[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 80 (Thursday, June 16, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6724-S6726]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           AGAINST RACE-BASED GOVERNMENT IN HAWAII, PART III

  Mr. KYL. Madam. President, I rise today to ask unanimous consent that 
the following account of the history of the Hawaiian monarchy be 
printed in the Record following my present remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. KYL. This history is in the appendix to ``Hawaii Divided Against 
Itself Cannot Stand,'' an analysis of the 1993 apology resolution and 
S. 147, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, that was 
prepared by constitutional scholar Bruce Fein. I previously have 
introduced earlier parts of that analysis into the Record--this is the 
third and final instalment.
  The appendix to Mr. Fein's analysis carefully explains the nature of 
the Hawaiian monarchy, its evolution toward constitutional democracy, 
the attempt by the last monarch to undercut those reforms and 
compromise the judiciary, and the actors involved in stopping that 
monarch and establishing a democratic republic. This account is a 
useful antidote to the tendentious blame-America narrative provided in 
the 1993 apology resolution. The truth is much more nuanced than the 
resolution's ``Whites vs. Natives'' account. The real story is about a 
multiracial constitutional monarchy slowly evolving toward democratic 
norms and equal rights--a process whose final step was the admission of 
Hawaii as a State in the Union. That step was approved in 1959 by 94 
percent of Hawaii's voters--large majorities of non-Natives and Natives 
alike.
  The Native Hawaiian Government Act would undo that step--Hawaii's 
admission to the Union as a unified people and State. Indeed, it would 
even undo the progress made under the Kamehameha monarchy. That 
constitutional monarchy was not a monoracial institution. It included 
Hawaiians of all races. This bill would create, for the first time in 
Hawaii since the early 19th century, a government of one race only. 
This is not progress.
  I urge my colleagues to read Mr. Fein's history, and to ask 
themselves why we would want to undo the achievements of past 
generations of Hawaiians by enacting S. 147 and creating a race-based 
government in Hawaii.

                               Exhibit 1

         [From the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, Jun. 1, 2005]

               Hawaii Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

                            (By Bruce Fein)


