Unfamiliar Fishes

by Sarah Vowell

  He says that he used to be a performer and cruise director for the Matson cruise ships, that he used to sail around the world. I ask him if he knew Don Ho. He says he did. I ask him if he could outsing Don Ho.

  “Well, nobody thought that he had an exceptional voice,” he says, laughing. “There were a lot of singers during his time that had more beautiful voices, but he was more of an entertainer than a singer.”

  I ask him if he has ancestors who signed the petitions against annexation. He says he does and finds them in the photocopies of the petitions Professor Cruz brought with her. He finds the names of his great-grandmother, his great-grandmother’s brother, and their uncle: Elena Mihilani, Moses Nahia, and Henry Maialoha.

  It must be a nice feeling, I say, to know that the names are stored in the National Archives.

  “Yes,” he says. “This is why Congress rejected the treaty. And since the treaty was rejected, then McKinley and his little elites decided to go through the route of a joint resolution, which is not lawful.”

  After the treaty died, a dizzying series of events in 1898 allowed the annexationists to sneak in the acquisition of Hawaii. To wit, the Spanish-American War: on February 15, the battleship Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. Warmongers exploited the “attack” (which may have been an explosion resulting from an accidental fire on board) and the U.S. declared war on Spain in April, supposedly, according to President McKinley, “to put an end to the barbarities, bloodshed, starvation, and horrible miseries now existing [in Cuba].”

  On May 1, Admiral George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron invaded the Spanish port of Manila in the Philippines. Dewey decimated the entire Spanish squadron in six hours. This victory, now nearly forgotten, was such a big deal at the time that the city of New York threw Dewey a big parade and erected a triumphal arch in his honor in Madison Square in 1899. Torn down in 1901, the only evidence left of the admiral and his arch is a bar called Dewey’s on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Fifth Street, which displays a replica of the arch behind the bar and a wall mural of the Battle of Manila Bay. When I talked my friend Sherm into having lunch with me there, he wondered, “Were all late-nineteenth-century naval battles really fought over big city sports-bar naming rights?”

  Dewey’s triumph in Manila’s harbor and the subsequent struggle to subdue the Philippines exaggerated Hawaii’s importance to America as a coaling station and potential naval base. The U.S. already had the rights to use Pearl Harbor to resupply its ships with coal but the imperialists who had been lusting after the islands for years used the war in the Philippines as a pretext for snatching all of Hawaii once and for all. In fact, two months before Dewey’s victory, McKinley had already confided in an aide, “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny.”

  On May 4, three days after the Battle of Manila Bay, a joint resolution to annex Hawaii was introduced in the House of Representatives.

  “A joint resolution,” scholar Keanu Sai told me, “is normally what the Congress of the United States does to say, ‘We recognize this day is Joe Blow Day.’ ” He’s right. H.J. RES. 374, for example, was “A joint resolution authorizing the President to proclaim the week of April 1, through April 7, 1980, as ‘National Mime Week.’ ”

  The introduction of the flimsy, barely legal joint resolution as a way of getting around the fact that President McKinley could not have achieved a proper treaty of annexation because he didn’t have enough votes in Congress revived the congressional debate over American imperialism. Most if not all of the legislators opposed to annexing Hawaii objected to inviting the islands into the American family because of the large population of native Hawaiians and Asian field-workers. South Dakota Senator Richard F. Pettigrew worried, “If we adopt the policy of acquiring tropical countries, where republics cannot live, we overturn the theory upon which this Government is established.”

  Representative James “Champ” Clark, Democrat of Missouri, spun a (to him) nightmare scenario in which annexing Hawaii would lead to Hawaiian statehood down the road. He asked, “How can we endure our shame when a Chinese Senator from Hawaii, with his pigtail hanging down his back, with his pagan joss in his hand, shall rise from his curule chair and in pigeon English proceed to chop logic with George Frisbie Hoar or Henry Cabot Lodge?” (As it happened, Hawaii’s first senator after statehood in 1959 was Hiram Fong, an Oahu native of Chinese descent, though Fong had pretty much the exact same haircut as Barry Goldwater.)

  On June 15, the House passed the annexation resolution, 209 to 91. That day, the group that would come to be called the Anti-Imperialist League held a meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston “to protest against the Adoption of a so-called imperial policy by the United States.” Boston attorney Moorfield Storey warned, “When Rome began her career of conquest, the Roman Republic began to decay. . . . Let us once govern any considerable body of men without their consent, and it is a question of time how soon this republic shares the fate of Rome.”

  Buried there in the Spanish-American War timeline, in between the surrender of the Spanish colonial island of Guam to the United States on June 20 and the July 17 surrender of Santiago in Cuba (thanks in part to the Rough Riders, including Theodore Roosevelt, who resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy to volunteer as a soldier), the Senate passed, and McKinley signed, the joint resolution annexing Hawaii to the United States on July 6.

  On August 12, peace with Spain was declared and a ceremony was held at Iolani Palace, where the American flag was raised and Sanford Dole was sworn in as governor of the new Territory of Hawaii.

