 Okay, we're back, we're live, interesting lineup today, Community Matters, and we have another one of our hosts, Marsha Joyner, she's the host of Navigating the Journey, which actually is today, that happened earlier today, and we have Keone Dudley, who is a PhD in philosophy, I always admire people with PhDs in philosophy, I consider them special thinkers, and he's a retired educator, and he was part and parcel of the play, and the play is what we're here to talk about. The play yesterday, and Marsha and Keone and me, we were all there, and we learned some stuff, or we taught some stuff, as the case may be. So Marsha, why don't you lead off and say what it was all about. Okay, while the Americans were celebrating the Independence Day, July 4th. This was done on July 4th, which is the National Independence Day, and there's definitely an activist tone to that. We don't show the American flag, we aren't excited about Independence Day, we do what? Overthrow Day. No, no, this was the day they sealed the deal. So while the Americans, because it was planned, while the Americans were celebrating 1776 and whatnot, the Provisional Government planned this taking the... Just back in 1893? 1894, when they, after their constitutional convention, to put this thing together, they decided that in 830, on the July 4th, 1894, at the exact minute that the ships in the harbor would toot their whistles to celebrate the 4th of July, they would swear themselves in as the Republic of Hawaii. So there was a historical significance to doing the play at Eleni Palace on July 4th. Exactly where they took the oath of office. Exactly. I kept thinking that it was on the same ground, the same steps, the same places, to the foot, the same place. And so for our audience, I was the producer, so see, I don't look like one of the guys that stood there and took the oath of office, but these two did. They were the bad guys. Now we had booze for our efforts, yeah. They booed you more, Keon. Don't we have a picture of these two on the step? Hopefully we do. I know we do, because you all look good being the bad guys standing there taking an oath of office. I told you it was like the opera Tosca. Tosca is this one character called Scarpeo, and Scarpeo is a terrible villain, you know. And at the end, traditionally for the last 150 years, when anybody plays Scarpeo in Tosca, the audience booze him. And the better a player he is, the more they brew him for being mean and a villain person. So the booze, as they were introduced as the Honorable James Blaine and the Honorable... Everybody was the Honorable something. Yes, the Honorable W. O. Castle. The audience would boo his, he's not Honorable, boo, boo, boo. And as the plot unfolded, the audience was just wild. Oh, they got very excited at the end. Yes. So, and we weren't alone here, Keone and me. No, they were cool. It was Peter Carlisle sitting next to me and Roger Epstein. And who else, you had a number? Jeff Pompadour, just great. He was very good. Yeah, there we are. There we are. Oh, there's a picture of us, yeah. That was quite something. Only yesterday, in front of the Eleni Palace. Oh, that's me. Oh, the Honorable James G. Blaine. See, that's your name there. And the fellow in the orange shirt was drafted. It was drafted at the last minute, because the person... He was very gracious about it. He was. He was. But he had a great accent. Too bad we didn't have him dressed up because he had this great accent. And let's... Oh, now here. This is real. In the book, this one. Yeah, we'll talk about the book. We'll talk about it. It says that the men, the provisional government, once they declare themselves that thirst and steps from behind Dole takes the Hawaiian flag down and cuts it up into two by three strips and handed it to the descendants of the provisional government. So as we see Peter Carlisle, who will never be able to run again. I told him that. Once I see them cutting the flag. He's got plenty of booze for what he did. We have some more of them cutting the flag. Yeah, there we are. He cuts the flag in little pieces. And every time he cut it in little pieces, the crowd was really reacting emotionally about this. Yes, they were. And even you see the young man standing in the back is... And Peter kept looking at me like, you know, he didn't want to do it, even though it's paper, you know. But we made it to cut. You know, he didn't want to do it. But the crowd went wild. And they were lying prostrated on the pavement. They were crying. Oh, the crying and the chanting. Very emotional chanting. It was interesting. And it has a place, historically, and it has a place in modern times. But to me, certainly, it's a big issue now in Hawaii. But to me, the most interesting part of it was the material that came out of Tom Kaufman's book. Was it Nation Within? Nation Within, yeah. The detail about how these guys took over a country. They took the whole country and one fell swoop. That's impressive. And they had to deceive a lot of people. Had to play a lot of politics