Stuff You Should Know - At Long Last: Hawaiian Overthrow Episode

Episode Date: September 24, 2020

By longstanding listener request, we look at how Hawaii was basically stolen by the United States in the 19th century. Rather than reverse this bit of geopolitical fraud, the US ended up making Hawaii a state instead. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, Aloha, and Jerry's out there somewhere, Aloha,

and this is Stuff You Should Know, ha. Melaka li kei laka, that's pronounced. Yeah, that's actually a little known fact, that's the Hawaiian way to say Merry Christmas to you. I didn't know this story, by the way. This is pretty interesting. Yeah, yeah, I have to say, Chuck, before we get started, we have to give a huge shout out, huge, to a dude,

I don't know his name, but he's on Instagram as- People like that. Kanaka Kai. Oh, okay, well, maybe that's his name. So, maybe so, or it could be Kai Kanaka, who knows? He calls himself the Hawaiian hillbilly, but he has, every time we post an episode, he goes on and comments,

Hawaiian overthrow episode, please. He's been doing it for like years. Yeah, yeah. So Kanaka Kai, this one is for you, man, that long last. And now he doesn't have to jump into the big woo. Right, so what I'm hoping though, is that he's not like super well-versed in this, it's just gonna be inevitably disappointed.

Hopefully it's just something he wants to know more about, so he's been asking for it for that one. Well, I'm glad he trolled us for years, because this is a really interesting and not at all surprising story. No, it's not. And basically what we're talking about today is the overthrow of Hawaii.

And it turns out that Hawaii, one of the most beautiful states in the union, probably the most beautiful state in the union, the state where you mean I got married in fact. It depends on what you're into. Sure, sure, if you're into tropical paradises, there's not much better. Somebody from Montana might be like,

you can have it, look at these mountains. Although I could see Montana people go into Hawaii and be like, I've been so wrong all my life. And these boots are really uncomfortable. Right, so it is a beautiful state, but if you go back not too very far, you will find that there's a lot of arguments you could make that it should not be a state

in any way, shape, or form. Yeah, and I'm curious about the current temperature of native Hawaiian people and how they feel about that now. Yeah, yeah, well, we'll get to that eventually. Do you know? I don't know about the temperature of the Hawaiian people, but I know about some proposals

to help kind of reverse or undo some of the damage that was done. That's for the end. Well, I guess we should go back some many thousands of years and talk about the settling of the Hawaiian islands by the Polynesian people about 1500 years ago, maybe a thousand years ago, somewhere in there. And for many, many hundreds of years,

there were the control of Hawaii was by chiefs and then sub-chiefs, and these chiefs claimed that they were divine and origin, and they said we have a set of very strict religious rules that we should follow called the kapu, and that wasn't so popular over the years. Well, it depends. I mean, like if you were born into that society

and that was what you knew, that was just what you knew, but I get the impression that over the centuries, some chiefs and sub-chiefs enforced the kapu more than others. And one of the big bases of the kapu laws is that there was a strict separation of men and women, and men were divine and women were profane, and they represented kind of like light and dark,

and you can't have one without the other, so they need each other, but also men were still definitely favored in that respect. But then if you also go look through Hawaiian history, there were also plenty of female rulers as well. So it's really interesting. Kapu could probably get its own episode, and I'm sure now we know what Kanaka Kaio

will be commenting on all of our episodes from now on. Exactly, move it on. But it was, so they had their own very strict social stratification and religious laws for sure. Yeah, I think if Emily heard that, she would say, Chuck is not divine, but I am profane, so we're halfway there. Right, non-profane women rarely make history.

So speaking of making history, this is where a man named James Cook enters the picture. In the late 1700s, the very famous British explorer, he was the most notable, some people say the first European to visit Hawaii, definitely the most notable, because there is some, you can make an argument that the Spanish were there before him at some point. Yeah, they have maps that appear to be Hawaii

from like the 16th century. Yeah, so the Japanese as well, but Cook was the first person to go as an Englishman, which was a big deal as a colonizer and say, I'm charting this island or these islands, I'm gonna name them the Sandwich Islands, not a great name. No, because well, James Cook was well known for loving sandwiches, so he was so great.

