HAWAII

HAWAII. When Captain James Cook arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in the 1770s, he found a people living in the most isolated location on earth who had developed a highly sophisticated agriculture based mainly on the cultivation of kalo (taro), some of which was grown in impressive irrigation systems. The subsistence economy was based on agriculture and the harvest of products from the sea. Items moved between farmers and fishermen through reciprocal gift exchanges that were not driven by values or timetables. Absent any metals, pottery clay, or textile fibers, the people developed a highly advanced culture based on the materials provided by the islands.

Politically, the people were ruled by regional moÛi (kings) of whom there might be several on one island. Religiously and legally the society was regulated by a religion based on a kapu (tabu) system that consisted of prohibitions, restrictions, and directions, all of which depended for their enforcement on the authority and punitive powers of the kahuna (priests). Under this system, women were prohibited from eating certain foods or dining with men and were restricted in other ways. The daily life of Hawaiians was also regulated by the konohiki (landlords), under whom they lived in a semifeudal status.

The makaÛainana (commoners) were subject to arbitrary exactions from the aliÛi (chiefs) in whose presence they were required to prostrate themselves, and were also subject to a formal tax annually during the makahiki season, which occurred late in every year and brought concentrations of people from the surrounding area. The burden of taxation was lightened through its accompaniment by a festival that included sports and games. It was during the makahiki festival that Captain Cook sailed into Kealakekua Bay, where he later met his unfortunate end, and the presence of the unusually large number of people may have caused him to exaggerate the population of the islands.

Early Merchant Trade

Despite their "discovery" by Cook, the islands at first seemed to offer nothing of economic benefit to the West, and their location away from established trade routes discouraged follow-up voyages. John Ledyard, an American who accompanied Cook, was struck, however, by the potential profits to be gained by trading the furs of the Pacific Northwest for the products of China at Canton. Ledyard's efforts to interest American businessmen in such a venture were met with skepticism until his stories were confirmed by the publication of the journals of the expedition, whereupon both English and American merchant ships set out to exploit the trade.

It was the fur trade between the Pacific Northwest and Canton that made the Hawaiian Islands a desirable way station and a convenient stopover between trading seasons. Thus began the rapid transformation of the islands and their people. Reciprocal gift exchanges quickly gave way to barter, then to trade and the beginnings of a commercial agriculture that focused on growing the products sought by the Westerners, many of them newly introduced to the islands. The reliance on stone and other indigenous products for tools and weapons was now supplemented by the use of metals. Western firearms were also introduced. These were used, with the help of Western advisers, by Kamehameha, a moÛi of the island of Hawaii, to unify all of the islands under his control as king of Hawaii.

The discovery of sandalwood in the islands, and its marketability in Canton, gave Hawaii an economic value it had not previously possessed and brought Western (mainly American) merchants to Honolulu to deal in this precious commodity, especially after Kamehameha's death in 1819 ended his monopoly over the trade. The aliÛi scrambled to exploit the sandalwood forests for access to the goods of the West that the fragrant wood provided, incurring debts with foreign merchants to be paid later in deliveries of sandalwood. The beginnings of a monetary economy began to intrude into the traditional subsistence way of life even in the most remote areas.

Forced Westernization and the Rise of the Sugar Industry

After Kamehameha's death, the traditional kapu system was thrown out by his successor, Liholiho, under the influence of Kamehameha's widow, Kaahumanu, whom he had appointed as kuhina nui (regent, prime minister) to advise the new king. The overthrow set the Hawaiian people adrift in a particularly chaotic time. In 1820, two events occurred that would further contribute to the transformation of the islands and to the stresses on the Hawaiian people: the arrival of the first Puritan missionaries from New England and the introduction of the first whaling ships to Hawaii's harbors. Their arrival accelerated the revolution in Hawaiian life that had been inaugurated by Cook's arrival, the main features of which would be: (1) the transition from a society in which wealth, power, and status were based on land to one in which they were increasingly measured in money; (2) the increasing control of that monetary economy—and the wealth and power and status associated with it—by Westerners rather than by the Hawaiian aliÛi; (3) the transition from a rural, largely subsistence lifestyle to an urban, consumerist one, with the accompanying rise of individualism at the expense of the traditional communalism; (4) the replacement of the traditional religion and its related social controls by a religion ill-suited to the Hawaiians in the form of Calvinist Christianity; (5) the destructive effects of the Calvinist missionaries in their efforts to replace all traditional culture with the Calvinists' own version of acceptable diversions, laws, and institutions; (6) the introduction of Western laws, practices, and institutions that were easily understood by the Westerners, but which increasingly placed the Hawaiians at a disadvantage in coping with these alien devices; (7) the blurring of class distinctions between commoners and chiefs that resulted in the loss of power and influence by the traditional leadership of the Hawaiian people, creating a vacuum increasingly filled by the missionaries and other Westerners; and (8) the integration of Hawaii into the global economy, with the accompanying globalization of Hawaiian culture and daily life.

