misogyny of the male legislators, and winning them over against the “petticoat rule” they would face under Emma Kaleleonalani. If anything, he succeeded too well in that, and in his seventeen years on the throne Hawai‘i became that much more Westernized. Lili‘uokalani was not Kamehameha V, the last great chief, and a constitutional abrogation that the people might have tolerated from him they would not accept from her, because she was a woman, because the times had come so far, and because a whole new political class—Lorrin Thurston, Sanford Dole, and the others—had come into being in the generation since Lot Kapuaiwa had quashed the previous constitution and issued his own.
Second, the issue of race had gained a different and uglier valence than it had had before. When Hiram Bingham brought the Congregationalist missionaries to Hawai‘i in 1820, they and the eleven reinforcement companies that followed over the next two decades were confident that they were bringing the light of a Christian civilization to a benighted culture. That population happened to have dark skin. The missionaries would have felt the same had they evangelized newly discovered islands of Scandinavia. The early missionary letters and literature are remarkably free of overtly racist epithets, not least because they discovered the Hawaiians to be quick and perceptive, and intelligent enough to have emerged from a culture with no written language to the highest literacy rate in the world in less than a generation.
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
Second, the issue of race had gained a different and uglier valence than it had had before. When Hiram Bingham brought the Congregationalist missionaries to Hawai‘i in 1820, they and the eleven reinforcement companies that followed over the next two decades were confident that they were bringing the light of a Christian civilization to a benighted culture. That population happened to have dark skin. The missionaries would have felt the same had they evangelized newly discovered islands of Scandinavia. The early missionary letters and literature are remarkably free of overtly racist epithets, not least because they discovered the Hawaiians to be quick and perceptive, and intelligent enough to have emerged from a culture with no written language to the highest literacy rate in the world in less than a generation.
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
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