The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  Taft now faced a dilemma. To please the president by going to the Philippines, he might displease Nellie, who yearned for Washington. “I dreaded meeting Nellie,” Taft later wrote. “She met me at the door and her first question was, ‘Well, are we going to Washington?’ ”22 But when Big Bill explained McKinley’s offer, Nellie realized that this executive-branch assignment could put her back on the road to becoming a First Lady, and she enthusiastically recommended that he accept.

  Big Bill was sworn in as governor of the Philippines on the Fourth of July, 1901. Nellie—married to the ruler of an island nation—was thus a First Lady, famed throughout the territory, living on a vast estate and attended to by innumerable servants. Later that year, Roosevelt succeeded the assassinated McKinley. Teddy offered Taft several nominations to the Supreme Court, but he turned them down despite being no fan of the hot and humid climate he now found himself in, as Nellie had no inclination to leave the islands and regress to the life of a justice’s wife.

  On March 27, 1903, an offer came from Washington that suited Nellie’s tastes and ambitions: Teddy offered Taft the powerful cabinet post of secretary of war. Big Bill took stock of his personal skills and wrote Nellie of his concern that he was not qualified: “I do not know how much executive ability I have and I very much doubt my having a great deal.”23 But Nellie felt that a cabinet post was “in line with… the kind of career I wanted for him and expected him to have,” and she got her way.24 Taft wrote, “It seems strange that with an effort to keep out of politics and with my real dislike for it, I should thus be pitched into the middle of it.”25

  EARLY ON THE MORNING of July 14, 1905, the Manchuria steamed into Honolulu harbor. Recalled Alice:

  I was wakened by the plaintive singing voices and musical instruments of the natives who had come out to meet the steamer. It was before Hawaiian tunes and ukuleles had become as hackneyed as they now are. I had never heard anything like it before…. My eyes were open and my head was out of the porthole simultaneously, to see the lovely mass of the island of Oahu lying off-side in the early dawn light, mountains and valleys in cloudy green down to the line of the white beach. The entire population seemed to be on the wharf to meet us and garland us with leis of heavy, perfumed flowers, gardenias and ginger blossoms.26

  Marines from the USS Iroquois fired a seventeen-gun salute, accompanied by “whistles all over the city, on factories, locomotives, and steamers.”27 When Alice appeared on deck, to more cheers, Taft placed a lei about her neck, formally welcoming her to Hawaii.28

  At 7:40 a.m., Alice and Big Bill led the passengers down the gangplank, where the acting governor and the welcoming committee greeted them. Taft and the governor got into the lead horse carriage, with Alice and Nick behind. A dozen carriages moved through crowds held back by U.S. Army troops and local police. A Honolulu newspaper reported, “The outer wharf was crowded with people, who had braved the early morning hours just to catch a glimpse of the great war secretary and the president’s daughter. It must be confessed that Miss Alice Roosevelt was really the cynosure of all eyes. ‘There she is,’ was the general murmur as the cavalcade moved on.”29

  The party drove out of Honolulu on a country road cut through the Nu‘uanu Valley’s moist green mountain walls. They rode past hibiscus flowers, mango trees hanging low with fruit, stands of gleaming green bamboo, white gardenia flowers, and waterfalls leaping off the mountainsides. They continued until they reached the magnificent Pali lookout.

  A local reporter recalled the scene: “A series of ‘Ohs!’ and ‘How wonderful!’ and ‘Would you believe it!’ were heard from all sides. Miss Roosevelt strode over to the rail which marked the beginning of the 1000 foot precipice and gazed in silence over the great expanse of landscape which has been, and was so pronounced yesterday as one of the most beautiful views in the world.”30

  The party returned to Honolulu, where they boarded a train to tour a sugar plantation—the heart of the modern Hawaiian economy. “On the way through the cane [the train] went slowly in order that the guests might see the steam plows at work and the process of planting, irrigating and cutting cane.”31 Japanese laborers served lemonade and cookies and a Hawaiian troupe performed what Alice called “a rather expurgated Hula.”32 Bare midriffs were considered too risqué, so the hula dancers were asked to cover up “in American costume.”33

  By 1:00 p.m. the group was back in Honolulu for a luncheon for 225 guests at a downtown hotel. Alice said she was “nearly suffocated” in thirty to forty leis “reaching from my neck to almost my knees—and for politeness sake I couldn’t take them off.”34

  Taft began his luncheon speech in jovial spirits: “The welcome that we have received today was no surprise, for the reputation of these islands for hospitality is known everywhere. We knew that even before you were annexed.”35 The appreciative audience laughed heartily.