Actually, it was named for the Earl of Sandwich, John Monoghue, and it's the very same Earl of Sandwich, though, that sandwiches are named for. So that guy was really, he was an influencer. And Hawaii's known for their sandwiches. Yeah, poi sandwiches. So Cook visits, he visits a few times and kinda did a lot of traveling while he was there,

so he makes one visit and then just starts sort of exploring the islands around Hawaii, eventually comes back kind of on that same trip and gets really aggressive at that point. Not a nice fellow trying to do sort of the colonizer thing. Here, let me make a deal with you. Let me trade something that isn't very valuable for something that is very valuable,

which is to say your land. Right, and yeah, he was just basically doing the standard Euro Explorer thing. Euro trash explorer. Exploitation, trying to get everybody into Kraftwerk, that whole thing, right? Yeah. So Cook, I guess he overstepped his bounds finally

and he was actually killed in a major battle after some of his men kidnapped a Hawaiian chief. Well, he did it personally, that's from what I saw. Oh, is that right, okay. It said by his own hand. Not a good move, not a good move. Because one thing about the Hawaiian islands, they were ruled by those chiefs and sub-chiefs,

like you said, but I get the impression that they were united largely when it came to the kidnapping of any Hawaiian chief by a European outsider. Yeah, like you can fight with your brother, but if someone else picks on your brother, then you gotta join forces. Who would ever pick on Scott?

Well, I was thinking of you and me, but sure. Oh, brother. Like real brothers too. Right, well, and blood brothers, I still have that scar on my palm. I actually, mine was a squib. I faked it. I thought that tasted like a high fructose corn syrup.

Yeah, you were like, Chuck is sweet blood. It's so sweet, like Scott. So yeah, Cook is, kidnaps this guy. They did not respond very kindly to that. So they sent a faction down there to attack him and his boats. They were on the beach and that's where he died. Faced down in shallow water.

He was bonked on the head by one chief, I think, and then stabbed by that chief's kind of attendant. Right, right. So this is a huge battle, a momentous battle in the history of Hawaii. It was very important and not just because James Cook died, but because there was one of the, I guess low level warriors there,

or middle class warriors, I guess, by the name of Kamehameha fought quite bravely in that battle. And Kamehameha actually went on to become the first genuinely influential Hawaiian chief. Maybe the most significant Hawaiian chief of all time because while he was there fighting the Europeans, he's like, man, these guns, they work really well.

And these Europeans are willing to sell them to you. And he figured out that if he could amass some European support and European weapons, he could get all of Hawaii basically under himself. And that's what he said about doing over the course of a couple of decades. Yeah, reading this stuff, this was the Grabster, right?

That helped us with this one. It seems to be. Oh, I'm sorry. No, it was James Mishner. Oh, really? No, do you remember? James Mishner would write those thousand page epics about like, I think he wrote one on Hawaii.

That's basically who you're talking about. This Grabster, so James Mishner is this author. He'd write these exhaustive historical fictions. And one of them was Hawaii, but they would be like a thousand pages easily. And I was making a jokey comment on Grabster's research skills. Yeah, English major over here flew right over my head.

And by the way, a little quick side note that I wanted to mention, I am speaking of epic tomes. I'm reading the Beatles biography from Bob Spitz that's like a thousand pages. Oh, yeah. And one thing I wish we could have mentioned, I know you hate the Beatles, but one thing I wish we could have mentioned

in the pirate radio thing was Radio Luxembourg. There would have been no Beatles without them because independently Paul, George, and John were all on their own listening to Radio Luxembourg. And that's what turned them on to music to begin with. Oh, really? That's cool. Turn me on Radio Luxembourg, turn me on, turn me on.

Why I did not see the Beatles making an appearance in this episode. So where are we now? Comeyamea? Yeah, comeyamea. Oh, I know what I was gonna say was a thread through this I found is that back then, Hawaiians were largely under armed

in most cases. That's a big thing. And then also just like with all other colonizations from outside European forces, disease basically paved the way for imperialism. Oh, sure. Where even if they were under armed and they didn't typically have standing militaries,

I should say the Hawaiians didn't, even if they had, there was like a plague that came around in 1803 that killed off half of the population. They think it was yellow fever. There was another measles outbreak about 50 years later that killed off another quarter of the population.

So when you're dying off in like numbers like this, how could you possibly defend yourself, especially against people who have these superior weapons like guns, germs, and steel as Jared Diamond put it? Yeah, I mean, it's the same story as America and the native population here. It's like, hi, we're outsiders and we have guns and here's some smallpox on the side.

Yeah, but God decreed that this should be our land because he killed all of you off with these smallpox. Right, because you have no immunity. It's the same depressing story over and over again. It is. So when Kamehameha was ruling Hawaii, which was really, he was firmly entrenched by the almost turn of the century, late 1700s.

He was pushing, and you know, so much of this boils down to money and class, and he was really pushing for trade with Europe. He wanted the elite landholders of Hawaii to kind of remain in that position. He was traditionally religious with the kapu and supported that, but he was very much, you know, like let's enrich ourselves as sort of the ruling class.

