Noon, August 12, 1898. On the front steps of ʻIolani Palace the Hawaiian flag came down for the last time as the flag of a nation, and the American flag went up in its place. Sanford Dole, president of the Republic of Hawaiʻi, handed the sovereignty of the islands to United States Minister Harold Sewall. Most Hawaiians were nowhere near the palace that day. Queen Liliʻuokalani, Princess Kaʻiulani, and their household stayed behind closed shutters at Washington Place, about 1,000 feet (300 m) away, in mourning.
That is the moment the textbooks call the annexation of Hawaiʻi, as if it fit into one afternoon. It took five years of maneuvering to get there, and a petition signed by more than 21,000 Hawaiians came within a few votes of stopping it. It then took another 61 years and a world war before the Territory of Hawaiʻi became the fiftieth state. This is the whole road, from the flag coming down in 1898 to the church bells of August 21, 1959, and where you can stand in the middle of it today.
Related: ʻIolani Palace: The 1893 Overthrow That Ended the Hawaiian Kingdom | Washington Place: Queen Liliʻuokalani’s Home for 55 Years (1847) | Aliʻiōlani Hale: The Palace That Became a Courthouse (1874)
How Hawaiʻi Got to 1898
The short version, told in full in our ʻIolani Palace post, goes like this. On January 17, 1893, a group of mostly American businessmen backed by U.S. Minister John Stevens and troops from the USS Boston declared the monarchy over. Liliʻuokalani yielded “to the superior force of the United States of America,” not to them, because she expected Washington to undo what its own minister had done. Grover Cleveland pulled the annexation treaty out of the Senate, sent James Blount to investigate, and told Congress in December 1893 that a “substantial wrong” had been done, but Congress did nothing and Dole would not step aside. On July 4, 1894, his government renamed itself the Republic of Hawaiʻi under a constitution that left about 2,700 voters. After a failed royalist rising in January 1895, Liliʻuokalani was tried in her own throne room, held in an upstairs bedroom of the palace for nearly eight months, and made to sign an abdication under duress.
Annexation stayed dead as long as Cleveland was president. William McKinley took office in March 1897, and by June 16 his administration had signed a new treaty with three envoys from the Republic: Lorrin Thurston, Francis Hatch, and William Kinney. The Queen was in Washington when it happened, and the next day she filed a protest that reads like a lawyer’s brief. Her people, she wrote, “about forty thousand in number, have in no way been consulted by those, three thousand in number, who claim the right to destroy the independence of Hawaii,” and the treaty would confiscate some 915,000 acres (370,000 hectares) of Crown lands with no compensation to anyone.
The Kūʻē Petitions: 21,269 Names Against Annexation
Back home, the protest went to the people. On September 6, 1897, Hui Aloha ʻĀina called a mass meeting at Palace Square. Its president, James Keauiluna Kaulia, told the crowd that agreeing to annexation was like agreeing to be buried alive, and that the nation would never consent “until the very last aloha ʻāina lives.” He asked where Hawaiians would live once foreigners took the jobs and the land. The crowd shouted back, “In the mountains.” Then David Kalauokalani, president of the separate Hui Kālaiʻāina, read out what the treaty actually said: every harbor, fort, and acre of public and Crown land handed over, and no promise that Hawaiians would keep the vote.
The petition drive that followed was run like a political campaign, and much of the legwork fell to women. Abigail Kuaihelani Campbell, president of the women’s branch of Hui Aloha ʻĀina, sailed for Hilo on the steamer Kinau with Emma ʻAʻima Nāwahī and came back with thousands of signatures. Laura Mahelona worked Kona and Kaʻū harbor by harbor and gathered 4,216 names on her own. Between September 11 and October 2, 1897, the petition headed “Palapala Hoopii Kue Hoohui Aina” reached 21,269 signatures, men and women in roughly equal numbers. The census that year counted about 39,000 Native Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians in the islands. More than half of them had signed. Hui Kālaiʻāina ran a parallel petition asking for the monarchy to be restored and gathered about 17,000 more.
Four delegates carried the pages to Washington: Kaulia, Kalauokalani, John Richardson, and William Auld. They arrived on December 6 and were told that night that 58 senators were already for the treaty and it needed 60. Meeting with the Queen the next day, they made a hard call: submit only the Hui Aloha ʻĀina petition and hold back the restoration petition, so the Senate would see one united message. On December 9 Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts read it into the record, and the delegates spent the winter lobbying. When they sailed home on February 27, 1898, the count for annexation had dropped from 58 to 46. The treaty was finished. Pro-annexation senators even wrote in their own report that putting the question to a vote in Hawaiʻi “would work a revolution” against the Republic. They knew exactly how the islands would vote, and that is why nobody was allowed to.
