Julia Flynn Siler is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent book is Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure, published by Grove/Atlantic in 2012. Her first book was the New York Times bestseller, The House of Mondavi. A graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Flynn Siler began her career as a staff correspondent for BusinessWeek, working in the magazine’s Los Angeles and Chicago bureaus.
Interview with Keri Kittleson and Author Julia Flynn Siler
Keri: Why did you write your book Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Venture? Julia: A few years ago, my family and I were invited to spend the weekend at a ranch near San Francisco owned by some family friends. On a tour of the property, they swung open the door of an old, dusty barn. Inside was a treasure trove of what collectors call “Hawaiiana” – fierce-looking totems, grass skirts, feathered staffs, and calabashes. That’s when I first started thinking about the close ties between California and Hawai‘i – and started to wonder whether some of the great fortunes on the West Coast had their origins in the islands. Once I began reading histories of Hawaii, I realized that the overthrow of the last queen was an important and dramatic story that ought to be better known.
Keri: Can you tell me about your book and the research you did for Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Venture? Julia: When I began researching Lost Kingdom, very few materials from the Hawaii State Archives were available digitally – so I ended up making many trips from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, to Honolulu, to dig through the archives. While my friends joke I must have loved my research trips to Hawaii, the truth was that I spent ever possible minute I could in libraries or archives – not on the beach! Luckily, I had a wonderful research assistant, Catherine Thorpe, who came with me on one of those initial trips and helped organize the mountain of materials we gathered. It was Catherine, who also worked with me on my first book, “The House of Mondavi,” who fact-checked and organized the hundreds and hundreds of endnotes. My hope is that all the work we did in terms of documenting where our material came from will help other writers and scholars.
Keri: What was your most interesting research find regarding the Queen, the explorers and the annexation of Hawaii? Julia: I remember spending an afternoon in the archives of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and coming across a fascinating document – a page that Queen Liliuokalani’s had torn from the Book of Psalms. She had written in pencil “Iolani Palace. Jan 16th 1895. I am imprisoned in this room (the South east 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.” Finding that yellowed page, which she had presumably torn out of the Bible and written on during the first night of her imprisonment after a failed counter-coup, gave me the chills!
Keri: What role do you think the sugar barons and Christian missionaries and explorers played in controlling the overthrow of the Hawaiian government and why did they get away with their plan? Julia: They played a central role. As a business reporter for many years, I saw what happened to Hawai‘i through the lens of modern corporate behavior: it could be argued that the overthrow was similar to a corporate takeover of the islands, funded and supported in large part by business interests. In fact, some of the families and firms behind Queen Liliuokalani’s overthrow more than a century ago still wield power in Hawai‘i. Castle & Cooke, one of the companies founded by the first Christian missionaries to the islands, was intimately involved in her overthrow. What happened to Hawaii was one of the most audacious land grabs of the Gilded Age, in which 1.8 million acres of land – now worth billions of dollars – was seized from native Hawaiians and claimed by American and European businessmen.
Keri: What do you think Hawaiian history would have been if Hawaii had become bound and protected by European explorers and their nation? Julia: Perhaps the closest comparison might be to one of the island-nations of the Caribbean that was once British or French protectorates or former colonies and are now independent. You might look to the example of the Bahamas, which was a British colony from 1718 to 1973 and is now the independent Commonwealth of the Bahamas. The British influence on the country remains in its public institutions (it is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy, similar to what the Kingdom of Hawaii was before the overthrow in 1893.)
Keri: If Hawaii was a free and sovereign country today with a reigning royal family, do you think U.S. citizens and the United States would think of attempting to annex and take over Hawaii? Julia: I do not think the United States would be able to overthrow a strong sovereign Nation nor would other countries allow such an act of aggression. My guess is that the U.S. would have very strong ties to Hawaii even if it were a sovereign country today – both military and economic. This is primarily because of Hawaii’s strategically important position between the mainland U.S. and Asia (not to mention the wonderful weather and many opportunities for tourism!
Keri: Thank you so much for writing your interesting book and allowing me to interview you. Julia: All the best and good luck on your project!