and, you know, intrigue. Lots of intrigue going on. Oh, my goodness. Yes. And what we got with Nation Within is that they kept such good records. Amazing. They didn't, didn't shred their records. And Tom researched them. And Tom spent months. He's a journalist, so he was going to dig and find the detail. So everything that I wrote, everything you said came out of what their actual conversation was. Yeah. Yeah. And we're lucky we have the benefit of that. We're lucky we have Tom's book. But we also have a book from Kelly. What is you right now, Kelly? Oh, it's actually 1990. Well, you were ahead of your time in a way, huh? Oh, yeah. I saw for Hawaii and sovereignty. It's no longer in print, but I do plan on redoing the ending of it, bringing it up to date and getting it out hopefully this year. Do you talk about the overthrow in there? Oh, yeah. Sure, sure. Yeah. When we did the original Street Play in 1993, Keone was a part of us. Yeah. We started in 1991 with Dallas Vogler had this script about the overthrow with all the details, all the players and none of us knew, especially me, this was all new history. They were a little bit more up to it. And I was working at Hawaii Public Radio. They gave us 15 hours of nonstop broadcast as a you were there. So we got to watch the unfolding of all of this. Very interesting. So we reenact it on the day that it 100 years later, on the day that something happened, we did it at the time that it took place. Yeah. And then we had this big gathering at the palace on the the actual day of the overthrow and reenacted that whole 94 2019 1994. So you were just how many 100 years yeah, after it was a 200th anniversary. 100th anniversary. So for me, you know, we're live, right? And I'm saying my battery is going. And we didn't have this smartphone. So I said it on the air, telling Hawaii Public Radio. And people came from everywhere with car batteries, but I like batteries batteries of every kind. That's when I knew we had an audience. So we said we had with Dallas was that if we get 500 people, we've done a good job. By the end, we had what 10 12,000. Oh, yeah. Yeah. People came from everywhere. No wonder who the audience is, you know, like me, I'm not an activist. Sorry, you guys, you can be activists, it's okay. But I'm not an activist when I'm very curious. And I like to put things in perspective. Historically, you know, frequently we have history shows where we try to figure out the continuum, you know, how you got to this point this turning point, and what happened after this turning point. And that's what was really interesting to me yesterday. So you have a paragraph you want to read, you try to get into the script that was in play yesterday, Mr. Doug, this is this is this one, what he reads, it's written big. So you can read it. Okay, this is Keone. This is part of Keone script yesterday. Yes, Marcia feels this is a good expression of what you're engaged to say. This one, if it had eggs, they would have Go ahead. All right. So you have to realize that we're really we who are going to now form the Republic are only doing it so that we become Americans later on. Okay, and we are Americans, all of us who do that are Americans right now. And so we start by saying Americans, a symbol here today, amidst novel and serious events, to make a new declaration of independence, and and the principles broader and wiser than the Declaration of 1776. We gather to make solemn declaration that the intelligent minority in every community had the inalienable right to good government, which they are justified in securing, holding themselves responsible only to God, and their own consciousness, with a just and proper use in their head for the just and just and proper use of power in their hands. It's very interesting. Keep going. No, we can't begin. Oh, no, no, there's some salacious parts in this one. Of course there are. There's salacious parts all the way through, Marcia. And what I want to get at is the devices that these guys use in order to fool the public, because those devices, you know, arguably are still in play at the national level right now. For example, they wanted to suppress the vote. They did. And they did. These guys suppressed the vote. A small group of quote, Americans, and quote, some of whom had been born in Hawaii, most of these guys born in Hawaii, and had somehow insinuated themselves into the power structure in business and within the monarchy to and they and they made a plan. They did a lot of back room discussion. And they came up with some concepts like the thing about, you know, independence. It's not really independence at all. They were trying to undo the monarchy. They're trying to rest control of it. And, you know, the thing about suppressing votes, suppressing the ability of Native Hawaiians to run for office, all kinds of things. When they said about suppressing the vote, we think of it today as well not enough places to vote. But they made it clear in the speech that it was for Anglo-Saxons and Teutonic descendants. Yeah, the