Hawaiian by Birth by Joy Schulz

Author:Joy Schulz [Schulz, Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036140 History / United States / State & Local / West (ak, Ca, Co, Hi, Id, Mt, Nv, Ut, Wy)
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0235-2
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2017-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

Homefront Battlefields

Like other Western-educated foreigners who returned to their homelands to appropriate what they had learned, the Hawaiian-born U.S. college students of the 1860s became the middle-aged revolutionaries of the 1890s. But supporting the eventual U.S. absorption of the islands and working toward it initially were considered two different things to missionary descendants returning to the Hawaiian kingdom. Missionary children remained ambivalent about U.S. expansion. English writer Isabella Bird was confused by the “incongruous elements” of Hawaiian culture in which “Republicans by birth and nature” uttered the words “Your Majesty” so easily. Bird noted that although missionary descendants expected U.S. annexation, it was “impious and impolitic to hasten it.”106

The Union’s prosecution of the Civil War gave missionary children from the islands a moral confidence in the United States. Bird, traveling the Hawaiian Islands in 1873, called the small nation thoroughly “Americanized.”107 Missionary children did not agree. Believing themselves Hawaiian, not American, they did not see the cultural and racial superiority by which they lived their Hawaiian lives. Missionary children believed their moral education and appreciation for republican government, which they had received at Punahou and in the United States, elevated their position in the islands. While in the United States, missionary children adopted racial understandings of national behavior. White missionary children distanced themselves from the Hawaiian people and argued for their own ability to rule the island nation based upon race. By lecturing each other not to abuse their superiority, they reaffirmed those beliefs. As missionary son Henry Whitney—who returned to the islands and became editor of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser—stated, native Hawaiians were “inferior in every respect to their European and American brethren.”108

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