                                APPENDIX

       The apology issued by the United States Congress in 1993 to 
     the Native Hawaiians for the ``illegal'' overthrow of the 
     Hawaiian monarchy and its annexation to the United States is 
     riddled with historical inaccuracies. The resolution alleges 
     that the Committee of Safety, the political juggernaut that 
     deposed Queen Lili'uokalani, ``represented American and 
     European sugar planters, descendants of missionaries, and 
     financiers.'' The language fails to disclose the Hawaiian 
     monarchy's deep and lasting ties with the most powerful sugar 
     planters on the islands. Many of the wealthiest sugar barons 
     steadfastly supported the monarchy in opposition to the 
     Committee for Safety.
       Chinese and Japanese immigrants provided an abundant source 
     of cheap labor on the sugar plantations. They labored for 
     wages below what was required on the American mainland. The 
     sugar planters owed their impressive profit margins to these 
     workers. Annexation to the United States would have 
     eliminated the sugar planter's labor cost advantage. Many 
     sugar barons vigorously defended the monarchy to retain their 
     access to cheap labor.
       The sugar barons invested heavily in the monarchy. Claus 
     Spreckels, the wealthiest sugar baron on the islands, 
     established Claus Spreckels & Co. Bank in 1885. King Kalakaua 
     borrowed heavily from Spreckels' bank; the planter's 
     substantial influence garnered him the nickname ``King 
     Claus''. King Kalakaua unsuccessfully endeavored to secure a 
     two million dollar loan from the British to settle his debts 
     to Spreckels' bank. Spreckels' financial stake in the 
     monarchy provided him with considerable political capital, 
     which he spent securing his business interests. After the 
     Committee of Safety deposed the Queen, Spreckels vigorously 
     lobbied for her re-instatement.
       Some planters and financiers did offer their support to the 
     Committee of Safety due to economic concerns. Prior to 1890, 
     the United States conferred the privilege of duty free sugar 
     imports only on Hawaii. The McKinley Tariffs eliminated 
     Hawaii's advantage by allowing all foreign suppliers to 
     export their sugar to the United States duty free and 
     subsidizing domestic sugar production. Some businessman 
     favored establishing a free trade agreement with the United 
     States; others contended that annexation would assure 
     unfettered access to American markets for Hawaiian goods. 
     However, the congressional resolution exaggerates the 
     presence of sugar planters on the Committee of Safety. Two 
     members did hold management positions at sugar companies, and 
     the Honolulu Ironworks, a provider of equipment to the 
     plantations, employed another member. No member held a 
     controlling interest in a sugar company, nor would it be 
     accurate to assert that any of the members were sugar barons.
       Queen Lili'uokalani herself furnished the proximate cause 
     of the revolt. Since its inception in 1810, the Hawaiian 
     monarchy embraced increasingly democratic governance. Queen 
     Lili'uokalani reversed that trend when she sought to 
     unilaterally change the constitution to augment her own power 
     and weaken the government's system of checks and balances. 
     The Hawaiian constitution, that the Queen had sworn to 
     uphold, explicitly limited the power to revise the 
     Constitution to the legislature, which represented native and 
     non-Native Hawaiians alike. Her proposed Constitution allowed 
     the monarch to appoint nobles for life, reduced judges' 
     tenure from life to six years, removed the prohibition 
     against diminishing judge's compensation, and admonished 
     Cabinet members that they would serve only ``during the 
     queen's pleasure.'' The Queen's own cabinet refused to 
     legitimize her autocratic constitution. Her disregard for 
     democracy provoked the 1893 revolution. The congressional 
     resolution blatantly ignores the historical circumstances 
     surrounding her overthrow.
       While the apology expressly condemns the alleged military 
     intervention by the United States, the Hawaiian monarchy 
     itself established its primacy through a series of bloody 
     conflicts with rival chieftains. King Kamehameha I succeeded 
     in uniting the islands and establishing control over foreign 
     immigration, which began with Captain Cook's arrival nearly 
     thirty years earlier. He did not hold elections. He gained 
     power through brute force and ruthless measures. During a 
     battle in the Nuuanu Valley, Kamehameha's forces drove 
     thousands of Oahuan warriors off steep cliffs to their death. 
     According to the logic of the congressional Apology 
     Resolution, King Kamehameha I's seizure of land by force 
     amounts to a violation of international law. The Hawaiian 
     monarchy, which the resolution holds in such high regard, is 
     guilty of far more egregious ``illegal'' actions than those 
     supposedly perpetrated by the United States.
       In 1819, shortly after the death of Kamehameha I, his 
     widow, Kaahumanu, became the de facto ruler and installed the 
     deceased King's 23 year old son by another wife, Liholiho, as 
     the nominal ruler, thereafter known as Kamehameha II. Under 
     pressure from Kaahumanu and Keopuolani, the young king's 
     mother, Liholiho broke the kapu, ordered the destruction of 
     heiaus (stone alters) and the burning of wooden idols. 
     Anthropologists have long regarded pre-contact Hawaii as the 
     most highly stratified of all Polynesian chiefdoms. The 
     chiefly elite from Maui and Hawaii Island had exercised a 
     cycle of territorial conquest, promulgating the kapu system, 
     an ideology based on the cult of Ku, a human sacrifice-
     demanding god of war, to legitimize chiefly dominance over 
     the common people. The chiefs typically imposed the death 
     penalty for violating kapu; women and those of lower castes 
     suffered disproportionately under the system. When Liholiho 
     broke the kapu by sitting down to eat with the women Ali'i, 
     Kaahumanu announced, ``We intend to eat pork and bananas and 
     coconuts

[[Page S6725]]