For sure, but he also, and he was also very open to the idea of exploiting European influence for, you know, to strengthen his kingdom or his house, I guess is what it's called. He actually had two advisors, Isaac Davis and John Young, Englishmen and a Welshman who were his closest advisors. And apparently I can't remember which one it was, but when one of them, whenever they would part company,

Kamehameha would just begin sobbing because he just knew one day that he was gonna leave, and he just loved him that much. Interesting. Yeah, it is very interesting. It's one of those things where, you know, we were raised as like Anglo-Euro-American boys in the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, right?

In the Midwest. So when you research history like this, it's just like Hawaiian chief did this, and then this Hawaiian chief came along. But when you start to look into them as we were older, it's just always so fascinating to me just how complex and complicated history really is, you know? And just how boiled down typically is presented as.

Yeah, totally. That's cause, I don't know. I think teachers do a good job as they can, but when we were in school, the history we were taught was pretty simplified. It is. I mean, there's also like a real advantage to dehumanizing the people that you've done wrong to

over the centuries. Especially when they live in a state of yours still. That's a good point. Yeah. So under his rule, he managed to sort of, sort of unify the kingdom of Hawaii. It wasn't like everyone was completely on board with what was going on, especially with the kapu

and human sacrifice and some of that stuff that happened. No, but they did live under his rule, whether they liked it or not. He was a very strong king. Yeah, because he had guns finally and people didn't. And so they couldn't rise up against him. But after he died, is when things got really complicated,

because then you had Hawaiian landowners, you had white people that own land. And then you had this third group, this really large working class, even though many were killed off. Still a lot of people. And that really complicated the whole situation. And maybe we should take a break there.

We should. All right, we'll take a break and we'll talk about what complicated that even more right after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Oh, God, stop, you should know. So Chuck, we have this, this is kind of like a brief sketch of what's going on here. We have a native group, the native Hawaiians, who live here and they are autonomous in running their own show. But then the European explorers have showed up

and they are trying to make headways in exploiting this area as best they can commercially for agriculture. At first it was sandalwood, and then it moved on to, I think, cattle, and then finally like sugarcane. And then those European white landowners in Hawaii started bringing in tons and tons of migrant workers

in basically like slave labor conditions. So you have these three groups kind of coming together in Hawaii, only one of which was originally there. Yeah, and another thing came in, which was missionaries from Europe, Protestant missionaries for the most part. And they did what missionaries do, which was say, hey, you should be Christian

and not worship whatever Hawaiian God you worship. And this was a big deal because there were, you know, Hawaii had a long rich tradition, a very sacred tradition of religion. And this was not that at all, but like they do, they were pretty forceful in making sure Christianity took hold among some of the people. And it became a pretty big deal in Hawaii

by like the sort of mid 1800s. Yeah, for sure. So in just like with other places where the missionaries were kind of like the leading edge of the spear as far as imperialism goes, they just were the first to kind of brave this and bring Christianity and a, you know, air quote civilization to the area.

So after they started to make headway and started to change the culture, it allowed greater entree for more like commercial interest to have nothing to do with religion. They were just coming to work the land kind of thing. Yeah, and 1840, this is when Kamehameha's grandson, Kamehameha III wrote the first real, legit Hawaiian constitution.

There would be many more to follow. Don't worry, right? This was just the first one. And this one basically kind of kicked Kapu law to the side, was a little more Christian, a little more Western for lack of a better word and basically said, all right, you can now vote over here. And this is kind of the first entree

of what democracy would look like there. Yeah, I mean, it created a judicial branch, a legislature, like it sounded awfully familiar really as far as constitutions go. And it was a huge watershed moment because like you said, it replaced Kapu with like, you said Western style democracy basically or some version of it, the beginnings of it, I guess.

Yeah. And it also would establish this framework, this foundation for people to point to and be like, oh, no, no, we wanna go further and further toward the constitution, not back toward the old ways. So it was like a goalpost that was set there that could be pointed to as we don't wanna monarch anymore.

Remember, we want this legislature and the judicial branch and all this stuff that Americans and Europeans are accustomed to working within. Yeah, and also money was a big complicating factor. Like we said, anytime money is introduced and there's very valuable land, it's gonna get pretty grabby. And that's what happened when the white Europeans

and Americans said, wow, this soil over here and the climate over here is great for growing stuff. And they don't have workers' rights laws here. So we can really, really get cheap, cheap labor, if not like you said, basically enslaved people essentially from Asia to work over here. And not really paying much money, like bring them over under false pretense,

say how great it is, how much money they're gonna make and then kind of build them back. Is it sort of like signing a record contract and bill you back for all the expenses of getting over there and overcharging for their living quarters, which were terrible. But it's exploitation that we've seen time and time again. Right.