  Just seven years earlier the U.S. annexation had divested native Hawaiians of their kingdom. To the white sugar barons this was a source of amusement; to the native Hawaiians, a tragedy. Hawaii was now the property of pink-skinned Christians, whom the real Hawaiians called “Haoles.” But Big Bill didn’t have to worry about any party poopers at this luncheon: there were no native Hawaiians present. No dark frowning faces of disenfranchised Others would spoil the good time.

  THE HAWAIIANS’ WORLD BEGAN its downward slide when the first White Christian Haole—Captain James Cook—“discovered” the islands in 1778.

  Observers on Cook’s ships wrote that Hawaiians were “above the middle size, strong and well made and of a dark copper colour… upon the whole a fine handsome sett of People [whose] abundant stock of Children promised… a plentiful supply for the next Generation.”36 Microbiologists now know that before contact with Whites, “the Hawaiians were an exceptionally well nourished, strong and vigorous people… who were afflicted with no important infectious diseases [and that] it is now almost certain that Hawaiians in 1778 had life expectancies greater than their European contemporaries.”37 Cook and his crew were the first westerners to behold healthy Hawaiians—and they would be the last. Along with great White civilization, Cook brought the Great White Plague (tuberculosis) to Hawaii. Cook’s sailors had been recruited from the lowest depths of English society, then beset by rampant diseases. Back in England, “more than three out of four deaths were being caused by typhus, typhoid fever, measles, smallpox, bronchitis, whooping cough, tuberculosis and ‘convulsions.’ ”38 Indeed, when Cook shoved off from Tahiti toward Hawaii, more than half of his crew were too sick from venereal disease to work. Upon reaching Hawaii, Cook commandeered a sacred Hawaiian house of worship and converted it into a hospital, where the locals cared for the sick sailors.

  Eventually, Captain Cook sailed away. Seven years passed. In 1786, the French frigate LaBoussole reached Hawaii. The ship’s surgeon observed Hawaiians

  covered with buboes, and scars which result from their suppurating, warts, spreading ulcers with caries of the bones, nodes, exostoses, fistula, tumors of the lachrymal and salival ducts, scrofulous swellings, inveterate opthalmiae, ichorous ulcerations of the tunica conjuctiva, atrophy of the eyes, blindness, inflamed prurient herpetic eruptions, indolent swellings of the extremities, and among children, scald head, or a malignant tinea, from which exudes a fetid and acrid matter…. The greater part of these unhappy victims of sensuality, when arrived at the age of nine or ten, were feeble and languid, exhausted by marasmus, and affected with the rickets.39

  Soon New England whalers and merchants visited the islands. Then American missionaries sailed to save the pagan Hawaiians. Missionary activity assumes the inferiority of its subject; for the missionary to bring civilization and light, there must be uncivilized darkness. As one American missionary wrote, the Hawaiians were “exceedingly ignorant; stupid to all that was lovely, grand and awful in the work of God; low, naked, filthy, vile and sensual; covered with every abomination, stained with blood and black with crime.”40 The missionaries soon forbade the Hawaiians�
�� easy ways: the hula was too sensual; surfboarding—with the half-nude dark-skinned natives exposing themselves as they gracefully rode the waves—was judged indecent. A white sailor who revisited Honolulu in 1825 wrote, “The streets, formerly so full of animation, are now deserted. Games of all kinds, even the most innocent, are prohibited. Singing is a punishable offense, and the consummate profligacy of attempting to dance would certainly find no mercy.”41

