American History Tellers - Hawai'i's Journey to Statehood | Lost Kingdom | 5

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

After she was deposed by powerful American business interests, Hawai’i’s Queen Liliʻuokalani lived out the rest of her days advocating for her people. Julia Flynn Siler, author of Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure, joins Lindsay to discuss the rise and fall of Hawaii’s only queen, and her legacy.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersSupport us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's the morning of April 3rd, 1917 in Honolulu, Hawaii. You're sitting outside on the veranda of Washington Place, the mansion you've lived in since the Americans deposed you in 1893. It's a typical warm and sunny day, but your heart is heavy. Over breakfast, your longtime secretary, Colonel Curtis Iaukea, delivered some sad news. Five young Hawaiian men were among those killed when a German U-boat

torpedoed an American cargo ship off the coast of northern France. You're 78 now, and you largely avoid public events. But after hearing this news, you agreed to host a ceremony this afternoon to honor the five Hawaiians who perished. Your secretary joins you on the veranda. Your Majesty, the territorial senators have all responded to our invitations. Very good. Ma'am, now that it appears the United States may declare war against Germany, perhaps it would be a welcome gesture to our guests if... Your secretary pauses, looking unsure of what he's about to say next.

Go on. Well, to raise the American flag here, in recognition of the loss of Hawaiian-American lives. A bold suggestion, Colonel. The American flag flew in front of this home for many decades, but I had it removed. Yes, Your Majesty, I know. I believe I am as attuned as anyone to your strong feelings towards the stars and stripes. And I still maintain those feelings. You pause to reflect as you smooth the skirts of your black silk dress, a color you've chosen to wear in protest since your overthrow. But your anger and sadness have mellowed with time. But I suppose I can see that

honoring these men this way might send a message of comfort to all Hawaiians. Those men died serving the only country they'd ever really known, and that country is America. Well, I agree, Your Majesty. I think the gesture would be well received by all. But do we even have an American flag here? I don't think so, but I'm sure we can find one quickly. Your secretary sends an aide scurrying off. He returns several minutes later with a neatly folded flag.

You grimace when you think of all it has stood for in your lifetime. But the legislators and their wives will arrive soon, and you've made your decision. All right then, please help me out to the flagpole. Your secretary takes your arm, guides you across the lawn, past the palm and banyan trees. You watch as he attaches the flag to the halyard and hoists the stars and stripes above your home. You look up at that flag, feeling a mix of sorrow and resignation. Five Hawaiians have died in the service of that country. These lost lives have come to benefit a different flag than you would have wished. But still, they deserve to be honored for their sacrifice. From the team behind American History Tellers comes a new book,

The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, intimate moments, and shocking scandals that shaped our nation. From the War of 1812 to Watergate. Available now wherever you get your books. I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns

of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history. Your story. In April 1917, five Hawaiian sailors were killed when the American cargo ship SS Aztec was sunk by a German submarine. Hawaii's former queen, Liliuokalani, agreed to raise the American flag over her home

in their honor. It was a remarkable gesture from the former monarch, after having been deposed in a bloodless coup by American forces 24 years earlier. In the decades after she was overthrown in 1893, Liliuokalani attempted to sue the U.S. government for the return of her crown and royal lands, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Eventually, she retreated to her residence, Washington Place, only rarely making public appearances. She was supported by a pension of $1,250 a month she received from the nation that had deposed her. When asked to speak about her experiences, Lili O'Kalani often expressed deep resentment and bitterness toward the American government for what she viewed as the unlawful takeover of her islands.

Lili'okalani spent the last years of her life at her Honolulu home under the care of her secretary, Colonel Curtis Iokea. She spent her time gardening and writing songs, poetry, and letters. She died on November 11, 1917, at age 79. Here with me to discuss the life and legacy of the last Hawaiian monarch, Queen Lili'okalani, is New York Times bestselling author and journalist, Julia Flynn Seiler. She's written several critically acclaimed works of nonfiction, including Lost Kingdom, Hawaii's Last Queen, The Sugar Kings, and America's first imperial adventure. Here's our conversation.

Julia Flynn Seiler, welcome to American History Tellers. Oh, thanks for having me, Lindsay. Now, the history of Hawaii is probably one of the least known of all 50 states. How did you first become interested in its history and in Queen Liliakalani's in particular? Well, I actually approached the subject in a very sideways manner. My family had been invited to spend the weekend at a ranch outside of San Francisco. And our friends gave us a tour and we went into this dusty old barn. And inside this barn, there are feathered staffs known as kahili, and there are incredible carved totems.

