A True Corpo-State
American Documents: The Newlands Resolution
2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, the Indian Removal Act, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club rules, Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech, the Emancipation Proclamation, Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address, the Appomattox Surrender Letters, the Homestead Act, the Gettysburg Address, the Alaska Purchase, the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, Susan B. Anthony’s Speech on Women’s Suffrage, the Nez Perce Surrender, and the Dawes Act.
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The Newlands Resolution is the act by the federal government that formally annexed Hawaii to the United States as a territory in spite of native opposition. From a legal standpoint it is unique compared to what happened with other land acquisitions on the continent, mainly because the driving forces were more corporate than political. In order for this all to make sense I’m going to have to speed-run Hawaii’s plantation history in the 19th century.
In the 1830s, American plantations popped up and started growing sugar (a crop that had thrived there for over a thousand years) to export it back to the mainland. This accelerated in the 1840s as the native rulers allowed the Americans to own more farmland. When the Civil War ended in 1865, the South’s agricultural capacity was wiped out, so certain crops became more valuable, especially “luxury” items like sugar and certain fruits. This led to expanded operations in the Hawaiian Islands by what were now corporate plantations with very large land holdings.
By the 1880s, five corporations held not just huge amounts of land, but also had sway with banks and local-level politics. In 1887 these corporations forced the king of Hawaii to sign the “Bayonet Constitution” which gave the corporations pretty much total control of the island cluster. They were making money hand-over-fist with special duty arrangements on the mainland. Then tariffs hit in the 1890s and that threatened their income streams, and so to bypass the tariffs they wanted to officially become a U.S. territory. In 1893 the corpo-cluster staged a coup and deposed the rightful queen of Hawaii, Liliʻuokalani, who surrendered to avoid bloodshed. (The U.S. sent 160 Marines to help with the coup.)
Based on what I’ve read about this—and I’m as ra-ra-American as anyone—there isn’t much to say about it beyond the fact that a handful of corporations grew and grew over the decades, wanted to protect their own power and wealth, and once they had the power to do so, they just took an entire nation. At some level I’ve got a problem with that. Simultaneously, the decision worked in America’s favor over the next fifty years, because Americans weren’t the only ones with designs on Hawaiian occupation. The Spanish-American War would kick off five years after Hawaii’s queen stepped down, and Japanese imperialism would proliferate throughout the region throughout the early 1900s.
That said, it wasn’t like Dole Pineapple and the other plantation owners knew that or even cared when they took Hawaii. They wanted to protect their businesses—which I understand—and they went about it in a very East India Trading Company kind of way.
I had to look up a lot of this to get the details and dates right, but this document wasn’t my introduction to the Hawaiian annexation; naturally I heard about it in history class in middle school, but I’m also from Las Vegas, which Hawaiians sometimes refer to as “Mainland 808” (their area code) because so many of them have moved there. In one of my trucking jobs I had three Hawaiian co-workers and one of them was a guy you might call a Hawaiian nationalist, and he’d talk about the forced annexation if you asked him.
So. The Resolution.
With all those dates established, when was the Newlands Resolution passed in Washington? July 7, 1898. The plantation coup happened in 1893, a provisional government was established a year after, and some attempts were made to undo it (including by Grover Cleveland, who understood the whole thing was improper) but the plantations had the power on the ground.
This was the same thing Andrew Jackson learned 70 years prior with the Indian Removal Act. An executive was limited by what he could actually do to enforce his policies. Hawaii would eventually become a territory in 1900, and would gain statehood in 1959. The American military was able to use it against Spain in 1898 and then parked the Navy there in 1941…which led to a very infamous day. But we’ll get to that in a few weeks.
Hawaii wasn’t brought into the Union by treaty, which requires a two-thirds approval in the Senate; since it was a resolution, it just needed a simple majority vote in both chambers of Congress. The Senate passed it 42-21 (there were 90 Senators in 1898, they would have needed 60 votes) and the House passed it 209-91. Quick note on Congress here: not everyone was present for the vote either, and you can hold votes with Senators who are there and disregard the concerns of those absent under certain circumstances. Or at least you could back then. The point is they could get a majority for a resolution but they couldn’t get two-thirds for a treaty.
The Queen Protests
Presented without comment.
I, Liliuokalani of Hawaii, named heir apparent on the 10th day of April, 1877, and proclaimed Queen of the Hawaiian Islands on the 29th day of January, 1891, do hereby earnestly and respectfully protest against the assertion of ownership by the United States of America of the so-called Hawaiian Crown Lands amounting to about one million acres and which are my property, and I especially protest against such assertion of ownership as a taking of property without due process of law and without just or other compensation.
Therefore, supplementing my protest of June 17, 1897, I call upon the President and the National Legislature and the People of the United States to do justice in this matter and to restore to me this property, the enjoyment of which is being withheld from me by your Government under what must be a misapprehension of my right and title.
Done at Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America, this nineteenth day of December, in the year one thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight.
So this is how Hawaii entered the Union. It’s unique compared to other States because of how the corporations got big enough to challenge a local monarchy and then bend the will of the Fed into their own alignment. They tried to get President Cleveland to accept the annexation and he refused, they tried again under McKinley and he favored it. I understand Hawaiians’ opposition to it.
All that said, it’s better that a 2,000-mile range of islands between America and Asia be part of America than Asia. (Source: I’m American.) Nevertheless, I’d prefer it had happened with the consent of the locals. But here we are.
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