Chapter 5

HAOLES

“Nineteenth-century democracy needs no more complete vindication for its existence than the fact that it has kept for the white race the best portions of the new world’s surface.”¹

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1897

Helen “Nellie” Taft did not accompany her husband on his 1905 Pacific cruise. Rather than sweat through another South Pacific summer, she took the children to England. At an English train station, Helen tried to get the stationmaster to hold a train long enough to load her luggage. “I am Mrs. William Howard Taft of Washington,” she told the stationmaster. “My husband is the Secretary of War of the United States.” The man looked at her blankly. Helen tried again: “You must have heard of him. He’s traveling now with Miss Alice Roosevelt.” The stationmaster sprang to attention, held the train, and accompanied Helen, her children, and her luggage aboard.²

On the second night out at sea the Americans threw a party. To create a dance-floor setting, they partitioned off a section of the ship with hanging flags and, for traction, sprinkled cornmeal on the deck. The ship’s captain had a Victor Talking Machine (a primitive phonograph) that provided the music. A correspondent on board reported, “Secretary Taft was nearly always on the floor and the surprise was not that he danced beautifully but that he could dance at all. But he can, fat as he is.”³ Alice later wrote, “I do not think that I have ever known any one with the equanimity, amiability, and kindliness of Mr. Taft. During all that summer, I never once saw him really cross or upset. He was always beaming, genial, and friendly, through all his official duties, and the task of keeping harmony among his varied and somewhat temperamental army of trippers.”⁴ Added a St. Louis newspaperman aboard the Manchuria, “Secretary Taft either designedly, or from natural good nature, has put the entire party at ease. He is an early riser and is not in a hurry to retire at night. He is at home on the promenade deck, in the smoking room, at the dinner table, or anywhere else. His good nature seems to become him.”⁵

Aboard the Manchuria, summer of 1905. Secretary of War William Howard Taft (center), Alice Roosevelt (below Taft), and Congressman Nick Longworth (to Alice’s left). (Collection of the New-York Historical Society)

Such was invariably the take on Taft: a reliable Mr. Nice Guy with a beaming smile and hearty chuckle. As the author Stephen Hess notes:

If one were to plot Taft’s career on a graph, the line would rise sharply and steeply, without a single dip, until it marked the summit of American political life. He became assistant prosecutor of Hamilton County, Ohio, at the age of twenty-three. Collector of Internal Revenue in Cincinnati two years later, judge of the state superior court at twenty-nine. Solicitor General of the United States at thirty-two, a federal circuit-court judge at thirty-four, first U.S. Civil Governor of the Philippines at forty-two, Secretary of War in the Cabinet of Theodore Roosevelt at forty-six…. Each job seemed to be a logical outgrowth of the one before; each new opportunity seemed only to await the successful conclusion of the preceding episode.⁶

As secretary of war, Taft oversaw the testosterone heart of the Roosevelt presidency. He controlled an enormous budget and commanded a fast-growing military machine. Millions of people were subjects of the War Department, from Cuba through the Isthmus of Panama and out to Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines.

Yet Taft’s War Department was a dysfunctional place, with the boss frequently absent and subordinates constantly competing for power. Serving as Teddy’s troubleshooter, dispatched to negotiate and smooth over political rough patches, Taft was absent from Washington more than any other cabinet member during his four-year tenure. At one point the War Department auditor received this written complaint: “As a taxpayer and citizen I beg to ask the following question: How many days, or if not days, hours, has Secretary of War William Taft spent at his desk in Washington?”⁷

Roosevelt managed the military himself, so Taft was not severely tested. In fact, the former judge knew little about military matters and admitted, “I have had so much outside work to do that I was entirely willing to turn the control all over to the chief of staff.”⁸

As Judith Anderson writes in William Howard Taft: an Intimate History, “Roosevelt initiated and Taft assisted…. Taft, eager for affection and approval, agreed with Roosevelt even when it meant revising his own earlier views.”⁹ The Taft biographer Henry Pringle observed, “One searches in vain for a major issue on which Taft took a stand, even in private, against Roosevelt.”¹⁰ Not surprisingly, Roosevelt was fond of his likeable yes-man: “You know, I think Taft has the most lovable personality I have ever come in contact with. I almost envy a man possessing a personality like Taft’s. One loves him at first sight.”¹¹

WHEN THE NEWLY APPOINTED secretary of war, Taft, was asked by an interviewer to explain his rapid ascent, he replied: “I got my political pull, first, through father’s prominence.”¹²

Alphonso Taft was born in Vermont in 1810. He cofounded Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones society, and he graduated from Yale College at the age of twenty-three in 1833. In 1839, at the age of twenty-nine, Alphonso decided that he would make his mark in the frontier town of Cincinnati. Tafts have dominated Ohio politics since.