  Ex-president Grover Cleveland wrote to his old secretary of state, Richard Olney, complaining, “Hawaii is ours. As I look back upon the first step in this miserable business and as I contemplate the means used to complete this outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair.”

  In 1900, William McKinley invited his former assistant secretary of the Navy, a newly minted war hero, to be his running mate. When McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became the president of the United States.

  For annexing Hawaii, McKinley was memorialized in Honolulu by a statue. Sanford Dole presided over the statue’s dedication in 1911. It’s still standing in Honolulu on the lawn of McKinley High School, the alma mater, incidentally, of Hawaii’s first senator, Hiram Fong. The bronze McKinley holds in his hand a rolled up paper engraved with the words “Treaty of Annexation” even though no such treaty exists.

  Kekuni Blaisdell, the activist whose grandmothers worked for Queen Liliuokalani, drove me over to McKinley High to look at the statue. Pointing to the words “Treaty of Annexation,” Blaisdell shook his head and sighed. “The lie continues,” he said.

  Blaisdell told me that one of his grandfathers, a ship’s captain, worked for the company that laid the telegraph cable across the Pacific, maintaining the cable between the West Coast of the United States and Hawaii. When the cable linking Hawaii to the Philippines was complete, President Theodore Roosevelt was given the honor of transmitting the very first round-the-world message on July 4, 1903. He wished “a happy Independence Day to the U.S., its territories and properties.”

  In a speech Roosevelt delivered in Chicago in 1905, “The Strenuous Life,” TR distilled his personal and political philosophy into an argument for “the law of strife.” Addressing his fellow Americans, Roosevelt proclaimed, “If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.” Regarding the acquisitions of 1898, he said, “We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.” Furthermore,

  The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues . . . all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of world’s work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from w
hich the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish flag. These are the men who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only national life which is really worth leading.

  The overcivilized sissies Roosevelt was complaining about, the men shrinking from the nation’s “new duties,” included the Anti-Imperialist League. In 1899, the Anti-Imperialist League issued its official platform calling for a return to the oldfangled virtues of the “land of Washington and Lincoln.” The platform condemned the annexation of the Philippines, claiming the new colonial policy “seeks to extinguish the spirit of 1776 in those islands.” The league, cribbing from the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed, “We maintain that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

  On March 7, 1900, Henry Cabot Lodge delivered a speech in the Senate in which he took up the crucial question of whether or not the imperialist developments of 1898 were a betrayal of the ideals of 1776. “Our opponents put forward as their chief objection that we have robbed these people of their liberty . . . in defiance of the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence in regard to the consent of the governed.”

  The evil genius of Lodge’s argument is that he bypasses the question of whether the United States has received the consent of the islanders now governed by smacking down the notion that consent of the governed is even possible. He exposes the twofaced irony of the Declaration, pointing out that a healthy percentage of English colonists circa 1776 were loyal to the British crown. “Did we ask their consent?” he said of the decision to sever ties with England. “Not at all.”

  Then, after mentioning the founders’ obvious disenfranchisement of white women and inhabitants of African descent, Lodge calls Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s author, “the greatest expansionist in our history” for negotiating the Louisiana Purchase. Lodge wonders, “Did he ask the consent of the thirty thousand white men at the mouth of the Mississippi, or of the Indians roaming over the wide expanse of the Louisiana Purchase? Such an idea never occurred to him for one moment. He took Louisiana without the consent of the governed, and he ruled it without the consent of the governed.”

  Lodge goes on to mention that after the Civil War, “we forced the Southern States back into the Union” without their say-so; that the U.S. bought Alaska from the Russians without asking the permission of anyone living there; and that in his home state of Massachusetts, women and children are disenfranchised, thus restricting registered voters to one fifth of the state’s population—and only half of those registered voted in the last election.

  In short, Lodge asserts, American government derived from the consent of the governed “has never existed.”

  I’m not sure what is more disturbing—that the annexation of the Philippines, along with Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam in 1898 is a betrayal of the principle of self-government established in 1776 or Lodge’s allegation that the principle of self-government was, is, and always will be a delusion.

  Lodge even went so far as to claim that the question of whether it is constitutional for a “domestic and dependent nation” to be absorbed within the United States had been settled by the Supreme Court way back in 1832, when Chief Justice John Marshall declared, in Worcester v. Georgia, that the Cherokee were a sovereign nation within American boundaries. Of course, Lodge doesn’t bother to mention that the executive branch failed to enforce that ruling when the president authorized the Trail of Tears.

  When I was spending time with those Hawaiians whose ancestors signed the petitions against annexation that were sent to Congress, I couldn’t help but think back to the fruitless petition the Cherokee also sent to Congress to protest their removal. “Our only fortress is the justice of our cause,” said the petition signed by my ancestors. Alas, having read the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, I know that a sturdier fortress than a just cause is an actual fortress.

