How the States Got Their Shapes Too

by Mark Stein

  Lili’uokalani’s position was legally sound, and she won the right to nominate new ministers. Since, under the “bayonet” constitution, the monarch could not dismiss a cabinet member after the nominee had been approved by the legislature, Lili’uokalani chose carefully those who would, in effect, run the country. She and her advisers also began to draft a new constitution that would extend greater voting rights to nonwhite citizens. That task was sidetracked, however, when the legislature rejected her cabinet nominees. A tug of war began, ostensibly over nominee negotiations but, as Lili’uokalani knew, really over something far more profound. Hawaii’s wealth had enriched and empowered the white population, but, as Lili’uokalani wrote, “sooner or later [it will] … also elevate the masses of the Hawaiian people into a self-governing class.”

  Indeed, Lili’uokalani’s struggle roused the nation’s nonwhite residents. In response, the white residents formed a Committee on Public Safety, which approached the U.S. commissioner to Hawaii for protection. He in turn instructed the commander of the USS Boston, at anchor in Pearl Harbor, to dispatch its Marines. Lili’uokalani later recalled:

  At about 2:30 PM, Tuesday [January 17, 1893], the establishment of the Provisional Government was proclaimed, and nearly fifteen minutes later Mr. J. S. Walker [president of the Legislative Assembly] came and told me “that he had come on a painful duty; that the opposition party had requested that I should abdicate.” … Since the troops of the United States had been landed to support the revolutionists by the order of the American minister, it would be impossible for us to make any resistance.

  Later that day, the chairman of the Committee on Public Safety declared to a mass gathering outside the government building that Lili’uokalani had abdicated and that a provisional government would rule until union with the United States was completed.4 Sanford Dole had been selected as president of the provisional government.

  Dole, the son of missionary parents, had been born in Honolulu in 1844. Though he left Hawaii to attend Williams College in Massachusetts and was, for a brief time, an attorney in Boston, he returned to practice law and was elected to the legislature in 1884. Three years later, he participated in the delegation that had maneuvered King Kalākaua into signing the “bayonet” constitution, transferring power to the white minority. Dole became a justice of the Hawaiian Supreme Court that same year.

  Not all white people in Hawaii supported Dole and his colleagues in their quest for annexation, since the 1882 U.S. prohibition of Chinese immigration would be applied to Hawaii, thus ending a main supply of imported labor. On the other hand, the United States had not restricted Japanese immigration. And Japan, as newspapers were beginning to report, was becoming a force to be reckoned with—and was already the nation Hawaii most feared. “The Hawaiian government is now endeavoring to check further Japanese immigration,” the New York Times reported in September 1897, noting that Dole’s government feared “Japanese influence and numbers may become too powerful and possibly overthrow the republic and bring about Hawaiian annexation to Japan.” Previously, the November 1896 issue of Harper’s Monthly had included an article entitled “The New Japan.” It coincided with news reports regarding Japan’s formal protest of American efforts to annex Hawaii.

  But Japan declared it had no intention of annexing Hawaii. “I am instructed by the imperial Government to state most emphatically and unequivocally that Japan has not now and never had any such design, or designs of any kind, against Hawaii,” its foreign minister stated.5 (The United States, when Daniel Webster was secretary of state, had said the same thing.)

  Most likely, opinions in Japan were mixed, as they certainly were in the United States. The New York Times expressed the views of those Americans who opposed the annexation of Hawaii, many of whom also deplored Hawaii’s coup d’état. Three editorials appeared in 1893 alone bearing headlines such as, “To Convey a Stolen Kingdom,” “A Case of Government by the Few,” and “A Shameful Conspiracy.”

  Many other Americans, however, supported annexation. Voicing their views that same year was the Chicago Tribune, arguing in a February editorial:

  The objections made nearly a century ago to the purchase of Louisiana were similar to those made now to the annexation of Hawaii. It was asserted that that territory was a great ways off, that its [Louisiana’s French-speaking] inhabitants were un-American … that it would be impossible to defend in case of war with a foreign country. All those were as naught when weighed against the fact that it was necessary for the United States to own the mouth of the Mississippi. It is necessary now that the United States should have Hawaii for the safety of its oceanic commerce.

