Hawaii’s 50th Anniversary of Statehood

January 6th, 2009

Now that it’s 2009, we can watch to see all the promotional and celebratory events that will take place in Hawaii during this year that marks the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood.

Most of the celebrations will be happy ones, certainly worthy of your notice if you’re thinking of vacationing here during the year.  (The  third Friday in August is when Statehood Day is recognized.)

But Hawaii’s statehood did not come easily, nor was it universally welcomed in the islands.  Here is a brief history of the process:

Back in 1887, a group of the Hawaiian kingdom subjects, members of the Hawaiian government, and American and European businessmen got together and forced King Kalākaua to sign the 1887 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii.  That document stripped the king of administrative authority, eliminated voting rights for Asians and set minimum income and property requirements for American, European and native Hawaiian voters.  That essentially limited the electorate to wealthy elite Americans, Europeans and native Hawaiians.   Queen Liliuokalani succeeded Kamehameha and ruled until she was overthrown in 1893.  That year, she had announced plans to establish a new constitution that would have replaced the 1887 Constitution.   A group of business leaders and citizens formed a Committee of Safety in opposition to the Queen.  United States Government Minister John L. Stevens, responding to a request from the Committee of Safety that expressed concern about possible violence directed against American citizens, summoned a company of uniformed U.S. Marines to come ashore.  The presence of those troops made it impossible for the monarchy to enforce its new constitution.

After the overthrow, Queen Liliuokalani was replaced by a Provisional Government composed of members of the Committee of Safety.   In the following years, the queen tried to re-establish her throne.  The administration of President Grover Cleveland commissioned the Blount Report, which concluded that the removal of Liliʻuokalani had been illegal.  The U.S. Government demanded that Queen Liliʻuokalani be reinstated, but the Provisional Government simply refused.  Congress then responded to Cleveland’s referral with another investigation, and submitted the Morgan Report by the U.S. Senate in 1894, which found all parties (including Minister Stevens and with the exception of the queen) "not guilty" of any responsibility for the overthrow.  The accuracy and impartiality of both the Blount and Morgan reports has been questioned by partisans on both sides of the historical debate over the events of 1893.

A century later, in 1993, a joint Apology Resolution regarding the overthrow was passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton, apologizing for the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.  It is the only time in American history that the United States government has apologized for overthrowing the legitimate government of a sovereign nation.

The Republic of Hawaii was the formal name of Hawaii from 1894 to 1898, when it was run as a republic.  Iolani Palace in Honolulu was the republic’s capitol.

When William McKinley became president in 1896, the issue of annexation was revisited.   His predecessor, Grover Cleveland, was a friend of Queen Liliuokalani and had remained opposed to annexation until the end of his term, but McKinley was open to persuasion by U.S. expansionists and by annexationists from Hawaii.  He agreed to meet with a committee of annexationists from Hawaii in 1897, when he agreed to a treaty of annexation of the Republic of Hawaii.  The president then submitted the treaty to the U.S. Senate for approval.  Despite some opposition in the islands, the Newlands Resolution was passed by the House and  the Senate in 1898, annexing Hawaii as a U.S. territory.  Its legality continues to be questioned because it was a United States Government resolution, not a treaty of cession or conquest as is required by international law.  Both houses of the American Congress carried the measure with two-thirds majorities.

In 1900, Hawaii was granted self-governance and retained Iolani Palace as the territorial capitol building.  Though several attempts were made to achieve statehood, Hawaii remained a territory for almost sixty years.  Plantation owners and key capitalists, who maintained control through financial institutions known as the "Big Five," found territorial status convenient because it enabled them to continue importing cheap foreign labor, which was prohibited in many states.  Their power  was finally broken by activist descendants of the original immigrant laborers.  Because they were born in a U.S. territory, they were legal U.S. citizens.  Expecting to gain full voting rights, they actively campaigned for statehood for the Hawaiian Islands.

In March 1959, both houses of Congress passed the Hawaii Admission Act and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it into law.  On June 27 of that year, a referendum was held asking residents of Hawaii to vote on accepting the statehood bill.  Hawaii voted at a ratio of 17 to 1 to accept.  There has been criticism, however, of the Statehood plebiscite, because the only choices were to accept the Act or to remain a territory, without addressing the issues of legality surrounding the overthrow.

Today, the so-called Akaka Bill is designed "to provide a process for the reorganization of the single Native Hawaiian governing entity and the reaffirmation of the special political and legal relationship between the United States and that Native Hawaiian governing entity for purposes of continuing a government-to-government relationship."  The government the bill intends to reorganize is identified as the Kingdom of Hawaii in the first paragraphs of Indian Affairs Committee Report 108-85.  The bill remains alive in Congress.

That’s a pretty complicated history to follow and remember, but if you plan to vacation in Hawaii this year, a lot of it will be flurrying in the media and you might want to be at least a little bit tuned in.

Posted by Jim Winpenny

Related blog posts:
Hawaii’s Strange Politics
Make Way. Hawaii Has Arrived
Hawaii Scoundrels

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Entry Filed under: Big Island, Kauai, Maui, Oahu