  David Stannard of the University of Hawai’i’s Social Science Research Institute estimates that the population of Hawaii in Captain Cook’s time was probably more than a million people. Just two generations later, in 1832, the first missionary census found only one hundred thirty thousand survivors. Missionaries observed an astonishing demographic phenomenon: annual deaths were at least double the number of births, and few Hawaiian children survived their first years of life. But to the American missionaries—who came from a country in the midst of cleansing its own natives—the decline of a non-White race was thought to be God’s will. One missionary wrote that Hawaiian deaths were like “the amputation of diseased members of the body.”42 Added one popular American magazine, “the experience of the Polynesians and of the American Indians has proved that the aboriginal races, under the present philanthropic system of Christianization, [were unable to] change their habits of life, as required by present Christian systems.”43 Missionaries took comfort in the fact that the doomed at least had had the good fortune of Christian conversion. Back in the United States, Mark Twain joked caustically that Hawaiians suffered from “various complicated diseases, and education, and civilization,” and Twain “proposed to send a few more missionaries to finish them.”44

  Like so many colonial adventures, saving souls was ultimately a secondary consideration. Imperialism’s great financial success story was the production of sugar from tropical sugarcane fields. From Jamaica to Jakarta, slaves had toiled under imperialism’s lash to produce this profitable commodity. Haole settlers took note of Hawaii’s fertile soil, constant sunshine, plentiful rain, and easy access to good ports and saw before them a sugar producer’s dream. Large-scale sugar production required high-level financial and government contacts back in the United States. It would be the educated American missionaries who offered Hawaii to Washington and Wall Street.

  In Hawaii there is a well-known saying that the missionaries “came to do good and stayed to do well.” One who did just that was Reverend Amos Cooke. Born in Danbury, Connecticut, and educated at Yale, Reverend Cooke had followed the sun to Hawaii in 1837, where he ran the Royal School to educate the future kings and queens of Hawaii. In 1843, Cooke agreed to sit on the Hawaiian king’s special board as an “unofficial adviser.” This was ethically dubious because the American Board of Missionaries had rules against their missionaries’ serving in government positions. In addition, the king had been Cooke’s pupil.

  Cooke’s first step was getting title to valuable Hawaiian land. As Stephen Kinzer writes in Overthrow, “Buying it was complicated, since native Hawaiians had little notion of private property or cash exchange. They had great difficulty understanding how a transaction—or anything else, for that matter—could deprive them of land.”45

  Ever persistent, Cooke helped convince King Kamehameha III to institute a revolutionary land reform: whoever had money could buy as much land as he wanted. Soon the terms missionary and planter became synonymous.

  In 1851, Cooke—along with fellow missionary Samuel Castle—founded the Castle & Cooke company. It quickly grew to become the third-largest company in Hawaii and went on to become one of Hawaii’s biggest landowners, one of the world’s largest sugar producers, and one of the infamous “Big Five” companies that controlled the Hawaiian government with an iron fist throughout much of the twentieth century.

  Sugar plantations required many workers, and the Hawaiians with their casual ways were considered by the Whites to be poor candidates for hard labor. If Hawaii had been settled in the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, slaves could have been imported. But with changing times, the Whites brought in “contract laborers” from China and Japan who were bound to serve at fixed wages for three to five years.

  The importation of Asian laborers created a demographic challenge. On the American mainland, it was possible to kill Indians, enslave Blacks, and still speak of “democracy” and “spreading freedom” because the majority (understood as White males, women being subordinate) were free. Hawaii was tiny, and relatively few white Haoles had moved there. The small community that came to control the land (about five thousand White Haoles) were soon outnumbered up to twenty times by the combined populations of the native Hawaiians and imported Chinese and Japanese. Therefore, Haoles opposed democracy for Hawaii, realizing that suffrage—even just male suffrage—would produce a government of non-Whites.

  THE NAVY DEPARTMENT described Hawaii as the “crossroad of the Pacific,” a link to the commerce of Asia: “With a supply of coal well guarded at Pearl Harbor, our warships and merchantmen can cross the Pacific at maximum speed, or concentrate at distant points at high speed.”46 The Reciprocity Treaty of 1875—forced down the throats of native Hawaiians—eliminated tariffs on Hawaiian sugar and included a provision that granted the United States exclusive rights to maintain military bases in Hawaii.

