King Kalakaua and the Hawaiian Renaissance

David Kalakaua became king of Hawaii in eighteen seventy-four by a vote of the legislature, after the death of the last direct heir of the Kamehameha dynasty. He was the first Hawaiian monarch elected rather than inherited, and he had a clear idea of what he wanted to do with the kingdom: survive.

The threat to Hawaiian sovereignty in the eighteen seventies was not primarily military. It was demographic and economic. The Native Hawaiian population had collapsed from disease. The plantation interests were growing more powerful. The United States was looking for a naval base in the Pacific. Kalakaua negotiated the Reciprocity Treaty of eighteen seventy-five, which gave Hawaiian sugar duty-free access to American markets in exchange for a guarantee that Hawaii would cede no territory to other foreign powers. The treaty saved the Hawaiian sugar industry and enriched the planters who were already agitating against him. When the treaty was extended in eighteen eighty-seven, the United States added a new demand: exclusive rights to Pearl Harbor as a naval station. That extension planted the American military presence that would make annexation strategically attractive to Washington.

What he is remembered for most is something different. Kalakaua was the Merrie Monarch, the king who brought the hula back. The missionaries and their successors had suppressed public hula as heathenism for fifty years. Kalakaua funded it, commissioned it, and performed it at his coronation in eighteen eighty-three with a ceremony that scandalized the American business community. He collected and recorded the sacred chants, the mele, that were in danger of being forgotten. He sponsored the first written transcriptions of the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant, which runs two thousand one hundred two lines and traces the genealogy of the Hawaiian people from the moment of creation to the present.

Every April, the Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo holds a hula competition that has taken his name. It is one of the most important cultural events in Hawaii. The king who negotiated away Pearl Harbor and the king who brought the hula back were the same man, working the same problem with every tool he had.