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Chapter 1: What events led to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893?
It is the afternoon of January 17th, 1893, in Honolulu. From the veranda of Iolani Palace, Queen Liliuokalani watches as an incredible scene unfolds. U.S. Marines have come ashore from the USS Boston, marching into the city. They carry rifles, not for ceremony, but for effect. No request has been made of their government. No threat has been issued against American lives or property.
And yet, as the Marines fan out across Honolulu, positioning near government buildings, the message is unmistakable. Inside the palace, the queen's advisors argue. Some urge resistance. Thousands of native Hawaiians stand ready to defend their queen. Liliuokalani knows this.
She also knows resistance would bring bloodshed, the near certain destruction of her people at the hands of a far stronger power. The next day, a small group of American and European businessmen proclaims a provisional government to rule Hawaii. Faced with force she did not invite and cannot defeat, the Queen makes her choice. She does not abdicate.
She yields her authority under protest, placing her faith, however fragile, in the belief that the United States will correct an injustice committed in its name. In her written statement, she is precise. Hawaii's sovereignty has been seized, not surrendered. No battle is fought, but a kingdom ends.
Not because its people abandoned it, but because a foreign power arrived by sea and rendered resistance impossible.
Music
Good day, American history hit listeners. Hello, or should I say aloha? Well, perhaps not, given that I'm a guy raised in New Jersey, which, as the crow flies, is about 5,000 miles from a certain gleaming archipelago in the middle of the vast ocean where one can hear that greeting uttered properly by a native-born speaker. We're all Americans, right?
Well, at least officially since 1959, when the United States welcomed its 50th state into the Union, and finally our nation stretched from sea to shining sea and then beyond, all the way to that paradise of the Pacific, Hawaii. How Hawaii's U.S. statehood came to pass is a painful tale, more so than most U.S. mainlanders realize.
One rife with issues of colonization and exploitation, and even a good old-fashioned coup d'etat, a controversial history brewing discontent even today on those glorious islands. And for anyone lucky enough to be planning a trip there or going there to live and work, it is a fundamental chronology.
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Chapter 2: How was the Hawaiian Kingdom structured before European influence?
It looks like a backwards apostrophe. It's a glottal stop. Yeah. So you say it Hawaii. Okay. And what does the word actually mean? We actually don't know what Hawaii means. It's such an old word. We have different stories of how the islands might have been named. But for our actual definition of Hawaii, we actually just don't have one. It's just such an old word in our culture. Interesting.
But it's a Polynesian. Yeah. Yeah. There have been stories of cultural appropriation and destruction throughout all of American history, but Hawaii is one example, as demonstrated by our mispronunciations of language. Okay, so this episode specifically recounts the American overthrow of the Hawaiian sovereign leadership in 1898, the year of my grandmother's birth, interestingly.
How we seize this territory and why. But first, let's understand what sort of nation we're talking about. Can you describe the kingdom of Hawaii before European settlers came politically, geographically? What were the islands and how do they compare to what we have today?
Right. So prior to the unification of the islands in 1810, Hawaii was actually not Hawaii. It was an archipelago of islands, each with its own name, right? You have Kauai, Maui, Oahu, Hawaii Island. These were separate island chiefdoms or kingdoms. And then in the late 1700s, early 1800s, you had
One chief in particular, Kamehameha, or Kamehameha I, who goes on a military campaign to unify these islands. But the islands were basically ruled in a chief structure. Each island had a major chief, and then you kind of fell in line under that major chief with lesser-ranking chiefs and then the common people living on the land.
And the year of unification, 1810, you say, by that time, it was a functioning, internationally recognized sovereign nation with its own political institutions, economy, and diplomacy, correct?
Not quite yet, actually. So 1810 is really the year when the islands first are formed under that blanket of that word Hawaii. And the reason why Hawaii is called Hawaii is is because Kamehameha came from Hawaii Island, or popularly known as the Big Island. So that word got applied to all the islands, but it was not yet recognized on an international stage as a sovereign country.
