Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  As early as 1885 key American senators, such as John F. Miller of California and John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, broached a sudden but apparently idle interest in the place, and buttonholed Carter about the harbor’s expanse and utility, and whether it was in private ownership. Carter was in the State Department on the kingdom’s business “when I heard that a resolution was being prepared asking the President to take steps to secure Pearl River harbor.” Alert instantly to the danger that the United States was going to hold the treaty hostage and demand Pearl Harbor as ransom, Carter scurried among Hawai‘i’s friends, warning them that the king and government would never agree to such a demand, and even if they did the legislature would not ratify it. “In a few days,” wrote Carter, “I was told that the project was being pressed, and that there was danger” that senators who wanted to get American hands on Pearl Harbor would strike a deal with those who wanted to divest themselves of the Hawaiian treaty altogether “and make Pearl Harbor the price of non-abrogation.”

  Carter was able to keep the undeveloped harbor in Hawai‘i’s hands for another year, but by 1887 circumstances altered decisively in the Americans’ favor. First, it had become increasingly obvious during the thirteen years of the treaty that Hawai‘i, whose very survival now depended upon sugar, needed its continuation more than the Americans. Second, the British had come to accept their loss of place with the end of Kamehameha dynasty, and with typical good manners had not only dropped their objection to American primacy in the islands but often seemed to be promoting it—to which the United States responded with eager assurances of friendship and British access to the ports. Third, the Bayonet Constitution of July 1887 had crippled the king’s position to maintain any demands about anything. Fourth—and what seemed to seal the deal—the Cleveland administration could credibly claim to be Hawai‘i’s friend, and when Cleveland’s secretary of state, Thomas Bayard, assured Carter that lease of the inlet would not compromise the kingdom’s independence, and that the United States would quit the place with the new treaty’s expiration, Carter recommended that Pearl be signed over, rather than face the alternative of losing reciprocity altogether.25 Carter also had Bayard’s informal aside that the enormous cost of improving the harbor would probably dissuade the United States from actually doing anything with the property anyway.

  Kalakaua was as entrenched as before and vowed to British commissioner Wodehouse that he would “never” sign it. The king, however, now browbeaten by a Reform cabinet and unable to muster enough allies in the legislature, had few options. The lease of Pearl Harbor was written up as a “supplementary convention” to the finally renewed reciprocity treaty, signed and published on November 29, 1887. The British Foreign Office later quietly removed Wodehouse from his posting in Honolulu, in an accommodation to amicable relations with the United States.26

  * * *

  News reports of dangerous unrest in Hawai‘i had reached Europe all through the late spring and early summer of 1887, but the coup was only two days old and the new constitution four days from being signed, when the queen and crown princess left England on July 2. Henry Carter told them more when they reached New York, and the two women actually exulted in Gibson’s fall, but discovered the depth of the situation when they reached Honolulu on July 26. The found the king deeply depressed and a pall cast over the palace; Lili‘uokalani was dismayed at the wreck of his reign. “King signed a lease of Pearl Harbor to U. States for eight years to get R[eciprocity] Treaty,” she wrote in her diary. “It should not have been done.”27

  Kalakaua played his powerless, bemedaled role for a further three years. During the summer of 1890 the Reform Party itself broke into factions and the government fell; it was a situation that the old Kalakaua might have been able to make something of, but the king had no fight left in him. He embarked on the USS Charleston for San Francisco hoping to recover his health. He declined, however, and was hospitalized; his servants ran down the street bearing his kahili from the hotel to the hospital to create a sacred space for him. Fascinated by technology to the end, he spoke his last words into an Edison wax cylinder: “Tell my people I tried.” He expired on January 20, 1891.

  First sight from Diamond Head of the returning Charleston sent a wave of celebration through the kanakas of Honolulu, but as she entered the harbor her crossed yards and black streamers told a different story. Queen Kapi‘olani had almost no time to absorb the news before the coffin was borne into the palace to lie in state in the throne room. She convulsed in grief; servants steadied her at the top of the long koa staircase lest she tumble down. The household was plunged into deep mourning, while Lili‘uokalani at fifty-two was proclaimed the first queen regnant of the Hawaiian Islands on January 29, 1891.

  She was a large woman, but not by measure of the Hawaiian ali‘i; various of her forebears, Ka‘ahumanu, Ruth Ke‘elikolani, were far bigger. She had been left in peace at Washington Place since her mother-in-law’s death two years before, although the two women had coexisted more peacefully for a time before that. Her husband Governor Dominis, elevated to “His Royal Highness, the Prince Consort,” died the following August at fifty-nine. In the ‘Iolani Palace throne room, the matrimonial chair next to hers would remain vacant, but in her marriage she had become quite accustomed to that.

  Lili‘u’s voluminous curly black hair, heavily streaked with gray, concealed many thoughts, even as her large frame concealed a conflicted heart. Her Christian upbringing had left her with a deeply persuaded faith, but her Polynesian heritage imbued her with a healthy skepticism of pomposity. She doubted whether Christ really demanded as many sacrifices of one’s personal pleasure as the sour Calvinist missionaries did. Her polished English and high manners made her perfectly at home in the company of Queen Victoria, but she could be bawdy and she had a husky laugh. It was not often written about, for she was discreet, but she had lovers, handsome young Hawaiians. “Mrs. Dominis has a new love,” Queen Emma once wrote to her cousin, “a native boy of Waikiki.”28 One would expect no less of a high chiefess who had been dumped by her American husband. She also, in strictest privacy, loved a good cigar.

  A newspaperwoman from Chicago, Mary Krout, who in her writings was frank, even brazen, in her opinion that the Anglo-Saxon race had a moral right to seize the Hawaiian government, obtained an audience with her, and found the queen’s bearing so gracious that Krout almost forgot her convictions. She was also surprised that, although Lili‘uokalani was often photographed, she did not really look like any of her pictures, and she would not have recognized her had Krout not been presented.

  Kalakaua was buried on February 15 after a much shorter royal wake than was the custom in older days; he was laid to rest in a new crypt, prepared for his dynasty and separated from the Kamehamehas, at Mauna ‘Ala. After the funeral the queen received the diplomatic corps to thank them for their condolences, including the American minister with whom she was destined to have a much trying acquaintance. John L. Stevens was seventy, a Maine man and Unitarian Universalist preacher, with white hair, sunken cheeks, and hollow eyes, as much of his chinless face as possible hidden under a scraggly white beard. He had some experience abroad, in South America as well as Scandinavia, and took the Hawai‘i posting at the call of his former business partner, James G. Blaine, who had become secretary of state. Stevens was a boor who less and less privately advocated U.S. annexation of the kingdom. Where other countries’ representatives had expressed their condolences and wishes for a happy reign, Stevens, with one leg swung over a chair arm, lectured her on the boundaries of her constitutional authority. Of course he couched his pedantry in phrases such as, he was happy to believe that she understood her limitations, but it was hard to think that he would have spoken to his own servants much differently. Lili‘uokalani was deeply offended.

  The reign had begun, however, and the queen had more than the requisite social presence to undertake her ceremonial duties. On June 22, 1891, she opened the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Hawaiian antiquities and n
atural history. Bernice had placed in trust the vast estate that she inherited from her Kamehameha cousin Ruth Ke‘elikolani. Through this trust her husband established the museum as a memorial to her. Bishop fussed mightily over the details of construction; he actively curated and improved the collection, much of which was stored at Ruth’s gigantic Keoua Hale, where Bishop was himself living while he directed the project. The museum also included the cultural treasures of the late Dowager Queen Emma.29 Not limiting the museum’s mission to cultural history, Bishop and the trustees reached out to Western scientists for the natural history of the Pacific—botany, ornithology, oceanography. The Bishop Museum began expanding no sooner than the doors were opened, with new halls dedicated in 1894, 1897, and thereafter, earning its reputation as the “Smithsonian of the Pacific.” But lest anyone forget the source of so much knowledge, immediately to the left of the main entrance, in one of the most prominent spaces, lay the room reserved for displaying the tall feather kahili standards of Hawaiian royalty.

