In January 1894, the American sugar baron and longtime Hawai‘i resident Zephaniah Spalding testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations about the situation in Honolulu. “We have now as near an approach to autocratic government as anywhere,” Spalding said. “We have a council of 15, perhaps, composed of the businessmen of Honolulu” who “examine into the business of the country, just the same as is done in a large factory or on a farm.”
The insurrectionists had, with support from the highest levels of the U.S. government, successfully overthrown a nation. They’d installed an autocracy in its place, with Dole as president.
Americans argued about Hawai‘i for five long years after the overthrow. And once the United States officially annexed Hawai‘i in 1898 under President William McKinley, Dole became the first governor of the United States territory. Most Americans today know his name only because of the pineapple empire one of his cousins started.
All along, the debate over Hawai‘i was not merely about the fate of an archipelago some 5,000 miles away from Washington. Nor is the debate over Hawai‘i’s independence today some fringe argument about long-ago history. America answered the “question of Hawaii” by deciding that its sphere of influence would not end at California, but would expand ever outward. Harrison took the aggressive, expansionist view. Cleveland took the anti-imperialist, isolationist one. This ideological battle, which Harrison ultimately won (and later regretted, after he joined the Anti-Imperialist League himself), is perhaps the most consequential chapter in all of U.S. foreign relations. You can draw a clear, straight line from the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom to the attack on Pearl Harbor to America’s foreign policy today, including the idea that liberal democracy is worth protecting, at home and abroad.
It’s easy to feel grateful for this ethos when contemplating the alternative. In the past century, America’s global dominance has, despite episodes of galling overreach, been an extraordinary force for good around the world. The country’s strategic position in the Pacific allowed the United States to win World War II (and was a big reason the U.S. entered the war in the first place). The U.S. has continued to serve as a force for stability and security in the Pacific in a perilous new chapter. How might the world change without the United States to stand up to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin?
But to treat the U.S. presence in Hawai‘i as inevitable, or even as a shameful but justified means to an end, is to disregard the values for which Americans have fought since the country’s founding. It was the United States’ expansion into the Pacific that established America as a world superpower. And it all began with the coup in Honolulu, an autocratic uprising of the sort that the United States fights against today.
Perhaps the true lesson of history is that what seems destined in retrospect—whether the election of a president or the overthrow of a kingdom—is often much messier and more uncertain as it unfolds. John Waihe‘e, the former governor, told me that he no longer thinks about how to gain sovereignty, but rather how Hawai‘i should begin planning for a different future—one that may arrive unexpectedly, and on terms we may not now be considering.