by Sarah Vowell
The Primacy plan accomplished nothing but riling up Germany, a country in the process of colonizing part of Samoa. The crown’s judgment was once again called into question.
King Kalakaua’s most damaging scandal was probably his behavior regarding the government license to import opium. The drug had been introduced to Hawaii by Chinese laborers. The Englishwoman Isabella Bird witnessed sugar plantation workers in Hilo smoking it in 1873. Plantation work was hard and monotonous. In his book on plantation life, Pau Hana, Ronald Takaki writes, “A Chinese plantation worker recalled how the cook for his gang would bring their hot lunches to the field: ‘In the top of the bucket [lunch pail] was a little paper or envelope with the dope in it. All the men . . . took their dope that way with their dinner.’ ”
Opium became illegal in Hawaii in 1874. Lorrin Thurston recalled of his freshman term in the House of Representatives: “In the 1886 session of the Legislature, a member of the Royal Ticket introduced a bill, at the direct instigation of Kalakaua to license the sale of opium and to sell a license for a fixed sum.” The bill was opposed by the haoles of the Independent or Reform Party, including Sanford Dole, who later described it as “inconsistent with the public welfare.” Still, it passed.
Kalakaua sold the license to import opium to a Chinese merchant for $71,000. The king collected the fee, then failed to give the merchant the license. Then the king charged a second Chinese merchant the same fee; the second merchant wouldn’t pay up until he got the license. When the first merchant asked the king to repay him the fee for a license he never received, the king refused and pocketed the money.
All of Gibson and Kalakaua’s mishaps and misjudgments were adding up. In January of 1887 some haole businessmen, led by Lorrin Thurston, formed a secret organization called the Hawaiian League, which Thurston later described as “an outgrowth of a revolt in the public mind of Hawaii against the aggressions, extravagance, and debaucheries of the Kalakaua regime.” Thurston described its genesis:
On the day after Christmas, 1886, as I stood at the front gate of my residence on Judd Street, near Nuuanu, Dr. S.G. Tucker, a homeopathic physician, drew up in his buggy and said: “Thurston, how long are we going to stand this kind of thing?” “What kind of thing?” I inquired. He replied: “The running away with the community by Kalakaua, his interference with elections, and running the Legislature for his own benefit, and all that.” “Well,” said I, “what can we do about it?” “I suggest,” Dr. Tucker answered, “that we form an organization, including all nationalities, which shall force him to be decent, and reign, not rule, or take the consequences.” After some discussion, I said I would consider the idea.
By “all nationalities” Tucker meant Anglo and Saxon—Americans, Brits, perhaps the odd German or Canadian. Thurston goes on to say that that afternoon he went to the house of his law partner and fellow Punahou alum William A. Kinney and discussed Tucker’s suggestion. Kinney, whom Thurston describes as “more belligerent than Dr. Tucker or I,” showed Thurston a book from his library about the French Revolution. “He got the book and pointed out the declaration made by the revolutionists and some of their orders. Among others, one called upon citizens in sympathy with the revolutionists to declare themselves, and requested that all arms be turned in to support the revolution.”
Thurston then started secretly fomenting revolt, recruiting, among others, Sanford Dole, William R. Castle, and Nathaniel Bright Emerson. Emerson, a physician, was, like Thurston, Castle, and Dole, the son of missionaries and a Punahou grad. His evangelist parents founded the Oahu town of Haleiwa on the North Shore, now a hippie surfer hangout; the church they built was renamed after Queen Liliuokalani and still stands across Kamehameha Highway from the famous frozen-dessert stand Matsumoto Shave Ice. Emerson was born in Hawaii and attended Dole’s alma mater, Williams College. He served in a Massachusetts regiment of the Union Army at Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, where he was wounded. He would go on to translate David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities and author a relatively appreciative book about hula called The Unwritten Literature of Hawaii. (Though Noenoe Silva noticed that in Emerson’s copy of the program of hula chants for Kalakaua’s coronation—the one that got its printers charged with obscenity—Emerson’s marginal notes next to a genital-celebration song includes the assessment “smut.”)