So interesting. This is a movement that's happening throughout the 19th century. Eventually, Italy is famously united, where all these city-states come together. So essentially, that's what you're saying. The islands were their own city-states. And finally, Kamehameha comes along and does that. 1778 is an important date, obviously.
Initial contact with Europeans when British explorer James Cook lands on the islands. Thus unfolds chapters that we see elsewhere around the world of the effect of this kind of arrival. Explain what happens. Tremendous amounts of disease eventually, yes? Right.
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Chapter 3: What were the effects of European contact on Hawaiian society?
Whooping cough, some unknown diseases, but yes, venereal diseases that cause people to become sterile. So different effects on the population.
Early 1800s, small numbers of Americans and Europeans begin settling there as traders, sailors, and advisors. You say that, and now that is an amazing backdrop to that further colonization or at least arrivals. I mean, terrible things are happening there. If it's to that scale and in that timeframe, amazing.
Yes, it was because of disease, the Hawaiian leadership, the world, the Hawaii as a world was quickly changing.
Yes.
You're seeing your population diminish, but you're also seeing these new people starting to come into Hawaii faster. Not a major settlement of foreigners in that early period, but more so people coming and going. But it was definitely a quickly changing world. You know, technology, ships, Western weapons, food, clothing. Hawaii was really changing at a rapid pace in a very short span of time.
And as happens elsewhere in the world, missionaries come. In this case, the first Protestant missionaries come from New England, and they begin to settle. And this really marks a more entrenched beginning of that settlement, right? It's 1820 or so.
Right. In 1820, the first Protestant missionaries are Calvinists who come from New England out of Boston and their connections to Yale and that religious community up in New England. They arrived in Hawaii in 1820, and this is the first, like, real formal settlement of American foreigners, or actually any group of outsiders. Again, you highlight more transient communities and, you know,
people who deserted ships, but this was a real intentional settlement in Hawaii by these missionaries.
So by this time, this period from 1810, the unification, onward over the decades of the 19th century, governance begins to develop. Hawaii is recognized internationally as a sovereign nation. They have diplomats. I mean, their first constitution was written and adopted in 1840, right?
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Chapter 4: How did the Bayonet Constitution impact Hawaiian governance?
And they just took that body of chiefs and moved them and became the House of Nobles. So these were the high-ranking chiefs of the kingdom. And then the bottom house, the House of Representatives, was the House of the Peoples, the commoners basically.
We're telling the story, though, of how all this is appropriated and destroyed, really, inside of a matter of decades. And I can't help but think about this. When I arrive, I've maybe done Hawaii three or four times in my life. I live in the east coast of the United States. Yes. Yes.
Yes, it does. I mean, you can look at that word hospitality in two ways. Like you mentioned, there's like the tourism version of hospitality in which I think there's some expectations for Hawaiians to act in a certain way, you know, providing for their guests and kind of being at the whim, but that's very much in the kind of touristic expectations.
But it is a value that is embedded within our culture and hospitality. making sure that your guests have food, are safe, have culture. The Hawaiian Kingdom was a very inclusive space for foreigners, including it's a very small population, but even there was People who had escaped from slavery or former slaves who ended up in the Hawaiian kingdom. The Hawaiian kingdom didn't practice slavery.
I just really want to underscore this because it's obviously will play an enormous part. And I think it had a huge theme to that for those Americans who were seeing opportunity. Sometimes that quality of a culture is misunderstood and played upon. The word is love. I mean, you literally feel a sense of love when you're there. And it's palpable everywhere you go. So that has gone back all the way.
And, you know, to the indigenous culture, certainly. But even visitors in the 19th century were having that feeling. So it's a really important thing to keep in mind as we talk about how things change so quickly. In 1887, we meet the first shift. Let's call it that. There are constitutional changes all the way along which favor the wealthy.
And are influenced heavily by foreign-born people, right?
Yes, especially in the 1840s, Commandment of the Third starts allowing or chooses to involve former missionaries, new foreigners to serve in the Hawaiian government. As ministers, as lawyers, as judges. And so some of these effects on legislation and the way things are run in the country are definitely influenced by foreigners. You had one major shift prior in the 1860s under Commandment V.
