The Lichfield Group

This article appeared in the July 21, 2005 issue of the Hawaii Reporter.

The customarily unerring U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye stumbled in marshalling a defense of the Akaka Bill to constituent George L. Berish of Honolulu in a letter dated June 13, 2005. The senior Senator from Hawaii mischaracterized the ending of the Monarchy in 1893, the right of revolution, and the Native Hawaiian flowering after annexation in 1898.

Sen. Inouye’s errors, however, impugn only the Akaka Bill, not his spotless integrity and bravery. As Alexander Pope versified, “to err is human, to forgive divine.”

The Senator stumbled twice in opining “that agents and officials of the United States knowingly participated in the wrongful overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani.”

The United States remained strictly neutral. It offered neither arms nor any other assistance to the Hawaiians involved in the domestic dispute with the Queen. Marines landed to protect American lives and property, as is customary when strife in a foreign nation is afoot, but no bullets were fired and no menacing gestures were made against the Monarchy.

Not a single person either died or was injured. A Hawaiian participant in the 1893 overthrow, W.O. Smith, declared without contradiction to James Blount, investigating on behalf of President Grover Cleveland: “[United States Minister] Stevens … emphasized the fact that while he would call for the United States troops to protect life and property, he could not recognize any government until actually established. He repeated that the troops when landed would not take sides with either Party, but would protect American life and property.”

The Queen was the architect of her own overthrow. She plotted to replace the Kingdom’s balanced separation of powers and rule of law with a monarchy reminiscent of French King Louis XVI. Judges, ministers, the House of Nobles, and the Constitution itself would have been made dependent entirely on her will. The Queen further aimed to issue opium and lottery licenses. Even her Cabinet balked.

The venerated Declaration of Independence of the United States recognized the right of Hawaiians to revolt against Queen Liliuokalani’s impending oppressions. As Thomas Jefferson wrote for the ages: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

The American grievances against King George III presaged the indictments of Hawaiians against the Queen: compromising judicial independence and unilaterally altering fundamentally the forms of their governments. In sum, the Queen’s overthrow was every bit as legal as was the American Revolution, the 1689 Glorious Revolution in Britain, or the 1789 French Revolution.

Sen. Inouye further erred in declaring that “the royal lands were taken without due process of law and without just compensation.” The right of revolution against Queen Liliuokalani and other would-be usurpers includes the right of the successor government to assert jurisdiction or ownership over crown lands. Accordingly, King George III lost his American colonies to the United States, King Charles I forfeited royal lands to Oliver Cromwell, and King James II yielded crown lands to William of Orange.

And King Kamehameha I never returned a single square inch of land to rival chiefs captured by force and violence. In any event, the United States assumed approximately $4 million in debt incurred primarily by the Monarchy at the time of annexation, a sum in excess of the market value of the Queen’s crown lands.

The honorable Senator slips again in asserting that “Native Hawaiians have suffered” from the Queen’s overthrow. But the Queen maintained otherwise in communicating with Sen. George Hoar (R. Mass.): “The best thing for [Native Hawaiians] that could have happened was to belong to the United States.”

Sen. Inouye as recently as 1994 boasted that Hawaii was “one of the greatest examples of a multiethnic society living in relative peace.” The median family income of Native Hawaiians is virtually the same as for non-Native Hawaiians. Native Hawaiians celebrate their culture under the umbrella of the United States Constitution like the Amish, Irish Americans, Polish Americans, and all other racial, ethnic, or religious groups. They have never been treated as less than equal in the eyes of the law or otherwise.

Hawaii today is the pinnacle of a policy of inclusiveness and fusion begun under the Kingdom more than 150 years ago. R.S. Kuykendall, the definitive historian of the Hawaiian Kingdom, has elaborated: “[T]he policy being followed looked to the creation of an Hawaiian state by the fusion of native and foreign ideas and the union of native and foreign personnel, bringing into being an Hawaiian body politic in which all elements, both Polynesian and haole, should work together for the common good under the mild and enlightened rule of an Hawaiian king.”

The Akaka Bill would be a stiletto in Hawaii’s grand success. That is why a commanding 2-1 majority of Hawaiians oppose the race-based legislation.

Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer and international consultant at Bruce Fein & Associates and The Lichfield Group. He is advising the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii.