A False Spring

Having survived the brutal cold of Washington's winter, the Hawaiian delegation welcomed spring. Having survived yet another campaign to annex their homeland to America, they took a brief moment to remark cheerfully on the survival of Hawai'i as an independent nation. Perhaps the moment for America to take over Hawai'i had come and gone, and perhaps the Hawaiians could now get their country back.

The queen of Hawai'i had been living in a hotel in Washington during most of 1897, and the delegates of the native political societies had arrived toward the end of the year, in the dead of winter, to support her with the most ambitious of their many petitions. The delegation had come from mass rallies in Hawai'i against annexation that had been attended by thousands of Hawaiians, who now were nearly one quarter of the earth's surface away. At one of the rallies against annexation, a speaker had likened the Kingdom of Hawai'i to a house, which had been built by the great king, Kamehameha. A handful of foreigners had taken over the house, and they had given the Hawaiians a lei stand in return, where the Hawaiians were expected to reside and sell flowers.

Would the Hawaiians live in the lei stand? 'A'ole, the crowd had shouted back. No, never.

When the delegates to Washington closed their eyes they could remember the faces, the families, and the petitions passing from hand to hand for people to sign their names. As a result of the petition drive, the Hawaiian delegation had arrived in Washington with thirty-eight thousand signatures protesting America's proposed annexation of their country, and they were eager to call the petitions to the attention of influential Americans. Considering that only forty thousand or so Hawaiians survived, it was surely true, as their opponents said, that some of the signatures were duplicates, and some were the names of children, and perhaps some were names of the dead. But the petitions nonetheless were a virtual census of the Hawaiian nation, as Hawaiians still called themselves, and the petitions said eloquently that in spite of everything that had happened, they wanted to be what they had been, a nation in the world system of nations.

Culturally it was very Hawaiian to recite stories of the past, and their desire to survive led them to recite the story of the preceding five years over and over. Americans seemed to have short memories, and so the Hawaiian delegates had to constantly remind people that their government had been taken over by a handful of haole men, many of them descended from American missionaries. The disloyal acts of this Committee of Annexation had been prompted by the United States minister to Hawai'i, and the committee had thereafter been shielded by the might of the United States navy. At many points along the twisting five-year path, the Hawaiians had challenged the committee's resulting Provisional Government — and challenged America — to open the question of annexation to a democratic vote, but their appeal had always been refused.

As their petitions said, the native people had not been consulted on the proposed dissolution of their nation. Nor was the Republic of Hawaii a republic, but rather a tyranny of the many by the few, bolstered by the nearly continuous presence of U.S. warships. Now, through the draft treaty of annexation, this small group of haole was trying to turn the land, sovereignty, and prospective naval bases of the nation of Hawai'i over to the United States. There was a name for such a transaction, former President Grover Cleveland had said, but he never wrote down what it was.

To describe the situation in words that Americans might understand, the queen of Hawai'i was to write that America surely would not want to become "a colonizer and a land-grabber." If the American government was to follow the British, French, and Germans into colonialism, was this agreeable to the American people? While no doubt Americans could rival the Europeans in the sad business of conquest, was this how an idealistic nation wanted to be known in the world? Would a nation that originated from an anticolonial revolution now want to be known for its colonization of others?

Although the queen was one of many Hawaiians who steadfastly resisted annexation, naturally it was she whose name would be remembered, Lili'uokalani. In the years following the overthrow, Lili'uokalani had gone from exalted sovereign to prisoner to parolee. When she left Hawai'i, she told the president of the white government that she was going to visit a sick relative, but after circulating among acquaintances in Boston long enough to dignify her story, she had taken a night train to Washington, D.C., and there she had tried to regain the sovereignty of her nation. In a short time she had reached a remarkable number of people, many of them highly placed in the world, just as she was. Given the racial stereotypes that sometimes confronted her in the press, and given that much of the globe had descended into the organized violence of colonial takeovers, there was a kind of mad civility to the events that engaged her.

Masons were among the many groups of people who came to see her. One day a hundred Masons from Philadelphia came calling. They sang her song, Aloha 'Oe, which spoke of one fond embrace before departing. Lili'uokalani played the piano superbly, and when Masons wanted to sing their national anthem, she obliged them by playing the accompaniment, O Say Can You See? She wrote in her diary that all were filled with good tidings for her. Grover Cleveland, the twenty-fourth president of the United States, had welcomed her warmly, and Mrs. Cleveland had honored her with a reception at the White House. Now, she wondered, with America in a more nationalistic mood, would the twenty-fifth president of the United States likewise entertain her, and entertain her thoughts as well?

Among the Hawaiian delegation who joined her, the two most prominent figures were James K. Kaulia and David Kalauokalani. James Kaulia was the leader of Hui Aloha 'Aina, which translates loosely as the Hawaiian Patriotic League and more literally as the gathering of people who love the land. Hui Aloha 'Aina was a mass protest organization that had sprung up to support traditional rule against "a handful of...