Robert M. Kamins

Jacob Adler

Walter Murray Gibson is one of the most enigmatic personalities in nineteenth-century Hawaiian history. Michener and Day saw him as an engaging rogue and included him in their Rascals in Paradise along with buccaneer Bully Hayes and Captain Bligh. Gavan Daws portrayed him in A Dream of Islands as a romantic and compassionate man who rashly challenged the ascendant planter-missionary party at a decisive period in Hawaii’s political history. Imbued since youth with grandiose ideals and soaring flights of fantasy, Gibson pursued throughout his life the dream of an island utopia flourishing under his leadership The East Indies beckoned first, and there on the island of Sumatra Gibson sought his fortune, finding instead a Dutch prison cell on Java. Recast as a Mormon, the High Priest of Melchizedek and chosen emissary of Brigham Young, Gibson gathered his flock about him on the island of Lanai, and was judged by the church to deserve excommunication. He finally realized his dream as Kipikona, Kalakaua’s “Minister of Everything,” the most skilled politician of his day, only to be driven from office and publicly taunted with a hangman’s noose. Authors Adler and Kamins bring historical reality to this turbulent and controversial life story. Carefully researched and engagingly written, The Fantastic Life of Walter Murray Gibson shows the many sides of this man of myriad talents--adventurer, New York businessman, Washington lobbyist, scholar, newspaper editor, orator, rancher, consummate legislative leader, “Minister of Everything,” and, always, a dreamer who dared to reach for the sun.

Hawaii's Minister of Everything

The Fantastic Life of Walter Murray Gibson

Robert E. Potter

In 1907 Hawaiâi's fledgling College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts, boasting an enrollment of five students and a staff of twelve, opened in a rented house on Young Street. The hastily improvised college, and the university into which it grew, owed its existence to the initiative of Native Hawaiian legislators, the advocacy of a Caucasian newspaper editor, the petition of an Asian American bank cashier, and the energies of a president and faculty recruited from Cornell University in distant Ithaca, New York. Today, nearly a century later, some 50,000 students are enrolled yearly at ten campuses--in a unique system of community colleges and professional schools. Malamalama: A History of the University of Hawaiâi documents the many contributions the University has made over the decades to culture and education in the islands. From its start, the University rejected the racial stereotyping and prejudice common in territorial Hawaiâi, thus fostering an ease of association among students of diverse backgrounds and providing, through student government and campus societies, a venue where future political leaders of the islands could hone their skills. The story of how the University of Hawaiâi grew from a regional undergraduate college to an internationally recognized graduate and research university, weathering repeated crises along the way, is told by emeritus professors Kamins and Potter in Part I. They highlight the University's relationship with the legislature, the actions and personalities of its very different presidents, and the effects of social upheaval and changing budgets on an evolving institution. Three alumni provide personal accounts of their years at the University. Parts II and III offer particular histories by knowledgeable contributors, including faculty members and administrators, of the Hilo and West Oahu campuses, of each fo the seven community colleges, and of programs at the Manoa campus. The strands of history woven together here reveal the University's abiding determination to serve as a cultural link across the Pacific and among Hawaiâi's own ethnic communities. The University seal, dominated by the Hawaiian word malamalama, "light of knowledge," depicts a map of the Pacific hemisphere, celebrating the great diversity of people and cultures that contributed to its founding and the westward reach of its connections.

Robert M. Kamins

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