Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (43 page)

The missionaries’ children, however, brought a different perspective. Sent to the mother country and welcomed back with their degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, many of them returned having absorbed the American racism of the late nineteenth century. William Richards could say of Timothy Ha‘alilio, “He is not my servant, I am his,” but that was not the starting point of the second and third generation
haoles
. In their minds it was but a small step from saying that the Kalakaua government was corrupt to saying that dark races are not capable of enlightened self-government. At the beginning of her reign the new queen, focused upon the recovery of meaningful royal power, had little notion of what a powerful obstacle she would face in simple racial prejudice. Social journalist Mary Krout was charmed by Lili‘u’s easy grace, but she still perceived the American side of the moment with perfect clarity: “When Queen Liliuokalani came to the throne more perverse than her brother; more determined to restore native rule in its most aggravated form, her subjects lost hope, and realised that there were but two alternatives—the relapse of the country into the state from which it had so painfully emerged, or the administration of the government by the Anglo-Saxon, aided by the natives of the better class.”
3
By “subjects,” of course, Mary Krout meant those of means and American descent.

Third, the new queen’s support among the native and mixed-blood political class was not monolithic. At the time Lili‘uokalani ascended the throne, the native population had continued on a downward drift of frightening inexorability. Even after the subsidence of the early postcontact epidemics, there had been a net loss of three to four thousand native inhabitants at each six-year census since early in the reign of Kamehameha V. And the census of 1890 was the first in which immigrants and island-born nonnatives (49,368) finally outnumbered the surviving native Hawaiians, including those of mixed race (40,662).
4
Many of the
maka‘ainana
resented being disenfranchised by the property restrictions placed upon voting rights, and they turned for leadership to an unpredictable firebrand, Robert William Wilcox, who was the
hapa haole
son of a Maui chiefess and a Rhode Islander. Wilcox had been twenty-five when Kalakaua had plucked him out of the legislature, taken him on his grand tour, and deposited him at the Royal Military Academy at Turin for a Western military education. The reform government recalled him to save money, and back in Hawai‘i he led an ill-advised putsch against the Bayonet Constitution that cost seven lives, and in which Kalakaua refused to get involved. At Lili‘u’s accession, Wilcox and his confederate John E. Bush sought government appointments from her, and when she refused they led as many of their party as they could command—but that was not everybody—against her, advocating a native republic not beholden to sugar, and to her anger they spread the rumor that she had taken her new half-Tahitian marshal of the kingdom, Charles B. Wilson, as a lover.
5

Fourth, she came to the throne at perhaps the most threatening moment the sugar industry had yet known. The United States was bound to the reciprocity treaty, but now that they had finally squeezed Pearl Harbor out of Kalakaua, the rest of its provisions were a drag on free trade elsewhere. Under the leadership of Senator William McKinley of Ohio, the United States passed a bill that removed tariffs from all foreign sugar imports, but made up for it at home with a two-cents-per-pound bounty to grow domestic sugar. McKinley and his allies managed to wreck the treaty without technically breaking it, and the Hawaiian sugar growers were looking over a precipice not too different from what Kalanikupule saw at the Battle of Nu‘uanu Pali.

Against this sea of troubles Lili‘u took up arms, and she was a quick study in how to use what little remained of royal power. Before the Bayonet Constitution, her brother had usually managed to milk what he needed from the legislature by appointing and dismissing cabinets. That avenue was now closed; cabinets could not be dismissed without a no-confidence vote, and in fact the first government to fall in the 1892 legislature was her own preferred one, composed of members of her National Reform Party, brought down by a freakish alliance of the American-dominated Reform Party and the largely native Liberal Party. Soon, however, with the Reform Party unpopular and riddled with dissension, the queen discovered that by exercising a little trouble she could engineer no-confidence votes, bring a government down, and get a new cabinet just the same. To the fourth government of the session she appointed Reform Party members, which sufficiently angered members of the Liberal Party whose leaders had expected ministerial posts that they supported two revenue bills that she found crucial to keeping the government financed.

