Hawaii’s “Bayonet Constitution”
August 25, 2023
News reports of how Hawaiians greeted Biden’s motorcade in Maui on August 21 with middle fingers and shouts of “F_ _ _ You!” “F_ _ _ You!” was especially appropriate – if not a century or so too late – in light of the history of how Hawaii became a U.S. government possession.
Twenty-two years after the Lincoln regime proclaimed to have saved American government “of the people, for the people, by the people,” by slaughtering nearly half a million fellow citizens in the Southern states, the Republican party of Lincoln disenfranchised the native people of Hawaii with what was known as the “bayonet constitution.” At the time, the American crony capitalists who essentially ran the Republican party (as they had from its inception) wanted Hawaii to be declared an American province under U.S. control (aka, their control). As historian Gregg Jones wrote in Honor in the Dust, Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani attempted to stave off the American crony capitalist imperialists by creating a new constitution. The crony capitalists responded by creating a laughingly named “Committee of Safety” that plotted to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy.
They got the U.S. government to appoint one John Stevens as an “envoy” to Hawaii, whose job was to arrange for American troops to land there, take over, get rid of the Monarchy, and create a puppet government with one of their own as the head of the government. Sound familiar?
A Judge Sanford Dole, whose family had long Puritan/Yankee roots in the state of Maine, was put in place as the new head of government. A paramilitary organization known as the Honolulu Rifles forced the Hawaiian king at gunpoint with the threat of being stabbed to death with bayonets to sign off on a new constitution that came to be known as the “bayonet constitution.” This was “the party of Lincoln” in all its glory, having just two decades earlier forced the Southern states at gunpoint to accept a new constitutional order that essentially destroyed the system of federalism of the founding fathers and replaced it with a consolidated, monopolistic, bureaucratic Leviathan in Washington, D.C. run by “rich men north of Richmond,” as a popular new country music song describes it.
The ”bayonet constitution” disenfranchised all Asians living in Hawaii as “an inferior race” as well as most native Hawaiians.
Voting rights were preserved for the relatively wealthy American land and business owners. James Dole, the cousin of Judge Sanford Dole, then founded the Dole Fruit Company.
But before the annexation of Hawaii was completed the great Grover Cleveland, the last Jeffersonian president and the last good Democrat, became president in March of 1893 and killed the deal, denouncing the “lawless landing of the United States force at Honolulu.”
Greg Jones writes of how, two years later Teddy Roosevelt, the biggest blowhard politician in American history, informed a cheering Boston audience that “I feel it was a crime . . . against the white race that we did not annex Hawaii three years ago.” Annexation finally did occur in 1898; Hawaii became an American territory in 1900 and achieved statehood in 1959.
Who knows, maybe the “greeting” that those Hawaiians gave Biden and his imperial motorcade is the beginning of a de-annexation movement, or at least a movement that will lead to the increased nullification of federal micromanagement of the lives of Hawaiians.
No comments:
Post a Comment