  17. The Coup

  Among the many letters of sympathy there was one from Robert Louis Stevenson, the author who had abandoned his native Scotland and begun roaming the Pacific in the summer of 1888, now resident on Samoa. “The occasion is a sad one,” he condoled with the queen, “but I hope, and trust, that the event is for the ultimate benefit of Hawaii, where so much is to be hoped from, as much is sure to be effected by a firm, kind, serious and not lavish sovereign.”1 That was a remarkable sentiment for Stevenson to write, in view of the fact that Kalakaua had befriended and hosted him and his traveling suite generously enough.

  Not many of those who offered Lili‘uokalani advice, however diffident and sugarcoated it was, appreciated how keenly she in fact grasped her situation. She had a powerful mind of her own and knew how to express it, even in pointed criticism of her brother that she could deliver (privately) with such reckoning that it almost put the name he gave her—“Smarting of the Royal Ones”—in a new context. The business community became well acquainted with her strength of will during her stint as princess regent while Kalakaua was traveling the world. She had no hesitation in closing the ports to prevent the spread of smallpox, shutting off exports and blocking the influx of labor, unswayed by the heated editorials in the American press. That was when they first marked her as “bad for business”; they were wary of her, and it was perhaps no accident that when they moved against Kalakaua with the Bayonet Constitution, they did it when she was out of the country.

  Now as queen, she did not wait for them to strike; she assembled her brother’s haole cabinet and asked for their resignations. They demurred in something approaching disbelief, pointing out that under the new constitution, ministers could only be dismissed on a no-confidence vote of the legislature. Surely, she insisted, a new sovereign at the beginning of a reign was entitled to a cabinet that held her confidence. The chief justice of the supreme court was now Albert Francis Judd, and she took her case to him, with the additional argument that the present cabinet had performed in a way “hurtful to the standing of a good and wise government.” The court agreed to consider the matter.

  When word of this initial skirmish reached Charles Bishop in San Francisco, he realized that she might win this battle but set herself up to lose much more. Bishop’s marriage to her hanai sister had been everything that her own marriage was not, and Bishop had the standing to offer private advice and encouragement to Lili‘u that she likely would not have accepted from others. On March 5 he wrote her a long and loving—but at its heart didactic—letter:

  Your love for our dear Bernice would of itself win my regard. Were she living now her large heart would be full of sympathy for you in every trial, and of joy for every honor that you may gain.… Permit me now, dear friend, to congratulate you upon your grand opportunity for usefulness and honor—and to give some advice which you have not asked for, but which I trust will not seem to be bad. I regard the moral influence which you can execute upon the community, and especially upon your own race, as of much more importance than anything you can do in the politics or business of the country.… In the politics and routine of the Government the Ministers have the responsibility, annoyances and blame—and usually very little credits. Let them have them, and do not worry yourself about them.

  Bishop went on to register the opinion that the cabinet she found objectionable would likely resign whatever the supreme court decided, but he thought the justices would sustain them. If not, then they would surely resign, and she could begin her reign with a slate of her own choosing.2 It was sage advice on constitutional government from an experienced man who cared about her very much. But as he perceived, she—like her brother and her distant relative Kamehameha V—was determined to rule. The Bayonet Constitution was an odious document whose legitimacy could be questioned as a historical exercise, but its ink was three years dry, and Kalakaua had closed out his reign obeying its terms. If she opened her reign by declaring war on that constitution, it would be a dark and dangerous business.

  First, Kalakaua had won election as king by playing on the growing misogyny of the male legislators, and winning them over against the “petticoat rule” they would face under Emma Kaleleonalani. If anything, he succeeded too well in that, and in his seventeen years on the throne Hawai‘i became that much more Westernized. Lili‘uokalani was not Kamehameha V, the last great chief, and a constitutional abrogation that the people might have tolerated from him they would not accept from her, because she was a woman, because the times had come so far, and because a whole new political class—Lorrin Thurston, Sanford Dole, and the others—had come into being in the generation since Lot Kapuaiwa had quashed the previous constitution and issued his own.

