Roundup: Talking About History
Gregory McNamee: Hawaii: A Pineapple Republic on the 50th Anniversary of Statehood
Source: Britannica Blog (8-21-09)
[Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor for Encyclopædia Britannica, for which he writes regularly on world geography, culture, and other topics. An editor, publishing consultant, and photographer, he is also the author of 30 books, most recently Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food (Praeger, 2006).]
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Hawaii: A Pineapple Republic on the 50th Anniversary of Statehood
Gregory McNamee - August 21st, 2009
It is the evening of January 14, 1893, a time that is cold in New England but blustery and humid in Hawaii. There, in Honolulu, a group of New England transplants are gathered to hatch big, world-changing plans.
Earlier in the day, Queen Liliuokalani had decided to revise the constitution so that only Hawaiian citizens had the right to vote and, moreover, so that there was no property owning requirement to attain that vote. Such conditions had assured power and privilege for the white landowners, the haole, who had been in Hawaii for only two generations, having arrived as missionaries and evolved into a class of plantation owners grown rich on the production of sugarcane and pineapple.
Liliuokalani was no admirer of the landowners. Neither did she much care for the American soldiers and sailors who now regularly steamed into Pearl Harbor, which her late brother and predecessor had deeded over to the U.S. government in 1887, an event that she recorded in her diary, with an eerily prescient turn of phrase, as “a day of infamy.”
For the haole landowners, her decision was a provocation. Two days later, one of them wrote a letter to the commander of a conveniently arrived expeditionary force requesting that soldiers be landed “to secure the safety of American life and property.” The commander obliged, landing 162 marines and sailors in Honolulu and surrounding Liliuokalani’s palace. The attorney then assembled an antiroyalist Committee of Safety, which picked as its leader a man named Sanford Dole. The group, backed with American guns, then deposed the queen and requested annexation as a territory of the United States. That annexation, after five years of independence as a republic, marked America’s first large-scale imperial act, as Stephen Kinzer (who’s also blogged here at Britannica) writes in Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq...
... Today marks the 50th anniversary of Hawaiian statehood. Given rumblings of secession coming from such places as Texas and Alaska, one wonders whether the dissolutionists there would advocate returning independence to the Hawaiian Islands as well, now that the pineapple barons have come and gone. Liliuokalani doubtless would have something to say about the matter. Aloha oe.
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