And all of a sudden, it hit me, what are the connections between California and Hawaii? And having that experience, seeing these amazing Hawaiian artifacts, made me think, aha, there is one royal dynasty in American history that most people don't know about, and that's the Hawaiian royal dynasty. And Lily Ukulani is a fascinating character from history. She really straddled two eras and two cultures. She was born in a Graff's house, and yet she was highly educated, and she wore Victorian-era silk gowns and diamond tiaras, and she really fashioned herself after Queen Victoria of Britain. She was such an interesting and powerful and important character in American history. I wanted to know more about her,

and I didn't find any sort of book that told me enough. So I decided to start taking. So when you were researching this history and diving into this story for your book, Lost Kingdom, what sources did you use to learn about the queen and more about the old Hawaii? Well, to my great delight, there was a treasure trove of sources in the Hawaii State Archives. And I spent a long time digging through the papers of Queen Lily Uokalani, of her brother King Kalakaua, and other members of the royal family. So I had a huge amount of material to work with, which provided a much more intimate glimpse of the members of the royal family, and even more specifically, the dynamics between Lily

Uokalani and her brother, David Kalakaua, who were really the last monarchs of the independent kingdom of Hawaii. And of course, the queen herself kept diaries in English. The experience of holding and reading papers and her diaries and letters she had written really gave me chicken skin, which is the expression that people in Hawaii use for the electric feeling that comes through you of emotion when you realize that you're holding something that she herself, that last queen of Hawaii herself held in her hands. And there was one particular afternoon that I'll never forget, and this was

spending an afternoon in the archives of the Bishop Museum on Honolulu, and I came across this amazing piece of paper. It was a page that Lily Wu had torn from the Book of Psalms, and she'd written in pencil across it, Ilani Palace, January 16, 1895. I'm imprisoned in this room, the southeast corner, by the government of the Hawaiian Republic for the attempt of the Hawaiian people to regain what had been wrested from them by the children of the missionaries who first brought the word of God to my people. That's what she wrote that night, the first night that she was imprisoned after a coup attempt. And that was really stunning and very powerful to me to find that. Your book actually goes much farther back in history, all the way to the first indigenous

peoples who settled on the Hawaiian Islands. What do we know about them and how did you discover their history? We don't exactly know who they were or where they came from. Scholars think they came from the Marquesas or the Tahitian Islands, and they probably were rowing double-hulled canoes that had pigs and shoots of taro root and gourds filled with fresh water. They navigated using the stars. The Pacific Ocean is notoriously dangerous and rough to navigate. These were very courageous people.

Now, why they came, we don't know that either. It may have been warfare. It may have been famine in the islands they came from. It may have been they. It may have been famine in the islands they came from. It may have been they were seeking new opportunities. Really, all we know is that they courageously managed to navigate these waters and start a new society in what we now know as the Hawaiian Islands. At the top of the society were the chiefs known as the Ali'i Nui, and they were respected and feared. And below them were the people who did a lot of the daily work, who tended the taro fields, who dug out the fish ponds. And there were a very strict series of rules about how life should be lived. It was a very hierarchical

society. And the best that we can guess is that this society began around 200 AD. That's our best guess. So the indigenous people lived largely untouched by outsiders for years until Westerners started to arrive, who began showing up. For thousands of years, these people lived in isolation. And that isolation was shattered in 1778 when the British explorer, Captain James Cook, who was searching for the Northwest Passage, arrived with his men. And he actually made two journeys, 1778, and then he came back in 1779. And it was in a dispute over a stolen canoe that Captain Cook was killed by the islanders. After Captain Cook, whalers started coming. Merchants on their way between the west coast of the United States and

China started arriving in what soon became known as the Sandwich Islands. It was Captain Cook who gave it that name after the Earl of Sandwich. And in 1820, what happened was the first company of Christian missionaries from New England arrived in Hawaii. And it changed everything because their goal, of course, was to convert the Native Hawaiians to Christianity. And with them, they brought printing presses, they brought more technology, they very quickly set out to teach the native Hawaiians how to read and to write. And remember, the Hawaiian culture up until that point had been an oral culture. There was not writing. And even before Captain Cook arrived, there really wasn't much technology.