The Maine, Manila, and a Way Around the Senate
Twelve days before they sailed, the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor. By late April the United States was at war with Spain, and on May 1, 1898, Commodore Dewey’s squadron destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. Troop ships bound for the Philippines needed a mid-ocean coaling stop, and the Republic threw Honolulu Harbor open to them.
Annexationists in Congress had learned their lesson about treaties. Representative Francis Newlands of Nevada introduced a joint resolution instead, which needs only simple majorities rather than two thirds of the Senate. The House passed it 209 to 91 on June 15, 1898, the Senate 42 to 21 on July 6, and McKinley signed it on July 7. The resolution took “all rights of sovereignty” plus “the absolute fee and ownership” of about 1.8 million acres (730,000 hectares) of Government and Crown land. No one who lived in Hawaiʻi voted on any of it.
Noon on August 12, 1898
The ceremony was held on the palace steps, with U.S. Marines drawn up on the lawn and the Republic’s officials in top hats along the railing. Dole made the transfer, Sewall accepted it, and the Royal Hawaiian Band was cued to play “Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī” as the flag came down. One kamaʻāina account, recorded for the Bishop Museum in 1964 by Johanna Wilcox, recalled that several band members could not go through with it and walked off crying, and that bandmaster Henri Berger, who had written the anthem’s music for King Kalākaua’s words, let them go. That evening the government held an Annexation Ball at the palace and sent Kaʻiulani an invitation. Her reply, as reported at the time: “Why don’t you ask me if I am going to pull down Hawaii’s flag for them?” She told a San Francisco paper the news was “bitterer than death.” She died the following March at 23.
Liliʻuokalani kept filing. On December 19, 1898, she sent a formal protest to the U.S. House of Representatives stating that her throne had been taken illegally and that the United States had no lawful title to the islands. It sits in the National Archives today.
The Territory Years: Citizens Without a Vote (1900 to 1941)
The Hawaiian Organic Act, signed April 30, 1900, created the Territory of Hawaiʻi with an elected legislature, a governor appointed by the president, and one non-voting delegate to Congress. Everyone who had been a citizen of the Republic on August 12, 1898, became a citizen of the United States. That included Native Hawaiians. It excluded the Asian immigrants who by then made up close to 60 percent of the population, because federal law barred them from naturalizing.
The two petition hui did something practical with the new rules: they merged into the Home Rule Party. In the first territorial election in November 1900, Native Hawaiian voters, a majority of the electorate again, won both houses of the legislature and sent Robert Wilcox, the man the Republic had sentenced to death in 1895, to Washington as the first delegate. Two years later Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole beat Wilcox as a Republican and held the seat until his death in 1922, long enough to win the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1921 and its 200,000 acres (81,000 hectares) of homestead land for Native Hawaiians.
Statehood sat on nobody’s front burner. Kūhiō introduced the first Hawaiʻi statehood bill in 1919; it died in committee without a word of support from the planters. In 1927 Lorrin Thurston, by then publisher of the Advertiser, said Hawaiʻi “needs statehood as much as a cat needs two tails.” Two blows changed the planters’ minds: the Massie case of 1931 and 1932, which put Hawaiʻi’s mixed-race society on trial in the mainland press, and the Jones-Costigan Act of 1934, which cut Hawaiʻi’s sugar quota as if the islands were a foreign country. After that the planters decided only statehood could protect them. Franklin Roosevelt opposed a 1935 bill, and Southern committee chairmen who did not want a state with a nonwhite majority sat on every bill that followed. In November 1940 the territory held its first statehood plebiscite anyway. It passed 39,413 to 19,911, about two to one. Thirteen months later Pearl Harbor took the question off the table.
War, Martial Law, and the Democratic Revolution (1941 to 1958)
From December 7, 1941, until October 1944, Hawaiʻi lived under martial law, with a military governor working out of ʻIolani Palace. The territory’s Japanese American residents, whose loyalty had been the loudest argument against statehood for a decade, answered it in the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Those veterans came home and in 1954 took the territorial legislature away from the Republican Party for the first time.
Not everyone in Hawaiʻi wanted a state. On January 17, 1946, the 53rd anniversary of the overthrow, territorial senator Alice Kamokila Campbell, daughter of the Abigail Campbell who had gathered petitions in 1897, told a congressional committee sitting in ʻIolani Palace that Hawaiians should not “forfeit the traditional rights and privileges of the natives of our islands for a mere thimbleful of votes in Congress.” The bigger obstacles were in Washington, where Southern senators such as James Eastland of Mississippi controlled the committees and a Red Scare painted the ILWU, the union that had organized the plantations, as a communist front. Delegate John Burns, elected in 1956, spent two years working Lyndon Johnson and the Senate leadership, and accepted a strategy that let Alaska go first, on January 3, 1959.
