page_title: Henry Martyn Whitney
section_title: Politics
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Martyn Whitney / Pioneer publisher / Politics
caption_attribution_description: English: Merchant Street between Bethel and Fort Street in Honolulu, Hawaii, was known as "printers row" in the 19th century. The Hawaiian Gazette company was purchased by Henry Martyn Whitney (1824–1904)in 1873. This building was built on the site of a former hotel and saloon in 1881 and opened in 1882. The ground floor appears to be the store of James W. Robinson, who started the Honolulu Daily Bulletin in 1883.
context_page_description: Henry Martyn Whitney was an early journalist in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Born of early missionaries, he became the first postmaster and founded several long-lasting newspapers.
context_section_description: 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.
  In 1866 the young reporter Samuel Clemens asked for a job, but there were no openings since Whitney already had the small staff he needed. Clemens, later better known as Mark Twain, often dropped by the office since Whitney enjoyed his humor, and would borrow Whitney's cigars.
  Originally Whitney's newspapers were focused on an objective professional philosophy to "get the story first". However, as Twain became more popular, Whitney adopted the satiric humorist's style. They exchanged letters and Twain mocked Staley and the Hawaiian royalty as he toured the US and wrote his book Roughing It with a chapter on Hawaii.
  
  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. Borden threatened Whitney with a knife, but had diplomatic immunity.
  After the war, he opposed the importing of contract labor from Asia, comparing it to slavery. This put him at odds with the growing influence of wealthy Hawaiian sugar planters.
  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
caption: The Hawaiian Gazette building in 1880s
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