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Hawaiian Sovereignty: Do the Facts Matter?

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Hawaiian Sovereignty: Do the Facts Matter? ANAN ATTEMPTATTEMPT TOTO UNTANGLEUNTANGLE REVISIONISMREVISIONISM HawaiianHawaiian SSoovereigntyvereignty:: DoDo thethe FacFac ts ts Matter?Matter? THURSTONTHURSTON TWIGG-SMITHTWIGG-SMITH Hawaiian Sovereignty DO THE FACTS MATTER? By Thurston Twigg-Smith GOODALE PUBLISHING Honolulu, Hawai‘i © 1998 by Goodale Publishing. All rights reserved Second edition, May 1998 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Twigg-Smith, Thurston, 1921- Hawaiian Sovereignty: Do the Facts Matter? Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. History—Hawaii. 2. Politics—Hawaii. Hardcover ISBN 0-9662945-0-5 Softcover ISBN 0-9662945-1-3 his book is dedicated to the continued T pursuit of the Hawaiian language. Why the interest in Hawaiian? The first three generations of my grandfather’s side of the family in these Islands were fluent in it: Asa Thurston, the missionary, spoke it, preached in it and translated books of the Bible into Hawaiian. His son, speaker of the Kingdom’s House of Representatives before his death at age 32, learned it in Kona as a boy and was as fluent in it as in English. His son, Lorrin A., the Rev- olutionist, was the same. He could catch the detailed nuances of other speakers in the Legislature when he was in it, especially if they thought they could get away with a wisecrack to their colleagues about him. And on my great-grandmother’s side of the family, her father, Lor- rin Andrews, put together the first Hawaiian dictionary in 1836 and followed it with an expanded edition in 1865. It was an unsophisti- cated product compared with the outstanding works of Mary Pukui and Samuel Elbert, but they saluted it for its pioneering thoroughness. They quoted H.W. Williams, a critic of Hawaiian dictionaries, as say- ing in 1926: “In 1865, it was the most important work of its kind....No other Polynesian dialect had received such thorough treatment...[it] remains a noble production.” In a salute to the missionaries who saved the language by reducing it to a written form in the 1820s, the ultimate dictionary writers quot- ed the Reverend Lorenzo Lyons, who wrote in 1878: “I’ve studied Hawaiian for 46 years but am by no means perfect...it is an interminable language...it is one of the oldest living languages of the earth, as some conjec- ture, and may well be classed among the best...the thought to displace it, or to doom it to oblivion by substituting the English language, ought not for a moment to be indulged. Long live the grand old, sonorous, poetical Hawaiian lan- guage.” If this book should happen to bring in revenue in excess of expenses, that profit will be donated to further support of the Hawai- ian language. Table of Contents Introduction i Prologue vii Foreword xi Chapters One 1 Sovereignty: The Claims Are Flawed Two 17 Colonialism & Missionaries: Facts of Life in the 19th Century Three 35 Seeds of Revolution Four 61 The Queen’s Own Men Wanted Her Out Five 83 Revolution Six 135 The Men Out Front Vignette 16 7 The Old Order Changes Seven 175 The Investigators Eight 207 The Road to Annexation Nine 241 Land Is the Key Ten 271 The Congressional Apology: A Travesty Eleven 299 Fact or Fiction? Twelve 323 Where Do We Go from Here? Historical Figures 341 Bibliography 359 Footnotes 363 Index 367 Illustrations Between pages The Bishops 88 and 89 The Thurstons Lorrin A. Thurston Kamehameha I, II Kamehameha III, IV Kamehameha V, Lunalilo Emma Kala-kaua Between pages Lili‘uokalani 152 and 153 Ka‘iulani William L. Lee Some of the Revolutionists More of the Revolutionists Claus Spreckels, J.E. Bush Annexation Committee, Kala-kaua’s crown Council of the Provisional Government, Citizens Guard Between pages The Blounts and Mills, Ali‘io-lani Hale 216 and 217 Cabinet of the Republic ‘Iolani Palace, Mrs. Hopper’s house Annexation Day ceremony Constitutional Convention of 1894 Prince Ku-hio-, Annexation Day Flag raising Between pages Timeline through Hawai‘i’s History 280 and 281 Introduction s Will and Ariel Durant state in The Lessons of History, “Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, Sovereignists’ knowledge of AAprobably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evi- past incomplete dence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship.” So it is with Hawai‘i’s 1893 Revolution and the subsequent events that continue to reverberate today. History is being ignored or rewritten to serve the perceived needs of those partisans of the sover- eignty movement in Hawai‘i. One of the unfortunate aspects of this is that many tend to accept the revised history without question and with no attempt to revisit the scene in 1893 to examine the events lead- ing up to and following the confrontations that took place. That 1893 Revolution ended