Captain Cook was the first to introduce weapons, and one adopting a system modeled on Great Britain's constitutional monarchy, in which the Hawaiian Islands also became a monarchy. These Westerners brought the printing press and other technologies, but that wasn't all. What else did they bring to Hawaii? The other thing that the Westerners brought to the Hawaiians was disease, Western diseases for which the indigenous people had almost no resistance to. Smallpox, measles, venereal diseases, and there's just a devastating decline in the number of indigenous people who are felled by these diseases. Whereas the newcomers, who the Hawaiians called haole, often had resistance.

So their numbers kept creeping up, and the native Hawaiians' population numbers kept declining. And it wasn't but just 18 years later, after the Christian missionaries arrived, that Queen Lili'uokalani was born. What was Hawaii like at the time when she was growing up? So Queen Lili'uokalani was born in a grass hut under an extinct volcano in the area of Honolulu, which was then a bustling port and harbor town. She was born still into legend goes, a rainbow appeared and people cried out, it's an ali'i, an li'i, meaning a high chief has been born, an aristocrat has been born. In fact, when she was born, it didn't appear that she would ever become queen of Hawaii because she was not a member of Kamehameha family. And she was an ali'i, but not an Ali'i Nui, not a high Ali'i. However, she was adopted by a higher-ranked Hawaiian family and brought up for

the first few years on the island of Maui. By about the age of seven, she was sent to the missionary school that they ran for the high chief's children. And she had a miserable time there. She didn't get enough food, there was fighting, and she looked back on that experience with a great deal of sorrow. And in fact, she supplemented her education by seeking out her own teachers later in life. And she ended up being marvelously educated. She spoke and wrote English. Of course, she spoke Hawaiian and wrote Hawaiian. And she also had a smattering of German, French, and Latin. And as a young woman, she also was quite well-traveled. She had visited the United States.

She'd visited Washington, D.C. and New York, and even was invited to London for the Jubilee celebration of Queen Victoria. So she was quite a sophisticated woman. So in terms of the society Lili'uokalani grew up in, it sounds like she moved in circles that included both Native Hawaiians and also Westerners, or what the Hawaiians called haole. She was being raised as a proper Victorian young lady by certainly her teachers at the royal school. She was also expected to be an ali'i, a member of the ruling class of Hawaiians, and she was expected to marry somebody who was equal to her in stature.

Now, the basic problem was that Native Hawaiians were dying in tremendous numbers. It was a national tragedy. Many, many of her family members and the children that she grew up with didn't survive into adulthood, and her choices of suitors were very, very limited. And so she ended up essentially being pushed into a marriage with the son of one of the most socially prominent white families in Honolulu. This was a young man named John Dominus, and he was the son of a sea captain. And they had a marriage that was not very happy and produced no children. But I would say that she put her creative energies, perhaps in part because she had a very unhappy marriage, into her songwriting, into her music, into

conducting choir as at church. And what kind of relationship did the Hawaiian monarchy have with the white business class leading up to Liliuokalani becoming queen in 1891? Her brother, David Kalakaua's ascension to the crown represented the end of the Kamehameha dynasty. And he was a candidate that was very much supported by the business class, by Howley. And over the decades when he was ruling, he became more and more indebted to Howley businessmen who paid for his travel, who lent him money, and who bought enormous amounts of lands from the royal coffers, essentially. By the early 1890s, three-quarters of the arable land in Hawaii was owned by Haole, by foreigners who had come to the islands, not by native Hawaiians. And a key moment occurred in 1887, and it became known as the Bayonet Constitution. And it was described that way because there was a sense that David Kalakau

had been forced into accepting this constitution that stripped many of his rights as the monarch and the rights of the Hawaiian people under threat of force by the businessmen who were supporting and consulting with him. Are you in trouble with the law? Need a lawyer who will fight like hell to keep you out of jail? We defend and we fight just like you'd want your own children defended. Whether you're facing a drug charge, caught up on a murder rap, accused of committing war crimes, look no further than Paul Bergeron.