Yeah, if it's still going on today, like basically human trafficking is what they were doing. Yeah. So one thing about Kamehameha, the house of Kamehameha, when the first Kamehameha, which is an awesomely fun word to say, and also just reminds me of Magnum PI, because that was the club that Rick managed,

the King Kamehameha club. Oh, wow. Yeah. I did not remember that. Oh man. So anyway, I would just kill to like be in 1983 hanging out at the beach bar in that club. But anyway, Kamehameha, despite there being like upheaval,

basically every time a successor died, he managed to establish a dynasty that lasted until the 1870s, I believe. And the problem was is that there were no strong succession laws. Yeah. So when a monarch died in a few instances, there were these periods called interregnums,

which is basically like, hey, you know the government, it doesn't actually exist technically right now. It's kind of a free-for-all while we figure out what comes next. We gotta get this together and decide how to move forward. And in this case, they would have the legislature vote for the ruler.

And this wasn't super popular. It led to rioting. Hawaiians were like, no, we kind of didn't mind the monarchy and we need these succession laws to be kind of ingrained. I think that that's a real telling or revealing tell about how the Hawaiians felt that they were like, no, we don't forget the legislature.

We just need better laws to say who succeeds who as far as the monarchs are concerned. Because I think that's what they were used to and that's what they wanted, you know? Yeah, but what this ended up doing was kind of, there was a real divide here when 1874, I think, was when Kala Kauaowa. Oh, oh, Kale Kaua.

Kale Kaua, I practiced it a million times. It's definitely Kale Kaua. Kale Kaua, I mean, I love these words, they're so much fun to say. Oh, yeah. Even though we're probably butchering them, but. No, I'm pretty sure it's Kale Kaua. All right, Kale Kaua was the new king voted on in 1874.

And this was the first real wedge because he had this faction that supported Queen Emma and a real opposition party was in place. Like people were very, very divided at this point. Yeah, Queen Emma was the wife of Kamehameha IV. So she had a pretty valid claim on the throne, but the legislature said, no, Kale Kaua is definitely our guy. He's now your king and your monarch.

And he was an interesting cat too. He was known as the Mary Monarch. He was a bit of a bon vivant. Hula had been banned by the big buzzkill missionaries for decades. Like hula hoops? Or hula dancing, I mean. Hula dancing, yeah.

So Kale Kaua said, hey, it's my birthday. Let's bring hula back. So he was kind of beloved for that. He played the ukulele, but he was also very corrupt. Like he took $130,000 bribe from some Chinese businessmen who wanted an opium license. And very importantly, his whole jam was little by little the power of the monarchs been eroded to,

well, now it's finally my turn. And I'm basically just a figurehead here. I want the power back. So I'm gonna do that. And instead, there were some white interests that had formed a group known as the Hawaiian League. And they were basically made up of landowners, businessmen, people who were all like white European

and American people who said, we actually don't like that idea. And in fact, we're going to make you form or sign a new constitution into law. And you're gonna do it basically at the gunpoint. And it's gonna be called the Bayonet Constitution, historically speaking. Yeah, so the Hawaiian League,

they had a bunch of different names. Initially, they were the missionary, not the missionary league, the missionary what? The missionary party. Yeah, the missionary party. But they thought that was too sexy. Right, so missionary party became the Hawaiian League, eventually became the reform party,

because who doesn't like reform? And they eventually became, because as we'll see, they pushed more and more toward annexation. And I don't know if it was, were they officially called the annexation party? Was that sort of like a? I honestly don't know. The way that they were introduced, I think, I don't know.

Well, either way, what they did was they said, all right, we know that not many people, we're an underarmed society. So if we're gonna do this, we're gonna get the guns on our side. And that was where they got the support of the Hawaiian rifles, which was a volunteer military unit, all white people.

And like you said, in July of 1887 is when those Hawaiian rifles got involved and said, sign this new constitution. They did. And so it basically said, you know how you thought you were a figurehead before? Now you are a genuine bonafide figurehead. Your power is completely at the pleasure of the legislature,

which by the way, is no longer appointed by you, but elected. And also further by the way, we Europeans and Americans now have voting rights because you have to be a landowner and literate to vote. So not only do we have voting rights now to elect the legislature to basically do whatever we want, but we've also just excluded all of those migrant Asian

laborers that we just brought over because they don't own any land and probably a lot of them can't read. So if so facto, you go play some ukulele for a while, Kalaka'ua. And thank you very much for Hawaii. Yeah. I mean, I got the impression that it was under the guise

of, hey, democracy is great. And voting is how things should go, but like, but we're gonna be the ones voting by the way. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, it definitely was presented like that. Like they were trying to liberalize the island, but yeah, ultimately it was for their own interests.