By the 1890s, commercialism, urbanization, and individualism had replaced subsistence agriculture and rural communalism as the key features of life in the islands, while large sugar plantations marketing their products in foreign lands had largely supplanted the kuleana (small fields) of Hawaiian farmers. The Hawaiian religion had been replaced by Christianity, and the kapu system by Puritan law codes, while the traditional prerogatives of the aliÛi and of the moÛi had been usurped by a new white "aliÛi" ruling in the name of a Republic of Hawaii within which the franchise of Hawaiians had been so sharply restricted that they were a minority of voters.

While there were many milestones in the march toward this fate, a major one certainly was passage by the kingdom's legislature of the alien land law in 1850, which made it possible for foreigners for the first time to own land in fee simple. Before this act, the economic penetration by foreign interests had been limited largely to commerce. Once the security of land ownership was provided, however, foreign interests, mainly American, were willing to undertake the investment in productive ventures like sugar plantations and mills. As declining demand for whale oil and whalebone caused whaling to die out in the 1860s and 1870s, the growing, processing, and exportation of sugar rose in importance. The ratification by the United States in 1875 of a reciprocity treaty with the Kingdom of Hawaii enormously accelerated the growth of the sugar industry. The effect, however, was to make the kingdom almost totally dependent on sugar for its prosperity, and the sugar industry, in turn, almost totally dependent on the American market. Like the tentacles of an octopus, the sugar plantations reached out everywhere for lands on which to grow the valuable crop.

Another effect of the reciprocity act was to accelerate the importation of laborers (mainly Chinese and Japanese) to work on the plantations, since there were not enough Hawaiians to do the work. The Hawaiian population, estimated at between 300,000 and 500,000 at the time of Cook's arrival, had shrunk by the end of the 1870s to fewer than 60,000, while between 1876 and 1890 the sugar planters imported 55,000 Chinese and Japanese laborers. In 1876, the Hawaiians, despite their reduced numbers, still accounted for 90 percent of the population of the islands. By 1890, they were not even a majority in their own land.

Annexation

The combination of the reciprocity act and the "bayonet constitution" forced by the white oligarchy on King Kalakaua in 1887 solidified the position and prosperity of that oligarchy in Hawaii. The reciprocity act permitted the shipment of sugar to the American market duty-free, thus putting it on the same basis as domestically produced sugar and at an advantage in competition with other foreign sugar. The 1887 constitution assured these planters and businessmen of control over the government of the kingdom, thus making them secure in their extensive investments in the islands. In the early 1890s, however, both profits and power were undermined by two events, one in Washington and one in Honolulu.

The first was the passage into law of the McKinley Tariff in 1890, which deprived Hawaiian sugar of all the advantages it had received by granting duty-free status to all foreign sugar while providing a bounty to domestic sugar producers. The second was the death of King Kalakaua and the succession of Liliuokalani as queen, who came to the throne determined to recover for the crown the powers it had lost in the 1887 constitution.

In January 1893, a combination of circumstances centering on the queen's proposal to promulgate a new constitution on her own initiative touched off a virtually bloodless coup. At a critical moment, U.S. forces were moved ashore from the USS Boston, then in Honolulu harbor, at the instigation of the U.S. minister to Hawaii, John L. Stevens. A provisional government was established under Sanford B. Dole and a mission was dispatched to Washington, D.C., to negotiate a treaty for annexation of the islands by the United States.

The timing was unfortunate, for a Republican sympathetic to annexation, Benjamin Harrison, was about to turn over the White House to an unsympathetic Democrat, Grover Cleveland. The treaty negotiated with the Harrison administration was stalled in the Senate until Cleveland's inauguration, whereupon Cleveland launched an investigation that seemed to reveal the culpability of the preceding administration in the overthrow. Denied the support of the White House, the annexation treaty drew dust in the Senate until the election of Republican William McKinley in 1896 and the Spanish-American War brought the renewed enthusiasm for expansion that made possible Hawaii's annexation by joint resolution of Congress. On 12 August 1898 the flag of the United States was raised over Iolani Palace in Honolulu.

Once under the U.S. Constitution, the sugar planters might have been more secure in their profits, but their political power was eroded by the guarantee of franchise to all Hawaiian adult males, which made up the majority of eligible voters. In the first territorial election, the Hawaiians' own Home Rule Party elected a majority of the legislature and also the territory's delegate to Congress. Placed on the defensive, the planters negotiated an agreement with Prince Jonah Kalanianaole Kuhio, an heir to the throne of the defunct monarchy, to run on the Republican ticket for delegate to Congress, thereby attracting enough Hawaiian voters to the Republican side to give the planter-controlled Republicans effective political domination until World War II.

During the next forty years, however, conditions were created for the political transformation of Hawaii by the arrival of tens of thousands of new immigrants, mainly now from the Philippines; by the coming to voting age of the sons and daughters of these and earlier immigrants; and by the rise of a labor movement in Hawaii. The Great Depression and New Deal of the 1930s did not impact Hawaii as much as they did the mainland United States, but they did exert an influence. Hawaii received a share of the public-works and work-relief spending that improved its infrastructure just in time for the needs of World War II. These programs were administered by federal officials from the mainland that breathed new life into the Hawaii Democratic Party. Legislation like the National Industrial Recovery Act and the National Labor Relations Act gave enormous stimulus to the unionization of Hawaii's workers. At the same time, the tendency on the part of some in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to deal with Hawaii as an "insular possession" like the Philippines and Puerto Rico, rather than as a territory of the United States, as in the case of the Jones-Costigan Sugar Act, convinced many that only statehood could provide the security that Hawaii's economy required.

