Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

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  In 1883 Kalakaua allowed himself to be drawn into a new scheme that added more tarnish to his reign, this one for Hawaiian coinage. It was not a bad idea; there were about half a million dollars in paper “silver certificates” circulating in the economy, but the law had been adjusted many times over the years, assigning values and depreciations to the many countries’ coins that were accepted in the islands. People were wondering whether those certificates were actually redeemable for anything. It was Claus Spreckels, to whom the king was badly in debt, and who now held a mortgage as well on Walter Murray Gibson’s Mormon paradise of the Palawai Valley, who came up with a solution: He would mint one million Hawaiian silver coins of various denominations, whose intrinsic worth could not be questioned. They would bear Kalakaua’s profile on the obverse, the Hawaiian arms and motto on the reverse—a capital way to appeal to the king’s ego. For this million dollars Speckels would be paid in government gold bonds bearing 6 percent. And that was after making $150,000 on the deal, because each face-value dollar of silver would cost him eighty-five cents for the metal and the minting. Some of the legislators, including Sanford Dole and William Castle, tried to block it but were unsuccessful. The coins were struck: half a million silver dollars, seven hundred thousand half-dollars, half a million quarters, and a quarter of a million ten-cent pieces. Spreckels then opened a bank in downtown Honolulu to compete with Bishop’s,13 and began laying plans for a Hawaiian National Bank that would be empowered to issue paper money. No one needed to be told who would be in charge of that. Hawaiian minister in Washington Henry A. P. Carter wrote a disgusted and confidential note to Dole: “Probably the next move will be to declare photographs of Mr. Spreckels legal tender for any amount.”14

  More capers over the next two years further eroded the king’s standing with the business interests. A penultimate straw was the elevation of Gibson to the premiership at the end of June 1886, an office for him to hold while he also held the Interior Ministry.15 For many downtown, the last straw was a bribery scandal that surrounded the king with too much smoke for anyone to believe there was no fire. In 1886 the legislature passed a bill to regulate the import of opium, which the religious quarter opposed, but the government saw little harm in allowing the now large Chinese community access to their traditional drug of choice. The newly appointed registrar of conveyances and friend of the king, Junius Kaae, importuned a wealthy Chinese named Aki, who wanted the opium-distributing license, into making a $75,000 gift to the king. However, the opium license went to a second Chinese in consideration of an even bigger gift to the king, and Kaae refused to give Aki his money back. Accepting one bribe would have been bad enough, but this was dishonor even among thieves. Aki went public, and both the British and American representatives reported that, while the government maintained that the king knew nothing of the dealing, public feeling against him on the part of those who wanted governmental reform—and that was most of the commercial element—was reaching the boiling point.

  In November 1886 the nation celebrated Kalakaua’s fiftieth birthday with bonfires, cannon salutes, and glittering balls and luaus. At a commemorative service on November 28 at the Kaumakapili Church (which had come to be known as the commoners’ church, as the Christian ali‘i increasingly claimed Kawaiaha‘o as their own16), Prime Minister Gibson delivered a lengthy homage to the glories of the king’s reign: “Is he not a Father beloved by his children? More than a Ruler revered by his subjects?.… He holds in his hands the sources of their welfare. And does he not shape all his action for the public good? For our King has inspired a great hope abroad, as well as at home, that his island realm was to advance, grow, and be glorified … that he, King Kalakaua, was the appointed man—the man of the Pacific, to lead onward to a higher destiny; to become a successful, beneficent and respected power.” The powerful faction that abhorred Gibson and scoffed at the king would not restrain from vomiting much longer.

  Kalakaua himself marked his birthday by establishing a secret organization, the Hale Naua Society, to promote “revival of the Ancient Science of Hawaii” to stand alongside the acquisitions of modern science from the West. The Western press bemoaned this validation of the “brutal and degraded past.” Actually the Hale Naua was nothing so sinister. Genealogy was the armature of Hawaiian identity, and Kalakaua conceived the organization to preserve that tradition as well as further promote other elements of the native culture; Kapi‘olani’s sister Virginia Po‘omaikelani was made president. But the Western community greeted the news with the darkest foreboding. It would “revive and vitalize the customs and usages of the barbarous and savage past,” glowered the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. But given that Kalakaua had already inflamed the moral haoles with his open embrace of hula, and sponsored legislation that legalized the practice of native medicine, and given that the new society was imbued with some of the perceived hocus-pocus of Freemasonry and limited to people with native Hawaiian blood, suspicions were inevitably aroused.17

  Reversion to heathen barbarity or preservation of indigenous culture was a matter of perspective. But adding the weight of the other events of 1886—the elevation of the despised Gibson to the premiership, the revelations of the latest bribery scandals—was finally enough to set the American and American-Hawaiian group into action. Early in 1887 they formed a secret society of their own, the Hawaiian League. The originator seems to have been Dr. S. G. Tucker, a homeopathic practitioner (perhaps not the best advertisement against native healers), who on Christmas Day, 1886, fatefully reined his buggy to a stop at the front gate of the young lawyer and missionary son Lorrin Andrews Thurston. “Thurston,” he demanded. “How long are we going to stand this kind of thing?” They discussed Kalakaua’s shortcomings, and Tucker put forward the idea of forming a coalition of men who could compel the king to reform, or be deposed.