  Even at the highest level of leadership, Americans were of two minds about this unprecedented extension of the country’s borders. President Benjamin Harrison had supported it. But he had been defeated in 1892 for reelection by the man he himself had defeated for reelection, Grover Cleveland. President Cleveland opposed Hawaiian annexation. Moreover, he ordered an investigation into U.S. military involvement in the coup d’état, raising the possibility that he might support the return to power of Lili’uokalani.

  Given these uncertainties, Dole expected that the American debate would be long and drawn out. Consequently, he proceeded to turn the provisional government into an official republic, the first step of which was writing a constitution. This entailed defining how Hawaiians would elect their leaders, and that entailed confronting Hawaii’s underlying conflict: power versus race.

  Dole sought guidance from an American constitutional scholar at Columbia University, John W. Burgess, to whom he described the delicate issue:

  Under the monarchy there were two classes of legislators who sat together and who were elected by voters having different qualifications. There are many natives and Portuguese, who had had the vote hitherto, who are comparatively ignorant of the principles of government, and whose vote from its numerical strength as well as from the ignorance referred to, will be a menace to good government.6

  Burgess replied: “I understand your problem to be the construction of a constitution which will place the government in the hands of the Teutons, and preserve it there, at least for the present.” He recommended separating the legislature into a system similar to the American Senate and House of Representatives, but tailored to Dole’s concerns. In addition to maintaining the current voting restrictions, Burgess suggested that the new Hawaiian republic “elect your president by a college of electors, … that one half of those electors should be elected by the voters for the members of the lower house of the legislature, and the other half should be elected by the voters for the upper house of the legislature.” By this method, white residents would garner yet another advantage in determining the nation’s leadership. Burgess closed his letter with some added advice: “Appoint only Teutons to military office.”

  Meanwhile, President Cleveland adjudged that, despite legitimate grievances and policy disputes, the coup d’état that had ousted Lili’uokalani was made possible through the use of American troops that had been deployed without presidential or congressional authorization. Consequently, he sent Kentucky Congressman Albert S. Willis to Hawaii to commence efforts to reinstate the queen, provided she grant amnesty to those who had participated in her ouster. Lili’uokalani was less than enthusiastic about this proviso. “There are certain laws of my government by which I shall abide,” she stated. “My decision would be, as the law directs, that such persons should be beheaded and their property confiscated to the government.”

  After a month of meetings with Willis and her advisers, the dethroned queen revised her view. “I must forgive and forget the past,” she now officially declared. One day later, Willis sent a message to Dole demanding his resignation, along with that of all others in the provisional government. After conferring with his cabinet, Dole sent Willis an official response saying, in effect, come and get us. It was a shrewd move, since even President Cleveland was reluctant to invade Hawaii and oust an ostensible democra
cy headed by white people in order to restore a dark-skinned monarch. Cleveland opted to punt; he submitted the question to Congress.

  Rather than drag on, however, the decision was made rather quickly, following the explosion of an American battleship at anchor in Havana. The sinking of the Maine in February 1898 triggered the Spanish-American War. Three months later, Admiral George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet defending the Philippines, a Spanish colony, in the Battle of Manila Bay. Dewey’s victory demonstrated the need for a permanent American military presence in the Pacific. Eight weeks later, on July 4, 1898, Congress enacted a resolution offering annexation to Hawaii. The islands’ white-dominated government readily accepted.

  In April 1899 President William McKinley appointed Dole to be Hawaii’s first territorial governor. In November Dole’s twenty-two-year-old cousin, James Dole, arrived in the islands and purchased sixty-four acres of government land on which he grew and canned pineapples. Sanford Dole left the governorship in 1903 to accept a presidential appointment as the territory’s federal judge. When he retired in 1915, his cousin James had expanded his operations and was now exporting roughly $10 million of canned pineapples per year.7 Sanford Dole died in 1926, not long after his eighty-third birthday.

