{"id":129,"date":"2023-07-13T18:55:25","date_gmt":"2023-07-13T18:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/?p=129"},"modified":"2023-07-13T19:01:35","modified_gmt":"2023-07-13T19:01:35","slug":"the-u-s-becomes-a-world-power-activity-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/the-u-s-becomes-a-world-power-activity-3\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Becomes a World Power: Activity 3"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Hawaii<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The Annexation of Hawaii<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

After a century of American rule, many native Hawaiians remain bitter about how the United States acquired the islands, located 2,500 miles from the West Coast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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U.S.S. Boston occupying Arlington Hotel.\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

On January 17, 1893, a group of American conspirators announced the overthrow of the Hawaiian government and its queen. To avoid bloodshed, Queen Lydia Kamakaeha Liliuokalani yielded her sovereignty and called upon the U.S. government “to undo the actions of its representatives.” The U.S. government refused to help her regain her throne. When she died in 1917, Hawaii was an American territory. In 1959, Hawaii became the 50th state after a plebiscite in which ninety percent of the islanders supported statehood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The businessmen who conspired to overthrow the queen claimed that they were overthrowing a corrupt, dissolute regime in order to advance democratic principles. They also argued that a Western power was likely to acquire the islands and therefore it was important to move before a competitor did.

Hawaii had the finest harbor in the mid-Pacific and was viewed as a strategically valuable coaling station and naval base. In 1851, King Kamehameha III had secretly asked the United States to annex Hawaii, but Secretary of State Daniel Webster declined, saying “No power ought to take possession of the islands as a conquest…or colonization.” But later monarchs wanted to maintain Hawaii’s independence. The native population proved to be vulnerable to western diseases, including cholera, smallpox, and leprosy. By 1891, native Hawaii’s were an ethnic minority on the islands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Queen Lili\u02bbuokalani.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After the bloodless 1893 revolution, the American businessmen lobbied President Benjamin Harrison and Congress to annex the Hawaiian Islands. In his last month in office, Harrison sent an annexation treaty to the Senate for confirmation, but the new president, Grover Cleveland, withdrew the treaty “for the purpose of re-examination.” He also received Queen Liliuokalani and replaced the American stars and stripes in Honolulu with the Hawaiian flag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cleveland also ordered a study of the Hawaiian revolution. The inquiry concluded that the American minister to Hawaii had conspired with the businessmen to overthrow the queen, and that the coup would have failed “but for the landing of the United States forces upon false pretexts respecting the dangers to life and property.” Looking back on the Hawaii takeover, President Cleveland later wrote that “the provisional government owes its existence to an armed invasion by the United States. By an act of war…a substantial wrong has been done.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

President Cleveland’s recommendation that the monarchy be restored was rejected by Congress. The House of Representatives voted to censure the U.S. minister to Hawaii and adopted a resolution opposing annexation. But Congress did not act to restore the monarchy. In 1894, Sanford Dole, who was beginning his pineapple business, declared himself president of the Republic of Hawaii without a popular vote. The new government found the queen guilty of treason and sentenced her to five years of hard labor and a $5,000 fine. While the sentence of hard labor was not carried out, the queen was placed under house arrest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Republican Party platform in the presidential election of 1896 called for the annexation of Hawaii. Petitions for a popular vote in Hawaii were ignored. Fearing that he lacked two-thirds support for annexation in the Senate, the new Republican president, William McKinley, called for a joint resolution of Congress (the same way that the United States had acquired Texas). With the country aroused by the Spanish American War and political leaders fearful that the islands might be annexed by Japan, the joint resolution easily passed Congress. Hawaii officially became a U.S. territory in 1900.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Painting depicting Cook’s death in Hawaii.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When Captain James Cook, the British explorer, arrived in Hawaii in 1778, there were about 300,000 Hawaiians on the islands; however, infectious diseases reduced the native population. Today, about twenty percent of Hawaii’s people are of native Hawaiian ancestry, and only about 10,000 are of pure Hawaiian descent. Native Hawaiians were poorer, less healthy, and less educated than members of other major ethnic groups on the islands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sugar growers, who dominated the islands’ economy, imported thousands of immigrant laborers first from China, then Japan, then Portuguese from Madeira and the Azores, followed by Puerto Ricans, Koreans, and most recently Filipinos. As a result, Hawaii has one of the world’s most multicultural populations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1993, a joined Congressional resolution, signed by President Bill Clinton, apologized for the U.S. role in the overthrow. The House approved the resolution by voice vote. The Senate passed it 65 to 34 votes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Making Ethical Judgments<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Teaching History<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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House of Kamehameha<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Hawaii rarely figures in standard depictions of U.S. history except as the site of the Japanese attack in December 1941. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the island chain has in fact had a significant, if overlooked, influence on American culture, from surfboards and hula to the steel string guitar and beyond. At various points, Hawaii has been an independent kingdom, a colony, and a U.S. state and was widely regarded, even a century ago, as a tropical paradise of exceptional strategic importance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With its rich mixture of cultures and peoples, distinctive foods and traditions, and its substantial population of Asian and Polynesian descent, Hawaii was quite different than the U.S. mainland\u2014though it may anticipate many of the issues that will characterize the multicultural U.S. of the later twenty-first century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Annexation of Hawaii After a century of American rule, many native Hawaiians remain bitter about how the United States acquired the islands, located 2,500 miles from the West Coast. On January 17, 1893, a group of American conspirators announced the overthrow of the Hawaiian government and its queen. To avoid bloodshed, Queen Lydia Kamakaeha […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"vec496","author_link":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/author\/vec496\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"The Annexation of Hawaii After a century of American rule, many native Hawaiians remain bitter about how the United States acquired the islands, located 2,500 miles from the West Coast. On January 17, 1893, a group of American conspirators announced the overthrow of the Hawaiian government and its queen. To avoid bloodshed, Queen Lydia Kamakaeha…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138,"href":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/embed.la.utexas.edu\/his-315l-external\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}