1959: The Vote and the Bells
Hawaiʻi’s bill, S. 50, passed the Senate on March 11, 1959, by 76 to 15, and the House the next day by 323 to 89. Eisenhower signed the Admission Act on March 18. The people of the territory still had to ratify it. On June 27, 1959, Proposition 1 on the ballot read “Shall Hawaii immediately be admitted into the Union as a State?” The count certified on July 2 was 132,773 yes to 7,971 no, a 94.3 percent margin. One precinct in the whole territory voted no: Niʻihau, whose population was entirely Native Hawaiian, went 70 against and 18 for.
On August 21, 1959, Eisenhower signed the proclamation admitting Hawaiʻi as the 50th state, and in Honolulu the church bells rang. Three days later Hiram Fong and Oren Long were sworn in as the first U.S. senators from Hawaiʻi, and Daniel Inouye, a 442nd veteran who had lost his right arm in Italy, took the House seat. Hawaiʻi marks Statehood Day on the third Friday in August, a state holiday, so if you are planning a downtown visit that day, remember the Capitol will be closed.
What the 1959 Ballot Did Not Ask
Hawaiʻi went onto the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories in 1946, and in December 1959 the General Assembly took it off on the strength of the June vote. The ballot, though, had offered two choices, statehood or staying a territory. Independence was never on it, and the UN’s own 1953 guidance said a free choice should include that option. Roughly 30,000 people who voted in that same election left the statehood question blank. Those facts are the reason many Hawaiians describe the state as an occupation rather than a settled question, and the reason you will see Hawaiian flags flying upside down, the sign of a nation in distress, on the lawn between the Capitol and the palace on anniversaries like January 17.
The United States has said part of this out loud. Public Law 103-150, the Apology Resolution signed by President Clinton on November 23, 1993, apologizes for the overthrow “with the participation of agents and citizens of the United States” and states 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, either through their monarchy or through a plebiscite or referendum.” Its last section says nothing in it settles any claim.
The petitions sat in the National Archives for nearly a century, and most families in Hawaiʻi had no idea they existed until Noenoe Silva, then a graduate student, found them in the Senate records in 1996. She and Nālani Minton brought a full copy home for the annexation centennial in 1998, and today every page is scanned and sorted by island and district in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library’s Kūʻē Petitions digital collection. If your family has roots here, pull up your ahupuaʻa and look. Plenty of kamaʻāina have found their kūpuna’s handwriting on those sheets.
Visiting the Places in This Story
All three sites sit within a two-block walk of each other in downtown Honolulu, so give yourself a morning and do them in order. Start where the flag came down. ʻIolani Palace (364 S King St, Honolulu, HI 96813) is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and closed Sunday and Monday. Plan ahead: tickets are sold online only, with no walk-ups or same-day bookings, and the self-led audio tour runs $28 for adults, $23 for teens, and $13 for keiki 5 to 12, with kamaʻāina rates of $11.95 for adults. If you live here, watch for Kamaʻāina Sundays, when residents get free audio-tour tickets once a month. The elevator is out while a new one is installed, so build in stairs to the second floor for now. Parking on the grounds is by pay station, currently $4 for two hours, with the vehicle entrance off Likelike Mall on King Street; prepay the full two hours, because the tour alone takes 60 to 90 minutes. This is where the Queen was imprisoned and where the Kingdom’s flag was hauled down, and the staff treat it as a sacred place. Treat it that way too.
From the palace, walk mauka (toward the mountains) out the back of the grounds and you are at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol (415 S Beretania St, Honolulu, HI 96813). It is free and open weekdays from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., no ticket needed; pick up the self-guided tour brochure in Room 415. On the palace side of the building stands the bronze statue of Liliʻuokalani holding her 1893 constitution, her song “Aloha ʻOe,” and the creation chant Kumulipo. To see where she and Kaʻiulani sat out the ceremony, keep going mauka across Beretania to Washington Place; we have a separate guide to visiting it.
One last thing. If you happen to be downtown on August 12 or January 17, you may see people gathered on the palace lawn with the Hawaiian flag, sometimes upside down. That is a commemoration, not a protest against you. Keep a respectful distance, put the phone down, and if you are invited to listen, listen. The whole reason to learn this history is so that when you stand on those steps, you know what came down them.
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