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and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition wherever you get your books. By the end of the 1880s, this was a monarchy that had been weakened and was vulnerable to business interests. And then it got its first queen. Did Liliuokalani expect to assume the throne in 1891? Liliu never expected or particularly wanted to become the Queen of Hawaii. I think she was very happy to

be involved in supporting women and children and charitable works and writing music and tending her gardens. So she gets the news of her brother's sudden death, and while her cabinet, David Kalakaua's cabinet, mainly made up of businessmen, urging her to immediately take on all of the powers of the monarchy, she pushes back right then. She says, no, we're going to have a funeral, and I need a period of time to grieve before we do this. She had become, over the years years increasingly critical of her brother. She felt that he had been compromised by some of his advisors. And so she wanted to make changes in the cabinet. And most importantly, she wanted to address the issue of the Bayonet Constitution and to try to wrest back some of the powers that had slipped away, had been forced away from her brother, involving both her powers as the monarch and also the enfranchisement

of native Hawaiians and other groups of people. I mean, remember what's happening in Hawaii at this time is the plantations are growing very fast, and they are bringing in workers from Asia and from the Philippines and from other places. And she wanted to include those workers as people who were potentially eligible to vote. And that alone would have increased the power that she had over the kingdom, because it would have diluted the power of the mostly white Haole class. What they were most concerned about was the trade relationship with the United States. And their end game was to drop duties on sugar, Hawaiian sugar being imported into the United States, which was its biggest market. The final goal certainly was to make Hawaii into a territory or a state.

And Liliuokalani realized that and was pushing back. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the businessmen who are gaining a foothold in Hawaii? I think what happened in Hawaii could be called a Gilded Age land grab, an audacious land grab by the businessmen who wanted a more malleable government and better relations with the United States. So who were these people? Well, many of them were the sons and grandsons of the first Christian missionaries who arrived. I mean, there's an old expression in Hawaii, and that expression is, they came to do good and they did well. And what that means is that these are people who are trying to do good in a spiritual sense

and ended up doing very, very well in a material sense. And the character that I focused on initially when I was starting this book project was Claus Spreckles. And he got the nickname Sugar King of Hawaii. And he was a German-American businessman. He was based in San Francisco. He owned the steamship company that ran between San Francisco, then the largest port on the West Coast of the United States, and Honolulu. He had a big beet sugar operation in California, and he started realizing that there were opportunities in the islands, and he started buying up land. And he got very, very close to the royal family, and particularly to David Kalakaua, and ended up acquiring a great deal of very valuable land, particularly on Maui, as a result in part of his close relationship to the monarch. So that's one person. Another person who is also a very important character was Loren Thurston, the grandson of missionaries.

And Loren Thurston was a lawyer, and he was a very fiery orator. And he was the person who was leading the effort, the figuring out how to block Lily Okolani from pushing forward a new constitution and also the person who figured out how to rally the show of military force. And a final figure that I'll mention to you is he's probably one of the most famous names associated with Hawaii, and that is Dole. We all know Dole Pineapple. Well, this is Sanford Dole. And Sanford Dole was a judge in the 1890s, the time that Queen Lily Ewell Kalani became queen. And he was a very tall, highly respected man with a long white beard and very stately. And I think Lauren Thurston knew that he was a little too fiery for mainlanders to take seriously as the leader of opposition movement to Queen Lily O'Connor.

So Sanford Dole ended up stepping into that role, really at Lauren Thurston's urging. Now, I'm not suggesting that every businessman in the island was part of this scheming and plotting against Queen Lily O'Connor. That was not the case. She did have her supporters amongst the businessmen. And Klaus Sprechel, surprisingly, was one of those supporters, although it would waver back and forth a bit. Now, in particular, in this time, it was really sugar that kind of transformed Hawaii and the profits from it, and also began a longstanding relationship with the United States. Tell us more about the sugar trade between the islands and the mainland.

One big victory for the business class in Hawaii was known as the Reciprocity Treaty. And that was a treaty signed between the independent kingdom of Hawaii and the United States. And it allowed Hawaiian sugar to come into the United States without the planters having to pay duties. Now, that was a huge advantage. It was very, very important. And what did they give up in return for that? Well, an important place that we now know as Pearl Harbor. And that was a very valuable inlet. And the U.S. realized that this could be important militarily to it, this Pearl Harbor Delta area. And so in return for reciprocity, Hawaii gave America access to this area near Honolulu. Now, this situation changed, and it changed shortly after Lily Okolani became queen in 1891. And that's when the McKinley Act passed. And that lifted, it took away Hawaii's advantage in selling sugar into the U.S. market. And the sugar planters were very upset about that. And it's in some ways, this is what, aside from David Kalakaua's death, this was an economic story.