The missionary descendants in the Hawaiian League were just as historically minded as Kalakaua. The king was reasserting the Hawaiian past through his patronage of hula and his publication of the Kumulipo, the creation chant linking his own chiefly ancestors all the way back to the planet’s dark beginning, to “the slime which established the earth.” But as a letter published in the May 31, 1887, edition of the haole mouthpiece the Hawaiian Gazette would put it, “Some of the descendants of the men who forced King John to give the English people the Magna Charta are here. The descendants of those who fought on Bunker Hill are with us.” The Magna Carta, the Revolutionary War—these are akin to the Kumulipo in that they are the creation stories of Anglo-American freedom, expressions of the belief that the king is not above the law of the land, the belief that subjects dissatisfied with their king should rebuke him, sever their ties to his throne.
The mission statement of the Hawaiian League, as remembered by Lorrin Thurston, borrows from the Declaration of Independence: “The Hawaiian League is a voluntary organization, organized to secure efficient, decent and honest government in Hawaii. To the securing and maintenance of government of this character, we do hereby pledge our lives, our property, and our sacred honor.” (Though Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, and their coconspirators who signed the Declaration pledged “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” not their property, property being the precise obsession of the Honolulu rebels.)
Sanford Dole: “When the plans became more definite and the support more assured, the league management took measures to arm its members.” They purchased guns from local hardware stores as well as ordering a shipment of Springfield rifles.
In June of 1887, the news broke of Kalakaua’s opium license swindle, and this emboldened the League to embarrass the king into dismissing his cabinet, including Walter Murray Gibson. In his diary Gibson writes, “Rumors of armed mob, purpose to lynch me.” Gibson was forced to flee to San Francisco, where he would die soon thereafter.
Meanwhile, the Hawaiian League held a rally in Honolulu on June 30. The Hawaiian Gazette called it a “great reform meeting” in which “one designing mind” called the Hawaiian constitution a “worthless rag.”
The Gazette reported Thurston’s address to the gathering:
Gentlemen, you and I have been waiting a long time for this day, but it has come. . . . I am here to speak as a Hawaiian. My ancestors came here in the reign of Kamehameha I. I was born and brought up here, and I mean to die here. Hawaii is good enough for me. We all remember the King’s message to the legislature in 1884, recommending economy, and asking that it should begin with His Majesty’s privy purse . . . but it was followed by appropriations enormously in excess of the revenue. . . . It is not sufficient to have the King accept these resolutions; we must have a new Constitution, and must have it now.
Thurston pointed out that if the king and the people agreed to change the Constitution, then that would not constitute a revolution. But another member of the League, Cecil Brown, put forth the ominous claim that “if Queen Victoria were to act as badly as Kalakaua, she would not live an hour.”
Thurston got cracking, writing a new constitution severely limiting the powers of the crown and narrowing voter eligibility. The king was no longer allowed to appoint his own cabinet, and his decisions had to be approved by the cabinet forced upon him. The king was also no longer allowed to appoint members of the House of Nobles. Candidates and voters for the House of Nobles had to own property worth $3,000 or receive yearly incomes of $600; about two-thirds of native Hawaiians of voting age neither owned nor earned that much and so were disqualified from electing representatives in the
upper house of their own legislature. If the king vetoed a bill passed by the legislature, the lawmakers could overrule him with a two-thirds majority. Voters were required to be of Hawaiian or European descent and literate in Hawaiian or a European language, including English.
In other words, the new charter barred the Chinese and Japanese from voting, which was significant, given that they were rapidly becoming the islands’ most numerous ethnic groups. This development, Jonathan Osorio points out, marked “the very first time that democratic rights were determined by race in any Hawaiian constitution.”
On July 6, the League bullied King Kalakaua into signing the paper reducing his office to that of figurehead. The document was nicknamed the “Bayonet Constitution.” If the king had refused to cooperate with his usurpers, Sanford Dole had written to his brother beforehand, “He will be promptly attacked, and a republic probably declared.” The cabinet Kalakaua was forced to accept included Lorrin Thurston as minister of the interior.
