Annexation, Territory, and the Long Road to Statehood

The method of annexation mattered. To annex a foreign country by treaty requires a two-thirds vote of the United States Senate. The treaty of annexation that President McKinley submitted in eighteen ninety-seven could not get those votes. The Senate had enough members who were uncomfortable with the legality of what had happened in eighteen ninety-three to block the required majority. So the administration changed the method. Instead of a treaty, which requires ratification, Congress passed a joint resolution, which requires only a simple majority. Hawaii was annexed on July seventh, eighteen ninety-eight, while the United States was in the middle of a war with Spain and acquiring the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The timing was convenient.

For sixty years, Hawaii was a territory. Territorial status meant that the islands were governed by administrators appointed in Washington, that residents paid federal taxes but could not vote for president, and that the plantation interests that had engineered annexation remained the dominant economic and political force. The Big Five oligarchy was more durable than most colonial arrangements. It survived labor organizing, World War Two, and the demographic transformation of the islands.

The path to statehood was complicated by race. Many members of Congress were reluctant to admit a state with a non-white majority population. The debates over Hawaiian statehood in the late nineteen forties and nineteen fifties were tangled up with debates over civil rights, with Southern Democrats in particular resistant to admitting a state where Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Native Hawaiians together outnumbered Americans of European descent.

Hawaii became the fiftieth state on August twenty-first, nineteen fifty-nine. The vote in the statehood plebiscite was about ninety-four percent in favor. The six percent who voted against were not recorded by name. Many of them were Native Hawaiian.