Cleveland withdrew the treaty, pending an investigation. He sent Congressman James H. Blount to Hawaii to look into the overthrow. Upon arrival in Honolulu, Blount lowered the American flag the Dole administration had raised.
Native political organizations, including the Hawaiian Patriotic League, submitted petitions to Blount, and a plea to pass along to Cleveland lamenting, “The fate of our little kingdom and its inhabitants is in your hands.”
Blount reported back to the president a number of troubling facts, most notably that a majority of native Hawaiians opposed American annexation and were adamant about wanting their queen back in power. Ultimately Blount concluded that the American Minister had colluded with the architects of the coup and sent American troops to back the revolution.
Based on Blount’s findings, Cleveland submitted a message to Congress in December 1893, noting,
But for the lawless occupation of Honolulu under false pretexts by the United States forces, and but for Minister Stevens’ recognition of the provisional government when the United States forces were its sole support and constituted its only military strength, the Queen and her Government would never have yielded to the provisional government, even for a time and for the sole purpose of submitting her case to the enlightened justice of the United States.
Cleveland proclaimed, “I shall not again submit the treaty of annexation to the Senate for its consideration.”
The Cleveland administration sent a request to the Dole government to restore the queen to the throne. The Dole administration replied, “We do not recognize the right of the President of the United States to interfere with our domestic affairs. Such right could be conferred upon him by the act of this government, and by that alone, or it could be acquired by conquest.” By which they meant that the only way Liliuokalani was regaining her throne was at gunpoint. Cleveland passed the buck, turning the matter over to the Congress.
Congress held hearings about the Hawaiian situation chaired by Senator John Tyler Morgan, Democrat of Alabama. The Morgan Report, as the committee’s findings became known, contradicted the Blount Report. On the subject of the restoration of Queen Liliuokalani, the Morgan Report proclaims, “When a crown falls, in any kingdom of the Western Hemisphere, it is pulverized, and when a scepter departs, it departs forever.” It goes on to conclude that the American people would not “sustain any American ruler” in restoring any monarch “no matter how virtuous and sincere the reasons may be that seem to justify him.”
Thurston, quoting that passage to one of his cronies, surmised in a letter that “it may be taken as the definite crystallization of the sentiment of Congress on the subject.” In other words, the American Congress was never going to send troops to restore the queen. The Dole oligarchy was safe.
Still, the Provisional Government men realized that Cleveland would not budge on annexation. They would have to wait until at least the end of the president’s term to hand over Hawaii to the United States. Accepting that fact, they needed to hunker down and establish a more permanent government. When it came time for the oligarchs to frame a constitution for their new country, Lorrin Thurston wrote Sanford Dole a letter on March 10, 1894, with his thoughts on the subject. It reads so much like a long Randy Newman song sung from the point of view of an uppity, powerful white man delighting in his own self-importance that I can’t peruse Thurston’s words without hearing Newman’s piano accompaniment twinkling in my head. Thurston writes, “I hope that those who are drafting the constitution will not allow fine theories of free government to predominate over the necessities of the present situation.” He counsels against free speech because that would only encourage the native opposition: “To treat them with forbearance and courtesy is like trying to disinfect leprosy with rose water.” He casually dismisses the need to guarantee a trial by jury, which had only been a bedrock legal principle in the English-speaking world for, oh, nearly seven hundred years. (When one of Thurston’s fellow revolutionaries in 1887 bragged to the Hawaiian Gazette that the descendants of the men behind the Magna Carta had settled in Hawaii, apparently that did not mean they wanted to actually abide by the Great Charter’s holiest guarantee.)
Thurston simply points out, “We may get into such a condition that all trials will be a farce.” You know, the sort of farce where a jury of an accused’s peers finds against the interests of the oligarchy.
Freedom of the press? “I feel that the power to suppress the revolutionary press and to deport conspirators are the key to the present situation,” Thurston concludes.
Thurston also touches on the idea of requiring a loyalty oath to those participating in the constitutional convention. He sees two advantages in this prerequisite. First: “To finally impress upon the world, and more particularly the Kanaka [i.e., native] mind the fact that monarchy is pau [finished].” Second: “To so far as possible shut out from participation in the reorganization of the government all those who are not with us.”
He was proven wildly correct in his second assumption. The vast majority of the native minority who were allowed to vote refused to pledge an oath of loyalty to a government they despised, thus cutting themselves out of the political process.
And what were they to call this new, ridiculous country? Thurston proposed, “I think that whatever else it is called it should have the word ‘Republic’ in the name.” He wanted Hawaii to be called a republic without it actually being one.
Also: “I do not think that under the existing conditions we are safe in leaving election of President to a popular vote.”
Regarding the possibility of female suffrage: nope. After all, “Even in liberty-loving Massachusetts over one half of the population is disenfranched.” (Though in a letter to Dole later that month, he changes his mind about this, adding that women’s suffrage “has grown on me.” He sees the advantage of beefing up the puny white minority with “a large number of the lady teachers” and “the wives of nearly all the prominent citizens.”)
