean, resting uneasily to the east of the largest continent, a restless ever-changing, gigantic body of water that would later be…
– James Michener, Hawaii.
The history of Western civilization. A parable.
Imagine an unsullied land. Just waiting to be discovered.
For thousands of years, Lanai was ruled by the god of nightmares.
No humans lived there until, according to Hawaiian legend, a teenage chief from Maui was banished to the island for bad behavior. The chief killed the nightmare god and routed his army of spirits.
Then he lit a fire.
People on Maui, eight miles to the east, saw the fire. It was a signal — an all-clear.
They got in their canoes and came over.
Hawaiians lived happily on Lanai for about 800 years.
Then the Mormons started arriving, eventually led in 1861 by Walter Murray Gibson, who, in retrospect, may have been only a megalomaniac con man masquerading as a Mormon. An article published by the Hawaiian Historical Society in 1960 describes Gibson as “ambitious and romantic and interested in ruling a tropical government.” Gibson spent his early years tramping through Southeast Asia, stoking a native revolt against the Dutch in the hope of commandeering one. He converted to Mormonism only one year before showing up on Lanai.
After building a Mormon colony in the island’s interior, Gibson began buying land on Lanai until he controlled nearly the entire island. He paid for the land with the church’s money but put the titles in his own name. When the Mormons figured this out, they excommunicated him.
Gibson retained the land, though. By the time he died in 1888, it had passed to his daughter, then through a few other owners as a single holding. None of them could figure out what to do with Lanai. They tried ranching sheep. They tried sugar cane. One crop that grew well was pineapples, and this caught the attention of James Drummond Dole, a Harvard grad with a fledgling pineapple company on Oahu.
In 1922, Dole paid $1.1 million for the land Gibson and his successors had accumulated. Just like that, The New York Times reported, “an entire island, Lanai, has been taken over by a pineapple company.” Dole plowed the interior into fields, built a harbor and roads and laid out an idyllic town near the center of Lanai — a grid of plantation-style cottages, with Dole Park in the middle — to house his mostly Japanese and Filipino workers.
By 1930, Lanai City had 3,000 residents, nearly all of them Dole employees, and the island was exporting 65,000 tons of pineapples a year. The company sent landscaping crews to weed and mow workers’ lawns. It ran an athletics program and built a golf course. Life on Lanai was good; Dole insisted it should be. His motto was: “Have happy workers, grow better pineapples.”
For 70 years, Lanai was among the world’s largest pineapple plantations. Then in 1992, the island harvested its last crop. Overseas production had driven down prices, and Lanai was left behind. By that point, the island had changed hands two more times. It was now controlled by the California billionaire David Murdock, who acquired the company Castle & Cooke, which took over Dole Foods’ holdings on Lanai in the ’60s.
Murdock was a somewhat imperial presence on Lanai. He referred to residents as his “children.”
As the pineapple era wound down, Murdock pivoted Lanai’s economy toward tourism. He built two resorts — the first developments on the island besides Lanai City and still the only major ones — and eventually contracted the Four Seasons to run them. Pineapple pickers were retrained as hotel staff and landscapers. Lanai was still a company town; the company just did something different now.
The transition did not go well. Murdock had to steadily infuse the island with money — as much as $20 million or $30 million a year, he’d later report. By the mid-2000s, he started cutting back. He laid off large numbers of workers and began abandoning some of his quasi-governmental responsibilities as the island’s majority landowner. Buildings fell into disrepair. The Chamber of Commerce disbanded.
As one resident put it, “Economically, there was real potential that we might dry up and blow away.”
Eventually, Murdock proposed a way forward: He would build an array of 45-story wind turbines on 20 square miles of the island and sell the electricity they produced to Oahu. The idea was controversial. It would be a mammoth development on an insistently small-scale island. Lanai had been settled by disparate immigrants who had to figure out how to get along, and that history, locals told me, keeps people from dwelling on divisions and differences.
“That’s what makes the place so special,” one woman explained. “We still have aloha together.”
But the long fight over what the locals called Big Wind was brutal and divisive. Family members stopped talking to one another. There were protests in the street. Many people who supported the wind turbines saw the protesters as reckless idealists; they were handcuffing the man the community relied on and driving the island into the ground. Murdock seemed to feel the same way.
By the summer of 2011, he confessed to the editor of the island’s newspaper that Lanai had been “the poorest financial investment I’ve made in my entire life.” He had only so many options. One was to “close it all down and leave.” Instead, he put Lanai up for sale.
The island rippled with anxiety. People worried that Murdock might sell off parts of Lanai to multiple owners, tossing the community into some uncharted, joint-custody arrangement. Or that he’d sell to a big resort developer who would shatter the character of the place.
“Oh, my God, he could sell to a Russian oligarch,” one woman remembered thinking.
Another said, “We were praying it wasn’t some sheikh!”
It wasn’t some sheikh. It was Larry Ellison.
Whodat?
Wikipedia will tell you this:
Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman and investor who is the co-founder, executive chairman, chief technology officer (CTO) and former chief executive officer (CEO) of Oracle Corporation. As of March 2022, he was listed by Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the ninth-wealthiest person in the United States and is the tenth-wealthiest in the world, with an estimated fortune of $98 billion, increased from $57.3 billion in 2018.
He is also the owner of the 43rd largest island in the United States.
So, as you can see, our story – the history of Western civilization – has come full circle.
Because what is an oligarch these days if not a teenage chief banished for bad behavior.
Most of this report on the history of western civilization was written by Jon Mooallem for The New York Times. September 23, 2014.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/oracle-billionaire-larry-ellison-just-083104325.html