Edmund Pearson Dole

Edmund Pearson Dole (February 28, 1850 – December 31, 1928) was a lawyer from New England who served as the first Attorney General of the Territory of Hawaii, and argued a case up to the U.S. Supreme Court. He also wrote several novels. Life Edmund Pearson Dole was born February 28, 1850, in Skowhegan, Maine. His father was classical language teacher Isiah Dole (1819–1892), and his mother was Elizabeth Todd Pearson (died 1851). Dole graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1874. He married Gertrude Ellen Davenport in 1878. He studied law under Charles Robinson, Jr., graduated from law school at Boston University, and was admitted to the bar at Suffolk County, Massachusetts. He practiced as a law partner of Farnum Fish Lane in Keene, New Hampshire. He served as Cheshire County Solicitor in 1880 and 1881, similar to a modern District Attorney. He wrote a book trying to explain the law profession to the public in 1887. He then moved to Seattle in 1890. In 1891 he was offered the position of dean of a new law school in Spokane. His cousin Sanford Ballard Dole had become president of the Republic of Hawaii and wrote to him for help. By June 1895 he was practicing law in Honolulu, and acting as assistant to Henry Ernest Cooper as Attorney General of Hawaii. Dole published a novel The Stand-By in 1897 with a hero who promoted Prohibition but was in love with the daughter of a brewer. It received praise from the Honolulu press:Its woof of romance richly colored with incident and episode is struck into a warp of informing fact relative to one of the leading questions of the age. The New York Times, however, saw a more political message:...as Mr Edmund P. Dole would have it, or as it seems to be written within the lines, the Republicans are the only lawabiding people on God's earth, the only virtuous, self-respecting souls, and the Democrats—quite the opposite. There is a tinge of fanaticism, then, in Mr. Dole's Romance.