Finally, voters for senators should be restricted “absolutely to those who can speak, read and write the English language.” In this, Thurston suggests that Dole track down a copy of the new Mississippi state constitution, because this post-Reconstruction Jim Crow masterpiece had figured out innovative ways to deny blacks the right to vote that the Dole government could apply to native Hawaiians. Thurston believes they could go further, refining Mississippi’s requirement that a voter should understand the constitution with a Hawaiian update in which “the voter be able to write correctly from dictation any portion of the constitution.”
Thurston notes, “This limitation of the electorate is of course going to raise a great howl from many of the natives.” Whiners.
In response to the founding of the ironically named Republic of Hawaii, native Hawaiians did organize a counterrevolution. This movement succeeded only in getting Queen Liliuokalani accused of treason. The Dole government locked her up on the second floor of Iolani Palace and coerced her into signing an agreement to abdicate the throne by threatening to execute the royalists who were captured and jailed. In her memoir, Liliuokalani complains, “For myself, I would have chosen death rather than to have signed it; but it was represented to me that by my signing this paper all the persons who had been arrested, all my people now in trouble by reason of their love and loyalty towards me, would be immediately released.”
During the eight months of her incarceration, besides sewing the quilt that is still on display in the room where she was held, she wrote songs as well as an English translation of the Kumulipo, the ancient Hawaiian chant that, as she notes, “chronicles the creation of the world and of living creatures, from the shell-fish to the human race.” In her introduction to the chant’s publication she points out that it was sung to Captain Cook at the temple at Kealakekua Bay. (This is the same temple, by the way, where Henry Obookiah’s uncle had been a priest.) She adds that “connecting the earlier kings of ancient history with the monarchs latest upon the throne this chant is a contr
ibution to the history of the Hawaiian Islands.” It was also a subtle protest against her jailers. Linking the reign of herself and her brother before her back through time to “the time when the heavens turned and changed,” she was taking a stand and, perhaps, mourning the eons of tradition that had been overturned.
IN 1890, THE year before Liliuokalani assumed the throne, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a lecturer at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, published The Influence of Sea Power upon History. Someday someone should write a book entitled The Influence upon History of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, because no book had a greater effect on Hawaii’s fate, except perhaps for Memoirs of Henry Obookiah.
Mahan’s premise was that national greatness depended on sea power—a mighty navy, a robust merchant marine, global commerce, and, in the age of steam, strategically placed insular naval coaling stations. He included case studies on the wielding of naval power by the empires of Rome and Britain.
Mahan had befriended Theodore Roosevelt when he invited the young New Yorker to be a guest lecturer at the Naval War College because Roosevelt had written a book about the War of 1812.
Roosevelt’s lust for naval dominance jibed with Mahan’s own. “It is folly for the great English-speaking Republic to rely for defence upon a navy composed partly of antiquated hulks, and partly of new vessels rather more worthless than the old,” he wrote.
Roosevelt would soon be appointed assistant secretary of the Navy. He and his fellow Republican and best friend, Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, helped spread Mahan’s ideas through Washington’s corridors of power, eventually turning his argument for an imperial navy into the policy of the United States.
In March of 1893, just as the new president, Grover Cleveland withdrew his predecessor’s treaty to annex Hawaii from the Senate, Mahan published an article in Forum magazine titled “Hawaii and Our Future Sea Power.” Hawaii, he wrote, “fixes the attention of the strategist.” He calls the archipelago a location “of unique importance . . . powerfully influencing the commercial and military control of the Pacific.” He concludes that “the American Republic must abandon her isolationist tradition and emulate England’s rise to greatness through the acquisition of an overseas empire.”
In a letter to his sister at the time, Roosevelt lumped in Cleveland’s failure to snatch up the islands with procrastination over building a canal in Central America. He wrote, “It is a great misfortune that we have not annexed Hawaii, gone on with our navy, and started an interoceanic canal at Nicaragua.”
In 1895, Senator Lodge gave a series of foreign policy speeches in the Senate in which he discussed naval power and the acquisition of Hawaii, bringing Mahan’s ideas about expanding America’s empire at sea into the congressional record. America’s interests, he claimed, demanded Hawaiian annexation. On March 2, 1895, Lodge bellowed of Hawaii, “Those islands, even if they were populated by a low race of savages, even if they were desert rocks, would still be important to this country from their position. On that ground, and on that ground alone, we ought to control and possess them.”
Hawaii was just the sort of outlying island Mahan had written that a great nation needs to refuel and resupply its navy. But Mahan had always linked commercial trade with military might as the two key components to world power. That the Hawaiian Islands “have a great commerce and fertile soil,” argued Lodge, “merely adds to the desirability of our taking them. The main thing is that those islands lie there in the heart of the Pacific, the controlling point in the commerce of that great ocean.”
