Henry Martyn Whitney

Henry Martyn Whitney (June 5, 1824 – August 17, 1904) was an early journalist in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Born of early missionaries, he became the first postmaster and founded several long-lasting newspapers.

Early life Henry Martyn Whitney was born June 5, 1824, in Waimea on the island of Kauai. His sister Maria Kapule Whitney (1820–1900) married missionary John L. Pogue (1814–1877). His father was originally a lay teacher, but was ordained in the field on November 30, 1825. The family moved to Lahaina on Maui in 1827, and then back to Waimea in 1829.

Whitney was sent to Rochester, New York, for school in 1831, and graduated from the Rochester Collegiate Institute in 1841. He planned to enter college, but a hearing loss convinced him to work in journalism. He worked for Harper & Brothers in New York City where he learned the printing trade and became a foreman in two years. He also worked in the American Bible Society printing office. He might have had a piece printed in the New York Tribune of Horace Greeley . Before that time, the Polynesian office had just used an informal mail bag that customers could use to gather letters to be taken by the next ship. The first stamps issued by the kingdom in 1851 are now called Hawaiian Missionaries. In 1855 he was elected to one term in the house of representatives of the legislature of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Independent newspaper On July 2, 1856, Whitney produced the first issue of his own newspaper: a four-sheet weekly called the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. It was the first successful publication in Hawaii sponsored by advertisements. Other attempts at independent newspapers had quickly gone out of business or become supported by government or missionary funding. Its name is based on the New York Commercial Advertiser which Whitney had known while living on the mainland, at least being acquainted with its editor William L. Stone. The first issue contained the news of Kamehameha IV's royal wedding to Emma Rooke besides the titular advertisements. A sketch Whitney made of Honolulu Harbor after climbing the mast of a ship became the paper's symbol even after the masthead was redesigned. In his words of the first editorial:Thank heaven the day at length has dawned when the Hawaiian Nation can boast a free press, untrammelled by government patronage or party pledges, unbiased by ministerial frowns or favors — a press whose aim shall be the advancement of the nation in its commercial, political and social condition.

Although born in the Kingdom of Hawaii (and thus a citizen of that country), he openly called for closer ties with the United States. The second Advertiser issue included coverage of the US Independence Day celebrations. The first issues were printed on a hand press that produced 600 papers an hour, but by March 1857 he could expand circulation with a new power press invented by Isaac Adams.

Hawaiian language contributions Whitney established a Hawaiian language newspaper Ka Nupepa Kūokoa ("the independent newspaper") in 1861, in response to the publication of the native Hawaiian newspaper Ka Hoku o ka Pakipika that commenced only one month previous. Whitney sought to control the Hawaiian language press at this time, and allowed extensive space in his paper to be utilized for the criticism of native traditions and beliefs, despite the fact that he employed many natives. Based on a one-page section his Advertiser in Hawaiian called Ka Hoku Loa ("the morning star"), it was first edited William P. Ragsdale, a half-Hawaiian and famous legislative interpreter. After Ragsdale contracted leprosy Whitney replaced him with fellow missionary son Luther Halsey Gulick. Whitney would serve as editor at various times. He hired native Hawaiians including Joseph Kawainui, and fellow Americans John Mott-Smith, Samuel Gardner Wilder, and Thomas George Thrum. Historian Samuel Kamakau wrote a series on Hawaiian history that has been translated and published in English. In 1862 Ka Nupepa Kūokoa published a two-color engraving of the Hawaiian flag, a level of professionalism not matched the other smaller Hawaiian language publications. In 1865 the bilingual Whitney published one of the first Hawaiian language dictionaries compiled by Lorrin Andrews.

Politics Over time Whitney became more outspoken in opposition to the monarchy, especially King Kamehameha V whom Whitney claimed was shifting the kingdom away from American Puritan influence to Europeans, such as allowing the St. Andrew's Cathedral to be built for Anglican Bishop Thomas Nettleship Staley. Kamehameha IV and Kamehameha V were the two princes Whitney met in 1849.

Scottish-born cabinet minister Robert Crichton Wyllie threatened Whitney with a libel suit, but eventually backed down.

