How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [139]
Dole sought guidance from an American constitutional scholar at Columbia University, John W. Burgess, to whom he described the delicate issue:
Under the monarchy there were two classes of legislators who sat together and who were elected by voters having different qualifications. There are many natives and Portuguese, who had had the vote hitherto, who are comparatively ignorant of the principles of government, and whose vote from its numerical strength as well as from the ignorance referred to, will be a menace to good government.6
Burgess replied: “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, at least for the present.” He recommended separating the legislature into a system similar to the American Senate and House of Representatives, but tailored to Dole’s concerns. In addition to maintaining the current voting restrictions, Burgess suggested that the new Hawaiian republic “elect your president by a college of electors, … that one half of those electors should be elected by the voters for the members of the lower house of the legislature, and the other half should be elected by the voters for the upper house of the legislature.” By this method, white residents would garner yet another advantage in determining the nation’s leadership. Burgess closed his letter with some added advice: “Appoint only Teutons to military office.”
Meanwhile, President Cleveland adjudged that, despite legitimate grievances and policy disputes, the coup d’état that had ousted Lili’uokalani was made possible through the use of American troops that had been deployed without presidential or congressional authorization. Consequently, he sent Kentucky Congressman Albert S. Willis to Hawaii to commence efforts to reinstate the queen, provided she grant amnesty to those who had participated in her ouster. Lili’uokalani was less than enthusiastic about this proviso. “There are certain laws of my government by which I shall abide,” she stated. “My decision would be, as the law directs, that such persons should be beheaded and their property confiscated to the government.”
After a month of meetings with Willis and her advisers, the dethroned queen revised her view. “I must forgive and forget the past,” she now officially declared. One day later, Willis sent a message to Dole demanding his resignation, along with that of all others in the provisional government. After conferring with his cabinet, Dole sent Willis an official response saying, in effect, come and get us. It was a shrewd move, since even President Cleveland was reluctant to invade Hawaii and oust an ostensible democracy headed by white people in order to restore a dark-skinned monarch. Cleveland opted to punt; he submitted the question to Congress.
Rather than drag on, however, the decision was made rather quickly, following the explosion of an American battleship at anchor in Havana. The sinking of the Maine in February 1898 triggered the Spanish-American War. Three months later, Admiral George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet defending the Philippines, a Spanish colony, in the Battle of Manila Bay. Dewey’s victory demonstrated the need for a permanent American military presence in the Pacific. Eight weeks later, on July 4, 1898, Congress enacted a resolution offering annexation to Hawaii. The islands’ white-dominated government readily accepted.
In April 1899 President William McKinley appointed Dole to be Hawaii’s first territorial governor. In November Dole’s twenty-two-year-old cousin, James Dole, arrived in the islands and purchased sixty-four acres of government land on which he grew and canned pineapples. Sanford Dole left the governorship in 1903 to accept a presidential appointment as the territory’s federal judge. When he retired in 1915, his cousin James had expanded his operations and was now exporting roughly $10 million of canned pineapples per year.7 Sanford Dole died in 1926, not long after his eighty-third birthday.
Lili’uokalani remained