Today, three days before Joe Biden takes office, is a good time to take a moment to reflect on one of the more shameful episodes in American foreign policy-the overthrow of the sovereign government of Hawaii on January 17, 1893. To mark that anniversary, the #stampoftheday is a 3-cent stamp, issued in October 1937, that pictures King Kamehameha I, who united the islands as one kingdom in the early 1800s.
The story is important because it was the start of what Steven Kinzer, author of “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” has called “a 110-year period during which Americans overthrew fourteen governments that displeased them for various ideological, political, and economic reasons.”
The islands, which westerners originally called the Sandwich Islands, were “discovered” in 1778 by James Cook. In the early 1800s, several hundred American missionaries, most of them from New England, went there. Many soon realized that while natives had been growing sugar for a long time, they had never refined or exported it. So they began establishing sugar plantations on land taken from natives. But high tariffs kept the sugar from being truly competitive in the US and therefore limited the growth of the plantations. Nevertheless, over the coming decades, the missionary planters became an increasingly important force in the islands, which the US had recognized as a sovereign nation in 1846.
In 1874, King Kalakau, signed a long-discussed agreement giving the US Navy control of Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. In return, the US agreed to reduce tariffs on Hawaiian sugar for seven years. With this agreement acreage being used for sugar production expanded tenfold and within a decade planters controlled about 80 percent of all arable land on the islands. The planters and their missionary allies pressed the government for increasingly beneficial concessions. In 1887, a group comprised many of non-natives used threats of force to get King Kalakaua to accept the so-called “Bayonet Constitution,” which greatly reduced his power and disenfranchised about two-thirds of the island’s residents.
In 1890, the US passed a tariff (sponsored by William McKinley who would be elected president six years later) that made it much harder for the Hawaiian sugar growers to sell their sugar in the U.S. Things got even more complicated in 1891 when Kalakaua died and was replaced by his sister Liliuokalani began working on a replacement to the Bayonet Constitution that would restore the monarch’s power and give only Hawaiian subjects the right to vote.
The planters, Kinzer said in an interview with Democracy Now, “were in a panic. They were about to lose their fortunes. And they asked themselves what they could do to somehow continue to sell their sugar in the U.S. They came up with the perfect answer: ‘We’ll get into the U.S. How will we do this?’ Well, the leader of the Hawaiian revolutionaries, if you want to call them that…went to Washington. He met with the Secretary of the Navy. He presented his case directly,” to President Benjamin Harrison, who had defeated President Grover Cleveland in 1888. “And he received assurances that the U.S. would support a rebellion against the Hawaiian monarchy.”
Things came to a head in early 1893. The existing legislature refused to approve the queen’s plan. Liliuokalani decided she would instead enact it by royal fiat on January 14, 1893. Although she ended up deferring action, the rebels moved forward. On January 16, they gathered with about 1,000 supporters, including many members of a recently disbanded all-white militia. They were supported by the U.S. minister to Hawaii who ordered the troops from the nearby naval ship to land in Honolulu, ostensibly to make sure Americans were safe and their property was protected. That evening, the queen watched as over 120 marines and sailors marched past her palace with a rapid-fire Gatling gun and set up camp a few hundred yards away. The next day, several leading conspirators went to the government offices next to the palace and proclaimed they were in charge, until they could convince the United State to annex Hawaii. The new provisional government was headed by Judge Sanford B. Dole, a first cousin of the man who would make Hawaiian pineapples ubiquitous in America.
Even though she had several hundred soldiers under her command, on January 17th, Liliuokalani decided to step down. She issued a statement, which said, in part: “I…solemnly protest against any and all acts done against myself and the Constitutional Government of the Hawaiian Kingdom by certain persons claiming to have established a Provisional Government of and for this Kingdom.” She added that “I yield to the superior force of the United States of America…until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representatives and reinstate me…as the Constitutional Sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.”
Stevens wrote to the US Secretary of State: “the Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.” But U.S. President Grover Cleveland who had defeated Harrison and returned to the Presidency in March 1893, balked. He appointed a special commissioner who determined that Liliuokalani had been illegally overthrown and that most Hawaiians opposed the coup, Cleveland urged that the monarchy be restored. But the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, which was headed by pro-annexation Senators, balked and the provisional government established a Republic of Hawaii in July 1894. And in 1898, McKinley, who had been elected president in 1896, agreed to annex Hawaii, which then became a US territory until1960, when it became the nation’s 50th state.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the so-called Apology Resolution, which “acknowledge[d] that the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States and further acknowledge[d] that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands, either through the Kingdom of Hawaii or through a plebiscite or referendum.” However, the measure did not call for reparations or a formal vote on sovereignty.
The U.S., Kinzer noted, would go on to overthrow 13 other governments over the next 100-plus years. In exploring common threads among those actions, he noted, “sometimes we hear the phrase ‘Business follows the flag.’ But in my research, I found that it’s actually the opposite. First comes the business operations, then comes the flag. It’s the flag that follows business.”
As it takes office, the new Biden Administration (and all Americans) will have to grapple with this sad legacy, and the distrust it has engendered around the world.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.