Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

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  Two weeks earlier the U.S. battleship Maine had blown up in Havana harbor, killing 276 American sailors. Coming after months of heightening tensions between the United States and Spain over a revolutionary insurgency in Cuba, many Americans and certainly the more sensationalist element of the American press were certain that the Maine had been sunk as the result of sabotage.18 On April 25 Congress issued, not an outright declaration of war against Spain, but an authorization for McKinley to utilize the naval and land forces of the United States in forcing American will on Spain. Officially it was to vindicate American honor and free a suffering Cuba; the subtext was that the Spanish empire had been in decline for two centuries and its remnants could be had for the taking.

  War with Spain made it likely that the United States would attack the then Spanish Philippine Islands in the western Pacific, which necessitated a secure coaling station in midocean. It was true that the United States had squeezed Pearl Harbor out of King Kalakaua by holding the reciprocity treaty over his head in 1887, but they had never developed the harbor. Clearly annexation offered the easiest solution. With a two-thirds majority vote lacking in the Senate, the expansionists seized on a stratagem last employed when the United States annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845. The U.S. Constitution is not specific on how territory may be annexed; in 1845, when the treaty majority was lacking, Texas was annexed by joint resolution, which required only a simple majority of both houses.

  Hawaiian annexation resolutions were reported out of the Senate and House on March 16 and May 17, respectively, ready for a final round of grand debate. Sugar was part of it. By the 1890s the sugar industry had changed Hawai‘i in fundamental ways—not just the economy but the ecology of the land, the makeup of the population, and the solidification of a social class system far different from, but as entrenched as, the kapu system a century before. But at the end sugar was not the reason for the overthrow of the monarchy. Most of the sugar planters actually opposed annexation, for the reason that bringing in the American exclusion law would put an end to importing more Chinese labor. Growing sugarcane on American soil would not, in their minds, adequately compensate them for the declining number of coolies.19

  War with Spain was now under way, and not to accept the strategic islands being offered seemed simply unpatriotic. Opponents of annexation were reduced to turning the Dole government’s antidemocratic racism back on them. If Hawai‘i became a state, railed James Beauchamp Clark of Missouri, “How can we endure our shame when a Chinese Senator from Hawaii, with his pigtail hanging down his back … shall rise from his curule chair and in pigeon [sic] English proceed to chop logic with George Frisbie Hoar or Henry Cabot Lodge?”20 It was a losing effort and they knew it. The House approved the annexation resolution by 209 to 91 on June 15, the Senate by 42 to 21 three weeks later.

  Among the senators giving his assent was Massachusetts’ George Frisbie Hoar, but he did not come to the decision easily. After introducing the Ku‘e petitions that sank the original treaty in the Senate, he had continued to follow the Hawaiian saga, and had come to an appreciation of the former queen. On various occasions on the floor of the Senate, he regretted that he had bought the tale of Lili‘uokalani vowing to take the heads of the junta if she were restored to power. “I ought not to have accepted the story without investigation,” he wrote. “I learned afterward, from undoubted authority, that the Queen is an excellent Christian woman; that she has done her best to reconcile her subjects of her own race to the new order of things … and that she expended her scanty income in educating and caring for the children of the persons who were about her court who had lost their own resources by the revolution.”21

  Hoar was troubled that the Hawaiian question had come to be dominated by jingoes interested not in the welfare of the native people but in the establishment of an American empire. While he accepted Mahan’s assertion that Hawai‘i was vital to the protection of the U.S. West Coast, the notion of empire for its own sake was thick in the air, and he sensed something deeply hypocritical about the intended annexation. By his own admission he was unable to commit himself to it. At one point McKinley summoned him to the White House, ostensibly to ask his advice on how to win the vote of Vermont’s Justin Smith Morrill, an eighty-eight-year-old legend whom McKinley was loath to pressure. Hoar came to the real point quickly, however: “I ought to say, Mr. President, in all candor, that I feel very doubtful whether I can support it myself.”