This was pushing to get back that advantage they had had in some way by growing closer to the United States. So it was in a moment of economic uncertainty in 1893 that these sugar barons saw their fortunes declining and a new queen perhaps finding her own voice. Tell us about then the coup. Who was responsible and how does sugar really drive some of this? So the backdrop to this drama is that there's a depression that has hit both the United States and the kingdom of Hawaii. The planters are suffering. The business community is suffering, and they want action. Meanwhile, Queen Liliuokalani, she has not been on the throne for very long. She stepped into it in early 1891.

By 24 months later, in January of 1893, she has received many petitions, many pleas from Native Hawaiians who are urging her to take back more power, to change the Constitution. And she decides after a cabinet reshuffle and also after an unsuccessful attempt by her to pass this through the legislature, she decides to do it by fiat. She appoints a new cabinet. She says, you will sign this constitution. And the new cabinet members balk at her request. Lauren Thurston, he reappears and he has gotten to several of these cabinet members and persuaded them it's not in their interest to push through this constitution. Meanwhile, what happens is that there is a U.S. minister to the islands. His name is Minister Stevens, and he receives a request by members of the business community to reach out to the commander of the warship that's stationed in Honolulu Harbor to ask for a landing of troops. And so sure enough, in January of 1893, that warship unloads Marines carrying rifles and rolling along a fearsome Gatling gun. Those are the guns that

are early versions of machine guns. And they're rolling them through the streets of Honolulu and they walk up and pass the palace and they briefly hesitate in front of the palace and they show arms at that point. And while their commander says that they were merely showing respect to the queen, the queen, of course, recognizes this for what it is, which is an overt show of U.S. military force. And so she's facing a question, and it's a very tough question. Does she risk the lives of her people by potentially ordering battle against those Marines who are now camped at the home on the grounds of a sugar planter nearby? Or does she back down, essentially, and save the lives of her people and avoid violence? So she backs down. And sure enough, those Marines stay camped in downtown Honolulu. And Lili'u'u Kalani is effectively forced to sign a piece of paper in which she acknowledges

that there is going to be a new government. She doesn't abdicate, but she acknowledges that she wants to wait for the U.S. government in Washington to resolve this conflict between her and what is now known as the Provisional Government, which is going to be led by Sanford Dole with Lauren Thurston in the background pulling strings. So presented with a military occupation of Honolulu, if nothing else, Queen Lili'uokalani eventually under protest surrenders, but she does not abdicate.

She writes, in fact, a note of surrender in which she forcibly protests against the actions of the day. Would you please read a bit from that surrender note? So, Queen Lili'u'l-Kalani signed a piece of paper that was thrust in front of her by the provisional government, what was known as the PG. I, Lili'u'l-Kolani, do hereby solemnly protest against any and all acts done against myself and the constitutional government of the Hawaiian kingdom. Now, to avoid any collision of armed forces and perhaps a loss of life, I do, under this protest and impelled by said force, yield my authority until such time as the government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the

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Ever. Follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. When Queen Liliuokalani surrendered, she did not abdicate. But what did she do in the immediate aftermath of the coup? Liliuokalani was a very savvy person. She realized that she needed to win the narrative. She needed to tell her story to not only change the hearts and minds of the U.S. president, but legislatures and the American public as well. Now, at the same time, the PG,

the provisional government, a lot of those folks had very strong ties to mainland media, and there was a vicious campaign, media campaign, being waged against Lily Ukulani. It's ugly, it's racist. There were cartoons of her, which to look at them now are horrifying. So she needed to counter these ugly images of her and her kingdom in the press. And so she went to Boston. She sought out a sympathetic journalist. She wrote a book that she titled Hawaii's Story. And it was a story that was powerfully told of her upbringing and how she came to be queen of Hawaii and the overthrow, putting forward her story. And she went to Washington. She met with both President Cleveland and President Cleveland's wife and other important people. And President Cleveland was very sympathetic to her cause, as were certain U.S. media organizations. The New York Times, for example, called this the political crime of the century, the coup that had taken place. And there were other publications that were also very critical of what members of the coup that had taken place. And there were other publications

that were also very critical of what members of the provincial government had done. Now, in making her case, this is a fragile and fraught political moment. Controlling the narrative is difficult. Did she make any missteps? She made a tactical error. It was a very serious error. The U.S. government sent an emissary to investigate what had happened with the PG taking over Hawaii. And in the course of a private conversation with this emissary, he asked her, what should be done with the plotters? And her answer was, well, under the rules of the Kingdom of Hawaii, traitors are put to death. They should be beheaded. And that put the emissary in the U meant endangering the lives of those people. So it was a big mistake on her part.