The two kept up an exchange of hyperbolic threats over a book that Whitney claimed Twain had borrowed, while Twain claimed the book belonged to Samuel Chenery Damon: I am going chiefly, however, to eat the editor of the Commercial Advertiser for saying I do not write the truth about the Hawaiian Islands, and for exposing my highway robbery in carrying off Father Damen's book - History of the Islands. I shall go there might hungry. Mr. Whitney is jealous of me because I speak the truth so naturally, and he can't do it without taking the lock-jaw. But he ought not to be jealous; he ought not to try to ruin me because I am more virtuous than his is; I cannot help it - it is my nature to be reliable, just as it is his to be shaky on matters of fact - we cannot alter these natures - us leopards cannot change our spots. Therefore, why growl? - why go and try to make trouble? If he cannot tell when I am writing seriously and when I am burlesquing - if he sits down solemnly and take one of my palpable burlesques and reads it with a funereal aspect, and swallows it as petrified truth, - how am I going to help it? I cannot give him the keen perception that nature denied him - now can I? Whitney knows that. Whitney knows he has done me many a kindness, and that I do not forget it, and am still grateful - and he knows that if I could scour him up so that he could tell a broad burlesque from a plain statement of fact, I would get up in the night and walk any distance to do it. You know that, Whitney. But I am coming down there might hungry - most uncommonly hungry, Whitney.

Whitney strongly supported the Union in the American Civil War, although the kingdom was officially neutral.

He printed letters from Charles Guillou critical of James W. Borden, the US Commissioner, who was from the South and had relatives in the Confederacy.

In 1870, after a threat of advertising boycotts by the planters, he sold the Advertiser to investors James H. Black and William Auld, but remained associated as editor. Whitney claimed he did not cave into planters' demands, but sold to finance a vacation with his family back to the United States, which he took in May 1871. On hearing the news Mark Twain continued the joke about cannibalism: "Mr. Whitney is one of the fairest-minded and best-hearted cannibals I ever knew" and "we used to eat a great many people in those halcyon days."

In 1872 he published a book on Hawaiian history with former Polynesian publisher James Jackson Jarves. The book was an expanded update of the 1840s Jarves book borrowed by Mark Twain on his 1866 trip with appendix by Whitney.

On January 22, 1873, Whitney was appointed to the privy council of King Lunalilo, but Lunalilo died just a year later.

In 1873 Whitney bought the Hawaiian Gazette company which published a weekly.

The Gazette had been founded in 1865 as a government publication by James Black after the Polynesian had failed in 1864.

In 1875, Whitney published the first tourist guidebook to Hawaii.

Whitney renewed his battles with the administration of the new King Kalākaua. By January 1878 Thomas Crawford MacDowell took over editing the Gazette, but Whitney kept a stake in the printing company.

In 1880, Claus Spreckels financed the purchase of the Advertiser by Walter Murray Gibson. Whitney cut any ties with the Advertiser and wrote editorials attacking Gibson (who was appointed to several prominent positions in the cabinet) and Kalākaua in the Gazette.

Meanwhile, the Gazette business had grown to the point where a new building was built in 1881, and offices moved there in 1882, next door to the original Advertiser building, which was in turn next to the original post office.

This block of the street was sometimes called "printers row". as he brought out new editions of his guide book in 1890 and 1895.

James W. Robinson bought the rights to the Bulletin and developed it into the newspaper known as the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

In 1888 the Hawaiian Gazette Company bought the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, which Whitney managed until 1894. Just a year later, the Advertiser got its first linotype machine. Lorrin A. Thurston bought the Advertiser in 1895, whose family would own it until 1992.

Active until the end, Whitney edited Planter's Monthly until April 1903.

He died suddenly at his home on August 17, 1904. He was buried in the Oahu Cemetery in Honolulu.

Family and legacy His children were: Henry Ely Whitney was born March 20, 1850, and died July 17, 1883. Helen Brown Whitney was born May 1, 1852, married Luke Chase Kelley and died April 7, 1896. Henry Martyn Whitney Jr. was born March 26, 1856, and died February 7, 1936. James Nowell Whitney was born October 22, 1858, and died in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. Emma March Whitney was born January 6, 1863, married William Whitmore Goodale (1857–1929) in 1884, and died June 9, 1943. Their son Holbrook March Goodale (1889–1927) married Juliet Atwood Rice (1901–1987) (granddaughter of William Hyde Rice) in 1922. After Goodale's death she remarried, and later co-founded the Kauai Museum. Albert James Whitney was born November 7, 1865, but died in 1869. Frederich Damon Whitney was born November 7, 1867, and died December 25, 1897.

The Gazette survived until 1918. Ka Nupepa Kūokoa became the most circulated and longest lasting Hawaiian language newspaper, publishing until 1927. The Advertiser later became known as the Honolulu Advertiser, which published daily until it was merged in June 2010 with the other major newspaper to become the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Whitney's first editorial was reprinted in the last issue.

Other works