Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  Back in Hawai‘i word of the new treaty, along with news that the proannexation senator John Tyler Morgan, who had buried the Blount Report, would arrive in September, set into motion two native organizations from former times. In the wake of the 1887 Bayonet Constitution, native activists had formed the Hui Kala‘ia‘ina to preserve some base for their political action. And after the 1893 coup, angry Hawaiians had coalesced into a political group, the Hui Aloha Aina (or Patriotic League) that had two divisions, the Queen’s Women and the Queen’s Men. The Hawaiian maka‘ainana, the commoners, had been mostly disenfranchised by the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, and they mattered even less after the takeover, but they had been too indoctrinated over too many decades in the propaganda of American democracy to believe that there was absolutely nothing they could do now. A mass meeting was announced for Palace Square on September 6, 1897.

  Despite threats published in the annexationist papers that they could be arrested for treason, the square was jammed with natives. James Keauiluna Kaulia, the lawyer and president of the Queen’s Men who had given Blount an earful when he was taking depositions, stoked the crowd:

  We, the nation, will never consent to the annexation of our lands, until the very last patriot lives.… If the nation remains steadfast in its protest of annexation, the Senate can continue to strive until the rock walls of Iolani Palace crumble, and never will Hawaii be annexed to America!… Let us take up the honorable field of struggle … Do not be afraid, be steadfast in aloha for your land and be united in thought. Protest forever the annexation of Hawaii until the very last aloha aina [patriot]!5

  Kaulia was followed on the podium by the leader of the older Hui Kala‘ia‘ina, David Kalauokalani, who made certain that the crowd understood exactly what annexation as a territory meant. Public lands and crown lands, and all infrastructure and improvements, would be handed over to the United States. The American Congress would rule the islands, but the protections of U.S. law would not necessarily come with it.

  The instruments of their protest would be two petitions, one remonstrating against American annexation of the islands, the other seeking restoration of the queen, to be signed by as many native Hawaiians as they could muster. Petitions were drafted and printed, and only five days after the rally on Palace Square, James Kaulia was on Maui, collecting signatures for the Queen’s Men. Organizing the petition drive for the Queen’s Women was its formidable president, Abigail Kuaihelani Campbell. Now thirty-nine, she had been nineteen in 1877 when she married Scotch-Irish sugar baron James Campbell, a man thirty-two years her senior. That year he sold his interest in the Pioneer Mill for half a million dollars, a fortune he doubled and redoubled by buying and irrigating the Ewa Plain on Oahu. What was good for sugar was good for her family, but they were aligned with the British interests; Campbell had been a friend of King Kalakaua, who had appointed him to the house of nobles during and after the Bayonet Constitution, and he was close to Archibald Cleghorn, father of the heiress presumptive. Abigail, moreover, was descended from the Kalanikini line of Maui royalty, with a solid reputation for noblesse oblige and charity toward native people.6

  Petitions in hand, Campbell and her aide, Mrs. Emma Aima Nawahi, sailed for Hilo on the interisland ship Kinau. Nawahi, secretary of the Hilo chapter, was the recent widow of Joseph Nawahi; the former legislator and publisher of the Ke Aloha Aina had died in San Francisco the preceding November of the tuberculosis he may have contracted while imprisoned by the junta. Unbowed, Aima Nawahi continued publishing their antiannexation newspaper and would do so until 1910. Hilo was her hometown, where she was popular as the daughter of a chiefess and the Chinese businessman Tong Yee, founder of the Paukaa Sugar Plantation.7 It was an accurate expression of native temper, albeit organized by the local chapter of the Hui Aloha Aina, that the ship was met by a traditional twin-hulled canoe, with chairs of honor on its deck draped with leis, to bring Campbell and Nawahi into Hilo harbor.

  Not known at the time, but made clear by recent research in Hawaiian-language letters, was that the petition drive did not materialize purely from these organizations. In fact it was the queen who suggested the idea, put forward some of the wording, and corresponded actively with Kaulia, Kalauokalani, and with Aima Nawahi, who shared her letters with Kuaihelani Campbell.8

  The American journalist Miriam Michelson of the San Francisco Morning Call interviewed Campbell, cleverly (as she thought) leading Campbell into asserting that no Hawaiians supported annexation. “I met a woman at Hana,” Michelson rejoined pluckily, “on the island of Maui. She was.”