She did regret that statement, and she walked back that statement, but it was really too late. What circumstances brought about her formal abdication in 1895? So it was a small group of supporters. They had gotten support from the mainland and including weapons. They tried to stage a counter-coup, which was quickly quashed. And they also, I should say,

almost clearly got support from Queen Lili'uokalani herself because they used her home in the country as a place to organize their countercoup. So Queen Lili'uokalani is arrested. She is charged with the somewhat arcane charge of misprision of treason, which is basically knowing about a treasonous plot. She is brought and put under house arrest in Iolani Palace and kept in a second floor bedroom and guarded there for months. And she's put on public trial by the provisional government and Dole. She's found guilty. She ends up abdicating and she's ultimately pardoned by Dole.

But it's a terrible, humiliating experience. And one of the most touching things that I found in the course of my research was to visit Ildani Palace, where the bedroom in which she was imprisoned has the quilt that she and her female companion worked on. And it's this beautiful, exquisite quilt in which she told part of her story. She says she stitched into the quilt, I was born in 1838, and it goes on from there. However, Cleveland lost the presidency to McKinley, and McKinley was very much in favor of annexation. At the same time, the U.S. was getting involved

in the Spanish-American War, and the military planners in Washington realized they needed a reprovisioning station as warships left the West Coast and headed towards the Philippines. So annexation happened. Both houses of Congress passed it, President McKinley approved it, and it was done. And Liliuokalani had to live with this terrible loss. So then, with Hawaii finally annexed in 1898, and with her power stripped, how did the deposed queen spend the rest of her life? Queen Liliu lived a very quiet life. She divided her time between Washington Place, which was the beautiful garden-surrounded

estate in central Honolulu that had been built by her mother-in-law. She tended her flowers there, and she would walk to nearby church and direct the church choir, and she became a spiritual leader and a source of courage and strength for Native Hawaiians who were feeling increasingly embattled in the Hawaiian islands controlled by this business class in which, for the most part, they really played no active role. Native Hawaiians didn't really have capital. Many of them didn't have land. And as they grew poorer, they turned increasingly to their queen as a source of hope. So then finally, I suppose, what do you think Queen Lili'uokalani's legacy is in Hawaii? Well, I have an oil painting of Queen L Ukulani that I look at sometimes, and

I think about her strength as a person. She could have been defeated. She could have retreated from public life entirely, and she chose not to do that. She set up late in life a trust, which still exists today. It's called the Lili'uokalani Trust, and it focuses predominantly on Native Hawaiian children and supporting them. She wrote hymns, Christian hymns, as well as more traditional Hawaiian music. I should mention that when I look at her, I think of her music a lot. I think many Americans, of course, know Aloha Oe, which is certainly the most famous Hawaiian song. And she composed that many, many years before she the palace. And that's a beautiful song. And at one point I'd been invited by her old church to sing with her choir when they were performing her songs.

And it was so moving to experience and feel her music and her words firsthand in that way. She was a beautiful composer. I think in some ways her legacy as a composer is as powerful as her short two-year legacy is sitting on the throne. Julia Flynn Seiler, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American History Tellers. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much. That was my conversation with author Julia Flynn Seiler. Her book, Lost Kingdom, Hawaii's Last Queen, The Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure

is available now from Atlantic Monthly Press. From Wondery, this is the fifth and final episode of Hawaii's Journey to Statehood from American History Tellers. In our next season, in 1919, one of America's strangest disasters struck Boston's busy North End. A giant storage tank holding more than 2 million gallons of molasses collapsed,

sending a deadly wave crashing into the city streets, leaving death and destruction in its wake, and sparking a contentious court case to determine who was to blame for the tragedy. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me,

Lindsey Graham for Airship. Sound design by Molly Baugh. Additional writing by Neil Thompson. This episode was produced by Lushik Lotus Lee and Polly Stryker. Our interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni. Produced by Alita Rozanski. Production coordinator, Desi Blaylock. Managing producer, Matt Gant. Senior managing producer, Tanja Thigpen.

Senior producer, Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marsha Louis for Wondery. Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neurolinguistic programming. Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict and murder suspect, and you can't help but wonder what his true intentions were. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away.

We recently dove into the story of the godfather of modern mental manipulation, Richard Bandler, whose methods inspired some of the most toxic and criminal self-help movements of the last two decades. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening.