ABSTRACT
The campaign for the annexation of Hawaii gained new momentum after McKinley’s inauguration on 4 March 1897. One of his appointments (made at Lodge’s request), making Roosevelt Assistant Secretary of the Navy, would have far-reaching consequences. Roosevelt, an early advocate of the annexation of Hawaii and much more resolute than his chief, Navy Secretary John D. Long, would make a significant contribution to the aggressive turn American foreign policy would take. In Hawaii circumstances had also changed. There, Harold M. Sewall, a ‘Cleveland appointee’, had taken the place of the deceased Willis as American ambassador. Sewall was as much an expansionist as Lodge and Roosevelt were and in retrospect would sing the praises of the person who had preceded him as consul in Apia and, in May 1886, on his own initiative had annexed the islands (Sewall 1900: 11). With similar speed as Cleveland had blocked annexation, McKinley proceeded to accomplish it. In June he asked Congress to agree to an annexation. As Dulles (1938: 189) would write, McKinley ‘took up the Hawaiian question so promptly and so vigorously that within a little more than three months of his inauguration a new annexation treaty had been signed’.
