Born and raised in Honolulu, Wilhelm George Schimmelfennig (1863-1927) was the son of German immigrants George Fredrick Schimmelfennig, a whaling captain, and his wife Fredricke.
As a young man, Schimmelfennig moved to Kaua‘i, where he was hired as a supervisor at Koloa Plantation under manager Anton Cropp (1853-1913), a reserve officer in the German Army.
Cropp was a harsh disciplinarian whose sole concern for non-supervisory laborers was that they worked hard and efficiently.
These laborers — faced with long hours, low pay and harsh taskmasters — resented Cropp and his supervisors, and reacted by refusing to work or by deserting, actions that were punishable by fine or imprisonment.
Schimmelfennig’s great-grandson, Charles E. Schimmelfennig III, informed me that Schimmelfennig, in carrying out Cropp’s orders, personified the caricature of the dreaded plantation luna on his big horse with whip in hand threatening his laborers.
One day in Lawa‘i, for instance, Schimmelfennig was on horseback, admonishing a Japanese bullock cart driver, when out of exasperation or anger he grabbed the driver to remove him from his seat, and in doing so, ripped the man’s shirt off, exposing his naked back.
In Western culture, this was no doubt an assault, yet to the Japanese bullock cart driver and his fellow Japanese laborers, it was also interpreted culturally as an act of shaming him, his family, and his ancestry.
A mob of Japanese laborers then chased Schimmelfennig to his house in Koloa, where he further incensed them by spraying them with kerosene and threatening to ignite it with his cigar, until a sheriff arrived and broke up the confrontation.
According to “Return to Maha‘ulepu” author Charles Katsumu Tanimoto, Schimmelfennig was then all the more widely reviled by Koloa Plantation’s Japanese.
Despite that, he was promoted to superintendent and was pensioned from Koloa Sugar Plantation in 1918 after a viaduct collapsed on him, crushing his leg.
Schimmelfennig and his Hawaiian wife, Rebecca Pahukoa Neal Schimmelfennig, had four children: Helen, Fischer, Carl, and Neal.
Their good character was never called into question.
The government of Japan eventually filed a formal complaint to the U.S. Congress over abuse of its laborers.
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Hank Soboleski has been a resident of Kauai since the 1960s. Hank’s love of the island and its history has inspired him, in conjunction with The Garden Island Newspaper, to share the island’s history weekly. The collection of these articles can be found here: https://bit.ly/2IfbxL9 and here https://bit.ly/2STw9gi Hank can be reached at hssgms@gmail.com