The members of the Reform Party, who had once risked their necks by conspiring to form the Hawaiian League, responded to the queen’s machinations by forming a new, equally clandestine, organization whose very name made its purpose unmistakable: the Annexation Club. The 1892 legislature met contentiously for 172 days, the longest session in the history of the kingdom. The sugar industry, and therefore the economy, was close to ruin because the Americans’ McKinley Act had gutted the reciprocity treaty, and much of the quarreling in the legislature was over how to raise revenue needed to sustain the government when its usual mainstay, sugar, was facing its bleakest hour.

Two notable proposals had been made in this regard: One was to begin a lottery, and the other was regulate and tax the import of opium. Both measures raised objections, mostly from the Americans in the legislature, on moral grounds. The queen was ambivalent on the subject of opium. She was grateful that the missionaries had brought the knowledge of Jesus to the islands. She spent most of her youth boarding in the Royal School, as she was reminded every day because the site of its building was now the barracks for her palace guard. Unlike Liholiho and Emma, she had remained loyal to that denomination and had her own pew in the Kawaiaha‘o Church, the first and still the largest church that they had founded. But the queen also knew them to be cold, dour people, and whether they actually preached it or whether it was because that was the way they lived their lives, they conveyed the message that the enjoyment of life was sinful. They took a dim view of both lotteries and opium. Nor did the Americans’ hypocrisy escape her notice: They did not seem to mind working the Chinese to death, but they spun into a moral tizzy at the thought of opium.

Her feeling about the lottery was more ambivalent. “They are not native productions of my country,” she wrote later, “but introduced into our ‘heathen’ land by so-called Christians, from a Christian nation, who have erected monuments, universities, and legislative halls by that method.”
6
The queen’s opinion of lotteries incorporated another point of view as well, which she confided freely enough to her diary but judiciously omitted from her memoirs. For some time she had been taking lessons in German from a tutor named Gertrude Wolf, who proceeded to insinuate herself into the queen’s confidence as a medium and fortune-teller. Even as Kalakaua had never entirely abandoned his attraction to the occult, Lili‘u gave access and her attention to Fräulein Wolf. The company behind the lottery proposal had attempted a similar operation in Louisiana, and seeking an easier game in Hawai‘i, probably had the acumen to use Fräulein Wolf to influence the queen.
7

The preceding July 7, after a ball, the queen retired at 1:30 a.m. with Fräulein Wolf, who read her cards. “She told me,” the queen wrote in her diary, “that at ten the next morning a gentleman will call on me with a bundle of papers where it would bring lots of money across the water.… She says I must have the House accept it, it would bring 1,000,000.” Wolf ventured further—the strongest evidence that it was the lottery boosters who were behind her—and using initials only, instructed the queen what men should and should not be appointed to her next cabinet.

Wolf went home at 3:30 a.m. but returned to the queen at 9:00. “When she felt sure the man was in the house,” the diary continued, “I sent her home. 10:25—sure enough—the man came up with the bundle of papers and spoke of lottery. How strange she should have told me.”
8
A month later Fräulein Wolf indicated that if the lottery bill passed, the queen herself would profit by fifteen to twenty thousand dollars per annum, “pocket money.”
9
This could only be called a bribe, but the queen was looking at least as hard at the public works projects to benefit the people that could be undertaken with such sums of money. Eventually the bills passed the legislature, and it was up to her to sign them or veto them. The kingdom needed revenue, and there was little chance at least in the near term of persuading the United States to repeal the McKinley Act. Taking pen in hand, she affixed her signature: Liliuokalani R.