When you really got down to brass tax, which is cockney rhyming slang for facts as we say. So I didn't think that was gonna show up either. No, I mean. So in 1891, that is when he died, the aforementioned Kalaka'ua, right? Kalei. Kalei Ka'ua.

Yeah. And he was succeeded by someone he chose, his sister. How are you gonna make me? Queen Lily Uokalani. Yeah, man. All right, I think that's right. Yeah, so yeah. And so she, if Kalaka'ua had a problem

with being a figurehead, Lily Uokalani was definitely opposed to the idea of just being like Queen Elizabeth, you know, where just showing up for state functions and that kind of thing. Like she was, she considered herself the ruler of Hawaii. She was the monarch who was meant to succeed. Kalaka'ua fair and square and had a real problem with this. And but the problem was that within the four years

that Kalaka'ua signed the Bayonet Constitution, the doors had been thrown so far open for Western interests, business interests in Hawaii that she basically faced an insurmountable challenge and undoing just the changes that had come in the last four years. It had been slowly creeping up over the decades, but from that Bayonet Constitution forward

over those four years between then and when she took over, the changes were insurmountable, basically. Yeah, married to an American too, incidentally. Well, that shows you like just how intermarried American politics and European politics were with Hawaiian politics, literally. Yeah, and I don't think we mentioned like this whole time there are both American and British warships

in Honolulu Harbor. Yeah. So like they've been there the whole time, they're the military and I didn't get the idea that they were active at that point. They were just there, kind of parked there. Yeah, I think just more to send a signal, but also to keep other interlopers out.

I think the British and the Americans basically considered Hawaii theirs. Right, unofficially, but moving toward officially because when you said the door was thrown wide open and change was afoot, it was the Hawaiian League that was really, you know, they had flirted with annexation a little bit, but by this point, they were really, and this is where they took on the name

the annexation club, like I mentioned earlier, they were really, really headed toward annexation, which is where we have to kind of go back over to America and talk about the Tariff Act of 1890 or the McKinley Tariff, which was basically a very protectionist thing. Hey, we need US goods to be an industry here to be ramped up, so we're gonna charge huge tariffs

on goods imported into the US, and that meant Hawaiian goods. And landowners in Hawaii said, this is not good for us because this is gonna make us raise prices, sales are gonna go down, our profits are gonna go down, and while they were, you know, the annexation club was making hay about democracy being a good thing, it really kind of came down to money. Yeah, that's exactly right, in that McKinley Tariff,

like really kind of forced everyone's hand, because like you said, I mean, Hawaii was a sovereign nation and so there were tariffs on the import, it didn't matter that they were American companies, this stuff was being produced in Hawaii, so when it came into America, there was a huge tax slapped on it, so they started saying, okay, we need to figure this out, like we need to get Hawaii annexed,

and so I get the impression that the Hawaiian League kind of went from, there were some people in there that had been saying the whole time, annexation, annexation, it's definitely the way to go, to where that was like the point of the Hawaiian League from that moment forward, was getting annexed. Fortunately for them, Lily Uokalani, whose name just flits in and out of my capability

to pronounce, she said, hey, you know what, I don't like all this, I don't like where this is going, I'm going to rewrite the Constitution, I'm going to restore the power of the monarchy, and you know your legislature? Your legislature can go sit on it, because I'm passing this by royal fiat, just by me decreeing that it's true, it's true,

and when that came out, that news came out that she was planning on doing that, the Hawaiian League said it's go time. Yeah, and as far as the US goes, they didn't outright say they wanted to annex, it was kind of a tricky situation for them, they didn't want anyone else to get in there, in front of them, of course, but they also didn't,

they didn't want to, I feel like they didn't want to be too aggressive with it, like, well, hey, if you're open to it, we'll talk about it, but we're not going to ask you to dance. Right, but it wasn't out of any respect or deference necessarily to Hawaii, it was because they didn't want to tick off the British, so yeah, so when Lillio, man, so when Lillio Kalani said that she was going

to rewrite the constitution, and this came out, the opposition was really strong, and she actually backed down, and she announced, okay, I'm definitely not going to do it by royal fiat, but I'm going to do it through normal channels, and really kind of took any hostility out of the move, but it was too little too late as far as the Hawaiian League was concerned, and like I said,

they decided it was go time, and Chuck, I say, it's go time for us to go to commercial. Let's do it. ["Go Time"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so it's go time in Hawaii. Queen Lily Uokalani has drawn a line in the sand.

