This is in answer to Dennis Gregory’s Your Voice (Aug. 23) “Road to statehood littered with what ifs.”
Mr. Gregory starts his narrative opinion by first stating a falsehood that “The Hawaiian Queen was overthrown in 1893, that really hurt. To go from a kingdom to being a U.S. territory was a real downgrade for Hawaiians.”
Hawaii did not go from the kingdom model to a U.S. territory. Hawaii became a model for an easy transition to its own republic, The Republic of Hawaii. The majority members of the government were Polynesian-Hawaiian, as well as the Speaker of the House. This is because many Polynesians were on the Constitution’s writing committee.
The republic’s Constitution only allowed men who were citizens naturalized or born in the old kingdom to vote, effectively excluding all immigrants to the kingdom (Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Europeans, about two-fifths of the population). This allowed only about 1,300 people who could trace their ancestry back to the U.S. out of the 2,500 here at the time to participate.
However, it did then allow the Polynesian-Hawaiians who had all been born here to vote giving them two-thirds of the power of the vote in the new republic. The result of the change in the form of government here in 1893 was to empower the Polynesians who had been languishing under a kingdom model.
Perhaps this is why two years after the new republic in 1895, ex-Queen Liliuokalani and her co-conspirators could only muster 175 men to take part in her dismal, failed counter revolution against the republic, in which many men were killed. Polynesians by then had had a taste of democracy and self-rule, and had no stomach to return to an illegitimate form of government full of fiscal maleficence, constant intrigue and corruption.
The republic’s electorate was most certainly in favor of aligning itself with the government of the United States. Not only had the English language been adopted here as the main language of communication among its many different ethnicities (first called for by Kamehameha IV in 1855), but American dress, technology, money (U.S. money was by kingdom law the only money allowed to be used in Hawaii), and, of course, the U.S. had a naval base in Pearl Harbor since 1885 as a result of a long-term lease given them by King David Kalakaua as part of agreeing to a reciprocity trade deal with the U.S.
Two U.S. presidents turned away from treaty offers from the Republic of Hawaii. Then, with the election of William McKinley, the U.S. Congress took up the latest offer of a treaty, unanimously voted on by the republic government in 1898. By a vote of 209-91 in the House, and a vote of 42-21 in the U.S. Senate (exactly two-thirds approval), and signed by the president, the treaty was accepted by Congressional-Executive Agreement method.
While no polls were taken before or after annexation, we do know that the Territorial Legislature of 1901 had a 73 percent Polynesian-Hawaiian membership. With over 70 percent Polynesian-Hawaiian membership the first act of the 1903 Legislature was to, by unanimous vote, ask the U.S. Congress for full statehood. It makes no sense that if the two-thirds majority Polynesian voters were against statehood, why they would continue to elect members to the Territorial Congress who were in favor of it. Polynesian Robert Wilcox was our first elected delegate to the U.S. Congress, the Prince Kuhio Kalaniana’ole was continually elected as delegate up until 1922 when he suffered a tragic heart attack the entire time giving speeches in favor of granting Hawaii full statehood.
Running for office in 1900, Robert Wilcox gave a speech down in Kakaako in which he said, “The question of the monarchy is gone forever. But, you do know you control two-thirds of the vote. If you want to rule it is for you to decide.”
And they did rule, until slowly but surely the children were born here to the very immigrants who were discriminated against from voting earlier, and became voters. The voting demographics changed until after statehood, then certain disgruntled Polynesian individuals began in earnest to claim some “sovereignty” right, and now want to start their own government.
David Taylor is resident of Pahoa.