intelligent minority. And they were the minority. That's another way of being racist. Yeah. They were the minority. And then they used the Thurston, used the Constitution of Mississippi, the state of Mississippi, 1891. Well, you know what that was. Because Mississippi didn't get around to cleaning it up until 1960. But so that was the basis for this. So that they were totally in control. They said they decided not to have an election. We'll just name Dole as a president. Yeah, he was acclaimed. There was no election. Yeah, no election. Yeah. Sanford Dole. They knew they couldn't. But in herringing the script, I mean, we can find little pieces here and there that will show the, you know, the lack of candor, the hubris involved. Where they said, how can we fool the people? We'll tell the people it's a republic. And that'll make them think that it's a democratic republic. We'll tell the people they will have, you know, they will have the franchise, but we won't give them the franchise. And it was all this, all this poppycock where they generated statements that were untrue and promulgated, you know, published those statements to the people and the people regrettably bought some of that. Or at least the press did. And at the end of the day, Okay, well, I realize there are two different kinds of people here. There were the native Hawaiians, and then there was the white community. Okay. And so there were people in the white community that bought this kind of thing. Hawaiians didn't buy that. And the other thing, G, is he got to realize that all of this was sugar and money and and trying to become a part of America was because it was business. And we need our sugar protected. After the missionaries came, they had children, these are the children. They grow up, they go to college on the mainland, you know, big schools, and they come back and they're really somebody. And then by that time, they start to buy up all of the land and lease all the land and so forth and build sugar companies. And others get into the newspaper like Thursday and so forth. And after a while, they realized they need to tie themselves to America more closely. But this is exactly at the time that America wants to take us over, because they're planning and the manifest destiny, related to the Spanish-American war. But even before that, with the civil war, when the sugar and cotton, when they, you know, the slaves, came profitable industry, then they needed Hawaii because of sugar and cotton. And so the economy of Hawaii really advanced during the war because of what it did to the southern states. Okay, so coalescing on all of that, it seems to me, and looking at the play that happened yesterday, the question is, where was the monarchy when this was happening? Did they not don't answer yet? Did they not see this coming? Yes. Did they, you know, could they have done a better job at preventing what amounted to a political coup? And right after this break, Marcia, we're going to get into that. You guys can tell me the answers. Okay, we'll be right back after this break. Aloha, my name is Stephen Philip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, and I'm the host of Shrink RAP Hawaii, where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Aloha, my name is Raya Salter, and I'm the host of Power Up Hawaii, which you can see live from one to 130 every Tuesday at thinktecawaii.com and then later on YouTube. I am an energy attorney, clean energy advocate and community outreach specialist. And on Power Up Hawaii, we come together to talk about how can Hawaii walk towards a clean, renewable and just energy future? To do that, we talk to stakeholders all over the spectrum from clean energy technology folks to community groups to politicians to regulators to the utility. So please join us Tuesdays at one o'clock for Power Up Hawaii. We're back. We're referring to the play. Marsha was the producer. One of the producers of the play yesterday on the Atlantic Palace Steps. Gillian was one of the players and I was, I had one line. She made me do it. Anyway, I can never run for public office again. I never ran public office in the first place, so it doesn't make too much. So in any event, so want to get to, you know, the the actual engagement. I mean, we've discussed, you know, the the back room quality, the cigar-filled room quality of this. We've we found that Americans were the holy guys, many of whom, if not most of whom have been born in Hawaii anyway, who had been given the sacred keys to join the Monarch Monarchical court and be with the royalty and have information about how they operated. But but here the monarchy was pretty pretty sophisticated in those days. What happened? Okay, let's step step way back. The Civil War. Commander the 4th did not want to go in on the side of the Americans. He wanted to stay on the side with the South, not about slavery, but if the South won, he knew then that he could stand up to annexation. If and he says this in his book, not this one, but another one, about his. So he had to