An article in the Washington Post this week described the 1915 U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti (“100 years ago, the U.S. invaded and occupied this country. Can you name it?).

The Post’s abbreviated history of the Haiti occupation cites “bloody battles” with insurgents, thousands of residents killed, brutal suppression of dissent over a period of years, shutting down the legislature for a decade, and practices that “included segregation and enforced chain gangs to build roads and other construction projects.”

The article quotes a 1920 report in The Nation Magazine:

“Machine guns have been turned into crowds of unarmed natives, and United States marines have, by accounts which several of them gave me in casual conversation, not troubled to investigate how many were killed or wounded.”

That was, indeed, a bloody American occupation.

One thing that strikes me is the stark contrast to the U.S. role in the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the relatively rapid incorporation of the islands into the United States as a territory.

During the 1893 coup that toppled Queen Liliuokalani, something short of 200 U.S. Marines landed at the request of the insurgent government, reportedly under orders to remain neutral. No shots were fired.

American and British troops had also landed after the election of Kalakaua in 1874, to “maintain order” when supporters of Queen Emma protested the results of the election.

In any case, it seems to me that attempts to call the subsequent history, up to the present, as an American “occupation” really ring hollow when compared to the reality of a military occupation, such as in Haiti, is actually like.

The Organic Act of 1900 included a broad grant of U.S. citizenship to citizens in Hawaii. From an article from the Hawaii Bar Journal (2002):

Sec. 4 of the Organic Act granted American citizenship to everyone who had been a subject or denizen of the Kingdom and everyone who had been a citizen of the Republic of Hawaii, i.e., everyone who was born or naturalized in Hawai`i during the Monarchy and its successor governments.142 Persons who had obtained denizen status under the Kingdom or the Republic also became American citizens because the United States recognized denization as being dual citizenship.143

With very broad citizenship rights granted to so many categories of island residents, including island-born children of imported laborers, it’s hard to maintain the idea of occupation.

Simply put, characterizing the history of the past century of Hawaii as a military occupation just doesn’t work.

There are a lot of grounds to criticize the overthrow of the Kingdom, and the plantation and corporate oligarchy that controlled politics in the islands during the first half of the 20th century, along with its echoes into the modern period, but trying to apply the “occupation” label just doesn’t fly.