World War II and Postwar Political Change

Within twenty-four hours of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, life in the islands changed, as the territory came under a rigorous martial law that worked closely with the white oligarchy (generally referred to as the Big Five, which consisted of Alexander and Baldwin, American Factors, C. Brewer and Company, Castle and Cooke, and Theo H. Davies and Company). On the surface it appeared to be only a brief interruption of normal conditions and that the 1930s status quo would return after the war. But numerous new factors were introduced during the war years that accelerated the changes already under way in the 1930s. For one, the war brought many new workers from the mainland who brought their union loyalties and an antipathy to the big businesses that ruled Hawaii and the political party that represented them. Many of these workers stayed after the war ended, as did many servicemen who had been exposed to the islands for the first time. Another factor was that many of Hawaii's minorities went off to fight in the war, most notably the Americans of Japanese ancestry (AJAs) who made up the famed 100th Infantry Battalion, and 442d Regimental Combat Team. Taking advantage of their veterans' benefits after the war, many would go on to receive college degrees and even postgraduate and professional degrees and would commit themselves to bringing reforms to Hawaii.

By 1954, a Democratic Party that had been reinvigorated by the leadership of former policeman John A. Burns, working with AJAs like Daniel K. Inouye and others, was able to capture control of both houses of the territorial legislature. (By 2002, the Democrats were still in control of both houses.) The loss of the Big Five's political control was soon followed by the weakening of their economic control as well. As Hawaii's delegate to Congress, Burns worked tirelessly in behalf of statehood for the islands. He was finally successful in 1959, when Congress approved a statehood bill. On 17 June of that year the voters of Hawaii ratified statehood by a margin of 17–1, and on 21 August, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill admitting Hawaii as the fiftieth state in the Union.

Hawaii since Statehood

In a special 1959 election, the last appointed governor of the territory, Republican William Quinn, became the first elected governor of the state, when he staged a surprising victory over John Burns. But in 1962, Burns defeated Quinn, ushering in an unbroken succession of Democratic governors for the remainder of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party's strategy changed from that of a working-class party to one racially oriented, based on appeals to the descendants of Hawaii's immigrant plantation laborers of whatever class.

Statehood did not save Hawaii's sugar industry. The combination of rising costs and foreign competition brought the demise of the industry by the end of the twentieth century. Left at least temporarily without a viable industry, the state of Hawaii was forced to rely almost entirely on tourism for its prosperity, with tourists sought from all over the world, particularly Asia. Tourism, however, was dependent on economic conditions in the source countries. Frequent economic crises on the U.S. mainland and in Asia during these decades revealed how fragile Hawaii's economic base had become when they triggered severe recessions in the islands that continued into the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, traditional Hawaiian culture, so long dormant that its very survival was being questioned, staged a renaissance in the 1970s, inspired in large part by developments on the U.S. mainland including the civil rights and ethnic studies movements of the 1960s. The Hawaiian renaissance encompassed both cultural and political elements, with a resurgence of interest in both traditional and more recent Hawaiian culture and language, together with the beginnings of Hawaiian political activism in opposition to development on Oahu and the U.S. Navy bombing of the island of Kahoolawe. Two laws passed during the Lyndon Johnson presidency contributed to both aspects of the renaissance. The creation of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities in 1965 provided money to encourage the growth and under-standing of arts and humanities. With government patronage available, Hawaiians and others interested in traditional Hawaiian culture were stimulated to undertake creative activities, pursue traditional arts and crafts, and learn and disseminate information about the culture. The Model Cities program inaugurated by the federal government in 1966 encouraged grassroots political activism and provided broader opportunities for the participation and leadership of Hawaiians.

The influence of the Hawaiian renaissance profoundly affected the state's constitutional convention in 1978, particularly the "Hawaiian package" of amendments that the new constitution included. The new constitution recognized the Hawaiian language as one of the official languages of the state (just eleven years after its use was still prohibited), confirmed the Hawaiians in various traditional rights, and established the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to represent the interests of native Hawaiians. Four years later, the leader of the Hawaiian forces within the convention, John Waihee, was elected lieutenant governor of the state, and in 1986, he was elected to the first of two terms as governor.

The twentieth century ended with many Hawaiians seeking the culmination of the renaissance in some degree of sovereignty, and many others continuing the resurgent interest in Hawaiian culture and language amid new opportunities available in the state's schools and colleges. It also ended with signs of a possible resurgence of the Republican Party as an apparent result of decades that Hawaii had spent in the economic doldrums.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daws, Gavan. A Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Fuchs, Lawrence H. Hawaii Pono: A Social History. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961. Reprint, San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1983.

Kuykendall, Ralph S. The Hawaiian Kingdom. 3 vols. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1938–1967.

Gary DeanBest

See alsoHonolulu ; Sugar Industry .