During some of that 172-day session, at least her worst nemesis was out of her hair: Lorrin Thurston, firebrand of the Reform Party, had sailed to the United States to manage the continental end of his business affairs. Had she known what he was up to, she would have felt differently about his absence. During his “business” trip to the United States, Thurston visited Washington on behalf of the Annexation Club to ascertain the current sentiment there on the possible American acquisition of Hawai‘i. He obtained a meeting with the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, James H. Blount, a Democrat of Georgia, who thought Thurston was a seditious little troublemaker and gave him short shrift. Angling higher, Thurston turned toward the Republican administration, and met with Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Tracy, and with Secretary of State (and onetime presidential nominee) James G. Blaine, who had recruited Minister Stevens for the Hawai‘i post. It would have seemed too conspiratorial for President Benjamin Harrison to himself receive Thurston, but those two cabinet officers carried his case to the president and returned with an explicit statement of the U.S. position: “If conditions in Hawaii compel you to act as you have indicated, and you come to Washington with an annexation proposition, you will find an exceedingly sympathetic administration here.”
10

With the legislature’s tasks nearly completed, the queen had a no-confidence vote called on Thursday, January 12, 1893; the cabinet resigned, and she installed a new one that would be adequate to govern until the legislature was called again during the spring. The leaders of the legislature agreed that their session had finally come to its end, and the ceremony of prorogation, their dismissal, was set for noon on Saturday, January 14. The queen had her own reason for looking forward to that day, for just as Thurston had been scurrying about the United States making certain of American support for annexation, Lili‘uokalani had been equally busy behind closed doors: She had written a new constitution.

This was not a closely held secret. She had previously given a draft of it to the man she now installed as her attorney general, Arthur P. Peterson, to comment on it and make suggestions; he returned it after a month with no recommended changes. One of her legislative defeats during the session was that she tried and failed to persuade the legislature to call a constitutional convention to debate, perfect, and enact the new fundamental law. So it was widely known that the queen had a new constitution ready to enact; the only question was whether she would limit herself to trying to put it into force through presently constitutional means, which would be difficult to impossible, or whether she would risk pulling down the monarchy around her in an attempt to restore the native franchise and her royal prerogatives by attempting to replicate Kamehameha V’s bold step.

On Saturday morning before the ceremony, she conferred with the cabinet in the blue room of the palace. Once closeted with them, Lili‘uokalani informed them that after she prorogued the legislature, she intended to abrogate the Bayonet Constitution and establish the new one. In it she would restore the vote to native Hawaiians, and—incorporating elements of the constitution of Kamehameha V—restore royal executive authority. Ministers would serve at her pleasure, she would appoint members of the house of nobles, and her sovereign acts would no longer depend upon the advice and consent of the cabinet. Her plan had only one breathtaking flaw: Under the provisions of the Bayonet Constitution then in force, she was barred from changing it except under the terms of its own admittedly all-but-insuperable amendment process.

Her four American ministers, in office for two days, were staggered. Most gravely shocked was Peterson. Born in the islands, the son of a business émigré from Plymouth, Massachusetts, he had attended law school at the University of Michigan and clerked for a Supreme Court justice. He was only thirty-three, but had previously served King Kalakaua as assistant attorney general and then attorney general toward the end of his reign. If any man in the government was positioned to know the angry mood of the American business community, it was he: His former law partner, W. A. Kinney, now practiced in the office of William O. Smith—whose partner was Lorrin Thurston. Before her sucker-punched ministers could recover, the queen further informed them of her intention to announce the new Constitution after she dismissed the legislature, first to an assemblage in the throne room, and again to the people from the palace balcony.

Bowing themselves away from this audience, Attorney General Peterson and the interior minister, John F. Colburn, beat a hasty retreat from the palace. Almost in panic at the queen’s contemplated overthrow of the 1887 constitution, they hurried to a place where they could receive counsel on what to do. Whether it was an act of betraying the queen’s plan (she later called it treason) or whether it was because they genuinely did not know where else to turn, they entered the law office of Lorrin Thurston.

Now returned with assurances of American sympathy toward annexation, Thurston knew exactly what to tell Peterson and Colburn: They must oppose the queen, but for the moment they must endure her fury; they must not resign from the cabinet. If they resigned, Lili‘uokalani would replace them with others who would do her bidding, and cabinet signatures on the new constitution would give it a greater appearance of legality. But once the legislature had been prorogued, she could not dismiss ministers until they convened again, and they would have her in the box in which their Bayonet Constitution was designed to keep her.