  Thurston discussed the proposal with others, and they began meeting in January 1887, furtively. It is surprising that they were able to keep their business so secret, as the membership expanded to just over four hundred, many decisions undertaken by a central committee known as the Council of Thirteen, their names never written down although the composition changed. Thurston produced a constitution for the group, which quickly fractured into two camps, one favoring royal reform or else the creation of a republic, the other espousing annexation to the United States. The latter faction was narrowly voted down, which would explain the support for the group in the British community and among some hapa haoles.18

  The Hawaiian League included other missionary scions, such as Sanford Dole and William Castle, who had previously been critical also of the sugar industry’s labor excesses. Another member was N. B. Emerson, who understood Hawaiian well enough to have written “Smut” on that part of Kalakaua’s coronation program describing hula in praise of the body. But Thurston, owing to the throbbing density of his discontent with the status quo, became the gravitational center of the Hawaiian League. He was only twenty-eight, a new member of the legislature, and grandson through union of the families of Asa Thurston and Lorrin Andrews, missionaries of the First and Third Companies, respectively. Like many of his contemporaries he was a product of the Punahou School, sent to the mainland to study law at Columbia before returning to Hawai‘i in 1881, and currently publishing the Pacific Commercial (“revive … the barbarous and savage past”) Advertiser.

  Such an organization needs muscle, which they found in the volunteer militia company called the Honolulu Rifles. After the barracks mutiny of 1873, anything along the lines of a standing army for the kingdom had been allowed to lapse, and by 1886 it had recovered only to the point of having five volunteer rifle companies, in addition to the king’s household guard. They drilled, marched in parades, and were otherwise decorative, and taken together they did comprise a kind of militia that could be called on in emergencies. Formation of the Honolulu Rifles early in 1884 was not thought suspicious. The appointment of Volney Ashford of Canada as its captain and drill instructor
saw them become the class of the field, winning drilling competitions with the other volunteer companies.

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  Much of this ferment early in 1887 was obscured by an important approaching event, the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, to culminate with a spectacular thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey on June 21. Hawai‘i readied a high-powered delegation to attend, with Queen Kapi‘olani at its head, accompanied by Crown Princess Lili‘uokalani and her husband, Governor Dominis; the king’s chamberlain, Curtis Iaukea, to deliver a letter of congratulations from Kalakaua to Victoria, and others. On March 25 the Honolulu Rifles drilled before an audience of the finest—the king, privy council, several legislators, and members of the foreign diplomatic corps and their spouses. The king presented them with a Hawaiian flag, and traded extravagant blandishments with Ashford, now a lieutenant colonel, as the Rifles had expanded into three companies, two American and one Portuguese.

  Packing her clothes into six gigantic koa wood trunks, Queen Kapi‘olani sailed with her contingent on April 12 for Great Britain, via the United States, disembarking in San Francisco and crossing the country courtesy of the railroads. In Washington they were sumptuously feted by President Grover Cleveland, just at the midpoint of his first term, and by his wife of almost a year, Frances Folsom, twenty-seven years younger than he—a circumstance that Kapi‘olani would have well understood.

  Lili‘uokalani moved easily in these circles but the queen, who had not been to the Royal School and spoke imperfect English, was more at sea. This became most apparent once they reached London. The evening before the jubilee celebration the British Foreign Office hosted a reception for visiting royalty; the two women went in different carriages, not knowing that owing to the complexities of protocol they would be routed to different gates. When Lili‘uokalani entered the salon she discovered Kapi‘olani standing unattended, with the room full of ranking dignitaries standing about in some apparent unease. She reached the queen, and once it was clear that the crown princess spoke English, a German grand duchess asked her, “Why does the queen not sit down, that the rest of us may be seated?” Kapi‘olani had not been aware that at that moment, she was the ranking lady in the room. The Cookes’ Boston Parlor training would have been useful to her.

  For the grand service Kapi‘olani selected a velvet court gown heavily trimmed with iridescent blue peacock feathers.19 She and Lili‘u were aware that by European standards their jewels were insignificant. Lili‘u wore in her hair a butterfly of small diamonds; Queen Victoria’s diamond collet necklace totaled 161 carats, and the other royals wore equivalent ensembles, whole parures of matching emeralds, sapphires, and rubies. Lili‘u was taken aback at the sight of “little women who seemed almost bowed down” beneath the weight of them. “I have never seen such a grand display … in my life.”20 But the humble means of their country had no bearing on the reception they were given. In the procession to Westminster Abbey for the thanksgiving service, the coaches bore a majority of the crowned heads of Europe, but Victoria’s Life Guards Household Cavalry escorted only two of them: the queen’s own, and that of the Hawaiians. When thanked, Victoria remarked that it was the least she could do when they had come so far.