but the the same people, the the holy elite is what they called them, wanted to go in on the side of the North because they wanted the the United States to stay intact. That meant the economy would stay intact. So they were making bets on the results of the war. So he came in as neutral. So if you read the record, he is neutral in the war. Did that play a role in the overthrow? Yes, it was the same people. The sons, the grandsons, they're moving forward, but they managed to stay together to keep him from going in on the other side. So what he is saying is that, although as we know, you know, the monarchy was becoming global, becoming more sophisticated, more worldly, I don't know how things were going with it, you know, with the guy in the street, but the monarchy was getting to be a global power kind of thing in those days. Well, people came here. Why couldn't they hold on to it? Why couldn't they deal with this, you know, court intrigue? They didn't have it done. The white people had done. And so they were able to force Kalakaua, you know, the Honolulu rifles were able to push their way in. They were able to get the kinds of trees that they wanted. They had the bayonet revolution, you know. Kalakaua could have had guns. No. He could have bought guns. He could have, but they killed him when he even got close. He was in a trip to, have you noticed, all of the Kalakauas die mysteriously of some kind of strange ailment. Has anything been documented? Has anything been shown? No. No, they said it was a suspicion that maybe these guys were too often, too reconditioned. He goes to San Francisco, never comes back, you know. So he knew that he was going to be overthrown. And so he sent word to the United States and asked for their help, because we had treaties with them, you know, and that they had the obligation to defend him. And who he sent was, um... That's, that's referred to Keone's book. Yes. He sent the fellow named Carter, and Carter gets there and says to the Secretary of State, Bayard, he says, um, well the guy's overthrowing him, our friends. And so the United States backed off and didn't do anything. But the next thing you know, he's dead, and then we have the Queen, you know. And she refers to him in her book, the Queen's book, that what they did to my brother, she says, what they did to my brother is sacrum, sacrum, sacrum meant, anyway, what she did, what they did to him. And she, she talks about all of those things. So the implication is they get away with him somehow. Yeah. And, uh, the Queen, uh, Capulani, knew what was going on. And she refused to speak English, even though she spoke what, seven languages, something like that. She refused to speak English because she knew what was going on, and that way they talked in front of her. But she refused. Oh, they knew. They could see it. They, they, they could see it. If we could go back now, I'm just curious, um, and advise them, say 1860, 70, in there somewhere, how to, how to ward off a takeover. What would you tell them? Actually, they had, they really thought this stuff out pretty well. When, when they landed the troops, you know, the Queen could have engaged them, but she didn't. Because if, if they landed the troops and were fought against and won, then they would have the spoils of war, the victory. There wouldn't be any way that Hawaii could say, uh, we need our independence back, you know, but, but she was smart enough not to send her troops against them so that they could never say, you know, we, we won this place in war and it's our victory and it's ours. You know, so, so they were really pretty akamai about, uh, what needed to be done and what to do and not to do in various situations. Well, and you mentioned before that, um, I had to play yesterday and, and at the actual event in 1894, um, the people, the people, um, didn't actively participate in it. They were more observers than actors. The actors were the ones on the steps of Yolani Palace. The actors were those Americans and the committee of safety and the royalty. Um, why didn't the people get involved? Did they have, did, did they miss out on something? Were they held in ignorance somehow? No, no, they were upset. And it talks about gangs roving the streets with guns and what have you. And part of what she had to do was damp that down. And the smartest thing, well, not the smartest, when she did, quote, surrender, she did to the United States of America, not to the provisional, the public safety, to the United States. And that forced the United States hand because I'm ceding power to you, not to them. And that held off for a long time. Would you have advice or otherwise? Would you have an advisor to use her troops now if you could look at? No. So you agree with what she did? Oh, yeah. But she set herself up, didn't she? Well, you know, you have to realize it was the United States all the way along. You played the part of James Blaine. He was the Secretary of State at the time. He and the, uh, the foreign minister here, uh, John Stevens, and they were