  Campbell was unfazed. “Was she in the government’s employ?”

  Michelson admitted that she was a teacher.

  “Ah, I thought so. You see, the government will employ no one who does not swear allegiance. Even the schoolteachers.” (And not just teachers. All but sixteen players in the Royal Hawaiian Band were fired when they refused the oath.9)

  While Campbell and Nawahi gathered signatures in Hilo, Laura Mahelona worked the Kona Coast on the west side of the Big Island, her boat stopping at every village from Kona south to Kau to leave blank petitions, after which she reversed course back up the coast to gather them again, along with 4,216 names on the documents.

  Back in Honolulu, Miriam Michelson got James Kaulia, president of the Queen’s Men, to pause for an interview on the hotel veranda. He verified Abigail Campbell’s assertion that government workers had given empty pledges of allegiance in order to secure their jobs. “Take the police now,” he said, “who have sworn allegiance, of course. Some of them have signed our petition against annexation.” Seven thousand natives had signed the petition since the preceding Thursday.10

  Such a number spoke more eloquently than any interview. The men’s and women’s sections of the Hui Aloha Aina had to work fast. The annexation treaty was set to be debated at the winter session of Congress; they had to select and fund a delegation, travel to Washington, divine a lobbying strategy—and October was nearly upon them. Known as the Ku‘e petitions, when they were finally rounded up they bore some twenty-one thousand signatures—more than half of the surviving native population of the islands and the equivalent, in the United States at that time, of a petition bearing thirty-five million names.

  Before sailing, when the Hui Aloha Aina for men and women and the Hui Kala‘ia‘ina learned that their former monarch had moved on to New York without pressing their case to McKinley, they sent her a perplexed letter requesting that she return to the American capital. With a delegation soon to take ship bearing the petitions of their last hope, Lili‘uokalani had to recognize that crashing the president’s public reception for a handshake was hardly sufficient, and she headed back to Washington. The groups decided to send four of their leaders as elele lahui, messengers, to make their case in Washington: Kaulia, Kalauokalani, the Maui attorney John Richardson, with William Auld as their secretary.11

  While they expected the core of their support to be among the Democrats, the Hawaiian delegation was invited to the opening of the Senate session on December 6 by an important Republican, Richard F. Pettigrew. A onetime frontier surveyor and the first U.S. senator from South Dakota, he was also, happily for them, an amateur archaeologist with a fascination for indigenous cultures, and a committed anti-imperialist. Like a select few other senators, he was inclined to break with his Republican colleagues over matters of conscience such as this—a sinful habit for which the South Dakota legislature booted him from the Senate two years later.

  In a meeting with the queen at her hotel, Ebbitt House, on December 7, the delegation decided to streamline its presentation. The petition of the Hui Kala‘ia‘ina called for the restoration of the monarchy, which might not be received well in such an antiroyalist country as the United States, and further it might be (erroneously) construed as being at cross-purposes with the petition of the Hui Aloha Aina, which merely protested annexation. The petition calling for the queen’s return was dropped in favor of this one.12

  The
next day, December 8, the delegation braved ice on the streets to call at the home of Senator George Frisbie Hoar, Republican of Massachusetts. It was a bold move, for he had supported annexation three years earlier. He was an early convert to the strategic naval theories of Alfred T. Mahan—that Hawaii in American hands was preferable to Hawaii in the hands of a potential enemy. They were surprised to be ushered into the presence of such an elemakule, an “old man.” Hoar was just shy of seventy-two, and after twenty years in the Senate this grandson of Roger Sherman (a signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) had risen to become a lion of conscience in that body. He had been also a consistent supporter of extending the voting franchise to minorities whether women, freedmen, or American Indians. The Hawaiians thought it significant that Hoar shook hands with them; they had seen enough of mainland haole politics to know that persons of darker skin pigmentation lived a different reality from the whites. As it happened, their visit came just at a time when Hoar’s thoughts about American empire were changing. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that it was fundamentally inconsistent for the United States, the world’s beacon of democracy, to engage in colonial exploitation in the manner of the European powers. Far better, it seemed to him, for America to spread its civilization and ideals without snatching others’ countries and cultures.