  Since being swayed by the Ku‘e petitions, Hoar had settled it in his own mind that the native Hawaiians, still by population a huge majority, had had five years to overthrow the cabal of sugar planters; if that government was so odious to them, they could have risen up. (Actually, they had risen up: In the countercoup of January 7, 1895, a number of them had been killed and nearly two hundred convicted and sent to prison.) Then too, although it saddened him and he felt sympathy for them, “The native Hawaiians were a perishing race. They had gone down from 300,000 to 30,000 within one hundred years,” and the remnant desired only “a quiet, undisturbed life, fishing, bathing, supplied with tropical fruits, and [to] be let alone.” (The shock of seeing the Ku‘e petitions and their cry for real democracy had certainly worn off by the time he composed his memoirs.) Hoar’s actual sticking point on annexation was what he perceived to be the real reason that it was being pressed, as a forward military base to take part in the dismembering of China. “I told President McKinley … I did not like the spirit with which it was being advocated. I instanced several distinguished gentlemen indeed … who were urging that we must have Hawaii in order to help us get our share of China.” China, which had been Alfred Mahan’s original bugbear and perceived threat in 1893, had since been humiliated in a catastrophic war with Japan. European powers were now in hot competition to divide the prostrate Chinese coast into spheres of influence, and American expansionists were half-crazed with jealousy that the United States was apparently seeking no spoils.

  McKinley, to Hoar’s satisfaction, expressed a repugnance equal to his own for the notion of establishing an empire in the Orient. But there was still another factor to consider that weighed against such idealism. “Well, I don’t know what I shall do,” said McKinley. “We cannot let those Islands go to Japan. Japan has her eye on them. Her people are crowding in there. I am satisfied they do not go there voluntarily, as ordinary immigrants, but that Japan is pressing them in there, in order to get possession before anybody can interfere.” The president cited the instance of supposed “immigrants” marching off their ship in lockstep, like soldiers, after which Hawai‘i [the Dole government] cut off further arrivals, and the Japanese responded by sending a warship, which McKinley had warned them to withdraw. But according to the president, “Japan is doubtless awaiting her opportunity.”22

  No credible evidence has ever surfaced that Japan had injected occupying troops into Hawai‘i under the guise of immigrant labor. It was true, however, that relations between the Hawaiian Republic and Japan had become very tense over the labor issue. In 1894 the U.S. Congress passed the Wilson Act, which discontinued the domestic two-cent sugar bounty and restored Hawai‘i’s advantages under the reciprocity agreement. The Hawaiian sugar industry entered another boom, but the country was now angling toward annexation, and they had to be mindful of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act, which meant finding a new source of labor. Naturally enough the plantations looked to Japan, and there came such a flood of Japanese laborers that by 1896, they comprised almost a quarter of the country’s population. In alarm the Hawaiian government tried to stem the tide, at one point refusing to allow some twelve hundred Japanese to land. The two countries traded sharp notes, Japan lodged a claim for damages against Hawai‘i, sent the powerful cruiser Naniwa back to Honolulu to remind the upstart country who they were dealing with, and protested to the United States when the annexation question came back to life that Hawai‘i as an American territory would complicate satisfaction of their claims.23

  What neit
her McKinley nor Hoar was aware of was that Japan was on the cusp of something much more drastic than monitoring the situation for an opening. The Japanese minister in Washington, Toru Hoshi, secretly cabled Foreign Minister (soon to be prime minister) Shigenobu Okuma, “strictly confidential … I desire to submit to your consideration … that taking advantage of the present strained relations between Japan and Hawaii a strong naval armament should be at once dispatched for the purpose of occupying the islands by force.”

  Hoshi was both irascible and a master of dissimulation; he had already made statements to the American press that the Hawaiian government had trumped up the recent immigration troubles as a publicity stunt to promote annexation to the United States, and that Japan had no interest in acquiring the islands. Okuma took the same stance in Japan. However, American naval analysts—not least among them Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt—were not interested in Hoshi’s truthfulness or lack of it. They knew that two powerful, modern battleships, the Fuji and the Yashima, were being built for the Japanese under contract by British yards. Fuji was almost ready to sail, and Roosevelt put out a call to American diplomats worldwide to monitor and report her movements. If the Japanese seized Hawai‘i, their fleet would have a forward coaling station that would leave California vulnerable to attack,24 and Captain Mahan’s worst nightmare would be realized. With a seven-thousand-mile cruising range on eleven hundred tons of coal, the new Japanese battleships could steam from Hawai‘i, reach the U.S. West Coast with nearly three thousand miles of operational steaming time to wreak destruction and still have fuel to return. Fuji and Yashima were only the first two of an envisioned class of six battleships, although they were the only two completed before being superseded by a still larger and deadlier design. They simply could not be allowed to operate from Hawai‘i. Okuma, not ready to precipitate war with America, brushed aside Hoshi’s prodding, but Roosevelt and the naval high command were already drawing up contingency plans on how to meet the Japanese threat. The crux, repeatedly, was Hawai‘i.