  When the treaty was formally approved, Hawaiians took to the streets in protest, just as they had done when the agreement had first been announced; it had taken 220 armed soldiers and eight days to restore order. Now the protests again turned violent and the king requested American protection. The United States provided 150 marines and the protestors were swatted away.

  Sugar exports soared over the next decades, and with great wealth came increased economic power and political influence. A Haole observed, “Nearly all important government positions are held by Americans, and the islands are really an American colony.”47

  Imbued with the belief that only the White man could efficiently rule, the Haoles sought to overthrow the monarchy as a form of Aryan patriotism. Referring to themselves as a “morally righteous group,” the white Haoles founded the Reform Party in 1887;48 native Hawaiians quickly dubbed it the “Missionary Party.” For muscle, the Missionary Party established an all-white vigilante organization, the Honolulu Rifles.

  On July 6, 1887, the Honolulu Rifles seized Iolani Palace and handed King Kalakaua a new constitution. His palace ringed by White soldiers with fixed bayonets, King Kalakaua signed the document that has been known ever since by many Hawaiians as the “Bayonet Constitution,” which reduced him to a mere figurehead with little power.

  The Bayonet Constitution rejiggered voting rights, with new property and income requirements. The result was a total exclusion of Asians as voters and the granting “to whites three-fourths of the vote… and one-fourth to the native.”49 Additionally, the State Department ruled that American citizens could take an oath to support the new Hawaiian Constitution, vote in local elections, and hold office without losing their American citizenship. Nowhere else in the world could American citizens pledge allegiance to and vote in another country while still retaining their U.S. citizenship. This put the real Hawaiians in an impossible situation. Their king was powerless and their government was controlled by white Haoles who—whenever it suited them—called themselves both Hawaiians and Americans.

  BENJAMIN HARRISON WAS ELECTED president in the same year that the Missionary Party gained control of the Hawaiian government. A famous Indian slayer, Harrison ruled at the time Buffalo Bill and Ranchman Teddy were celebrating America’s race wars. The first president to travel across the country entirely over the transcontinental railroad, Harrison believed that the Pacific beckoned as America’s next step west.

  Harrison appointed James Blaine, who for years had promoted the seizure of Hawaii, as his secretary of state. Blaine wrote Harrison, “I think there are only three places that are of value enough to be taken, that are not continental. One is Hawaii and the others are Cuba and Porto [sic]
Rico. Cuba and Porto [sic] Rico are not now imminent and will not be for a generation. Hawaii may come up for decision at any unexpected hour and I hope we shall be prepared to decide it in the affirmative.”50

  Queen Lili’uokalani, the last ruler of the Hawaiian Kingdom, overthrown by the United States Marine Corps. (Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  The American Aryan’s golden hour in the Pacific arrived courtesy of the new monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, who ascended to the throne in 1891 upon the death of King Kalakaua. Troubled by the usurpation of Hawaiian rights, she was determined to restore dignity to the Kingdom of Hawaii and power to her people. In the New York magazine Judge, a cartoon portrayed her as a demented Indian squaw, mouth agape, her lips fat, her feet rough and shoeless, around her neck a cannibal’s bone necklace. A crooked crown on her head made Queen Lili’uokalani look stupid and sloppy, the Indian feathers sprouting from her hair another clue to her barbarity.

  In early 1893, the queen, exercising her traditional rights as a Hawaiian monarch, decided to promulgate a new constitution that would abolish the humiliating Bayonet Constitution and restore power to the majority Hawaiians. On Saturday morning, January 14, 1893, Queen Lili’uokalani informed her cabinet of her plan. Word leaked immediately. The Missionary Party founder, Lorrin Thurston, quickly convened a meeting downtown of fellow party members to form a thirteen-member all-Haole “Committee of Safety.” Thurston proposed the first order of business: annexation to the United States.

  Over the next two days, Thurston and the Committee of Safety hatched their scheme with the U.S. minister to Hawaii, John Stevens, an old friend of Secretary of State Blaine. Missionary Party members complained to Stevens that they didn’t have enough military force to topple the government and they feared arrest. Stevens promised them U.S. Marines then aboard the USS Boston anchored in Honolulu harbor. This was a historical first: an American minister accredited to a sovereign nation conspiring in its overthrow.