Hawaii and the US: A Deal with the Devil

Hawaii was the last of the fifty states to join the United States of America. And, were you to dig a little deeper, it might seem strange that it did. 

There is no accident of geography binding it to the union, as there are for the contiguous 48 states that make up most of the US. Hawaii is far out on its own in the vast Pacific, a tiny island chain further west and further south than any other states, with very little on common with the states of North America.

Nor is it immediately obvious from the point of view of the US itself. There are plenty of other small territories controlled by the US around the world: what is it that makes Hawaii different. And in rooting out the answer we uncover a dirty little secret in the history of the US, and Britain.

For Hawaii was once Hawai’i, a proud and powerful island kingdom which stood alone. However this kingdom was destroyed and its rulers overthrown, and it was done in the name of capitalism.

A Kingdom Build on Cooperation

Nobody is entirely sure when settlers first came to the uninhabited island chain which included the island of Hawaii. The closest we have to a consensus suggests that it was around 300 AD that Polynesian sailors crossed the great ocean in their push eastwards and found a paradise there.

This confusion comes about because of how this early history was recorded: through a list of the royalty and priesthood of the kingdom, genealogies which can be traced back to when only gods lived here. These lists are hazy as to time, and in truth it may be several hundred years later that such permanent inhabitants arrived.

What we do know with more certainty starts with a priest named Pā‘ao. Legends swirl around this man also, but it seems that around 1200 AD this man from Tahiti created the first ordered society on the islands, with social classes dividing royalty, nobles, commoners and kauā, the lowest class.

Over the following centuries this social order became firmly established, with multiple kingdoms springing up over the entire island chain. The islanders eventually spread beyond the coast from around 1500 AD, and as they ventured into the interior they truly embraced the islands as their home.

It would be Kamehameha, ruler of the single island of Hawaii, who conquered the other kingdoms in 1795. He gave the name to Hawaii to the entire chain: this was henceforth one kingdom, the Kingdom of Hawaii.

In truth, Kamehameha had help. Seven years before the Kingdom was established, the islands were visited by European explorers. It would be Captain Cook, the famous British explorer, who reached out across the ocean to Hawaii, landing there for the first time on January 18 1778 and bringing them the questionable gift of European military technology.

Cook was not the first westerner to find the islands: the Spanish had encountered them 150 years before. Nor was his first contact entirely smooth: Hawaiian theft of a British longboat had to a rash kidnap attempt by Cook’s crew, which in turn led to several British sailors being murdered. But the ultimate success of the expedition changed the Kingdom forever: it now knew of a broader world, and the broader world knew of Hawaii.

This was, from a perspective of sovereignty and independence, a deal with the devil indeed. For as British guns and soldiery allowed Kamehameha to conquer his rivals and emerge as king over all the islands, so it sowed the seeds for the Kingdom’s eventual destruction and thralldom.

The establishment of the Kingdom on friendly terms with Britain and the newly minted US led to a wave of immigration. American settlers arrived in large numbers, establishing plantations and other ventures. Other waves of immigrants arrived from China, Japan and the Philippines, meeting the requirement to work these plantations, and the Hawaiian population boomed.

The monarchs of Hawaii saw this enormous growth as a good thing, fostering and encouraging their new multiethnic kingdom. Half a century after the founding of the Kingdom of Hawaii, a constitution was signed in 1840 which enshrined equal voting rights for all inhabitants of the islands, regardless of social status, gender, or race.

But in truth this was the beginning of the end of the Kingdom, which came after a century of rule by only five hereditary kings. It was the beginning of the end for Hawaiian independence, too, for the last king, King Kalākaua, did not ascend to the throne by birthright but by election. The new king was vulnerable to coercion by those had very different plans for Hawaii.

Kalākaua was forced to sign a new constitution in 1887, one which weakened the Hawaiian monarchy and the Kingdom they had established in favor of a system which emphasized the American immigrants and their foreign laborers. The US also wanted the natural deep water port of Pearl Harbor, which they saw as vital for their interests in the Pacific.

Although he saw the lands of the island chain as sacred and not for sale, Kalākaua was persuaded to eventually lease the harbor to the US. This too was accomplished in 1887. In the following years there were a series of small rebellions as the capitalist interest of the US tightened their grip, which led to things coming to a head on January 14 1893.

On that day, Queen Liliʻuokalani made a move which led to the downfall of the Kingdom of Hawaii. The new queen, who had ascended to the throne amidst the chaos, was seem as sympathetic to the west, with US officials several times attempting to persuade her to take over.

However, once on the throne, Liliʻuokalani had different ideas. She attempted to change the constitution again, walking back many of the 1887 changes and restoring power to the sovereign monarch. For the US officials this simply would not do.

Three days after the new constitution was floated, Lorrin Thurston, the Hawaiian Minister of the Interior who had drafted the 1887 constitution, overthrew the monarchy. The aims of Hawaii would henceforth be aligned with those of the US: annexation.

The rest, as they say, is history. Five years later in 1898 Hawaii was officially annexed by the United States. In 1959 the territory became the 50th state of the USA. 

The realpolitik behind this fall of a Kingdom is that lands were simply too valuable for the US to ignore. They needed the port, they needed the wealth, and so they took the territory. 

There were only five kings of the Kingdom of Hawaii before Kalākaua, ruling a kingdom which only lasted a century. In uniting the island chain Kamehameha played a dangerous game: it was western support which won him a kingdom, but it would be the west who sank it, too.

Top Image: King Kamehameha I, the first king of the Kingdom of Hawaii (Louis Choris / Public Domain)