Regime Change in Hawaii

Queen Liliuokalani around 1917, the year she died.

(Library of Congress)

On this date, January 17, in 1893, a group of American businessmen, with the backing of a U.S. Navy gunboat, assembled at the Government House in Honolulu to proclaim the end of the Hawaiian monarchy. They said they were promoting democracy and stability, but the deposed Queen and her cabinet, among others, argued that they had engineered a coup to serve the American sugar companies. President Grover Cleveland, inaugurated two months later, once declared, “I am ashamed of the whole affair.”

In the century that had followed the British discovery of Hawaii, in 1778, whites, or haoles, had settled on the archipelago first to spread Christianity and later to develop the land. In the 1840s Amos Starr Cooke, a former missionary from Connecticut, persuaded King Kalakaua to open up tracts of once-communal land to private development. Cooke used the land to build one of the largest sugar companies in the world. He also successfully lobbied Washington to lower import taxes on Hawaiian goods in exchange for getting a naval base at Pearl Harbor. This greatly increased profits for the sugar growers, and by 1890 they were exporting 225 million pounds of the stuff a year to the United States.

They were also continually leeching power from the Hawaiian monarchy, pushing through “reforms” to increase their influence in the cabinet. In 1891 Kalakaua died, and the throne passed to his independent-minded sister Liliuokalani. The new queen’s outspokenness worried Lorrin Thurston, a haole landowner and lawyer. He formed the Annexation Club with like-minded mostly American transplants and traveled to Washington to lobby President Benjamin Harrison to annex the islands.

Harrison was sympathetic and his administration offered to bribe Liliuokalani to step down. That didn’t work, but it convinced Thurston that the United States government would back him if he tried to overthrow the monarchy himself. At the end of the 1893 legislative session, the queen announced sweeping changes to the constitution, voiding property requirements for voting and mandating Hawaiian citizenship for it. The haoles were outraged. In 1890 there were 40,612 native Hawaiian and only 6,220 people of European descent on the islands. Democracy did not appear to be in the whites’ best interest.

Thurston and his allies, calling themselves the Committee for Safety, gathered to make a plan to depose the queen. On the night of January 14, Thurston made an unannounced visit to the home of John L. Stevens, the American minister to Hawaii, who had the power to mobilize the troops stationed at Pearl Harbor. Thurston won Stevens’s promise that if asked he would provide military support.

The next day Thurston prepared a letter to Stevens that read “We the undersigned, citizens and residents of Honolulu, respectfully represent that, in view of recent public events . . . culminating in the revolutionary acts of Queen Liliuokalani . . . the public safety is menaced and lives and property are in peril.” It was signed by 13 white planters, all but two of whom had significant stock holdings in sugar companies. Thurston knew that his very public role in the bid for annexation had made him unpopular, so he recruited Sanford Dole, the future fruit magnate, to lead a provisional government.

The Queen, at the urging of her ministers, tried to defuse the situation, backpedaling on many of her reforms, but the insurgents held firm. The committee held a rally at the Honolulu armory, where Thurston proclaimed, “I say, gentleman, that now and here is the time to act! The man who has not the spirit to rise after the menace to our liberties has no right to keep them!”

At 5 o’clock the cruiser USS Boston docked in Honolulu, and 162 Marines and sailors got off with Gatling guns and a light cannon. This modest group could easily overpower the palace security force, and their arrival sent the cabinet into a panic. They camped out near the Government House, while the Committee for Safety spent the night making final plans.

The following day, the rebels amassed at the Government House, read a declaration “abrogating” the queen, and strode into the building to take it over. There they found only a few bewildered clerks. The ministers had slunk off to the police station to write a plea to Stevens to remove the soldiers, but it was too late. Dole installed himself in the Government House and started firing off proclamations in an “official” capacity. Stevens recognized Dole’s government. The Queen, to avoid violence, stepped down.

President Harrison tried to rush an annexation treaty through the Senate before his term expired, but debate held it up. His successor, Grover Cleveland, withdrew the treaty, arguing that the Committee for Safety’s actions were illegal and that Stevens had acted independent of the United States government. He added, “I mistake the American people if they favor the odious doctrine that there is no such thing as international morality; that there is one law for a strong nation and another for a weak one, and that even by indirection a strong power may with impunity despoil a weak one of its territory.” But despite Cleveland’s protests and several filibuster attempts, a resolution passed both the House and Senate by a slim margin to establish Hawaii as a territory. Even after it became a state, in 1959, bitterness over the coup lingered, and in 1993 President Clinton signed an official apology to the Hawaiian people admitting the “historical significance of the illegal overthrow.”

Since the overthrow in Hawaii, the United States has directly participated in coups or toppled governments in Nicaragua, Iran, Chile, and, of course, Iraq. In Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, the journalist and historian Stephen Kinzer writes that “America’s long ‘regime change century dawned in 1893 with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy . . . a tentative, awkward piece of work.”

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.