The Fruits of Empire: Selling American Consumers on Hawaiian Pineapples and Hawaiian Statehood

In 1954, an advertisement for the Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Company declared: “It’s Hawaiian Party Time!” In this color photograph, generations of cheerful people gather around a pineapple feast, wearing leis and flowers that announce their Hawaiian-ness according to popular tropes of the time. This ad was part of the "Be sure it's Hawaiian—Be sure it's DOLE" campaign from the 1950s, a celebration of Hawai'i just five years before it became an official state in the Union. It seems no coincidence that the prominent display of Hawaiian people in company advertisements occurred in the years before statehood. Leaders of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company lobbied for Hawaiian statehood in the 1950s just as it had done for annexation in the 1890s, when U.S. marines overthrew Hawaii’s Queen Lili'uokalani and took control over the Hawaiian Islands for militaristic and economic advantages. U.S. occupation produced devastating consequences for indigenous and Asian populations on the Islands, although these consequences are not reflected in pineapple advertisements urging statehood. Instead, pineapple ads romanticized colonial settlement and assuaged fears that Hawaiians were too racially and culturally different to be incorporated into the United States. Leaders of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company recognized the vital role that visual images of Hawaiian pineapples could play in advocating for statehood, working with politicians and artists to present a sanitized image of Hawaiian people and goods in support of the region’s incorporation.