White men in Hawaii were super worried all of a sudden. And so that annexation club that has now changed names four times, changed their names again, and said, all right, now we're the committee of safety. And by committee of safety, I mean, we're going to lead a military coup. Right, which are typically very safe. Yeah.

So there was a move, basically, to collect arms, specifically to depose Lily Uokalani. Like, that was the point that this group had. And I guess it was pretty, if it wasn't overt, basically, everyone knew about it. So much so that a loyalist to Lily Uokalani, his name was Charles B. Wilson. Yeah, he was a loyalist.

Which we should say, so his name sounds pretty American. Sure. And that's for good reason, because he was American. And if you go back a couple of monarchs, you will start to see Germans and Americans and British people in their cabinets. Like, as like foreign minister or secretary of finance, like, just like it's just some normal thing.

That's how entrenched everything was. So Charles B. Wilson was to Lily Uokalani the Marshal of Hawaii, which, as Ed put it, is kind of like the head of the FBI and the head of the Department of Defense all rolled into one. But he was in charge of the National Police, basically. And he found out about this plot. And he wanted the plotters arrested for treason.

Yeah, he called it out and said, arrest the committee or whatever they're calling themselves today. And the American members of the cabinet said, no, we're not going to do that, because this could break out in violence. So let's all chill out. That all changed on January 17th when there was a shooting. A native Hawaiian policeman was shot trying

to prevent delivery of some weapons to the annexation club. He didn't die, but he was shot. And there wasn't a lot of, I mean, James Cook obviously died pretty in a grizzly way. But there wasn't a lot of actual violence and bloodshed that was rioting and stuff over the years. But I get the feeling that this shooting was kind of a big, big thing at the time.

It was. I mean, it was the only shooting in the entire overthrow of Hawaii and this entire coup, which makes it significant. But I get the same impression that you had, that Hawaiian society was generally rather peaceful. And so to shoot somebody was a very, very big deal. So much so that the cop got $200 for his wounds collected by the local community, which was pretty nice.

Pretty good scratch back then. Yeah, I didn't look it up on West Egg. Oh, we should have. So the Committee of Safety goes to, we mentioned the warships and the harbor. They go to the USS Boston that's parked there and go to Captain Wiltz and say, hey, you know what? There are American citizens on the island there.

Now you guys are having a good time just kind of hanging out and playing cards. But there's property that's in danger. There's American citizens that are in danger. And there are armed troops. Like we need you guys in your guns to come on the island. And he went, well, all right. Come on, guys, let's go.

And they all put down their cards and 162 soldiers went ashore. And that was sort of the real turning point as far as an actual American military presence in there. Supposedly defending property and American citizens from danger, but it really ratcheted things up as far as conflict goes.

Well, yeah, and particularly for Liliu O'Kalani, to her, she saw American troops coming ashore, establishing a fort like a couple of hundred yards away from the Imperial Palace and basically creating a presence on native sovereign Hawaiian land. And this was at the same time that the committee for safety

had run up on the steps of the Capitol building, read a proclamation that the queen had been overthrown, that the monarchy didn't exist any longer and that she had been deposed and that they were now in charge. And combine that from her point of view with the presence of American troops, she's like, okay, I guess the Americans just overthrew me.

She didn't know who was working with who. She just knew there were armed troops. She didn't really have any kind of standing army or anything like that. So she made a very wise and in my opinion, very noble decision to say, you know what? I will surrender for the moment because I don't want to,

I want to avoid any unnecessary bloodshed. Like anybody who fights for me is going to get wasted by these American Marines and I don't want to see that happen. So I will surrender, but I'm not surrendering my position to the provisional government. I'll surrender to the United States of America temporarily

until they can restore my position because this is BS. Yeah, and in her statement, we don't read the whole thing, but at the end she essentially says, I'm doing this for now until which time I will be reinstated as the authority at which point everyone just kind of pat it her on the head

and said, that's adorable. That you think that's actually going to happen. She said, PSBS. And I don't think we mentioned this new provisional government said, all right, we have a president now and his name is Sanford Dole. If that name sounds familiar,

Sanford's brother James founded the Dole Fruit Company in Hawaii in 1899. So really no surprise how that worked out. Right, so let's just recap real quick. Okay, so there was a group of American and European white business interests, landowners, businessmen who overthrew like during this a little melee after a cop was shot,

ran up onto the Capitol steps, read a proclamation that they were in charge. John Stevens, who we hadn't mentioned, he was the American minister to Hawaii. He was very much in on this and in league with the Hawaiian League. And he said, I as official representative of the United States officially recognize you,

the provisional government as the true government of Hawaii. I no longer recognize the monarch and that was it. All of a sudden, this island kingdom of Hawaii that had been around for a thousand or more years and had been organized since for a couple of hundred years or a hundred or more years just didn't exist anymore. Poof, because an American minister recognized a group of other Americans who just said,

we claim this place basically as our own. Yeah, and they said, we're voting for this stuff now. Dola's president, like I said, but the royalists are boycotting the elections. So the annexation party, which eventually became the American union party, they just were winning the elections because it was no contest basically.

