How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [138]
Dole, the son of missionary parents, had been born in Honolulu in 1844. Though he left Hawaii to attend Williams College in Massachusetts and was, for a brief time, an attorney in Boston, he returned to practice law and was elected to the legislature in 1884. Three years later, he participated in the delegation that had maneuvered King Kalākaua into signing the “bayonet” constitution, transferring power to the white minority. Dole became a justice of the Hawaiian Supreme Court that same year.
Not all white people in Hawaii supported Dole and his colleagues in their quest for annexation, since the 1882 U.S. prohibition of Chinese immigration would be applied to Hawaii, thus ending a main supply of imported labor. On the other hand, the United States had not restricted Japanese immigration. And Japan, as newspapers were beginning to report, was becoming a force to be reckoned with—and was already the nation Hawaii most feared. “The Hawaiian government is now endeavoring to check further Japanese immigration,” the New York Times reported in September 1897, noting that Dole’s government feared “Japanese influence and numbers may become too powerful and possibly overthrow the republic and bring about Hawaiian annexation to Japan.” Previously, the November 1896 issue of Harper’s Monthly had included an article entitled “The New Japan.” It coincided with news reports regarding Japan’s formal protest of American efforts to annex Hawaii.
But Japan declared it had no intention of annexing Hawaii. “I am instructed by the imperial Government to state most emphatically and unequivocally that Japan has not now and never had any such design, or designs of any kind, against Hawaii,” its foreign minister stated.5 (The United States, when Daniel Webster was secretary of state, had said the same thing.)
Most likely, opinions in Japan were mixed, as they certainly were in the United States. The New York Times expressed the views of those Americans who opposed the annexation of Hawaii, many of whom also deplored Hawaii’s coup d’état. Three editorials appeared in 1893 alone bearing headlines such as, “To Convey a Stolen Kingdom,” “A Case of Government by the Few,” and “A Shameful Conspiracy.”
Many other Americans, however, supported annexation. Voicing their views that same year was the Chicago Tribune, arguing in a February editorial:
The objections made nearly a century ago to the purchase of Louisiana were similar to those made now to the annexation of Hawaii. It was asserted that that territory was a great ways off, that its [Louisiana’s French-speaking] inhabitants were un-American … that it would be impossible to defend in case of war with a foreign country. All those were as naught when weighed against the fact that it was necessary for the United States to own the mouth of the Mississippi. It is necessary now that the United States should have Hawaii for the safety of its oceanic commerce.
Even at the highest level of leadership, Americans were of two minds about this unprecedented extension of the country’s borders. President Benjamin Harrison had supported it. But he had been defeated in 1892 for reelection by the man he himself had defeated for reelection, Grover Cleveland. President Cleveland opposed Hawaiian annexation. Moreover, he ordered an investigation into U.S. military involvement in the coup d’état, raising the possibility that he might support the return to power of Lili’uokalani.
Given these uncertainties, Dole expected that the American debate would be long and drawn out. Consequently, he proceeded to turn the provisional government into an official republic, the first step of which was writing a constitution. This entailed defining how Hawaiians would elect their leaders, and that entailed confronting Hawaii’s underlying conflict: