Pineapple farm in Hawaii

{This is an Editorial reprint from the Roanoke Times}

We remember today as “a date which will live in infamy,” the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged the United States into World War II.

 

What fewer remember is the United States and Japan came close to going to war over Hawaii years before — 120 years ago, in fact.

 

The reasons the two nations came close to war in 1897 sheds an instructive light on a period that is often skipped over as we flip through the pages of history. Indeed, there are lessons in that near-war of 1897 that illuminate issues today— and some Virginia connections.

 

Thomas Jefferson was the first president to see the United States as a potential power in the Pacific, even though at the time American territory stretched only to the Mississippi River. Jefferson had read the accounts of the Captain James Cook, the British explorer of the Pacific, and was eager to establish some American claim to the West Coast before the British could. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made a point of venturing well beyond the Louisiana Purchase territory Jefferson had just acquired — going all the way to the Pacific.

 

The question of who owned the Pacific Northwest would be a point of tension between the United States and Great Britain for another four decades. Even before “the Oregon question” was peacefully resolved in 1846, another Virginia-born president set his sights even further west. In 1842, President John Tyler saw the strategic importance of Hawaii, then an independent republic.

 

American missionaries were already starting to proselytize there. More importantly, American businessmen were starting to invest in sugarcane plantations — a move that would revolutionize the islands’ economy and make them more important to U.S. interests. Tyler feared the British would seize the islands. In 1842, Tyler declared that the United States would view with “dissatisfaction” any attempt by a foreign power to take control of Hawaii. Translation: Britain, keep your hands off Hawaii. American meddling in Hawaii — that was just fine. Over the ensuing decades, the American presence in Hawaii would grow, often to the consternation of the natives. The United States was particularly covetous of Pu’uloa, the sheltered bay that today we know as Pearl Harbor. Whoever controlled it could project power in the Pacific.

 

In 1875, under President Ulysses Grant, the United States signed a free-trade deal with Hawaii. As with free trade deals today, that one was controversial. American sugar plantation owners in Hawaii wanted tax-free access to U.S. markets. Hawaii was offered tax-free American imports. Many native Hawaiians feared (correctly) that economic integration would hasten the deal when the United States simply annexed their nation. Their government agreed to the treaty anyway, because the economics were too tantalizing. Part of the deal: The U.S. Navy got access to Pearl Harbor.

 

American investment in Hawaii sugar cane boomed; so did American meddling in Hawaiian politics. American immigrants staged a rebellion in 1887 that tried to strip the Hawaiian king of most of his power. More rebellions and counter-rebellions followed that eventually resulted in whites overthrowing the native royalty in 1893. U.S. Marines arrived to protect American interests. The new government was led by Sanford Dole. You might recognize the name as a popular brand of pineapples. He asked the United States to annex Hawaii.

 

President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, was keen on annexation but was in his last days in office. His successor, Democrat Grover Cleveland, was cool on annexation. He worried that Hawaii would effectively be a colony; he wanted no part of that. Racism also played a part in the debate on both sides: Was it wise for the U.S. to annex such a large non-white population? Or did the U.S. need to annex Hawaii to protect the whites there?

 

The whites in Hawaii —many by now native-born but American in outlook — bided their time. They set up the Republic of Hawaii. At the same time that Virginia (and other Southern states) were moving to disenfranchise African-Americans and poor whites, the white-run Republic of Hawaii did the same thing. The only difference was the new Hawaiian government targeted native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants, many of whom were Japanese. Think of it as Jim Crow in the Pacific. About 7,200 whites lorded over a non-white population of 109,000.

 

In 1897, Republican William McKinley became president. Unlike Cleveland, he was open to annexation. So was Japan, or at least so the United States feared. Japan sent two shiploads of immigrants to Hawaii; the white-run Hawaiian government turned them away. Japan was so infuriated — and so worried about the fate of Japanese citizens living in Hawaii — that it sailed a battleship to the islands. The white-run Hawaiian government declared that Japanese immigrants were “dangerous to the community in its moral, sanitary and economic interests.” A military clash seemed imminent.

 

The crisis escalated. In Washington, McKinley’s young assistant secretary of the Navy rushed ships to Hawaii. That assistant secretary was named Theodore Roosevelt. Japan, in turn, warned that annexation would upend “the general status quo of the Pacific.” McKinley put the U.S. fleet on alert and American ships were ordered to turn back the Japanese if they tried to land in Hawaii.

 

In the end, they didn’t, and no shots were fired but the Japanese interest in Hawaii only increased American determination to control the islands. Roosevelt gave a bellicose speech declaring that the U.S. had no intention of asking “Japan, or any other foreign power, what territory it shall or shall not acquire.” He was acting on his own, but the more cautious McKinley later told him he approved of such inflammatory rhetoric. Roosevelt wasn’t done: He instructed the new U.S. Naval War College to study a military solution to one particular scenario: “Japan makes demands on Hawaiian islands.” Roosevelt also pushed to build six more battleships so that the U.S. could have naval superiority in the Pacific.

By year’s end, Japan suddenly withdrew its objection to American annexation. Japan faced a military threat closer to home from Russia that in time would lead to war. The following year, 1898, the United States formally annexed Hawaii.

Pearl Harbor was now ours, and a date that would live in infamy lay ahead.