As so often occurred under settler (and other forms of) colonialism, the colonizer’s drives and discourse of good works proved to be forces of destruction for indigenous people. Although many Americans did sincerely strive to save the souls and improve the economic plight of the Hawaiians, settler colonialism took their land and cultural imperialism undermined their way of life. Even as they sought to convert and uplift the islanders, the same predominantly New England families “gradually converted the independent kingdom into a sugar plantation economy in which many of the Hawaiian commoners became landless peasants and destitute urbanites.”36 Immigrants could more easily assimilate into this new society while Hawaiians were marginalized and impoverished.
The Sweet Taste of Annexation
As the Americans took charge of the land, the emergence of a fabulously profitable sugar industry paved the way for the US political takeover of the islands. Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico had preceded Hawai’i as profitable sugar islands. Beginning in 1875 with the elimination of trade barriers through reciprocity agreements, the Hawaiian sugar industry experienced “an explosion of growth,” as the planters were able to sell their product duty free to a tariff-protected US market. “Due to the Great Mahele, the Gold Rush, the American Civil War, and the Reciprocity Treaty,” Ronald Takaki explains, “the Hawaiian sugar industry experienced meteoric success.”37
The Hawaiian sugar industry flourished behind “latifundia-like colonization by a small elite holding huge parcels of real estate.” Five dominant firms, held or managed by a tight-knit group of elite intermarried families, “controlled the banks, hotels, utilities, and above all the land,” Bruce Cumings explains. By 1911, journalist Ray Stannard Baker declared Hawai’i was not merely a tropical paradise but also “a paradise of modern industrial combination. In no part of the United States is a single industry so predominant as the sugar industry in Hawai’i.”38
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the sugar plantation owners began to import foreign labor to do the backbreaking work in the sugar fields, work that was considered inappropriate for white people to perform themselves. In four years after the reciprocity agreement of 1875, 2,300 immigrants arrived in the islands from Asia, initially mostly from China, to work in the sugar industry. Over the ensuing decades the sugar elites extended their importation of low-cost labor to Japan, Korea, and the Philippine Islands.39
While American elites exploited cheap labor for massive profits from Hawaiian sugar cane, expansionists and naval enthusiasts coveted Hawai’i for strategic reasons. Hawai’i had featured prominently in Secretary of State William Seward’s targets for US expansion but he had been confined to the purchase of Alaska and the Midway Islands, located some 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu. By the 1880s another ardent expansionist secretary of state, James G. Blaine, viewed “the Hawaiian islands as the key to the dominion of the American Pacific.”40 By the late nineteenth century the naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, and other architects of the “large policy” of US imperial expansion viewed Hawai’i—and especially the coveted port at Pearl Harbor—as essential to the rise of the United States as an Asian power. Hawai’i and other islands provided the coaling stations and trans-Pacific trade centers that were crucial to Pacific expansion and establishment of the “Open Door” to trade with China.41
With backing in Washington, the Americans who had taken control of the land and established highly profitable sugar and fruit plantations, set their sights on terminating the monarchy and seizing direct political control of the Islands. As with the “Vanishing American” back on the mainland, expansionists argued that the Hawaiians were dying out and that the United States had already established de facto control. An 1874 tourist guide proclaimed, “If our flag flew over Honolulu we could hardly expect to have a more complete monopoly of Hawaiian commerce than we already enjoy.”42
Under these circumstances, Americans argued it made no sense for the backward indigenes to retain even titular authority over the Islands. By the late nineteenth century, Social Darwinist sentiment bolstered a wave of overseas colonialism and imperialism. The Western powers engaged in a “scramble” for Pacific outposts that mirrored the scramble for Africa. Europeans as well as Americans undertook the “white man’s burden” of spreading civilization by force over “primitive” peoples perceived as unable to keep pace with the modern world. “Whether the Hawaiians were doomed because of their paganism, their devotion to their chiefs, their want of private property, their laziness, their lack of sanitation, or, finally, their opposition to haole, in the end they were just naturally doomed,” Osorio explains.43