Yeah, which is, I mean, that's a problem. You're in such a pickle with that. Like you're like, I reject that these elections are even valid on their face. But then if they just keep holding these elections and other people keep recognizing them as valid, then you're SOL, it was a really sticky, terrible situation for the native Hawaiians and their monarch.

Yeah, so Dole and the gang are firmly entrenched at this point and this is when they can really, really start to go after annexation. So over in America, you have Grover Cleveland in office and he's like, wait a minute, this all sounds very hinky and illegal. So I'm gonna send an envoy, James Blunt to Hawaii. You put together a report and report back to me

and let me know what's going on. Blunt went over, put together his report and he said, yeah, it was super illegal, what happened. And so Cleveland said, all right, Queen, if you want, we'll send troops in there to overthrow the Republic and put you back in position of Queen. But what you have to do is, is you gotta offer amnesty to that committee of safety that overthrew you,

kind of using our soldiers to begin with. And she probably had whip flash at this point. But she was like, no, I'm not gonna do that. And actually those guys should be beheaded if I'm really being completely honest. And so Cleveland kind of slunk down and said, all right, well, I guess we're not gonna do that then. Yeah, he said, the headings are gonna,

that's gonna be tough to get past Congress. So I guess we don't have anything to say here. But you have to kind of hand it to Lily Uokalani that, I mean, she stuck to her principles that she could have been restored to Monarch, maybe even back to like the pre-figure head version of the Monarchy. And she said, nope, I'm cutting their heads off

if you put me back as Queen. Yeah, at the same time the US Congress gets involved, they said, you know what, we're the ones who investigate people. So listened over our guy, John Tyler Morgan, and Morgan went over and his report said, you know what, this was not some illegal coup. This was just Hawaii being Hawaii.

This is their politics. This is how they do things. We didn't really do anything wrong. No blood on our hands. It's Hawaii. This is what they do, no big deal. So the Congress is like, good enough for us. By this time also, Cleveland had been replaced

by who was Cleveland's successor? McKinley. Oh, okay. So the McKinley tariff came before all this, huh? Yeah. It came after all this. No, I got the idea that maybe it was for as a senator or something.

Okay, all right. I might be completely wrong though. No, but that would make way more sense. But the point is is that McKinley was much more in favor of annexation than Cleveland was. And so the United States officially annexed Hawaii as a territory in 1898. And this was exactly, exactly what all of those American

and European landowners wanted. Because, especially in America, no longer were they subject to these high tariffs for the imported goods, because Hawaii was an annexed territory. But, Chuck, they also were in a state, which means that they weren't subject to US laws like immigration, which meant that they could continue

up their human trafficking, which meant that as an annexed territory, their profit margins were as wide as they've ever been, basically. Yeah, I mean, those were, I mean, they were terrible in reality, but those were the golden years if you're a plantation owner in Hawaii.

Yeah. Because you're basically just making money, hand over fist, with no oversight. Right. And by the way, I just looked up real quick, McKinley was a house representative when that tariff act came out. Not a senator. Got you.

But thank you. That was a really great in-show correction. We usually don't do this. So when does statehood come on the scene? Because Hawaii didn't become a state until 1959, which was not that long ago. No, and it was a full 60 plus years after it was annexed. Is that because they were just fat cats

and they were loving it? That's exactly right. The powerful interests who basically ran the legislature said, hey, we really, like Chuck said, we're making money, hand over fist. And somebody said, who's Chuck? They said, just give it a couple of decades, you'll see. It's gonna knock your socks off.

But they had no desire to be a state because then that meant that the immigration laws would be imposed and they'd have to follow a lot more social and cultural mores that America had established. And it was gonna be a bad jam for them. The other thing was here at home, and it was just straight up like racist xenophobia. Yeah, I think, I don't know if we said to put a pin in it,

but we were talking about all these migrant workers who had kids and stuff and those kids were born, they eventually became a non-white majority in Hawaii. And they were like, you know what, if we make this place a state, he said they're gonna actually, these migrant workers are gonna gain real voting power and they have a non-white majority

and we really don't want those people in our Congress. In Congress, that was basically the reason that kept Hawaii from being a state until 1959. People didn't want people of Asian or native Hawaiian descent in DC in Congress, I guess. In that nuts. Yeah, so it took until March 18th, 1959 to finally become a state.