  Hoar listened intently as John Richardson explained the whole gambit of revolution and annexation from the beginning—the collusion of the American minister Stevens with the Missionary Boys, the involvement of the Boston and the marines, and they saw tears well up in Hoar’s eyes. Hoar was quite familiar with the Blount Report, and the subsequent whitewash of the Morgan Report. Now, it seemed to him, Blount had been right. The Hawaiian delegation should, said the old senator, entrust their petition to him, and be in the Senate gallery on the following day. From the floor of the chamber on December 9 Hoar intoned the text of the petitions into the record, which protested “against the annexation of the said Hawaiian Islands to the said United States of America in any form or shape.” A representative leaf of the 556 pages of signatures bore thirty-eight names, the petitioners ranging in age from fourteen to eighty-six, the variety of penmanship attesting to their literacy, pride, and expectations.13

  Hoar had the documents accepted for consideration with the proposed “treaty.” And Hoar was a Republican, the party of the expansionist president. To have made an ally of him was a huge step in the right direction.

  The next day Richardson, Kaulia, Kalauokalani, and Auld had a far less sympathetic audience with McKinley’s secretary of state, John Sherman (no relation to Roger), to present him a memorial in protest of annexation. Then came rounds of lobbying; some senators they found courtly but unpersuaded. The Hawaiian delegation learned to polish ready answers when confronted by the alleged policy justifications—apart from imperial landlust—why Hawaii should be annexed. Might not Japan seize Hawai‘i if the United States refused annexation? The Japanese had been powerful enough to take the islands for half a century; why would they wait until now to challenge President Tyler’s doctrine, which was still in force, that a foreign conquest of Hawaii would not be allowed to stand? Might not the British or French gain too much influence there? On the contrary, it was the British and French who had vouchsafed Hawaiian independence in the wake of seizures of the islands by their own jingo-driven naval officers, whereas it was an American cruiser and marines who had bolstered the coup that toppled the constitutional government. For the United States to question the motives of England and France in this circumstance could only be regarded as a bad joke. Besides, the United States had vetted its own growing ties to Hawai‘i with both France and Britain for decades without them registering any objection.

  Thurston and the annexationists did all they could to discredit the Ku‘e petitions. In Washington on March 4, 1898, Thurston submitted a carefully typewritten rebuttal with handwritten underscoring and insertions. Thurston claimed that as many as 10 percent of the signatures were either forgeries or had fraudulently entered the ages of children who were really as young as two. Moreover, he alleged, many natives had signed the petition for the simple reason that, in that setting and circumstance, it would have been rude not to. In Hawai‘i, furthermore, “it is common knowledge … that there is little feeling of responsibility attached to signing a petition. Among the native Hawaiians especially the feeling is that it is rather an honor to see ones [sic] name attached to a petition.”14 Even if Thurston’s allegations could have been borne out, however, the remaining signatures still comprised virtually half of all the natives on the islands. That was a monolithic expression of sentiment that no quibbling over handwriting could overcome.

  Still, Thurston recapitulated his arguments in an eighty-three-page tract titled A Hand-Book on the Annexation of Hawaii. He demonstrated Hawai‘i’s existing importance to American trade, enumerating its 1896 imports from the mainland in meticulous detail, from 4.1 million board feet of redwood lumber to fourteen thousand tons of fertilizer, from 937 sewing machines to nearly half a million yards of denim cloth. His main amplification, however, was to include the texts of U.S. diplomatic papers relating to Hawai‘i dating back to the 1840s. The document was an effective polemic but deceitful in its selection of facts and context. Thurston’s citation of Kamehameha III’s offered cession of the islands in 1851 made no mention that it was done in the wake of French and British seizures of the country. He dealt curtly with the charge that the coup was accomplished with American collusion. “This accusation is ancient history. If it were true, which is not admitted, it would have no more effect today upon the status of the Hawaiian Republic than does the fact that French troops assisted Washington to overthrow the British monarchy.”15 (The French government, of course, actually knew that its army and navy were aiding Washington.)

