Hawaii—a U.S. territory since 1898—became the 50th state in August, 1959, following a referendum in Hawaii in which more than 93% of the voters approved the proposition that the territory should be admitted as a state.

The voters wished to participate directly in electing their own governor and to have a full voice in national debates and elections that affected their lives. The voters also felt that statehood was warranted because they had demonstrated their loyalty—no matter what their ethnic background—to the U.S. to the fullest extent during World War II.

In retrospect, perhaps, the genuinely interesting question about Hawaii’s becoming a state is why it took so long—60 years from the time that it became a U.S. possession. There were many Hawaiian petitions for statehood during the first half of the 20th century. These were denied or ignored. Some in the U.S. had been convinced, even at the time of Hawaii’s annexation, that Hawaii had no natural connection to the rest of the states. It was not contiguous territory, most obviously, but 2,000 miles from the coast.

Hawaii’s annexation in 1898 had much to do with the power of American plantation owners on the islands and the protection of their financial interests—both in gaining exemption from import taxes for the sugar they shipped to the U.S. and in protecting their holdings from possible confiscation or nationalization under a revived Hawaiian monarchy. There was considerable sentiment in the U.S. that annexation would be an unjust, imperialistic, and therefore un-American, move (Hawaii had more than sugar; it was a potential harbor and coaling station for naval vessels and was historically pressured in the 18th and 19th centuries for concessions by countries including Great Britain, Japan, and Russia).

Nevertheless, at the time of annexation the monarchy itself had only been in existence for a century, and originally consolidated power brutally, with the help of European sailors and firepower. Even by the end of the 19th century, a significant portion of the Caucasian residents of Hawaii had been born and raised there and considered themselves natives. Complicating the question was a large population of immigrant Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese, all of whom had been originally encouraged to come in order to supply agricultural labor to the islands.

Part of the decades-long reluctance to change Hawaii’s status from territory to state derived, both in Hawaii and on the mainland, from uncertainty and fear about granting electoral power to one ethnic group or another. This was not just Caucasian vs. ethnically Polynesian. Some ethnically Polynesian Hawaiians opposed the change from territory to state because, while they had come to feel comfortably “American,” they feared that the Japanese population on Hawaii (perhaps as high as 30%) would, under a universal franchise authorized by statehood, organize and vote itself into power to the disadvantage of the Hawaiians of Polynesian descent.

At the time of the vote, 90% of the population of Hawaii consisted of U.S. citizens. Hawaii’s importance in World War II had secured its identity as fully American in the minds of both Hawaiians and mainlanders. In addition, persistent and effective lobbying of Congressional representatives during this initial period of the modern Civil Rights Movement convinced enough members of Congress that this was the right moment to accept Hawaiian statehood, no matter what its racial makeup was.

Hawaiians themselves had been awaiting this for years, so much so that the “49th State” Record Label had been selling popular Hawaiian music since shortly after the War. As it turned out, Alaska entered as a state at the very beginning of 1959, making it the 49th, and when Hawaii came in several months later, it became the 50th state of the Union.

Hawaii's monarchy was limited by the 1887 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, which King David Kalakaua (1836–1891) signed under threat of force, and which was therefore often known as the Bayonet Constitution. It established a constitutional monarchy much like Britain's, but also transferred power through a redefinition of the electoral franchise to an elite class of American, European, and native Hawaiian landowners.

When Kalakaua died in 1891, his sister Lili'uokalani (1838–1917) succeeded him on the throne. Soon she made plans to restore the monarchy's veto power and other features of the pre-1887 Constitution. A group of American and European residents, in opposition to the Queen, organized themselves and solicited protection from U.S. Marines and sailors, which U.S. Government Minister John Stevens provided. Queen Lili'uokalani was deposed on January 14, 1893, and a provisional government was formed.

On February 1, Stevens proclaimed Hawaii a protectorate of the United States. On July 4, 1894, the Republic of Hawaii was founded and Sanford Dole became its President. A brief effort at the beginning of 1895 to restore the monarchy and Lili'uokalani to the throne was thwarted. Arrested and convicted for playing a part in the failed effort, Lili'uokalani was confined to house arrest in Iolani Palace, where she spent much of her time writing songs. She abdicated her throne eight months later, in return for the commutation of the sentence of her fellow conspirators. Later, she would write that her signature on the abdication agreement, which she signed "Lili'uokalani Domonis" (she had married Robert Domonis), invalidated it because, as a monarch, she had never acted under that name, but only "Lili'uokalani." Be that as it may, the government pensioned her off and she retired to her palatial home, where she died, at age 79.

Hawaii was a united kingdom under a single monarch only for eighty years, from 1810, when Kamehameha I (1738–1819) brought all the islands under his control, to the time when the monarchy became defunct under Lili'uokalani. During that time, the rules of succession evolved, to include not only the members of the families of Kamehameha and Kalakaua, but also adopted sons and daughters (Lili'uokalani had three) and members of a noble class recognized by Kamehameha as eligible to be rulers. Because the kingdom ended more than a century ago and because all these families have continued to proliferate, there are currently a large number of people who might be considered as heirs or pretenders to the Hawaiian throne, were it ever to be revived.