  In January 1899, Carl Schurz of the Anti-Imperialist League gave a speech in Chicago three weeks after Spain officially ceded to the United States the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Schurz suggested that citizens should reread the farewell address George Washington delivered when his second presidential term was ending in 1796. Washington warned Americans of the dangers of meddling in foreign affairs. The old general cautioned his fellow citizens to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

  Schurz shared this fear of militarism. Among his many worries about the colonial corner the country had just turned was exactly what Roosevelt, Lodge, and Mahan had called for: “a material increase of our army or navy” to protect the new island acquisitions against “any probable foreign attack that might be provoked by their being in our possession.” Then, having predicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forty-two years later, Schurz prophesies the entire twentieth-century arms race. He fears that American armaments would be determined “by the armaments of their rivals” if someday, like the European empires, “We, too, shall nervously watch reports from abroad telling us that this power is augmenting the number of its warships, or that another is increasing its battalions . . . and we shall follow suit,” eventually requiring “larger armies and navies than we now have.”

  As I write this, more than a century after Schurz gave that speech, Schurz’s nightmares, and Alfred Thayer Mahan’s dreams, have all come true. The American military installations in Hawaii alone include, besides the original object of military desire, Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Fort Ruger, Fort Shafter, Hickham Air Force Base, Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Pacific Missile Range Facility, Pohakuloa Training Area, Schofield Barracks, and Wheeler Air Force Base, as well as the headquarters of the United States Pacific Command, whose self-proclaimed “Area of Responsibility (AOR) encompasses about half the earth’s surface, stretching from the waters off the west coast of the U.S. to the western border of India, and from Antarctica to the North Pole.”

  ONE MEMORIAL DAY, I went up to Honolulu’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. More than 30,000 American casualties from World War II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam are buried there in the Punchbowl volcanic crater.

  The Hawaiians call Punchbowl Puowaina, meaning “Hill of Sacrifice,” for it is thought that back during the kapu system, men and women who had been executed for violating the kapu were taken up to Punchbowl, where their bodies were cremated. Once Kamehameha established the monarchy, he mounted his cannons on the crater’s rim, firing them off on ceremonial occasions. It’s also the hill Hiram Bingham climbed on his first day in Honolulu in 1820, the place he stood surveying his new home, marveling at the ocean and Diamond Head before him, feeling like Moses gazing upon the Promised Land, spying what had been the “battle-field of. . . the last victory of Kamehameha” and vowing “it was now to be the scene of a bloodless conquest for Christ.”

  Congress provided funding to build a military cemetery in 1948. It is filled to capacity. On Memorial Day, each grave is decorated with an American flag. That is the fruit of Alfred Mahan’s ideas and Theodore Roosevelt’s ideals—30,000 American flags flapping in the wind above American remains in the crater of an extinct Polynesian volcano.

  At Punchbowl’s Memorial Day service, after a speech by Hawaii’s senator, the Japanese-American World War II veteran (and McKinley High alumnus) Daniel Inouye, after performances of “Amazing Grace” and taps, the national anthem and “God Bless America,” after the Hickham Air Force Honor Guard shot a twenty-one-gun salute and the Hawaii Air National Guard’s 199th Fighter Squadron flew over our heads in the Missing Man formation, then the Royal Hawaiian Band, the Pearl City High School Choir, and the Honolulu Boy Choir joined together to play and sing “Hawaii Pono‘i,” Hawaii’s state song. It was written by King David Kalakaua as a hymn to the power of King Kamehameha the Great: Na kaua e pale/Me ka ihe (Who guarded in the war/With his spear).

  After the ceremony, I took a seat on one of the buses t
hat were waiting to take attendees back downtown. Big American flags slapped the windows as we pulled away from the cemetery and I thought about another, sadder, song about Kamehameha I heard one morning on the island of Lanai.

  I was eating breakfast with my sister Amy and nephew Owen at a Four Seasons resort. Not the Four Seasons at the beach, the one done up in “Hawaiian-Polynesian-Mediterranean styles with an Asian influence.” We were at the Four Seasons in the Lanai hills decorated, for some reason, like an old English country estate. We had walked up there from Lanai City to see an old Norfolk Island pine tree, a gift from King David Kalakaua to Walter Murray Gibson that locals saved from the resort’s bulldozers by raising a stink.

  So we were sitting there on the set of Brideshead Revisited eating eggs and Portuguese sausages and the song “Hawaii ’78” starts playing in the background. Before the singer breaks into English, he wails something in Hawaiian. I can pick out ‘aina, the word for land.

  Owen asked, “Is this Iz?”

  I might have marveled that this blond, blue-eyed eight-year-old mainlander—Baby Custer I used to call him—recognizes the voice of the late Hawaiian crooner Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole, affectionately nicknamed Iz. But it wasn’t Owen’s first trip to Hawaii. Anyone who has been to any of the islands for more than fifteen minutes and hasn’t heard Iz’s cover of “Over the Rainbow” at least five times is not paying attention. In fact, on Owen’s first trip to Hawaii, when I took him to the Big Island to cheer him up after he was diagnosed with the family wheat allergy my sister and I enjoy, the three of us were in line at a seaside resort’s breakfast buffet, undoubtedly steering clear of the pastry selection, when the opening ukulele chords of Iz’s “Over the Rainbow” came on the PA system just as it had every other time we left our room. A man behind us in line sighed noisily, complaining, “If I had a dollar for every time I heard this song in Hawaii, I could afford to stay another night in this damn hotel.”