  Lili’uokalani remained in Hawaii. The former queen urged her people to accept their future as American citizens. Annexation to the United States brought one immediate improvement for native Hawaiians, in that the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the denial of voting rights based on race or color. Periodically Lili’uokalani traveled to Washington, DC, unsuccessfully seeking government compensation for the loss of her family’s property. She died in 1917 at the age of seventy-nine.

  · · · OKLAHOMA · · ·

  ALFALFA BILL MURRAY, EDWARD P. McCABE, AND CHIEF GREEN McCURTAIN

  Oklahoma’s Racial Boundaries

  I have no doubt that today there are half a million people in the Indian Territory.… A small fraction are full-blooded Indians, another portion are mixed bloods, and a large share of them are white people who are members of the tribe simply by marriage or adoption.… Then, in connection with that, there are a number of negroes.

  —SEN. KNUTE NELSON, OKLAHOMA STATEHOOD DEBATE, 1903

  Oklahoma came close to being two states. The western half, whose residents were primarily white, would have been the state of Oklahoma. The eastern half, whose residents were primarily Indians, would have been the state of Sequoyah—named in memory of the Cherokee who had devised the first American Indian alphabet and, not, presumably, in memory of the fact that a pole had once been erected to display his head because of boundaries he had helped negotiate (see “Sequoyah” earlier in this book).

  In addition, another effort was made to create a different racial boundary. When Indian lands were made available for settlement, a movement was initiated among African Americans to migrate to the new territory (named Oklahoma) in sufficient numbers to constitute a majority of the population. Had the effort succeeded, Oklahoma would have become, in effect, an African American state. But the movement triggered a countereffort to embed white supremacy in the Oklahoma constitution.

  Proposed states of Oklahoma and Sequoyah

  Green McCurtain, “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, and Edward P. McCabe were three of the principal participants in these different efforts to create, in effect, racial boundary lines. Of the three, only McCurtain, a Choctaw, was born and raised in present-day Oklahoma. At the time of his birth in 1848, Oklahoma was part of a region known as the Indian Territory. The Indian Territory was not composed of U.S. citizens with a governor appointed by the president but rather of American Indian reservations, each with its own tribal leadership. McCurtain was forty-four, married, and treasurer of the Choctaw government when his career was profoundly altered by events in Washington. Aspiring settlers seeking land in the West had been pressuring Congress to open up unassigned lands in the western half of the Indian Territory. Americans rich and poor, along with railroads and other corporations, recognized the opportunities available with this land. “Fully a hundred thousand people are intending to rush into Oklahoma, as soon as it is opened for settlement,” the Atchison Daily Champion reported in February 1889. As arrangements with the tribes were completed, the gates opened, and settlers poured into the new Territory of Oklahoma.

  Chief Green McCurtain (1848-1910) (photo credit 40.1)

  McCurtain first surfaced in outside news accounts as a result of his tribe’s agreement with the federal government. The Choctaw Nation bore little resemblance to the tribe that had arrived from Mississippi some sixty years before, as could be gleaned from an 1891 Dallas Morning News article on the land transfer: “Some of the members [of the Choctaw Council] could not speak Choctaw and some could not speak English.… Appointed delegates to Washington to watch the interests of the Choctaws … are Gov. W. N. Jones, Treasurer Green McCurtain, and Thomas D. Ainsworth.”

  The final paragraph of the same news item contained an omen regarding the state of Sequoyah: “It is frequently suggested that the Five Civilized Tribes [the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles] should form a federation for their mutual protection. This is not likely to be done for some time on account of local jealousies. When it is done it will be too late, and only precipitate the transfer of that country to the control of the whites.”

