Hawaii Statehood and the Vote That Did Not Ask the Right Question

On August twenty-first, nineteen fifty-nine, Hawaii became the fiftieth state of the United States. The statehood referendum held two months earlier had returned a yes vote of ninety-four point three percent, one of the largest margins in any such vote in American history. The numbers appeared to settle the question of Hawaii's political future definitively.

What they did not settle was whether the right question had been asked. The ballot presented voters with two choices: statehood or continued territorial status. It did not offer independence, which was what some Native Hawaiian leaders had sought and which was the option the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization later concluded should have been available. Some historians and Hawaiian sovereignty advocates argue the nineteen fifty-nine vote did not meet international standards for a valid act of self-determination, though no United Nations body has issued a formal ruling to that effect.

The structure of the electorate also shaped the result. Hawaii's population in nineteen fifty-nine included a substantial military presence and a civilian population that had grown considerably since annexation in ways that diluted Native Hawaiian proportional representation. The vote of ninety-four point three percent was not ninety-four point three percent of Native Hawaiians; it was ninety-four point three percent of whoever was eligible to vote in the territory at that moment.

The Hawaii sovereignty movement regards statehood not as a resolution but as a third stage in a sequence: the eighteen ninety-three overthrow, the eighteen ninety-eight annexation, and the nineteen fifty-nine statehood vote, each ratifying the previous step without ever returning to the foundational question of whether the United States had the authority to claim the islands in the first place. The Apology Resolution of nineteen ninety-three acknowledged that it did not. The question of what follows from that acknowledgment is still open.