Then, practically plagiarizing Mahan, Lodge continued: “The sea power has been one of the controlling forces in history. Without the sea power no nation has been really great.” Further parroting Mahan, Lodge explained that “Sea power consists, in the first place, of a proper navy and a proper fleet; but in order to sustain a navy we must have suitable posts for naval stations, strong places where a navy can be protected and refurnished.” He concludes, “If we are ever to build the Nicaraguan Canal, it would be folly to enter upon it if we were not prepared to take possession of those islands.”
The Republican Party platform in 1896 included United States control of Hawaii and the construction of a Central American canal, also controlled by the U.S. The GOP also expressed sympathy for “the heroic battle of the Cuban patriots against cruelty and oppression” as well as favoring “the continued enlargement of the navy and a complete system of harbor and seacoast defenses.”
Once the Republican William McKinley was elected, Lodge convinced the president-elect to hire his friend Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the Navy.
Meanwhile, Queen Liliuokalani, now released from her palace prison, traveled to the United States to lobby against annexation once again. On a train from California heading east, she marveled, “Here were thousands of acres of uncultivated, uninhabited, but rich and fertile lands. . . . Colonies and colonies could be established here. . . . And yet this great and powerful nation must go across two thousand miles of sea, and take from the poor Hawaiians their little spots in the broad Pacific.” She had a point, but it doesn’t take a graduate of the Naval War College to notice you can’t exactly park a battleship in Denver.
In March of 1897 the queen attended William McKinley’s inauguration in Washington. She wrote of the parade, “I saw and intensely enjoyed the grand procession.”
I wonder what she would have thought if she had known, witnessing that inaugural parade, that 112 years later, the first Hawaiian-born president of the United States would be inaugurated and in his parade the marching band from Punahou School, his alma mater (and that of her enemies), would serenade the new president by playing a song she had written, “Aloha ‘Oe.”
Roosevelt, the new assistant secretary of the Navy, gave a Mahanian address at the Naval War College in Newport on June 2, 1897, calling for a great navy because “no national life is worth having if the nation is not willing, when the need shall arise, to stake everything on the supreme arbitrament of war, and to pour out its blood, its treasure, and tears like water rather than submit to the loss of honor and renown.”
Two weeks later, McKinley, egged on by Roosevelt and Lodge, signed a treaty of annexation with three representatives of the Republic of Hawaii, one of whom was Lorrin Thurston. The president submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification.
In the coming months, native Hawaiians rallied to the cause of defeating the treaty’s passage. The Hawaiian patriotic clubs, Hui Aloha Aina for Women and Hui Aloha Aina for Men, began a mass petition drive, their members fanning out around the islands, calling meetings and gathering signatures to protest annexation.
Reporter Miriam Michelson of the San Francisco Call witnessed one such meeting in Hilo on the Big Island on September 22, 1897. Michelson described a speech given by one of the leaders of the movement, Emma Nawahi, widow of the recently deceased lawyer, legislator, and newspaperman Joseph Nawahi. Mrs. Nawahi addressed her countrymen, asking for their signatures. She said:
The United States is just—a land of liberty. The people there are the friends—the great friends of the weak. Let us tell them—let us show them that as they love their country and would suffer much before giving it up, so do we love our country, our Hawai’i, and pray that they do not take it from us.
Our one hope is in standing firm—shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart. The voice of the people is the voice of God. Surely that great country across the ocean must hear our cry. By uniting our voices the sound will be carried on so they must hear us.
They did. According to the National Archives, where the Hawaiian patriotic leagues’ petitions are stored, they collected more than twenty thousand native signatures. Four Hawaiian delegates carried the petitions to Washington, D.C., and, along with Queen Liliuokalani, presented the documents to the U.S. Congress.
The queen submitted her own protest to the Senate, stating, “I declare such a treaty to be an act of wrong toward the native and part-native people of Hawai
i . . . [and] an act of gross injustice to me.”
The Hawaiians were successful in lobbying lawmakers to defeat the treaty. On February 27, 1898, the treaty was defeated in the Senate when only forty-six senators voted in its favor.
A couple of weeks before the annual Kamehameha Day celebration in 2010, I accompanied my friend Laurel, the ex-blackjack dealer/missionary descendant/researcher, to a meeting of the Hawaiian Independence Action Alliance Project organized by Lynette Cruz, an activist and professor at Hawaii Pacific University. This was the same group who marched down Ala Moana Boulevard on the fiftieth anniversary of statehood, carrying the signs that said “We Are Not Americans.”
Cruz and her comrades were planning to commemorate the 1897 petitions by making hundreds of signs to display on the Iolani Palace lawn. Their goal was for each name on the petitions to get its own sign.
“We are here to honor our kupuna past,” Cruz said, using the Hawaiian word for ancestors to describe the signers of the petitions. “It’s not a protest. This protest was done already in 1897. We’re going to honor them now for the protest they did in 1897, which was successful.”
I joined the dozen or so people who showed up and were sitting around, assembling signs. It was very neighborly, everyone snacking on potluck food, reminiscing about past protests, generally just chatting and joking around.
I met a dapper older gentleman named Tane. When I asked him his last name, he said, “It’s just one name. Professionally, I go by that name. I was a singer at sea.”