The Fifth saw particularly the United States as a problem. So he actually wanted to move the Hawaiian kingdom back towards his grandfather's vision of being more aligned with the British. But you had this influx of foreigners serving in politics and that eventually would...
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Chapter 5: What role did Queen Liliuokalani play in the struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty?
And so their idea was that they were going to essentially redistribute the land and recategorize land. And then the second half of that was to make private land tenureship.
So until that point, it had been that land was held communally, I guess, by the royal government, isn't it?
Yes. So the land, basically all the land in the archipelago was under the sovereign or what we call the mo'i. And then you had the lesser chiefs who kind of were like the land managers. And then, of course, again, the people who lived on those lands. So it was divisions of land that were managed in the system. But yes, kind of communally held by the sovereign government.
Right. It's a system of stewardship that is intentionally changed in order to put land in the hands of Hawaiians, native-born Hawaiians. It kind of backfires in some ways, right?
Yes. Yes. So basically, out of that Mahele in 1848, all the land in Hawaii is split into three categories or three interests. So about a third of the land is kept by the sovereign as his private land. Um, the next third was put aside for the government. So this is going to be for the Hawaiian kingdom to build infrastructure, you know, agriculture, whatever.
Um, but it was government land and the last third went to the rest of the chiefs. And then following the Mahele in 1848 is the second half of that legislation, which was the Kuleana Act in 1850, which helped spur that transition to private tenureship. So it required the common people or the Makainana to put in land claims for the pieces of property they had already been living on.
And so ultimately, Makainana or the common people got very, very little land.
Because that land was seized by large plantations for the most part, which has been a huge... Well, actually, not yet.
So there was limitations on how much land they could claim in those applications for their title. And a lot of people just didn't understand... the point of privatizing land. So you had people like, you know, oh, what is this like private land? Like, why doesn't, this doesn't make sense. We've been living, our family's been living here for centuries.
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of the Committee of Safety in the overthrow?
So there's that. And it also wasn't lucrative as well because they're primarily exporting to the United States, but the United States was growing its own sugar. So sugar was somewhat slow in that first half of the century. And the big change, the biggest change for Hawaiian sugar was the Civil War. So this is the melding of U.S.
history and Hawaiian history coming together when the Civil War breaks out. sugar production in the South, in the American South, comes to a halt. And this is the prime opportunity for these sugar planters in Hawaii to fill that void. And so the sugar plantation owners are making money like they've never seen before during the 1860s.
And of course, the Civil War is ended and that cash cow comes to a screeching halt and they are left pretty desperate and begging the Hawaiian kingdom, begging the sovereign, hey, can you do something about this? We just made a lot of money. It's stopped. We have to figure some kind of trade agreement or something with the United States that will allow us to continue these profitable gains.
And is that accomplished? Yes, that actually is eventually. And that is under the reign of Kalākaua, King Kalākaua, who takes office in 1874. Kalākaua agrees to a major piece of international diplomacy called the Reciprocity Treaty. And the Reciprocity Treaty, as in its name, Reciprocity, there's a benefit for the United States and there's a benefit for the Hawaiian Kingdom.
The Hawaiian kingdom was able to export sugar to the U.S. parafree. There's sugar and a whole bunch of other products, but primarily sugar was the cornerstone of that agreement. And then for the U.S., and this is kind of tying economic and then military advantage together, the U.S. wanted exclusive rights to a place called Pūloa in Hawaii. And Pūloa is the traditional name for what people call
What most people in the United States and around the world might know as Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor. There we are. It was a natural harbor. It was deep. It is essentially a perfect harbor, naturally formed harbor for big ships. And so the U.S. asked the Hawaiian Kingdom, if we do this treaty with you, then we want exclusive rights to build a coaling station in Pearl Harbor.
No other country can do that. Coming to Pearl Harbor except for the United States. And this goes into agreement in 1874 and it's renegotiated again in 1887.
Yeah, be careful letting the U.S. military come in because watch out. And there we are. And we're talking about this era. There's a bookend to this. It starts kind of 1810 as we say the unification. But it's going to end this period and then we'll take a break with 1887 and what's called the Bayonet Constitution. Explain that to me. It's probably 10 years after what you're talking about, right?
