Bye Bye, Miss American Empire by Bill Kauffman
Author:Bill Kauffman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
CHAPTER FIVE
And Why Is This a State? Aloha, Hawaii
Hawaiian statehood is even more inexplicable than Alaskan. At least Alaska is on the same continent as the Lower 48. The Hawaiian islands are almost five thousand miles from my Genesee County. In what way, other than in the profound but, in practice, attenuated sense that “we are all brothers under the skin,” are a Hawaiian (of whatever ethnic background) and I countrymen? Why, pray tell, should I have even a whisper of a say in how he lives his life or how his government is organized? And vice versa.
Though the Hawaii islands were settled by Polynesians around AD 750—the date is of course only barely approximate, and native activists sometimes assert that settlement predated the birth of Christ—they were “discovered” for the West in 1778 by Captain James Cook, who sycophantically named them the Sandwich Islands after one of his patrons. On a return trip to the archipelago the next year, Cook fell afoul of the natives and was killed. His flesh may or may not have been consumed, though probably not between slices of bread, as his onomastic contribution would have suggested.
In the years following Cook's demise, Kamehameha the Great, ruler of the Island of Hawaii, attacked and took Maui and Oahu and effected, by military force, consolidation of the islands into the Kingdom of Hawaii, which from the 1790s on served as a trading partner and port for American ships. Those ships carried away sugar and coffee but they brought missionaries and misunderstanding.
The land use, ownership, and sexual practices of Hawaiians were vastly different from those of Americans—plural marriage, communal property, and native gods and goddesses were the rule. New England missionaries to Hawaii disapproved. Of these “bloodsuckers of the community,” the US consular agent said that they had “much better be in their native country gaining their living by the sweat of their brow, than living like lords in this luxurious land, disturbing the minds of these children of Nature with the idea that they are to be eternally damned unless they think and act as they do.”1 The natives' sexual practices appalled, and perhaps titillated, New England missionaries, who with Yankee shrewdness bought heavily in the real estate market, yet the missionaries' record is not without distinction. They developed a Hawaiian alphabet, opened schools (and compelled attendance), and ministered to the Hawaiian population, which was ravaged by smallpox and venereal diseases and alcoholism.
And give the missionaries their due for “their remarkable preservation of the nomenclature.” As toponymist extraordinaire George R. Stewart writes, “The Protestants not only did not replace the names, but also did much to preserve them by transliterating them into the roman alphabet and recording them. No important name [in Hawaii] seems to have originated under the missionary influence.”2 The Sandwich Islands never stood a chance.
As Hawaii is halfway between the West Coast and the China Sea, the trading and warmaking nations of the world took notice. Britain and France had designs on the islands, but Hawaii gravitated into the orbit of the United States.
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