  Hoar voted for annexation but he did so in light, he said, of the Teller Amendment, which attempted to put a brake on the imperialist tilt of the coming conflict with Spain by affirming the self-determination of people in territories acquired in the course of the war. It did not save Hoar from bitter recrimination, from Democrats and antiempire Republicans, who accused him of speaking one way and voting the other.25

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  The ignobility of the Hawaiian coup is a matter of history. It is also necessary, however, to look at the islands’ subsequent annexation in light of those imperialist times. Even Kalakaua had perceived that Hawaii was too weak to exist indefinitely as an independent nation, with no army or navy and no resources or population to defend itself. He believed that the islands must pass to either Japan or to the United States. His experience with the duplicitous, bullying sugar boys, weighed against the royal courtesies extended to him by Emperor Mutsuhito, led him to prefer the latter, indeed to offer his niece, Princess Ka‘iulani, in a marriage alliance to the imperial house. Japan’s performance as an imperial power over the next half century, however, gives sufficient hint of what horrors Hawai‘i was spared at not becoming a Japanese protectorate.

  As the legal drama played out in the United States, back in Hawai‘i the government and pro-American element extended themselves in welcoming American soldiers and sailors en route to the Philippines. While waiting for word about annexation, four extra coal-storage yards were allocated to American use; the Dole government offered a hundred volunteers to fight in Cuba; Princess Ka‘iulani offered the grounds of her ‘Ainahau estate for the recreation of American soldiers and sailors; pending annexation, the government offered its alliance. The Hawaiian government agreed to an American suggestion to pay the Japanese $75,000 to satisfy their claims and go away. The anxious wait ended on July 13 when the long, slender White Star liner Coptic entered Honolulu Harbor. Even before coming to rest she ran up signal flags: ANNEXATION. The Americans were delirious.

  Lili‘uokalani returned from the mainland on August 2, and ten days later shuttered herself, family, and retainers into Washington Place during the ceremony at the palace that rendered her country an American territory. Before a huge throng, the U.S. minister to Hawai‘i, Harold Sewall, read aloud the Joint Resolution of Hawaiian annexation. Sanford Dole then rose for a short address, concluding, “I now, in the interest of the Hawaiian body politic and with full confidence in the honor, justice and friendship of the American people, yield up to you as representative of the Government of the United States, the sovereignty and public property of the Hawaiian Islands.” Minister Sewall accepted the transfer and the two bands, the (formerly Royal) Hawaiian and the one from the USS Philadelphia, together played “Hawai‘i Pono‘i” as the national flag was lowered. Tears flowed freely.

  In its stead a thirty-six-foot Stars and Stripes was hoisted up the central flagpole of the ‘Iolani Palace, to the accompaniment of “The Star Spangled Banner.” At this, several members of the Hawaiian band abandoned their instruments and quit the scene, unable to continue.26

  20. Angry Lu‘aus

  With annexation in 1898 the capture of paradise was accomplished. Hawai‘i entered the United States with a healthy balance sheet; in each of the last two years of the junta, the value of exports approximately doubled the value of imports. Sugar production, after the McKinley disability was removed, increased to 220,000 tons.

  Princess Ka‘iulani, the heiress presumptive, died on March 6, 1899, at the age of only twenty-three. She had been horseback riding near Kawaihae with friends, scorned to wear a raincoat, and was drenched in a storm. The cold she caught deepened into pneumonia; she was returned to her Waikiki estate where she lingered for several weeks, the pneumonia no doubt exacerbated by a lack of will to live. Among the mourners who filed into ‘Ainahau to view her laid out in white silk was Dowager Queen Kapi‘olani,1 who at sixty-four had only three months to live herself. When Ka‘iulani died the presumptive heir to the Hawaiian crown became Prince David Kawananakoa, Kapi‘olani’s nephew, who had been betrothed to Ka‘iulani, who nicknamed him “Koa” for the strong, beautiful native wood.

