The Sugar King Of California

Claus Spreckels (1828–1908) emigrated from his homeland of Germany to the United States with only seventy-five cents in his pocket, built a sugar empire, and became one of the richest Americans in history alongside John D. Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates. Migrating to San Francisco after the gold rush, Spreckels built the largest sugar beet factory of its kind in the United States. His sugar beet production in the Salinas Valley changed the focus of valley agriculture from dry to irrigated crops, resulting in the vast modern agricultural-industrial economy in today’s “Salad Bowl of the World.” When Spreckels gave America its first sugar cube, he became the “Sugar King.” The indomitable Spreckels was a colorful and complicated character on both sides of the Pacific. A kingpin in the development of the Hawai‘i-California sugarcane industry, he wielded a clenched fist over Hawai‘i’s economy for nearly two decades after occupying a position of unrivaled power and political influence with the Hawaiian monarchy, while also advancing major technology developments on the islands. The Sugar King’s legacy continued as the Spreckels family developed large portions of California, building and breaking monopolies in agriculture, shipping, railroading, finance, real estate, horse breeding, utilities, streetcars, and water infrastructure, and building entire towns and cities from infrastructure to superstructure. In The Sugar King of California Sandra E. Bonura tells the rags-to-riches story of Spreckels’s role in the developments of the sugarcane industry in the American West and across the Pacific, triumphing in a milieu rife with cronyism and corruption and ultimately transforming California’s industry and labor. Harshly criticized by his enemies for ruthless business tactics but loved by his employees, he was unapologetic in his quest for wealth, asserting “Spreckels’s success is California’s success.” But there’s always a cost for single-minded determination; the legendary family quarrels even included a murder charge. Spreckels’s biography is one of business triumph and tragedy, a portrait of a family torn apart by money, jealousy, and ego.

Sandra E. Bonura tells the overlooked yet genuine rags-to-riches story of Claus Spreckels and his pioneering role in developing the sugar industry in the United States and the kingdom of Hawai'i.

Explores his contributions to the development of the island kingdom of Hawaii.

A comprehensive and readable account of the history of Hawai'i presented in three chronological units: Unit 1, Pre-contact to 1900; Unit 2, 1900¿1945; Unit 3, 1945 to the present. Each unit contains chapters treating political, economic, social, and land history in the context of events in the United States and the Pacific Region. The student book features primary documents, political cartoons, stories and poems, graphs, a glossary, maps, and timelines. The activities, writing assignments, oral presentations, and simulations foster critical thinking.

“A remarkable, vivid, and meticulously researched story about an unjustly forgotten major figure of the nineteenth century.” - Nicholas B. Lemann “It’s more than a bio. It’s a way to understand Jewishness, the South, and America.” - Walter Isaacson “Peter Wolf’s The Sugar King is an absorbing ancestral journey.” - Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Peter M. Wolf unearths Southern Jewish history in a major new work, with a foreword by Calvin Trillin. A penniless, illiterate, Jewish thirteen-year-old from France crosses the Atlantic alone. Landing in raucous and polyglot New Orleans in 1837, the third largest city in America, he starts out as a peddler of notions to plantations along the Mississippi. He remains unable to read or to write in English or in French his entire life. Nevertheless, by the end of his intrigue-filled life, Leon Godchaux is known as the “Sugar King of Louisiana,” the owner of fourteen plantations, the largest sugar producer in the region and the top taxpayer in the state. He refuses to enter the sugar business until the end of slavery. Unsympathetic to the Lost Cause, caught up in the Civil War, and negotiating Reconstruction and Jim Crow, Godchaux simultaneously builds an esteemed New Orleans clothing empire. Godchaux relies on the accomplishments of two Black men. Joachim Tassin, a slave whose birth status both men conceal, is entwined with Leon Godchaux in his clothing business, and Norbert Rillieux is a free man of color whose overlooked ingenious invention enables Godchaux to build his sugar empire.