  As it happened, the Five Tribes set aside their jealousies less than two years later when Congress added a clause to its 1893 appropriation for the Office of Indian Affairs. Inserted into the bill in the last few hours before Congress adjourned, the amendment gave the consent of the United States for tribes to divide and deed their lands to individual members. In addition, those Indians who acquired ownership of their share of land would become citizens of the United States. The option was accepted with virtually no debate.

  The seemingly benign amendment regarding land deeds enabled a geographic shift of politically epic proportions. Transferring ownership of Indian land from a tribe to its members would shift the authority to sell the land. From the perspective of Indian leaders, such a shift would be nothing short of divide and conquer.1 In 1896 McCurtain, now the elected chief of the Choctaw Nation, called for a convention of the Five Tribes to plan their opposition. When they met in November of that year, the delegates ultimately agreed to relinquish their tribal form of government and to divide their lands among each tribe’s individual members—on condition that the Indian Territory be admitted as a state.

  It was not a decision easily reached. Very few, in fact, of the delegates who voted in favor of the resolution fully agreed with it—including the man who had initiated the summit, Green McCurtain. “It has come to the point where the Indian must take a decisive step forward or forever be swallowed up and lose his identity,” he agreed, but he opposed the demand for immediate statehood. “Today the Choctaw Indian—and what I say applies equally to the other tribes—is not prepared to have a state or territorial government.… It will result in the red man being outvoted by the white occupants of the territory.”2 McCurtain preferred a gradual implementation of the land shift, to buy time for American Indians to learn how the levers of power worked in white America. Once acclimated, he hoped, Indians would be able to maintain their hold on those levers when the land transition was completed and statehood conferred.

  Even that, he knew, was a huge hope, since those levers of power weren’t always securely fastened. When a proposal for Oklahoma statehood first came before Congress in 1905, the Dallas Morning News showed how they could become unhinged.

  A circumstance in this statehood controversy worthy of remark is the beautiful faith of the Indians that Congress will redeem the promises … made as far back as 1839.… These agreements between the government and the Indians … were not intended to express a fixed policy for all future time but were designed to meet the exigencies of the period in which they were made.

  McCurtain put it differently:

  No Indian can get the better o
f a paleface.… Two Oklahoma palefaces once hunted in my camp. They spent the evening with me and over the fire.… Bill said, “Sam, let’s trade horses—my bay for your roan.”

  “It’s a go,” Sam agreed. “Shake on it, partner.”

  They shook hands. Then Bill said with a loud laugh, “I’ve bested ye this time. My hoss is dead. Died yesterday.”

  “So’s mine,” Sam said, “Died this morn’n. And what’s more, I’ve took his shoes off.”3

  Despite his misgivings, when the Sequoyah Convention for statehood was convened in August 1905, McCurtain joined in, serving as one of its vice presidents. A fellow vice president, representing the Chickasaw Nation, was William H. Murray, soon to be widely known as “Alfalfa Bill” for his urging Oklahomans to grow alfalfa. Murray, however, was not of Chickasaw descent. Born to a poor family in Toadsuck, Texas in 1869, he had arrived in the Indian Territory in 1897 as a young lawyer and became involved in the successful election campaign of Chickasaw governor Douglas Johnston. Not long after, he married Johnston’s niece—a social event in Indian society which so emulated white high society that Oklahoma’s Daily Ardmoreite headlined the wedding announcement as “Prominent Young Attorney Secures a Chickasaw Queen.”

  Though Murray was a fellow vice president at the Sequoyah Convention, he privately doubted the effort would succeed. He was not alone. “There is not the faintest chance to get the Indian Territory admitted separately,” Idaho’s Daily Statesman asserted. “If it were necessary to create a state where Indians would exercise such great influence the experiment might be tried, but in this case it is not necessary and the country will never consent.” Murray, for his part, was not aiming to create an Indian state. His goal was to organize future voters in the Indian Territory in order to strengthen that constituency in the future state Murray anticipated—one that would combine the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory.4