Alphonso was “Judge Taft” to the locals as he served on the superior court of Cincinnati and became the first president of the Cincinnati Bar Association. He was later appointed secretary of war by President Grant in March 1876, and three months later attorney general of the United States. He was made ambassador to Austria-Hungary in 1882 and ambassador to Imperial Russia from 1884 to 1885.

William Howard Taft was born in Cincinnati in 1857 in a house that is now part of the William Howard Taft National Historic Site. While Alphonso was the guiding patriarch, the Taft boys were products of a proud, strict, domineering mother. Louisa Taft’s first child, Sammie, died in that house of whooping cough soon after his first birthday. Bill was Louisa’s second child and she showered more attention on him than her other children. She also pressured him more to succeed. Instead of gentle hugs, Louisa issued sharp orders. A recent Taft biographer writes, “Taft never developed much confidence in himself or his abilities. He had been taught in early childhood that no matter how hard he strove, he would not succeed fully, that he had never done enough to merit full acceptance and approval.”¹³

He was not the only one to suffer: Louisa Taft’s pressure on Bill’s half brother Peter was particularly intense. At first, he responded: Peter delivered the valedictory address to his high school class, and at Yale he scored the highest grades recorded up to that time. But after graduation he suffered a nervous collapse and died in a sanatorium.

From childhood through Yale to various appointive offices and then on to the presidency, Big Bill’s weight increased in proportion to his stressors. Diet and exercise could never overcome his inner disharmony, and he ate compulsively from frustration and to better fill the roles into which he was pushed.

Taft’s parents, hoping to model his career on his father’s, declared that Bill would become a Cincinnati lawyer. Yet even after establishing his own Cincinnati practice, Taft still received written rebukes from his father: “I do not think you have accomplished as much this past year as you ought with your opportunities. Our anxiety for your success is very great and I know that there is but one way to attain it, & that is by self-denial and enthusiastic hard work.”¹⁴ And his taskmaster mother never loosened the reins. Up until her death, on the eve of his nomination as a candidate for president, Louisa followed each step of his career and often gave her son highly critical advice.

Taft set his sights early on a girl named Helen. Helen “Nellie” Herron’s father, John, had been law partners with President Rutherford Hayes. In 1877, when she was seventeen years old, she spent several exhilarating weeks in Washington, living in the Executive Mansion with the president’s family. Nellie wrote of “brilliant parties and meeting all manner of charming people,” and she later admitted “that she fantasized becoming First Lady herself,” vowing to marry a man “destined to be president of the United States.”¹⁵

For his part, Big Bill saw Nellie as “his ‘senior partner’ for life [and] got what he felt he most needed in his life—a whip that would drive him to achieve.”¹⁶ Bill once wrote her, “I need you to scold me.”¹⁷

Mrs. William Howard Taft (Helen “Nellie” Herron Taft). From childhood she yearned to be the wife of a president. She willed her husband into the presidency but soon suffered a stroke. (Library of Congress)

Bill got the whip, but not much love. Nellie never did show as much interest in him as he did in her. For her, it was a union of ambition, not affection.

TAFT HAD BEEN ENJOYING his life in Cincinnati as a federal judge when, in 1890, President Benjamin Harrison nominated him to become solicitor general, the attorney who represents the federal government before the Supreme Court. Bill found the prospect “rather overwhelming,” but Nellie saw her husband’s contented Cincinnati life as “an awful groove” and the opportunity to live in Washington as a welcome “interruption… in our peaceful existence.” Big Bill hesitated, Nellie pushed, and Nellie won, proclaiming herself “very glad because it gave Mr. Taft an opportunity for exactly the kind of work I wished him to do.”¹⁸

In 1891, Harrison nominated Taft to become a judge of the Sixth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. This meant a return to his beloved Cincinnati. Nellie feared the appointment would divert her from her goal of being a president’s wife and warned her husband about accepting the offer. But because of the prestige of this presidential appointment, Taft—for once—got his way.