Liliuokalani, who was away from home, attending Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebration in Great Britain, would later describe her brother’s depantsing as “the overthrow of the monarchy.” She was right: Hawaiian control of Hawaii was effectively over for good.
Picturing the moment King Kalakaua was coerced into signing Lorrin Thurston’s new constitution, I cannot help but remember the first interaction between Thurston’s grandmother, Lucy, and Hawaiians sixty-seven years earlier: natives paddling their canoes alongside the Thaddeus, passing her a banana through the porthole. She handed them biscuits in return, and they called her “wahine makai,” good woman. She wrote, “That interview through the cabin window of the brig Thaddeus gave me a strengthening touch in crossing the threshold of the nation.”
That cordial, welcoming exchange in 1820 led to this one in 1887, which is all the more frustrating to contemplate because Lucy Thurston’s arrogant, disenfranchising grandson and his coconspirators sort of kind of had a point. If Kalakaua had taken better care of his charge, been more mindful of just how fragile his tiny nation’s independence was, if he had led with restraint and probity, if he had spent less, drunk less, gambled less, steered clear of that petty, greedy opium con, then his enemies would have been unable to swaddle themselves and their undemocratic motives in the mantle of the Magna Carta and 1776.
Thurston, the Bayonet Constitution’s mastermind (and beneficiary), wrote, “Unquestionably the constitution was not in accordance with law; neither was the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Both were revolutionary documents, which had to be forcibly effected and forcibly maintained.”
In the fall of 1887, the Thurston cabinet signed off on the renewal of the reciprocity treaty with the United States, with one significant amendment—Pearl Harbor was ceded to the U.S. to use as a naval coaling station. In other words, within one year, working-class Hawaiians had been denied the right to vote for half the legislature, the Hawaiian king became the puppet of a white oligarchy, and one of the archipelago’s best ports was handed over to a foreign government.
In 1889, an ailing Kalakaua left for California, hoping to revive his health. He died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. His old friend Claus Spreckels attended his deathbed.
At Iolani Palace, Kalakaua’s coffin lay in state in the throne room, draped in Princess Nahi‘ena‘ena’s feather skirt, the skirt that had been woven to symbolize the hoped-for fertility of the Kamehameha line.
LILIUOKALANI WAS SWORN in as queen on January 29, 1891. She was fifty-two. Childless, she named her niece, Princess Kaiulani, as her heir.
When Liliuokalani was sworn in, the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 threatened Hawaii’s livelihood. The reciprocity treaty was still technically in effect. But the McKinley bill, named for its sponsor, Ohio congressman William McKinley, negated Hawaiian sugar’s favored status by canceling all foreign sugar tariffs and subsidizing American sugar at two cents per pound. This development erased Hawaii’s leg up over sugar produced outside the U.S. and made it more difficult to compete with America’s domestic sugar.
To the planters, annexation to the United States—thus making Hawaiian sugar American sugar—seemed like the best fix. The usual haole suspects, once again led by Lorrin A. Thurston, formed a secret organization called the Annexation Club. Thurston, who was scheduled to travel to the States to attend meetings in Chicago about a Hawaiian exhibit at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, made a side trip to Washington, D.C., to investigate the American government’s willingness to acquire Hawaii. President Benjamin Harrison sent Thurston a message via Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Franklin Tracy, who promised, “If conditions in Hawaii compel you people to act as you have indicated, and you come to Washington with an annexation proposition, you will find an exceedingly sympathetic administration here.”