And then it took until 1993 for Congress to pass an apology bill. And this is hysterical, and it's so believable, but it points out that they were, it was disputed because they were literally arguing about either the Blunt Report or the Morgan Report being more accurate like a hundred years later. Yeah, can you do Clinton apologizing?

Oh, what do I have to apologize for? That was great. So that bill actually said that Hawaii or the native Hawaiians quote, never directly relinquished to the US their claims to their inherent sovereignty. The US said in 1993, in so many words, like the United States stole Hawaii,

Hawaii's a state because we took it basically back in 1890 or the 1880s. Pretty great story. It is. So you were asking about the pulse of Hawaii today. There's a bill that was introduced in 2000 by Senator Daniel K. Akaka. And he's since retired, I believe,

but the Akaka bill is still around. And it basically would extend sovereignty to native Hawaiians in virtually the same way that Native American tribes in the continental US have their own tribal nations. They have their own governments that make decisions for them and they have their own laws and all that.

And it's just never been passed. I don't think there's quite enough support for it or what the holdup is, but it's still languishing right now. I haven't been, I gotta go at some point. Oh, dude, I would like to live there one day. Yeah, maybe that's a good place for you and you and me to retire.

It's amazing. So, and maybe I'll meet up with Kanaka Kai, the Hawaiian hillbilly while we're there. I think with your magnum obsession, you were destined to just wile away with a coconut, with a straw in it in your hand. Who do I have to kill to get a refill of this coconut? I used to be somebody.

How do you think I got this rainbow helicopter? Yeah, that's right. Oh, man. I've been to the magnum house before you me took me. Does not surprise me. Oh, it's neat. Well, you got anything else about the overthrow of Hawaii? Nope.

Well, if you want to know more about the overthrow of Hawaii, there's a lot more out there. It's a pretty interesting story and Hawaiian culture is pretty interesting too now that we dug into it. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm gonna call this Anvils. And by the way, this is from Nolan.

Nolan did not point this out, but we heard from many people who said that the Smithie was not the blacksmith, but the place their workshop is called the Smithie. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, Smithie, that's the blacksmith. Yeah, that's what I thought. I think they're the Smith.

Okay. Not the Smiths. That's Morrissey and Johnny Martin Company. That's right. Hey guys, love the episode on blacksmithing. I've been to blacksmith since I was 19 when I bought my first anvil. I started listening to stuff you should know

during grad school and my anvil was sadly packed away. I had no time to use it, but thankfully it isn't on the shelf any longer. And I found myself sitting next to it while listening to your episode. Seems silly, but these things have a real personality to them. They're like old friends. I met mine close to a decade ago

and it's a one-zero-16, 128-pound Peter Wright. Wow. That means something to Smithies. I was impressed by the Peter Wright. Yeah, he's a legendary anvilist. The Smithie. So one thing on the show I thought I'd mentioned is about anvils.

Josh said you want to attach the anvil to a stump to disperse the hammer strike to the earth, which is partially. Absolutely right. Which is partially correct, but missed one beautiful thing about a good anvil, which is its rebound. An anvil's quality can be measured by the rebound.

This is how much force pushes back at you when you strike. Because this is a good anvil, I'm sorry, because of this, a good anvil hits back when you strike it. And a good blacksmith uses this to effectively forge both sides of a workpiece at the same time. I also, one thing I also saw somebody else write in and say that it helps you in swinging a 10 pound hammer,

like working the rebound to your advantage too. Totally. He said you can tell if you have a good anvil by the rebound by dropping a ball bearing on it, or lightly dropping a hammer head and seeing how high it bounces. A dead anvil will have no bounce and only gives it a soft thud.

A good anvil bounces back a lot and leaves a ringing in the air. And this is actually where the phrase has a nice ring to it comes from. Oh, really? How about that? I love that stuff. I love it.

It was a blacksmithing phrase. So great job, guys, as always. Keep it up. Always love tuning into these shows. Can't wait to hear more. And that is Nolan. Thanks, Nolan. You really quenched our thirst for etymology.

Big time. Appreciate Nolan. Appreciate everybody, all of the Smiths who wrote in to let us know all the stuff we got wrong, but also say, hey, you generally got it right. Yeah, in fairies, we heard from fairies. Yeah, tons of fairies out there. So we appreciate all of you

and we're fascinated by the work you do. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,

visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.