Campaigning in Ohio in 1899, President McKinley remarked to a local judge, “I am in need of a man who is strong, tactful, and honest, for an executive in the Philippines.”¹⁹ Days later Taft opened a telegram from the president that read, “I would like to see you in Washington on important business within the next few days.”²⁰

McKinley now offered Taft an appointment as commissioner to the Philippines, but Taft demurred. “Why I am not the man you want,” he told the president. “To begin with, I have never approved of keeping the Philippines.” McKinley was not put off by his answer, explaining, “We have got them and in dealing with them I think I can trust the man who didn’t want them better than I can the man who did.” McKinley added that if he accepted posting to the Philippines, the president would appoint Taft to the Supreme Court if any opportunity arose.²¹

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.”³⁶Microbiologists 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.

John Stevens, U.S. minister to Hawaii. Stevens gave the order for the coup d’état in the Hawaiian Kingdom. Afterward he wrote the secretary of state: “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.” (Library of Congress)

On Monday, two days after the queen had declared her intention regarding a new constitution, she posted a more modest official proclamation throughout Honolulu. It was a pledge from the queen that she would seek to change the constitution “only by methods provided in the constitution itself.”⁵¹ But while Lili’uokalani had moderated, the colonizers had no intention of responding in kind. The Committee of Safety drafted an appeal to Stevens in which they noted the “general alarm and terror…. The public safety is menaced and lives and property are in peril…. We are unable to protect ourselves without aid, and therefore pray for the protection of the United States forces.”⁵² After signing this “general alarm and terror” document, the Committee of Safety adjourned for the day and its members ambled off through Honolulu’s quiet streets for lunch.

Minister Stevens boarded the USS Boston at 3:00 p.m. and handed this written request to her captain:

UNITED STATES LEGATION

HONOLULU, JANUARY 16, 1893

Sir: In view of existing critical circumstances in Honolulu, indicating an inadequate legal force, I request you to land Marines and Sailors from the ship under your command for the protection of the United States Legation, and the United States Consulate and to secure the safety of American life and property.

Very truly yours,

John L. Stevens⁵³

One hour later, 162 heavily armed United States Marines from the USS Boston marched through Honolulu’s peaceful streets. The only large group of Hawaiians to be found were those enjoying the weekly Monday night Royal Hawaiian Band concert under the gazebo of the Hawaiian Hotel. The marines, making no effort to pretend that they had landed “to secure the safety of American life and property,” surrounded the royal palace and forced out Queen Lili’uokalani. As the British minister to Hawaii, William Cornwall, observed, “If the troops were landed solely for the protection of American property, the placing of them so far away from the… property of Americans and so very close to the property of the Hawaiian Government was remarkable and suggestive.”⁵⁴

The next day, representing the United States, Stevens recognized the Hawaiian provisional government. The new president of Hawaii was Sanford Dole, a son of missionaries, a white and blue-eyed Haole.

Sanford Dole. Son of missionaries and cousin of the founder of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now the Dole Pineapple Company), Sanford Dole served as president of the Hawaiian Republic after the American coup d’état of the Hawaiian Kingdom. (Hawaii State Archives)

There were at long last no dark-skinned Hawaiians in the new Hawaiian government. Stevens raised the American flag in Honolulu and declared Hawaii an American protectorate. Then, in a letter to the secretary of state, he suggested, “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.”⁵⁵ Meanwhile, the new government began enforcing its regime by putting into practice a series of repressive policies to silence its critics.

President Dole dispatched five Missionary Party members to Washington to make a deal. President Harrison proclaimed, “The overthrow of the monarchy was not in any way promoted by this Government… and the change of government in the Hawaiian Islands… was entirely unexpected so far as the United States was concerned.”⁵⁶ Added the new secretary of state, John Foster: “At the time the provisional government took possession of the Government buildings no troops or officers of the United States were present or took any part whatever in the proceedings.”⁵⁷

After seven meetings over a short ten days, Secretary of State Foster and the White “Hawaiians” signed the annexation treaty on February 14, 1893, less than a month after the U.S. Marines had captured Iolani Palace. The next day Harrison submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification.

The president hoped the senators would approve Hawaii’s annexation before the truth came out, but time was against him: Harrison had lost the election of 1892 and had less than a month before he would leave office.⁵⁸ Things started well. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hastily approved the annexation treaty and sent it to the full Senate on February 17. But on that day a visitor appeared in Washington with a different story than what the president had told. He was Paul Neumann, Queen Lili’uokalani’s personal attorney and envoy.