Meanwhile, Queen Liliuokalani had secret plans of her own. In her memoir, she describes receiving a series of visits by wellrespected Hawaiians beseeching her to establish a new constitution. She names Joseph Nawahi as one of her visitors. Nawahi, a Lahainaluna-educated lawyer and newspaper editor who was elected to the legislature in 1872, had been one of the Hawaiians opposing her brother early in his reign, condemning reciprocity as “a nationsnatching treaty” that would cause “the throne to be deprived of powers that it has always held as fundamental.” After the signing of the Bayonet Constitution, Nawahi had joined a new native Hawaiian political association, Hui Kalai‘aina, devoted to amending the loathed constitution and loosening the property requirements so as to allow unfettered suffrage. And so, when Nawahi and others, the queen recalls, “called my attention to the same public need . . . I began to give the subject my careful consideration.” Then, she continues, during the legislative election of 1892, “Petitions poured in from every part of the Islands for a new constitution; these were addressed to myself as the reigning sovereign.” She estimated that the petitions were signed by 6,500, or two-thirds, of the registered voters. “To have ignored or disregarded so general a request I must have been deaf to the voice of the people, which tradition tells us is the voice of God. No true Hawaiian chief would have done other than to promise a consideration of their wishes.”
She wrote a new constitution that would restore the crown’s lost powers and expand her subjects’ voting rights, presenting it to her cabinet on January 14, 1893. The cabinet convinced her to wait a couple of weeks so they could discuss it. A crowd had gathered in front of Iolani Palace and she addressed them in Hawaiian from the lanai, promising to present them with a new constitution soon.
Hearing this news, Lorrin Thurston started consulting members of the Annexation Club. A hundred or so of his cohorts composed and signed an open letter, since lost. In Memoirs of the Hawaiian Revolution, Thurston remembered the gist of it this way: “Since Liliuokalani had announced her intention of subverting the constitution and arbitrarily promulgating a new one, the undersigned declared her to be in attempted revolution against the constitution and government, and pledged their support to the cabinet in resisting her.”
The irony of constitutional revolutionaries complaining about a possible constitutional revolution was lost on Thurston. Moreover, for the queen to present a new constitution to her cabinet was in fact legal according to the Bayonet Constitution—she simply needed the cabinet’s approval, which is why the ministers asked her for time to consider her proposals.
Nevertheless, Thurston organized a “committee of safety” and argued that “the solution of the present situation is annexation to the United States.” He called on the United States Minister to Hawaii, John L. Stevens, to seek the diplomat’s support. Thurston then informed his coconspirators that Stevens had reassured him that the USS Boston, a naval cruiser, was in the harbor and at the ready to land troops “to prevent the destruction of American life and property, and in regard to the matter of establishing a Provisional Government they of course would recognize the existing government whatever it might be.” Meaning, if the committee took control of the govern
ment, Minister Stevens would formally recognize that new government as legitimate.
Dueling mass meetings were held by both royalists and antiroyalists. On January 16, troops from the Boston marched into Honolulu to guard the American consulate. That night the Committee of Safety asked Sanford Dole to serve as the president of the forthcoming new government—which they thought of as a temp job until American annexation went through. Dole balked and asked them if they would consider ousting Liliuokalani and installing her heir and niece, Princess Kaiulani, as the new queen. They refused. The next morning, January 17, Dole accepted.
That afternoon the Committee of Safety occupied the government office building across the street from Iolani Palace while the cabinet ministers loyal to the queen were out trying to secure aid from Minister Stevens, unaware that the diplomat had sided with their opponents. Once Stevens received word that the revolutionaries were in place, he issued a statement on behalf of the U.S. government, recognizing the new provisional government “as the de facto Government of the Hawaiian Islands.”
Upon hearing this news, the queen issued a statement of protest: “That I yield to the superior force of the United States of America, whose minister plenipotentiary, His Excellency John L. Stevens, has caused United States troops to be landed at Honolulu and declared that he would support the said provisional government.”
In other words, Liliuokalani surrendered, but not to her usurpers—only to the American government, and only temporarily. Her statement continues that she will “yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representatives and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.”
That night Dole and his new cabal of administrators met and decided to dispatch a delegation to Washington to lobby for annexation forthwith. Among the travel party: Lorrin Thurston and William R. Castle. They had no trouble convincing President Benjamin Harrison to submit a treaty of annexation to the U.S. Senate. But the treaty was not ratified before the inauguration of Harrison’s successor, the Democrat Grover Cleveland, in March of 1893.