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Autograph Letter, from Oahu College student

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Title: Autograph Letter, from Oahu College student
Author: Bond, Robert Elias
Description: Autograph Letter, unsigned, but identified from accompanying mailing envelope. 6 pp + envelope.To his mother, Mrs. E.C. Bond, Kohala, Hawaii. Written by a 14 year-old boy whose grandfather was one of the first American missionaries to Hawaii, while his father was a wealthy sugar planter. Soon to go on to Yale and a career as corporate executive, Bond, as a student at the famous Punahou co-ed college prep school - later attended by Barack Obama – shied away the bitter political controversy following the American–led Revolution which deposed Queen Liliuokalani, abolished the monarchy and, in July 1894, established a Republican government, recognized by Washington as prelude to annexation. The ex-Queen was soon convicted of plotting armed rebellion against the Republic. In this tense time, Bond writes his mother, there had been “quite a row” at Oahu College, as the Punahou School was then formally known. After some boys who had misbehaved in the class of an unpopular woman teacher were “pahan or imprisoned”, confined to their rooms, and the principal, Massachusetts Professor Frank Hosmer, had called all the boys to his office, “and gave us a terrible talking to”, Christian Conradt, an American businessman whose younger brothers were at Punahou, accused Hosmer of “punishing the royalists only”,.“bringing politics into the school” – and, worse yet, “running down the half whites and native” students. Hosmer was “fearfully mad and wanted to fire out the Contradt boys and sue them for accusing him of such things and injuring his public reputation. I never struck such a row before. It is a regular railroad strike.” Bond assured his mother that “I have kept out of it” and only regretted that the punishment “took off some of our best athletes” on the very day of a sports competition at the baseball grounds.
Heading: (Hawaii)Place Published: Oahu College [Honolulu]
Publisher:
Date Published: October 15, 1894