Yeah.
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Chapter 7: How did the U.S. government respond to the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom?
Okay. Coupled on with that post-Civil War downturn in sugar. So by 1887, they had formed Secret Society, which plotted against Kalakaua. They write a new constitution that basically shifted all of this executive power into the legislative branch. And then they forced Kalakaua to sign this constitution under the threat of violence, which is why it's called the Bannock Constitution.
And who was these? These were American interests? These were American businessmen who were threatening this?
So these were a mix of American and other European settlers. So they didn't... It's kind of funky because they are American, but they're not acting on behalf of the United States. They are domestic to Hawaii. A lot of them are citizens of the Hawaiian kingdom, but they come from those American families.
The takeaway is they've stripped the monarchy of most of its power, much of its power, shifting that to the legislature, disenfranchising many native Hawaiians while empowering American and European residents. Petitions, public meetings, political organizing was already taking place prior to this overthrow. But this changes everything. And so let's take a break.
And when we come back, we'll talk about the new legacy of the Bayonet Constitution and what happens towards the end of the century.
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on not just the Tudors from History Hit, we do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry VIII, from Anne Boleyn to her daughter Elizabeth I. But we also do lots that's not Tudors. Murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches. Clues in the title, really.
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Welcome back. We're speaking with Professor Noah Dolom of the University of Hawaii. Noah, in the late 19th century, as events unfold, the monarch in power, what we're about to speak about, her name is Queen Liliuokalani, who has ascended the throne after the death of her brother. Who was this queen and what were her goals?
Right, so Queen Lili'uokalani was one of the younger sisters of Kalakaua, who had been the previous monarch. Lili'u, even more so than her brother, came into a horrible situation as a monarch. Her brother had been forced to sign that bayonet constitution, and it was thus the constitution that Lili'uokalani herself inherited.
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Chapter 8: What were the consequences of annexation for Hawaii and its people?
So some of the same men who wrote that constitution are now sitting in the House of Nobles, in that upper house. So Lili Okorani goes, she's hard at work writing a new constitution. She actually finishes a draft of that constitution. She wants to put it before the legislature of the Hawaiian kingdom and the committee of safety, they have spies all over.
We don't know who exactly it was, but there is allegedly, you know, somebody within Liliu's camp who was relaying information to the committee of safety. So they get wind that, hey, the queen is done with this constitution and she's going to put it before the legislature. And that's when they decide to act upon that. And basically,
cut off the queen before she can do any damage to their, their goals. And that's the catalyst for the.
Yeah. John L. Stevens, the U S minister to the Hawaii is the central figure in this January, 1893, uh, Stevens orders the U.S. Marines to land in Honolulu. They take up positions near the government buildings, show a force was not authorized by the Hawaiian government. Their presence intimidates royalist forces, made resistance very risky.
It was pretty much exactly what they wanted to do, these forces coming on. And in the end, the queen seeks to avoid bloodshed and yields authority, stating she trusted the U.S. government to reverse the illegal actions. Okay, there you go. That's the Hawaiian love at work here. We're looking for the best in humanity and not the worst. In this case, that's going to get you in trouble.
What was the reaction of the Hawaiian people to this? To the measures taken by the U.S.?
Yeah, so leading up to the actual January 17th, you know, Stevens, the minister, the U.S. minister to Hawaii and the community safety were, they were in cahoots already. Minister Stevens was acting on his own accord in which which leads to him getting fired by the United States because it was not an authorized call to land those Marines that shipped the USS Boston.
It had actually been in Honolulu Harbor for quite a while, but Administrator Stevens took it upon himself to call those Marines ashore as a show of force and, you know, quote, unquote, you know, to protect the American people and property. But it was really to be the, you know, unofficial order are part of the unofficial militia for this Hawaiian League, sorry, Committee of Safety.
As far as the responses of Hawaiian people, I mean, this is devastating, right? You've seen the last five years where monarchy is stripped of its power. And then this is kind of like the nail in the coffin with the actual overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom. And I might also remind of years too, especially with some of these men who were missionary descendants. These are men that people knew
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