  Thurston also included testimonials of notable Americans on the subject. Surprisingly—at least it was surprising if he had the goal of masking U.S. conspiracy in the overthrow—Thurston actually included a testimonial from Capt. G. C. Wiltse of the USS Boston. Or rather, it was an excerpt from Wiltse’s statement in a Senate report, made to appear as a testimonial that “there is a large and growing sentiment, particularly among the planters, in favor of annexation … everything seems to point to an eventual request.” Perhaps weightier were extracts from Mahan’s imperialist tracts on Hawai‘i’s “strategical position,” and more from Gen. John Schofield. The latter took issue with the point of view that the islands would be a political drag on the rest of the country, pointing out that the Chinese and Japanese would be excluded from participation. He also noted that citizens of Hawai‘i would become citizens of the United States (omitting that “citizens” as defined two months after the coup also excluded the native islanders). But failing to extend America’s protection to Hawai‘i’s citizens “would be a crime.”16 The endpapers of Thurston’s little handbook displayed a map of the Pacific showing Hawai‘i as the hub of its commerce—which was accurate enough—and then, to emphasize how much of the globe was at stake, they creatively overlaid that map on one of the Atlantic; if Hawai‘i were in the center of the Atlantic, it would command a wedge of the planet from San Francisco on the west to Madagascar on the east.

  Additionally, now that most kanakas were disenfranchised back home and the only issue before the Congress was whether or not to annex the islands, the racial undercurrent erupted to the surface as it had seldom done before. Thurston’s close confederate, the fifty-four-year-old Reverend Sereno Bishop, sent a private note to the formerly “Paramount” Blount. Bishop was no relation of Bernice Pauahi’s husband, Charles Bishop, but he was the son of Artemas and Elizabeth Bishop of the Second Company of missionaries. His parents had sent him to the mother country for an education, and he came back to the islands in 1851 with a degree from Auburn Theological Seminary; after a stint as seaman’s chaplain in Lahaina, he edited The Friend (monthly newsletter of the Seamen’s Friend Society) for many years. His le
tter to Blount was a prime exhibit of how the views of the missionary offspring had sunk to the most stupefying racism. In denying the native Hawaiians’ right to self-determination, he held that “such a weak and wasted people prove by their failure to save themselves from progressive extinction … the consequent lack of claim to continued sovereignty.… Is it not an absurdity for the aborigines, who under the most favorable conditions, have dwindled to having less than one third … of the whole number of males on the Islands, and who are mentally and physically incapable of supporting, directing or defending a government, nevertheless to claim sovereign rights?”

  When it came to actual debate in the Senate, the Hawaiians found most of their allies among the Democrats, such as David Turpie of Indiana, chairman of the Democratic Conference, who held the singular distinction of having taken his Senate seat away from Benjamin Harrison. When the Hawai‘i issue reached the floor, it was Turpie who spearheaded the drive to submit the question to a plebiscite of the whole Hawaiian people. Thurston had anticipated this, and his Hand-Book argued hotly against any constitutional necessity of submitting annexation to a popular vote.17 Nevertheless, knowing that such a referendum would go down in an avalanche of defeat if the native Hawaiians were allowed to vote, Senate Republicans were forced to kill the measure, thus admitting that democracy had no part in the junta’s continuing control of the islands.

  With time and argument, and 556 pages of petitions signed by Hawai‘i’s highly literate native population—more literate by a large percentage than Americans on the mainland—support for the annexation treaty fell in the Senate from fifty-eight votes to forty-six, far fewer than the sixty needed for passage. In a jubilant frame of mind the four elele lahui departed Washington on February 27, three months and a week after they left Hawaii. Had they understood American politics better, they would have waited to celebrate.