  Nearly three years after Ka‘iulani’s death, on January 6, 1902, Kawananakoa married Abigail Campbell, daughter of the redoubtable Kuaihelani Campbell of the Ku‘e Petitions. Their wedding had been in a California hotel, but they received more proper recognition after they returned home, and Abigail was requested to preside over a Mardi Gras ball. The brothers had been favorites of the ex-queen, and Lili‘uokalani herself, bearing a hefty casket, was waiting as Abigail arrived for the occasion. “I may no longer be queen,” she announced as the crowd gathered, “but I have jewels fit for a queen.” As Abigail stood breathless Lili‘u fitted her with a diamond-studded girdle and pearl rope, and then to gasps she lifted the Hawaiian crown from the casket and settled it on her dark tresses.2 As the hopes of the House of Kalakaua passed to the House of Kawananakoa, Abigail produced three children in the next three years to carry forward their claims, a son bracketed by two daughters. When not starting a dynasty Kawananakoa was active in starting the Hawaiian Democratic Party, and in 1900 became the first royal prince to take part in a presidential nominating convention. The son, Edward David Kalakaua, shouldered the mantle at the age of four when David died in 1908.3

  Hawai‘i’s position as a U.S. territory gave it a voice, albeit a nonvoting voice, in the Congress. While it was Prince David who established their family as the dynasty-in-waiting, it was his brother Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalani‘anaole who represented the islands on the mainland. However, the first elected Hawaiian representative to Congress was in fact the ubiquitous gadfly, Robert Wilcox. When he entered Congress in 1900, instead of submitting the usual résumé, he handed in a short autobiography describing himself as fearless and indefatigable, a champion of the poor. The U.S. Congress was a body in which windy self-promotion was usually considered a virtue, but it was not welcome from a newcomer w
ho had to use the “colored” facilities, and his term was not a success.

  Prince Kuhio, who unseated Wilcox in the 1902 election, was leading an interesting life. During the year he served in prison, his fiancée, Elizabeth Kahanu Ka‘auwai (younger cousin of Kapi‘olani and niece of Queen Emma’s chaplain Hoapili), sang to him daily and brought him food to keep his spirits up. Upon his release they married and traveled abroad, usually received as royalty, but he also volunteered and fought in the Second Boer War in South Africa. While touring Europe, in one happy aftermath of the Germans’ behavior to his aunt at Queen Victoria’s jubilee, a German duke made an unkind observation about their skin color; Kuhio, drawing upon his superior rank and boxing skill, punched him out.

  Back in Hawai‘i, seeing that the Democrats were historically not very successful in matters pertaining to Hawai‘i, and not finding the collection of home-rule sort-of radicals under Wilcox very useful, Kuhio joined the Republican Party. It was a keenly astute move; they were delighted to have the legitimacy of a royal prince in their midst, and they accommodated him in a number of projects. He organized the territorial counties and made certain to staff the civil service positions with natives—a convenient marriage of the ancient watchfulness of the ali‘i over his people with modern political patronage. Kuhio died in his tenth term, on January 7, 1922, all too aware that much work remained to restore the stature of the Hawaiian natives. “Stick together,” he enjoined a friend from his deathbed, “and try to agree to the best of your ability to meet the most important problem: the rehabilitation of our race.”4

  Kuhio died with some hope that he had helped achieve that, although his bill to establish Hawaiian statehood, which was the first, went nowhere. He had better expectations of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, an attempt to undo the evils of the Great Mahele of 1848. In the preceding few years leases on about a quarter of a million acres had expired, and for native rehabilitation Hawaiians of 50 percent blood or more were allowed to apply for homesteads. Wise to the flaws of the Mahele, they would lease the land and not be able to turn around and sell it. To overcome opposition, productive cane fields were excluded from homesteading, and for environmental protection (rather a first for the islands), forest reserves were excluded as well. Kuhio did not live to see the act misfire on about the same scale as the Mahele, this time because kanakas were given leases to inferior and often remote and unproductive lands. To the Anglo governor of the territory, however, the act removed the pressure for the government to step in and further “help” anybody. To his way of thinking, the kanakas had had land made available to them, and if they could not improve their lives by it, that was their own fault.5