Hawaii Annexation - U.S. Legitimizes Corporate Coup Against Monarchy

President McKinley signs the Newlands Resolution (House Joint Resolution 259) annexing the Hawaiian Islands, legitimizing a corporate coup d’état executed five years earlier by American sugar planters who overthrew the constitutional monarchy of Queen Liliuokalani. The annexation occurs despite two petitions with over 20,000 signatures representing more than half the Native Hawaiian population opposing it, and despite President Grover Cleveland’s 1893 Blount Commission finding that Liliuokalani was overthrown illegally and ordering the American flag lowered from Hawaiian government buildings. Congress uses the controversial joint resolution procedure requiring only simple majorities in both houses rather than the two-thirds Senate majority needed to ratify a treaty, evading constitutional requirements specifically because the annexation lacks sufficient support. The Spanish-American War provides the strategic justification: use of Pearl Harbor naval base during the conflict convinces Congress that Hawaiian control is militarily necessary for projecting American power in the Pacific.

The annexation culminates decades of American business interests systematically capturing Hawaiian sovereignty. American and British missionaries originally arrived reporting Hawaii’s ideal climate for sugar cultivation, attracting investors who acquired vast land tracts and replaced traditional Hawaiian agricultural practices with a plantation economy based on private property, taxation, and wage labor. By the 1890s, American businessmen control Hawaiian politics and recognize they can increase profits if Hawaii becomes U.S. territory, eliminating tariffs on sugar exports. In January 1893, the “Committee of Safety”—organized by Sanford B. Dole and composed of seven foreign residents (five Americans, one Scotsman, one German) and six Hawaiian Kingdom subjects of American descent—stages a coup with tacit U.S. support. Over 1,000 armed men led by wealthy sugar planters and businessmen face no resistance from royal forces, establishing a Provisional Government. When Dole refuses Cleveland’s order to restore Liliuokalani, he proclaims the Republic of Hawaii in 1894 with himself as president, arguing the U.S. has no right to interfere in Hawaii’s internal affairs despite the coup being executed by Americans for American business interests.

The annexation ceremony on August 12, 1898 reveals the colonial violence: almost no Native Hawaiians attend, and the few Hawaiians on the streets wear royalist ilima blossoms in protest. Most of the 40,000 Native Hawaiians, including Liliuokalani and the royal family, protest by shuttering themselves in their homes. Post-annexation, tariff reductions open vast markets for Hawaiian sugar and pineapple controlled by American corporations like Dole and Castle & Cooke, enriching the same planters who orchestrated the overthrow. The 1993 Apology Resolution by Congress concedes “the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States and the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands.” The Hawaii annexation establishes the template for corporate-driven American imperialism: business interests engineer regime change, the U.S. military provides support, and Congress later legitimizes the seizure under strategic pretexts while indigenous populations are dispossessed of sovereignty and land.