The Annexation of Hawai'i

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Some of you may be familiar with this already, I don't know. What I'm posting here is a direct quote from a history textbook, enjoy.

"In Hawai'i's multiracial society, Chinese and Japanese nationalists outnumbered Americans, who represented a mere 2.1 percent of the population. Prominent Americans on the islands organized secret clubs and military units to contest the royal government. In 1887 they forced the king to accept a constitution that allowed foreigners to vote and shifted decision making from the monarchy to the legislature. The same year, Hawai'i granted the United States naval rights to Pearl Harbor. Many native Hawaiians felt that the haole ("foreigners") - especially Americans - were taking their country from them.

The native government was further undermined when the McKinley Tariff of 1890 eliminated the duty-free status of Hawai'i sugar exports in the United States. Suffering declining sugar sales and profits, the American island elite pressed for annexation by the United States, thereby classifying their sugar as domestic. When Princess Lili'uokalani assumed the throne in 1891, she sought to roll back the political power of the haole. The next year, the white oligarchy formed the subversive Annexation Club.

The annexationists struck in January 1890 in collusion with John L. Stevens, America's chief diplomat in Hawai'i, who dispatched troops from the U.S.S Boston to occupy Honolulu. The queen, arrested and confined, surrendered. Rather than yield to the new provisional regime, headed by Sanford B Dole, son of missionaries and a prominent attorney, she relinquished authority to the U.S government. President Benjamin Harrison hurriedly sent an annexation treaty to the Senate.

Sensing foul play, incoming President Grover Cleveland ordered an investigation, which confirmed a conspiracy and noted that most Hawaiians opposed annexation. But when Hawai'i proved a strategic and commercial way station to Asia and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley maneuvered annexation through Congress on July 7, 1898. Under the Organic Act of June 1900, the people of Hawai'i became U.S citizens. Statehood came in 1959."

(Norton, 584)

Basically it sounds like the plot of The Phantom Menace without the happy ending.

[East Coast Hustle]

Yep. America never met a strategically-located island paradise that it didn't want to "annex" and turn into a festering shithole. At least they let Hawaii become a full-fledged state. The USVI (where I'm from) is on the UN list of non-self-governing territories for fuck's sake. It's an embarrassment. And they'll never let us be REAL Americans, but they'll never give us the independence that would allow us to suck up to the far more useful and pragmatic Chinese tit like all the other islands are doing. You know, the ones with decent roads and functional schools and things like that.