Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (49 page)

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 letter 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.

*   *   *

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.