In the 1880s, as the American settler colonial elites steadily increased land holdings, they moved toward seizing direct political control of the Hawaiian Islands. As they successfully recruited new settlers to relocate in Hawai’i, the Americans continued to “remonstrate for the sale of government lands.” US settler colonials secured government approval of land acts in 1884 and 1885 that “augmented the alienation of lands from Hawaiians.”44
Even as they took possession of colonial space, the white elite experienced “chronic anxiety” over the uncertain political future of the islands. Any potential threat to the windfall profits of the sugar industry “struck terror” within the tight circle of haole elites. Strategic ambitions married economic self-interest. Mahan emphasized “over and over, in crucial moments the primary importance of Hawai’i to America’s global strategy.”45
The American elite led by Lorrin Thurston and Sanford Dole formed the Hawaiian League, a “shadow organization” that plotted “insurrection” at a meeting in Dole’s home. Thurston and Dole were prominent men from well-established missionary families; both were attorneys and both had been elected to the Hawaiian legislature. They and their followers in the Hawaiian League secretly vowed “to persuade the dusky monarch into subjection.” After overthrowing the monarchy, the haole elite would have complete control of the islands and could orchestrate their eventual annexation by the United States.46
In July 1887, the haole initiated the seizure of power by forcing King Kalakaua to sign the “Bayonet Constitution” in which the monarch turned over executive powers to the oligarchy of planters and businessmen, making them the de facto rulers of the islands. Mirroring the spread of Jim Crow segregation on the mainland, the new constitution disenfranchised the indigenes as well as Asian immigrants. It “was the very first time that democratic rights were determined by race in any Hawaiian constitution,” Osorio notes. The United States at this time also claimed an “exclusive right” to build and maintain a coaling station at Pu’uloa (Pearl Harbor) in conjunction with a renewed reciprocity treaty. Hawaiians had vigorously opposed and successfully fought off previous American efforts to take control of the coveted harbor.47
The Kanaka Maoli bitterly protested and resisted the coup but the elitecontrolled militia took to the streets with bayonets in place. Prepared to shed blood if necessary, the coup plotters had imported 900 rifles from San Francisco. A “white crowd that at times functioned as a vigilante mob” threatened to hang a small group of ambivalent American advisers to the King who stood in opposition to the gutting of the monarchy.48
The Hawaiians defied the colonial stereotypes of primitive, indolent islanders by holding mass meetings, signing petitions, attempting to work within the colonial legal system while at the same time plotting conspiracies against it. “One of the most persistent and pernicious myths of Hawaiian history is that the Kanaka Maoli passively accepted the erosion of their culture and the loss of their nation,” Neone K. Silva points out. “The myth of nonresistance was created in part because mainstream historians have studiously avoided the wealth of material written in Hawaiian.”49
The undermining of the language of the Kanaka Maoli was an important component of the settler colonial project. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the haole disparaged the Hawaiian language “as inadequate to the task of ‘progress.’ “ The Ameri
cans subsequently outlawed teaching of Hawaiian in the schools and established English as the official language. In the absence of Hawaiian sources, a “colonial historiography” subsequently evolved, rendering the indigenous people “nearly invisible in the historical narratives of their own places, while making the actions of the colonizers appear to be the only ones of any importance.”50
As they strove to contain the indigenous Hawaiians, the haole elite moved to terminate the monarchy and to annex Hawai’i to the United States. In 1889 Blaine appointed John Stevens, a close associate from their native Maine and an avowed annexationist, as US minister to Hawai’i. In January 1893 Stevens launched a coup, reporting back to Washington, “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.” US marines landed, ostensibly to protect property, as Stevens declared Hawai’i a protectorate under the benevolent guidance of the United States.51
American settler colonialists in Hawai’i, joined by US officials and journalists on the mainland, demonized the reigning monarch Lili’uokalani on at least three levels: as a monarch, as a woman, and as the representative of a backward race. Editorial cartoons invariably depicted “Negroid features and black skin, signifiers to Americans that the queen was of a race unsuitable to rule.” Lili’uokalani refused to give up the throne, however, and used the Yankee legal structures as a tool of resistance. The Queen attempted to work through the political system to promulgate a new constitution affirming the authority of the monarchy. She proved so nettlesome that the Americans finally seized the monarch’s land, put her on trial, and placed her under house arrest in 1895.52
The indigenous hui (associations) anchored grassroots resistance, backed by the native language papers, but the Hawaiians “had no arms of consequence” whereas the haole were “armed to the teeth.” An attempt at armed resistance in 1893 would have amounted to a “ritualized sacrifice.” Arriving back in Maine, Stevens crowed that the “semi-barbaric monarchy” had been rendered “dead in everything but its vice.”53
Stevens spoke too soon, however, as the US-led coup became a contentious issue as a result of ambivalent opposition within the United States. A large segment of American public opinion perceived that “the United States did wrong by Hawai’i in the 1893 revolution even when judged by 1890s standards and practices.”54 The takeover had been too blatant thus undermining the imperial project and delaying annexation to a more propitious moment.
In a reflection of the triangulated framework typical of settler colonialism, metropolitan authority attempted to rein in the settlers. President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, condemned US imperialism in Hawai’i and rejected the treaty of annexation submitted by his Republican predecessor. “The provisional government owes its existence to an armed invasion by the United States,” Cleveland flatly declared, yet he made no effort to restore the Hawaiian monarchy.55 Cleveland’s anti-imperialism like that of the nation he represented proved ephemeral.
On July 4, 1894, with opposition fading and an economic depression setting in at home, the oligarchy proclaimed the existence of the new Republic of Hawai’i. The United States proffered immediate recognition, with Great Britain and most European countries following suit. Thousands of Kanaka Maoli protested the hoisting of the American flag outside the Iolani Palace and continued to sign petitions against the dissolution of the monarchy.56
Amid the manic energies unleashed by the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States annexed Hawai’i by joint resolution of the Congress, which required only a simple majority rather than the two-thirds required in the Senate for approval of treaties. Annexation guaranteed continuing access to US and global markets thus assuring the continuation of high profits for the haole owned sugar industry. Annexation also mollified the “large policy” strategists—Roosevelt, Mahan, and Lodge—who convinced President William McKinley to annex the islands in the name of “manifest destiny.” Roosevelt had long been demanding that the United States should seize control of Hawai’i “in the interests of the white race.” In 1897 he declared, “If I had my way we would annex those islands tomorrow.”57
Even as the United States went to war in April 1898 ostensibly to liberate Cuba and other Spanish possessions, the oligarchy worked assiduously to foreclose the possibility of any actual democracy in Hawai’i. The haole elite admitted to McKinley that in the event of a referendum on annexation in the islands that they would lose. “The files they so carefully left behind,” Tom Coffman points out, “are littered with the theme of preventing a free and open vote.”58
Unlike other colonies taken from Spain, which would require indirect strategies of colonial control, the United States annexed Hawai’i, making it, as one congressman put it, “the only true American colony.” In the debate over annexation, proponents emphasized that Hawai’i was a US settler society colonized by an American Christian and economic elite, with an established constitutional government, and widespread use of the English language. In other words, unlike the other “primitive” and racially suspect possessions, annexationists averred, Hawai’i had already achieved a level of civilization and control that made it ripe for territorial status and eventual statehood.59
In a reflection of continuity over the longue dureé of American colonialism, imperialists outmaneuvered ambivalent opponents of annexation by using the history of Indian dispossession against them. The so-called anti-imperialists who argued that the United States was abandoning its tradition of advancing republicanism and self-determination were indulging in “a strange forgetfulness of the facts of American history,” an Iowa congressman reminded them. After all, “Every American State was made by dispossessing the native Indians.”60
Although indigenous Hawaiians were incapable of governing themselves, they were not “savages” but rather “barbarians of a milder and more progressive type,” Lodge assured his colleagues. The Massachusetts senator pointed out that physically the Hawaiians had features “resembling the Europeans” and were “olive” in color rather than “yellow like the Malay nor red like the American Indian.” Hawaiian women, he added, were a “dazzling vision of sparkling eyes, pearly teeth, bright flowers, and bare legs … her voluptuous bust rounding in graceful curves.” As Lodge’s florid description attests, feminine representations could provide “an important justification for U.S. political and cultural hegemony.”61
As occurred throughout the history of American and other settler colonialisms, the colonizers of Hawai’i rationalized their destruction of indigenous cultures by celebrating their own inherent goodness in advancing progress, under God. The manifestation of aggression under the guise of good works reflects pathologies identified by Sigmund Freud and later analyzed by Jacques Lacan (see Chapter 1). As the Americans were advancing Christian civilization and progress, the settler takeover was ultimately a good thing and enjoyed the blessings of Providence. Similarly, the application of American place names to streets, buildings, and sites, as well as the association of the takeover of a foreign government with the Declaration of Independence, offer examples of what Mary Louise Pratt described as “anti-conquest” rhetoric—”strategies of representation” in which imperialists “seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert hegemony.”62
Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i
As the elite US minority seized the land and controlled the politics and economy of the islands, Hawai’i appeared to be a classic colonial state. Hawai’i, however, functioned not only as a colonial state but also as a distinctive settler colonial state comprised overwhelmingly of Asian settlers imported in large numbers to perform the labor on the sugar, coffee, and pineapple plantations. Following the arrival of the first major contract labor group of Chinese in 1852, the sugar planters imported thousands of Portuguese, Japanese, Filipino, and Korean laborers. As Asian contract laborers settled in Hawai’i in large numbers, the indigenous Kanaka Maoli became further marginalized.63 The large influx of Asian settlers— “made possible by U.S. se
ttler colonialism”— became the majority population on the islands. The early Asian settlers “were both active agents in the making of their own histories and unwitting recruits swept into the service of empire.”64
In sum, US colonialism created an Asian settler colonial state in postcolonial Hawai’i. In an astonishingly rapid demographic transformation, US-sponsored Asian settler colonialism in Hawai’i quickly dwarfed the indigenous population. A census conducted in 1872 found the island comprised of 86 percent Hawaiians and another 4–5 percent of half-Hawaiians. By 1890, as a result of the rapid influx of Asian laborers and settlers, Kanaka Maoli comprised only 38 percent of the population, with part-Hawaiians comprising another 7 percent. The number of American settlers steadily increased yet they comprised a mere 2 percent of the population even as they dominated the islands politically and economically.65
Japan, a rising world power in the wake of industrialization and the Meiji restoration, sharply opposed the US takeover of Hawai’i. The Japanese protested and dispatched warships to Hawai’i. These actions aroused racially charged American concerns about rising Japanese power in the Pacific. Alarm over the “Japanese menace” in Hawai’i undercut anti-imperial discourse in the United States while spurring congressional approval of the annexation of Hawai’i. As with the history of continental settler colonialism, racial formation married imperial ambitions and economic self-interest in the US takeover of Hawai’i.66
While Japan proved unable to impede US annexation, Japanese immigrants continued to flood into Hawai’i. By the beginning of the twentieth-century Japanese workers had become the largest foreign group in Hawai’i. Americans remained concerned that “the Japs” were “getting too numerous” in the Hawaiian Republic.67 The oligarchy nonetheless sought to exploit the Japanese labor for the sugar industry even as they determined to fend off, as Dole put it, “the desire on the part of the Japs to control Hawai’i.” Accordingly, the haole elite reinforced policies of “systematically granting extraordinary rights to immigrant whites while systematically denying those rights to Japanese and other Asian immigrants.”68
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