     and live as the white people do.'' The following year, 1820, 
     the first American missionaries arrived in Hawaii. Soon 
     after, Kaahumanu took charge of Christianity and made it the 
     official religion of the Kingdom. These shattering changes in 
     the religion, culture and governance of Hawaii were the work 
     of the Native Hawaiians themselves.
       All foreigners came under the purview of the Native 
     Hawaiian monarchy. The Apology Resolution decries the 
     imperialist tendencies of the missionaries, yet their access 
     to Native Hawaiians remained contingent on the monarchy's 
     good graces. Several attempts to inject the Ten Commandments 
     into the civil code failed, and King Kamehameha III actually 
     banned Catholic missionaries for a time.
       The Hawaiian monarchy had gained international recognition 
     by the reign of King Kamehameha III. The child king ceded 
     power to his regent, Kaahumanu, who remained the de facto 
     ruler until her death in 1832. While the regency yielded 
     significant changes in Hawaiian common law, including the 
     introduction of jury trials, King Kamehameha III affected a 
     seismic shift toward democracy when he produced the 
     Constitution of 1840. The influx of foreign merchants and 
     settlers had exposed the Native Hawaiians to new modes of 
     jurisprudence and governance. These revolutionary ideas found 
     expression in the new Hawaiian constitution. King Kamehameha 
     III took a particular interest in studying political 
     structures; he requested that an American missionary, William 
     Richards, tutor him in political economy and law.
       The king, the chiefs, and their advisors convened to draft 
     a declaration of rights and laws in 1839. The declaration 
     secured the rights of each Hawaiian citizen to ``life, limb, 
     liberty, the labor of his lands, and productions of his 
     mind'' and represented a critical concession to the king's 
     subjects. The language ensured that native and non-Native 
     Hawaiian citizens enjoyed equal protection under the law.
       The following year, the council of chiefs and King 
     Kamehameha III drafted a formal constitution. The document 
     provided for the creation of a ``representative body'' chosen 
     by the people and a supreme court consisting of the king; the 
     kuhina-nui, the premier or regent; and four judges appointed 
     by the ``representative body.'' Moreover, the document 
     specified that only the legislature could approve alterations 
     to the constitution following a year's notice of the proposed 
     change. The government followed the mandated procedure and 
     revised the constitution in 1852, which more explicitly 
     outlined the powers accorded to each branch of government. 
     While the Hawaiians borrowed many of their political 
     philosophies from Western civilization, they forged a 
     government of their own accord.
       The Apology Resolution contends that ``the Indigenous 
     Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to 
     their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national 
     lands to the United States,'' yet the land system remained 
     virtually unchanged after the 1893 overthrow and subsequent 
     annexation. King Kamehameha III embarked on an ambitious land 
     reform program in 1848, termed the ``Great Mahele.'' The 
     original spate of reforms, the Buke Mahele, divided the land 
     amongst the King and the 245 chiefs. The King further divided 
     his lands into the Crown Lands and the Government Lands, the 
     latter was to be ``managed, leased, or sold, in accordance 
     with the will of said Nobles and Representatives . . .'' 
     [Footnote: R.S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom 1778-1854 
     Vol 1, pg. 289.] Then, the Kuleana Grant program offered fee 
     simple titles to the native tenants tilling each plot or 
     kuleana. The commoners' share of land constituted a small 
     fraction of the total; however, the kuleana lands were the 
     primary productive agricultural land of the Kingdom and were 
     considered extremely valuable. The Kuleana Grants awarded 
     land to approximately two out of every three Native Hawaiian 
     families.
       The editor of the Polynesian newspaper extolled the grant 
     as ``the crowning fact that gives liberty to a nation of 
     serfs.'' Indeed, fifty years prior to annexation, the 
     Hawaiian monarchy dismantled the ``subsistent social system 
     based on communal land tenure'' that the Apology Resolution 
     references. The government only extended the possibility of 
     land ownership to foreign born residents two years after the 
     Kuleana Grant. The provisional government of 1893 simply 
     gained ownership of the crown lands and the government lands. 
     The Apology Resolution faults the United States for acquiring 
     those lands from the provisional government without providing 
     compensation to Hawaii. Yet, the United States assumed over 
     3.8 million dollars of Hawaii's public debt, largely incurred 
     under the monarchy, after annexation. That debt burden 
     amounts to twice the market value of the land the United 
     States inherited. Native Hawaiians did not forfeit one acre 
     of land as a consequence of the overthrow or annexation.
       King Kamehameha III's reign institutionalized a measure of 
     representative democracy and property rights in Hawaii. King 
     Kamehameha V's failure to designate a successor afforded 
     native and non-native subjects alike the opportunity to elect 
     the next two monarchs, King Lunalilo and King Kalakaua. The 
     Hawaiian monarchy itself infused democracy, property rights, 
     and a system of common law into Hawaiian society. The 
     annexation did not alter those institutions.
       The Constitution of 1887 extended democracy to the 
     selection of nobility, reduced the arbitrary power of the 
     King, stipulated that only the legislature could approve 
     constitutional changes, and mandated that no cabinet minister 
     could be dismissed without the legislature's consent. While 
     the King signed the new constitution under pressure from a 
     militia group, the Honolulu Rifles, the net effect of the 
     revisions provided Hawaiian citizens with a more democratic 
     government. Many natives expressed concern over the extension 
     of suffrage to resident foreigners of western descent and the 
     property qualifications to vote for or become nobles. A 
     minority embarked on an ill-fated effort to depose King 
     Kalakaua and install Lili'uokalani in his place. However, 
     most native and non-native dissenters sought redress within 
     the democratic system. Their opposition parties, the National 
     Reform Party and the Liberal Party, garnered a substantial 
     number of seats in the legislature. Queen Lili'uokalani's 
     autocratic demands in 1893 appear even more egregious against 
     the backdrop of liberalization that her predecessors 
     championed.
       The Apology Resolution also casts United States Minister to 
     Hawaii, John Stevens, in a sinister light, charging that he 
     ``conspired with a small group of non-Hawaiian residents of 
     the Kingdom of Hawaii . . . to overthrow the indigenous and 
     lawful Government of Hawaii.'' Moreover, the resolution 
     contends that the United States Navy invaded Hawaii and 
     positioned themselves ``near Hawaiian Government buildings 
     and the Iolani Palace to intimidate Queen Liliuokalani.'' 
     There is not a shred of hard evidence to support either of 
     those claims. The Blount Report itself, cited by the Apology 
     Resolution, contains statements from the leaders of the 
     revolution and from John Stevens himself which directly 
     refute those allegations. W.O. Smith recounted the 
     Committee of Safety's contact with Minister Stevens in 
     Blount's report: ``Mr. Stevens gave assurances of his 
     earnest purpose to afford all the protection that was in 
     his power to protect life and property; he emphasized that 
     fact that while he would call for the United States troops 
     to protect life and property, he could not recognize any 
     government until actually established. He repeated that 
     the troops when landed would not take sides with either 
     Party, but would protect American life and property.''
       Minister Stevens consistently denied any involvement in the 
     revolution. Any statement to the contrary amounts to little 
     more than speculation.
       The Blount Report was a partisan endeavor. The newly 
     elected Democratic President Cleveland castigated the 
     outgoing Republican administration of President Harrison for 
     its ``interventionist'' tactics in Hawaii prior to any 
     investigation. Cleveland accused Minister Stevens of 
     orchestrating virtually every aspect of the revolution in an 
     address to Congress claiming that ``But for the notorious 
     predilections of the United States Minister for annexation, 
     the Committee of Safety, which should be called the Committee 
     of Annexation, would never have existed.'' In fact, King 
     Kamehameha III first proposed annexation to the United States 
     in 1851, despite strenuous objections from the French and the 
     British. When Cleveland commissioned the Blount report, the 
     ongoing effort to discredit the Harrison administration 
     colored Blount's impartiality. He did not swear in his 
     witnesses, nor did he interview all involved. Cleveland even 
     attempted to re-instate Queen Liliuokalani, although he 
     aborted those efforts after the Queen repeatedly insisted 
     that all involved in the Committee of Safety be executed. The 
     Senate's bipartisan Morgan Report found little evidence to 
     support Queen Lilioukalani's fraudulent claims that United 
     States pressure forced her to abdicate the crown.
       The provisional government encountered little resistance. 
     Just 800 Hawaiian royalists staged a short-lived counter-
     revolution in 1895. Under the leadership of President Sanford 
     B. Dole, the new government convened a constitutional 
     convention in the summer of 1894. The resulting document 
     cemented civil liberties for all Hawaiian citizens, similar 
     to the American Bill of Rights, and mandated that a Senate 
     and House of Representatives be elected by the people. 
     Royalists continued to express their frustrations in 
     opposition newspapers without censure. After the 1898 
     annexation, Native Hawaiians proved a dynamic force in island 
     politics. While just one of the Washington-appointed 
     Governors, Samuel Wilder King, possessed Hawaiian blood, five 
     out of ten elected Delegates to Congress boasted Native 
     Hawaiian ancestry. In 1903, a Native Hawaiian Delegate to 
     Congress of royal ancestry, Prince Kuhio, delivered Hawaii's 
     first petition for statehood to Washington.
       August 21, 1959 remains a day of celebration for Hawaiians 
     of all races and creeds. Hawaii's induction into the union as 
     the fiftieth state marked the culmination of its protracted 
     struggle for statehood. Native and non-Native Hawaiians voted 
     overwhelming in favor of statehood in the plebiscite 
     preceding the formal declaration. Native Hawaiians did not 
     rally in opposition to statehood; just 6 percent of the 
     voters opposed the measure whereas 94 percent resoundingly 
     announced their support. As Senator Inouye of Hawaii so 
     eloquently testified, ``Hawaii remains one of the greatest 
     examples of a multiethnic society living in relative peace.'' 
     Congressional Record, 1994, Page S12249. He echoes the same 
     sentiments Captain Ashford expressed in 1884 to King Kalakaua 
     when he referred to the Hawaiian flag as, ``this beautiful 
     emblem of the unity

[[Page S6726]]

     of many peoples who, blended together on a benignant basis of 
     political and race equality, combine to form the Kingdom of 
     Hawaii . . .'' The Akaka Bill would thus represent a wretched 
     regression in race relations that would occasion equally 
     wretched racial ills.

                          ____________________