The usual reluctance to incorporate nonwhite peoples (it would be a “pigmy State of the Union,” scoffed the Chicago Herald) could no longer hold in the face of the argument that Dewey required Hawai‘i to control the Pacific. “We ought to take Hawaii, in the interests of the White race,” Roosevelt pressed. And so, over the protests of Native Hawaiians, more than thirty-eight thousand of whom had signed anti-annexation petitions, the United States seized the islands.