  Second, the issue of race had gained a different and uglier valence than it had had before. When Hiram Bingham brought the Congregationalist missionaries to Hawai‘i in 1820, they and the eleven reinforcement companies that followed over the next two decades were confident that they were bringing the light of a Christian civilization to a benighted culture. That population happened to have dark skin. The missionaries would have felt the same had they evangelized newly discovered islands of Scandinavia. The early missionary letters and literature are remarkably free of overtly racist epithets, not least because they discovered the Hawaiians to be quick and perceptive, and intelligent enough to have emerged from a culture with no written language to the highest literacy rate in the world in less than a generation.

  The missionaries’ children, however, brought a different perspective. Sent to the mother country and welcomed back with their degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, many of them returned having absorbed the American racism of the late nineteenth century. William Richards could say of Timothy Ha‘alilio, “He is not my servant, I am his,” but that was not the starting point of the second and third generation haoles. In their minds it was but a small step from saying that the Kalakaua government was corrupt to saying that dark races are not capable of enlightened self-government. At the beginning of her reign the new queen, focused upon the recovery of meaningful royal power, had little notion of what a powerful obstacle she would face in simple racial prejudice. Social journalist Mary Krout was charmed by Lili‘u’s easy grace, but she still perceived the American side of the moment with perfect clarity: “When Queen Liliuokalani came to the throne more perverse than her brother; more determined to restore native rule in its most aggravated form, her subjects lost hope, and realised that there were but two alternatives—the relapse of the country into the state from which it had so painfully emerged, or the administration of the government by the Anglo-Saxon, aided by the natives of the better class.”3 By “subjects,” of course, Mary Krout meant those of means and American descent.

  Third, the new queen’s support among the native and mixed-blood political class was not monolithic. At the time Lili‘uokalani ascended the throne, the native population had continued on a downward drift of frightening inexorability. Even after the subsidence of the
early postcontact epidemics, there had been a net loss of three to four thousand native inhabitants at each six-year census since early in the reign of Kamehameha V. And the census of 1890 was the first in which immigrants and island-born nonnatives (49,368) finally outnumbered the surviving native Hawaiians, including those of mixed race (40,662).4 Many of the maka‘ainana resented being disenfranchised by the property restrictions placed upon voting rights, and they turned for leadership to an unpredictable firebrand, Robert William Wilcox, who was the hapa haole son of a Maui chiefess and a Rhode Islander. Wilcox had been twenty-five when Kalakaua had plucked him out of the legislature, taken him on his grand tour, and deposited him at the Royal Military Academy at Turin for a Western military education. The reform government recalled him to save money, and back in Hawai‘i he led an ill-advised putsch against the Bayonet Constitution that cost seven lives, and in which Kalakaua refused to get involved. At Lili‘u’s accession, Wilcox and his confederate John E. Bush sought government appointments from her, and when she refused they led as many of their party as they could command—but that was not everybody—against her, advocating a native republic not beholden to sugar, and to her anger they spread the rumor that she had taken her new half-Tahitian marshal of the kingdom, Charles B. Wilson, as a lover.5

  Fourth, she came to the throne at perhaps the most threatening moment the sugar industry had yet known. The United States was bound to the reciprocity treaty, but now that they had finally squeezed Pearl Harbor out of Kalakaua, the rest of its provisions were a drag on free trade elsewhere. Under the leadership of Senator William McKinley of Ohio, the United States passed a bill that removed tariffs from all foreign sugar imports, but made up for it at home with a two-cents-per-pound bounty to grow domestic sugar. McKinley and his allies managed to wreck the treaty without technically breaking it, and the Hawaiian sugar growers were looking over a precipice not too different from what Kalanikupule saw at the Battle of Nu‘uanu Pali.