  Others were less gracious. At the banquet King Albert of Saxony and the crown prince of Prussia (later Emperor Wilhelm II) objected to being seated next to the Hawaiian queen and crown princess because they assumed them to be Negroes. Not amused, Victoria detailed the Prince of Wales to escort Kapi‘olani, and Prince Alfred the Duke of Edinburgh to attend Lili‘uokalani, whom he knew from his visit to the islands. In her memoirs Lili‘u omitted the entire incident—not the only artful dissimulation in her book—and maintained that she and the future Kaiser Willy were engaged in lively discourse for the duration.21

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  Back in the islands, politics reached a crisis. Gibson realized how vulnerable he was to the American business community, and responded by trying to promote Hawaiian nativism. He sent a tatty embassy to King Malietoa of Samoa on a converted tramp steamer manned by just-released juvenile delinquents, with a proposal to join Hawai‘i in a federation. Malietoa agreed, but the larger result was that Germany, up to then a bystander in Pacific empire building, seized Samoa as a colony. Then various depositions of the opium bribery matter hit the newspapers. By the time the cabinet council met on May 23, the scope and aims of the Hawaiian League hit the open air, and the council passed resolutions to the attorney general and secretary of war to take steps to secure the country. The newspapers reacted with such ferocity that on May 26 the council authorized the attorney general to begin prosecuting them for defaming the king.

  On the night of June 27, Kalakaua called American minister G. W. Merrill to the palace to ask his candid assessment of the situation, and his advice. Merrill told him plainly that the financial maladministration had created monolithic opposition, and that a change of cabinet was imperative to have a hope of salvaging the situation. The king had clung grimly to Gibson’s obsequious services, even to the point of digging artillery emplacements around the palace and doubling the household guard, but now he collected the resignations of his cabinet at one o’clock in the morning.

  The Hawaiian League went from meeting behind closed doors under cover of night to hosting a mass meeting in the Honolulu Rifles armory. Sanford Dole brought the meeting to order; Lorrin Thurston read five specific requirements to be made of the king, beginning with removal of the present cabinet. Charles Reed Bishop, widower of Princess Bernice, attended to read a letter from the king acquiescing in their demands and naming as new prime minister William L. Green, who was first on the League’s list of four suggestions. He was English by birth, an adventurer who had settled in the islands after losing everything in the California gold rush, but his utility to the League was that he could deflect criticism that the bloodless coup was a purely American project.

  The malcontents also wanted a new constitution, but like Kamehameha V before them, knew the obstacles to getting one. They wanted one immediately, and Lorrin Thurston set to drafting one. Volney Ashford, with a squadron of Honolulu Rifles behind him, arrested Walter Murray Gibson and locked him in a waterfront warehouse. He was preparing to hang him when Thurston stepped in and prevented it; within several days Gibson was allowed to sail for San Francisco, “for health reasons.” Thurston, now the interior minister in the new cabinet, was able to edit the old 1864 constitution of Kamehameha V into a new document and have it ready for the cabinet to present for the king’s signature on July 6. Upon reading it Kalakaua discovered that he had not been dethroned, but he had been defanged. Executive authority was no longer his alone but shared with the cabinet. He could still appoint ministers, but not dismiss them except upon a no-confidence vote of the legislature—votes in which the ministers themselves could no longer take part. Manipulation of the cabinet had been an important weapon in Kalakaua’s ability to control the government. So, too, had been his power to appoint members of the house of nobles, and they were now to be elected. The king’s veto power over legislation could now be overridden, and he was removed from any ability to amend the constitution in the future; that was solely the power of the legislature.22

  It was to be sure bitter medicine. He would remain as a constitutional king, but the monarchy as a repository of meaningful power was finished. Kalakaua’s new attorney general Clarence Ashford, brother of the colonel of the Honolulu Rifles, recalled that as the document was read to him, “His Majesty … listened in sullen, and somewhat appalling silence. And then came a general silence.” At length Premier Green asked the king if he approved and would sign it. For some moments Kalakaua seemed to calculate furiously what chance he had of resistance, but with the rebel cabinet within and the Honolulu Rifles without, “his sullen and forbidding countenance … dissolved into a smile as sweet as seraphs wear,” and he signed.23

  The monarchy was maimed, but it survived—unlike Kalakaua’s friend Walter Gibson, who died scarcely six months after his flig
ht to the mainland. He had asked to be buried in the islands, a request that was granted on compassionate grounds. As he lay in state in the courthouse, several of those involved in the coup went to view the body—only to discover that embalming fluid had turned it “black as coal.” Sanford Dole asked his brother George what he thought, and the latter remarked on the propriety that Gibson’s complexion finally matched his soul.24

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  For the circumstances that surrounded it, the constitution of 1887 has become known as the “Bayonet Constitution,” and as odious as it was, worse followed. Soon after his accession, Kalakaua had managed to secure the reciprocity treaty with the United States without having to cede Pearl Harbor. The Americans, however, never ceased lusting after the lochs below Pu‘uloa, and during the decade of the treaty’s life their avarice became harder to conceal. Kalakaua’s man in Washington remained Henry A. P. Carter, son-in-law of Gerritt Judd, who had distinguished himself in winning European acceptance of the original treaty, and who had been on station in Washington now for four years. He had managed to win annual extensions of the treaty since its expiration in 1883, but had seen the American insistence over Pearl harden year by year.