Reasons For Hawaii To Fall Into The Hands Of The United States

Businessmen like Dole held imperialistic values to have unrestricted access to United States markets to bypass tariffs, like the McKinley Tariff passed in 1890 that raised the average duty on imports to almost fifty percent. In his letters, Minister Stevens credits Manifest Destiny as a reason why Hawaii should inevitably fall into the hands of the United States. Hawaii was a strategic location for the United States, as it housed a US Naval Base built on Pearl Harbor which provided access to Asia, a climate for developing sugar and pineapple plantations and a workforce that could easily be exploited for profit. Many believe that Hawaiians even needed the United States to intervene and Westernize it, part of the white savior mentality that was

During the Late 1800s, European powers gained control of nearly 10 million square miles of land in Asia and Africa, and in 1895, the First Sino Japanese war came to an end in which Japan emerged as a world power, prompting fears from Americans that Hawaii, and other strategic locations in the Pacific, would be taken over in a land scramble and that America would be closed out of a global market for exports and raw materials. In 1893, a period of economic depression hit the United States called the Panic of 1893, which democrat president Grover Cleveland was blamed for. These new economic factors, combined with feelings of the inevitability of manifest destiny leading to its eventual annexation, Americans started to believe that a new path as an imperial power would be the most beneficial for America’s economic security, opportunity, and growth in the future. In the later election of 1898, Republican and pro-imperialist William McKinley would win the popular vote. His actions would set America on the path to becoming a dominant world power and would open America up to foreign

pro-imperialist conflict in the United States, the decision to annex the country was made without any of their input. Hawaiians became victims of American imperialism, which drastically changed their economic and cultural landscape. Acts of protest from Native Hawaiians went ignored by the United States government when they were considering annexation, and no attempts to compromise with them were made. According to petitions made by Native Hawaiians of the Hui Hawaii Aloha Aina (Hawaiian Patriotic League) and its female counterpart the Hui Hawaii Aloha Aina o Na Wahine in 1897, the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani and the prospect of Hawaii’s annexation to the United States was strongly opposed by Native Hawaiians, as they contained signatures from more than half the Native population. In 1897, Queen Liliʻuokalani herself wrote a formal protest to the annexation of Hawaii to President McKinley, In which she stated, “I, Liliuokalani of Hawaii...do hereby protest against the ratification of a certain treaty, which, so I am informed, has been signed at Washington by Messrs, Hatch, Thurston, and Kinney, purporting to cede those Islands to the territory and dominion of the United States. I declare such a