the Hawaiian Monarchy, opened the door to Annexation of One might think Hawai‘i by the United States five years later and led . all is well . to Statehood for the Island territory in 1959. One might think that the political process had run its course a century later, and all is well in paradise today. But for the past decade our fiftieth state has been experiencing a difficult, often divisive, argument, whose roots lie in the history of the 1893 i Hawaiian Sovereignty: Do the Facts Matter? Revolution. All Native Hawaiians became U.S. citi- zens at Annexation, but some Native Hawaiians today are denying their American citizenship and its values. Instead, they are laying claim to sovereignty rights, reparations, state-owned government lands and possible independence from the United States, all based on an interpretation of the history of the revolutionary period that calls what happened a coup by the United States instead of a revolution by a vol- Major difference in interpretation unteer army of Hawai‘i residents. This is a major dif- ference! Almost everything about the Revolution is controversial, even what to call it. The men who took over the Kingdom called their action a counter-revo- lution, claiming Queen Lili‘uokalani herself was in revolt. She called their action treason. Sovereignty activists today call it an overthrow. Such distinctions are more than mere seman- tics, particularly in view of how current activists attempt to defend their positions on the basis of revised history. As John Clive notes in his book Not by Fact Alone, “Let us then come to a preliminary finding, to the effect that the past lends itself all too Past can be used readily to use by those who have a political axe to for political ends grind. Nothing works better to further a cause—good or bad—than to lend it legitimacy by supplying it with a long heritage.” Caught up in today’s nationwide swirl of political correctness, many residents of the Islands are reluctant to speak up against the extravagant claims of some Native Hawaiian leaders. This is the first attempt in book form to question the claims of sovereignty activists, and to dispute the accuracy and interpretations of the historical basis for their goals. The author, Thurston Twigg-Smith, is uniquely entitled to raise these questions. He is a ii Introduction fifth-generation resident of Hawai‘i, a descendant of missionaries who arrived on the first mission vessel, the Brig Thaddeus, in 1820. Twigg-Smith For the past fifty years he has been intimate- is a fifth- generation ly associated with The Honolulu Advertiser, Hawai‘i’s resident leading newspaper—from 1961 to 1993 as its pub- lisher and chief executive officer. His grandfather, Lorrin A. Thurston, was the leader of the revolu- tionary movement. Thurston’s Memoirs of the Hawaiian Revolution contains a detailed and docu- mented record of the Revolutionists’ viewpoint of the events before, during and after the confrontation. Five years ago Twigg-Smith jumped into what had been largely a one-sided discourse by writ- ing an article that began: “The overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani and subsequent annexation to the Unit- ed States were the best things that ever happened to Hawai‘i and its people.” The statement was ridiculed by sovereignty activists, but it got others, including some Hawai- ians, to thinking: “It isn’t so bad being an American citizen, and maybe some of the other claims and demands being made by sovereignty activists are questionable, too.” The continuing flood of pro-sovereignty arti- cles and letters, particularly in his former newspaper, The Advertiser (he relinquished his leadership role in 1993 when the newspaper was sold), made Twigg- Smith realize that the other side of the sovereignty story was not being told. This book, which might be called “the case Other side not against sovereignty,” is the result. Based on books being told and research not easily available, it presents a con- cerned journalist’s viewpoint of what actually took place at that crucial time. Many of the findings are surprising, and the evidence rebuts many current iii Hawaiian Sovereignty: Do the Facts Matter? claims, including the one that no Hawaiians were happy with Annexation or came to the Annexation Day ceremonies at ‘Iolani Palace. Even the Queen is quoted in 1900 as approving Annexation and the book contains photographs showing there were some Hawaiians present on Annexation Day, both on the dais with President Dole and in the audience on the Palace grounds. Twigg-Smith obviously hopes that facts like Some Hawaiians wanted Annexa- those and others will give Hawaiians an awareness tion that the community, somewhat divided now, was not torn apart at Annexation. There was disagreement at the time, but many Hawaiian politicians supported Annexation and capitalized on the new voting power U.S.
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