Neumann made the case that the queen had been unfairly dethroned and that Minister Stevens had improperly landed U.S. troops and had illegally proclaimed a United States protectorate over the islands. Neumann told senators and the press that native Hawaiians had not been consulted and would not favor a treaty. Suddenly senators went on record calling the American actions in Hawaii “an outrage” and “an act of war,” and they “ridiculed annexation as a Hawaiian sugar planters’ scheme to obtain American bounty.”⁵⁹

Neumann delivered a letter from Queen Lili’uokalani as head of government to president-elect Grover Cleveland, requesting that the United States oust the usurpers and restore Hawaii’s independence.

Cleveland smelled a rat. On March 8, Cleveland withdrew U.S. support for the Hawaiian annexation treaty. Two days later, he dispatched the former congressman James Blount of Georgia to Hawaii on a presidential investigation. Blount sailed immediately and lowered the American flag in Honolulu on April 1, which ended Hawaii’s status as a U.S. protectorate.

Many Americans opposed annexing Hawaii—but not for reasons of sympathy. Some claimed that “the framers of the Constitution intended the Republic’s territorial expansion to be restricted to contiguous land which would be settled by Americans of Anglo-Saxon lineage.”⁶⁰ Harper’s Weeklywrote, “History had shown that Anglo-Saxon democratic institutions could not survive in tropical colonies.”⁶¹

On December 18, 1893, Cleveland sent a scathing report to Congress:

There is as little basis for the pretense that forces were landed for the security of American life and property. When these armed men were landed, the city of Honolulu was in its customary orderly and peaceful condition. There was no symptom or disturbance in any quarter. Men, women, and children were about the streets as usual, and nothing varied the ordinary routine or disturbed the ordinary tranquility, except the landing of the Boston’s marines, and their march through the town.⁶²

…

The Provisional Government has not assumed a republic or other constitutional form, but has remained a mere executive council or oligarchy, set up without the assent of the people. Indeed, the representatives of that government assert that the people of Hawaii are unfit for popular government and frankly avow that they can be best ruled by arbitrary or despotic power.⁶³

One month after President Cleveland’s criticism, President Dole’s provisional government celebrated its one-year anniversary. Missionary Party leaders realized that if Cleveland hadn’t acted to restore the queen after twelve months, Hawaii was safely within their White hands.

A few days later, on February 7, 1894, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 177 to 78, with 96 abstentions, to condemn Minister Stevens. But nothing was done about the situation on the ground in Hawaii. And Dole was working hard to make sure that the Aryan would now dominate, consulting Teddy’s law school mentor, the Columbia professor John Burgess, regarding a new constitution. In a March 31, 1894, letter to Burgess, Dole explained that Hawaii had “many natives… comparatively ignorant of the principles of government [and a] menace to good government.” Burgess responded:

If I understand your situation, it is as follows: You have a population of nearly 100,000 persons, of whom about 5,000 are Teutons, i.e., Americans, English, Germans, and Scandinavians, about 9,000 are Portuguese, about 30,000 are Chinese and Japanese, about 8,000 are native born of foreign parents, and the rest are natives.

With this situation, 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.⁶⁴

Dole thanked the professor: “Your letters showed a clear knowledge of our peculiar political circumstances.”⁶⁵

In fact, Hawaii would remain as Cleveland had described it: an oligarchy “set up without the assent of the people.” But the president had been discreet about such imperial efforts—too discreet for some. Theodore Roosevelt was outraged that Cleveland had not proudly followed the sun to Hawaii. Indeed, it was this failure that sparked Roosevelt’s interest in Pacific expansion. In 1896, Teddy fumed in the Century Magazine: “We should annex Hawaii immediately. It was a crime against the United States, it was a crime against white civilization, not to annex it two years and a half ago. The delay did damage that is perhaps irreparable; for it meant that at the critical period of the islands’ growth the influx of population consisted, not of white Americans, but of low caste laborers from the yellow races.”⁶⁶

FROM BOYHOOD TO MIDDLE age, William McKinley—a devout Methodist—had witnessed Christianity’s conquest of the North American continent. Once president, he concerned himself with the souls of Pacific pagans. McKinley’s Republican Party had run on the platform that “the Hawaiian Islands should be controlled by the United States and no foreign power should be permitted to interfere with them.”⁶⁷ Once in office, McKinley resubmitted the Hawaiian annexation treaty to the U.S. Senate. Because the United States had for so long dominated Hawaii, the president said, “Annexation is not a change. It is a consummation.”⁶⁸

Senator David Turpie of Indiana believed that native Hawaiians should be heard, arguing, “There is a native population in the islands of about 40,000. They are not illiterate; they are not ignorant. A very large majority can read and write both languages, English and Hawaiian, and they take a very lively and intelligent interest in the affairs of their own country…. Any treaty which had been made without consulting [native Hawaiians] should be withdrawn and ought never to have been sanctioned.”⁶⁹

His was a minority viewpoint. And native Hawaiians were not to be heard.