the best of buddies. They had worked at a newspaper in Maine 30 years before. Blaine, as he rose in power, he would appoint John Stevens to various positions. It was all connected when they came. Oh, and the overthrow was planned by the United States. They had been ramping up a long time. Yes. And these guys were establishing relationships that sort of led inevitably to do what they wanted to do. But, you know, but it happened on July 4th, and that's meaningful to me in the sense that, you know, right now these days, more than ever in my lifetime anyway, there are questions about the way the federal government works, about how effective it is and about how invulnerable it is. And I think the play and the whole study of the events of 1893, 1894, the overthrow itself, you know, leads us to examine just how vulnerable we are nationally now and the kinds of demagoguery that could go on that may be going on as we speak that could lead to the erosion of our government and the taking of our country in the same way. Any thoughts about that, Marcia? Yes. Exactly. When there's a there are rules to coups, to a coup d'etat, there are rules, surprising. And one of the first things you do when you have a coup, you shut down the other side's communication. Where did you rehearse this, by the way? So, you know that the first thing they did, at that time, there were 80 newspapers in Hawaii, 80. This was the most literate place in the world, 80 different language. That's right, I've heard that many times. Different language papers. The first thing they did is shut all of them down, all of them, and the only paper was Thurston's paper in English. So, you have... Is that like a wool on the press, perhaps? Like the fake news? Yes. Exactly. You asked me about today. Sorry, really rehearsed this. No, exactly. When there is a coup, the first thing you do is shut down the other side's communication. You control the communication and that's what they did. So, there were all these steps and that's what the play gave me. It's like calling this a closer look at the overthrow. I think it's instructive to study it and I think you want to go forward on that and you want to look further into it and look further into Tom Kaufman's book, and for that matter, Keone's book, and go into the detail because it's a really interesting study of the sociology of government and of the transitions of government and how fragile government and any particular government or form of government may be in the times we live. So, Keone, were you... and I have... I think I have an answer to this, but were you emotionally affected by what was happening on the palace steps yesterday? Yeah. Yes, I was. You know, I just want to tell you one thing about yesterday, that the NR re-enactment that is really, really interesting. The queen was overthrown because she was going to give a new constitution and they... They cut that possibility off. They saw that as a threat. Yeah. They thought that would be popular, so instead, stop it. And she was going to proclaim the constitution and put it into effect and that's why they overthrew her. Yesterday's re-enactment was a re-enactment of them doing exactly the same thing. They promulgated their constitution. It was not read by the people. It was not approved by the people. It was promulgated. So, the same thing they overthrew the queen for is what they were... Is what they were doing yesterday. They were starting a republic with a new constitution and it had nobody voting for it, nobody approving it. That 90 percent of the people of Hawaiians and opposed to it, you know. We had the Kuwait petition at this time that's signed by three-quarters of the Hawaiian people sent to the Congress. I mean, you know, there are a lot of things that... The history is just so terribly interesting. It really is, really is interesting. And the way that Hawaiians bought and bought and bought to try to save their nation. There are many lessons, I mean, to go beyond Hawaii, in my view. And one of them is the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Eternal. It cannot be complacent. You cannot take anything for granted. You've got to protect what you have. If you like it, protect it. And that means don't be an observer. You know, be active about it. So, you get a chance to close because you're a closer. And we only have a minute left. So, close quickly. I call me a grain of sand. And you ask, why a grain of sand? With an oyster, you know, when the grain of sand gets in the oyster, the oyster begins to put the seal around it. And the more the sand grows, the more the oyster protect itself, the prettier it grows, the prettier it grows. So, the world needs people like me, the irritant, to get under the skin, to make a really beautiful world. So, that's what we did yesterday was get under the skin. Okay, so we've learned two things here today, with Marcia Joyner. One is, if I may, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And the other is Marcia is a very irritating person. Yes. Thank you both. Thank you.