A more powerful and persuasive voice was that of the assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt. Teddy wrote that if the United States did not annex Hawaii, “it will show that we either have lost, or else wholly lack, the masterful instinct which alone can make a race great. I feel so deeply about it that I hardly dare express myself in full. The terrible part is to see that it is the men of education who take the lead in trying to make us prove traitors to our race.”⁷⁰

Export-minded U.S. businessmen imagined four hundred million customers in China, with Hawaii as an American coaling station and naval base. In January of 1898, McKinley—in a speech to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)—declared that using the U.S. military to pry open foreign markets was a legitimate function of the U.S. government. Senator William Frye of Maine urged the same room of NAM members to lobby Congress for a Central American canal and the annexation of Hawaii. Senator Cushman Davis of Minnesota proclaimed, “The nation which controls Hawaii will control that great gateway to commerce.”⁷¹ The Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a majority report declaring that all of the traffic passing through a Central American canal would pass through Hawaii before continuing on to Asia.

The war with Spain provided a further excuse. Congressman De Alva Alexander of New York declared, “The annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, for the first time in our history, is presented to us as a war necessity.” Added Representative Richmond Pearson of North Carolina, “I believe that this is a necessary step in the successful prosecution of the war with Spain.” The historian Thomas Osborne writes in Annexation Hawaii, “Potential trade with China was the primary reason for the annexation of Hawaii. War with Spain was about timing.”⁷²

On July 6, 1898, Congress passed the Hawaii Annexation Resolution, and President McKinley signed it the next day. The New York Sun cheered: “The America of the twentieth century has taken its first and most significant step towards the grave responsibility and high rewards of manifest destiny.”⁷³

On July 8, a distressed former president Grover Cleveland wrote to his former attorney general: “Hawaii is ours. As I look back upon the first steps in this miserable business, and as I contemplate the means used to complete the outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair.”⁷⁴

On August 12, 1898, in the “Hawaii Annexation Ceremony” in Honolulu, President Sanford Dole formally handed the former independent kingdom to the U.S. minister, Harold M. Sewall. The white Haoles applauded. Queen Lili’uokalani did not attend.

AFTER THE LUNCHEON, THE Taft party scampered off to world-renowned Waikiki Beach, the birthplace of surfing. Princess Alice donned a bathing costume—a high-necked, long-sleeved mohair dress with long black stockings and bathing shoes, her hair tucked under a tightly fitting cap. Alice recalled, “Mr. Taft thought that there was too much skin showing,” and that he pleaded “with photographers not to take photographs of me in my bathing suit. It was considered just a little indelicate.”⁷⁵

Beachboys paddled Nick and Alice out into Waikiki Bay’s famous waves in an outrigger canoe. A newspaper reported, “Cameras by the dozen snapped and clicked as she swept by. It was always with those on shore: ‘There’s Alice, see her now!’ ”⁷⁶ When she returned to the beach, a reporter heard her exclaim, “I never knew there could be so much enjoyment in a Hawaiian canoe, racing along with the billows, as I have found at Waikiki beach today. It was perfectly delightful, and I wish I could stay to enjoy more of it.”⁷⁷

Hawaii Annexation Ceremony, Honolulu, August 12, 1898. Americans cheered while native Hawaiians boycotted the ceremony. (Hawaii State Archives)

At 5:30 p.m., Taft ordered the Manchuria to pull out from Honolulu harbor even though Nick and Alice were not aboard. Remembered Alice: “We stayed on the beach at Waikiki until it was time to go back to the steamer. I did not want to leave. I missed the boat at the wharf, as it had to sail at a definite time because of the tides. So, in a launch with Nick… and a few others, leis about our necks, regret in our hearts at leaving, I pursued the Manchuria out into the open Pacific.”⁷⁸

Alice Roosevelt and Congressman Nicholas Longworth, Honolulu, 1905. (Library of Congress)