Something about Grover Cleveland is funny.  I don’t know why, but Grover is just one of those things you can sprinkle into the conversation for some sudden hilarity.  He’s one of those presidents that we all vaguely remember from some high school history class we dozed through, but unlike, say William Henry Harrison, he’s funny.  All the stiff mustachioed seriousness of White Male American History is summed up by Grover.

I realized Grover was funny when I was writing a stick-a-needle-in-your-eye boring TOEFL passage about his second presidential term.   As sometimes happens writing these passages about tapirs or biomechanical engineering, I get sucked into the topic.  So with this slight curiosity about why Grover was so funny I wikipedia-d him and found out that actually, his presidency contains some of the great themes of American history.  Namely, fruit company barons taking over sovereign countries, American businessmen snuggling up with Congress to take over a country here, overthrow a government there, and the general subjugation of native peoples, etc, etc, etc.  It also contains one strikingly NON-American theme – a president who apparently opposed imperialism.

Now, before I turn ol’ Grover into a saint, let me state here that I did not even know that Hawaii’s monarchy had been taken over by American businessmen and the territory had then been annexed to the U.S in 1898.  Nope.  Nor did I know anything about the involvement of the Dole fruit company.  Whether we want to blame this on the selective information in the God Bless America! textbooks of middle school, or my own brain promptly rejecting this information immediately after the end of 6^th grade, I don’t care.  The point is I obviously know very little about this particular historical event, so I can’t exactly determine Grover’s real motives.  He seems to have some unfortunate strike-breaking tendencies and also appears to be somewhat of an icon of the dead-white-male Republican “values” cult, so that’s a little scary.

BUT I must say that what I know now is pretty surprising, and makes Grover stand out in U.S presidential history.

Let’s go back in time a bit.

Hawaii in the 1880’s had a decent sized community of American and European expatriates.  Predominantly the descendents of missionaries, they’d left the monotony of prosletyzing to devote themselves to amassing wealth.   Unfortunately, just when they were really beginning to pick up steam with the whole exploit-the-local-labor-in-the-name-of-capitalism game, the Hawaiian government’s constitution started getting in the way.

So what did they do?  With pull yourself up by your bootstraps gusto, they took action.

In 1887 a group of Americans and Europeans led by Walter Gibson, a former Mormon preacher and gunrunner who’d been excommunicated from the church for embezzling funds, forced the king of Hawaii to sign a constitution eliminating his administrative powers and limiting the right to vote to Americans, Europeans, and native Hawaiians with a certain amount of wealth and property.  This effectively disenfranchised the entire native population of Hawaii and all the people of Asian descent living there.  In America’s signature style of joyously spreading civilization and freedom round the world, this signing of the constitution was accomplished by threatening the king with bayonets.  Hence, the constitution of 1887 was known as the bayonet constitution.

In 1891 the king died and his wife, Queen Lili’uokalani, took over.  She ruled for two years before she received enough complaints and petitions from her people that she decided to overturn the bayonet constitution.

This did not sit well with the Americans, particularly Sanford Dole, whose family’s pineapple company had, well, something of a stake in a government dominated by American business.

So what did they do?  They listened to the wishes of native Hawaiians and respected democracy, that oh-so-American of traditions, no?

Or…they put together a snappy little coup d’etat, deposed the queen, and installed a provisional government headed by none other than the Dole family.

Is all of our fruit in the U.S tainted by the history of military overtakings?  Cause I know bananas and pineapples sure have that rich bite of the coup, masterminded by American business in collusion with one dictator or another in a nice little violent handshake to do away with the rights of the locals.

So, moving on, there’s Sanford Dole solemnly proclaiming that Hawaii is now in the hands of the just, who’ve taken it “to protect the lives and property of American citizens.”   The Queen was not thrilled.  She petitioned the U.S government, headed by none other than Grover Cleveland, to restore her powers and to investigate the coup.

The new Dole-headed government, meanwhile, was petitioning Grover to annex Hawaii to the U.S.

This is where Grover surprises us all.

What did he do?  Give a wink and a nod to his ol’ buddy Sanford and hush the queen into exile or a quick ‘n easy execution?

Nope.  He sent a commission to investigate the coup.  A commission which later found the coup to be – gasp! – against the will of native Hawaiians.  And he made this statement to Congress in December of 1893:

“I suppose that right and justice should determine the path to be followed in treating this subject. If national honesty is to be disregarded and a desire for territorial expansion or dissatisfaction with a form of government not our own ought to regulate our conduct, I have entirely misapprehended the mission and character of our government and the behavior which the conscience of the people demands of their public servants.”

He then rejected the provisional government’s petition for annexation, and asked for Queen Lili’uokalani to be reinstated.

Take a pause here – before we veer back into the established pattern of American history – to think about this decision on the part of Grover Cleveland, and his extraordinary insinuation that it was not in the character of the American people to act against a government not their own or act with a desire for territorial expansion.  Whatever might’ve been going on in Grover’s mind, whatever pressures he was feeling, whatever else he did in his presidency, he represents a moment when at least publicly, the U.S was not so brash and so righteous and so terrible in bringing the club of “freedom” down on the head of some foreign nation.

And then back to the norm.  Congress quickly put together another commission that declared the provisional government “not guilty” of the overthrow and led to a resolution terminating Grover’s efforts to restore the queen.  The provisional government declared the Republic of Hawaii in 1894, and finally, after Grover’s presidency had ended and William McKinley had proved much friendlier to the Dole crowd, Hawaii was annexed to the United States in 1898.

Ninety-five years later, in 1993, Congress passed a resolution signed by Bill Clinton apologizing for the overthrow of a legitimate government in the sovereign nation of Hawaii.

I still think Grover Cleveland is rather funny…but now he’s the kind of funny tinged with sadness, and perhaps even tenderness.  Oh Grover.  I don’t know if I want to know too much else about you, because you seem safer somehow lurking in the annals of history as a tragic defender of something America has never really believed in or practiced.  Someday I’ll write a play about you.  Surely your mustache and your double chin and your troubled eyes merit some artistic undertaking.  In the meantime, I’ll keep nursing a little crush on you, encouraged by your inherent funniness and your one valiant moment which, like any good crush-ridden girl, I’ll hoist bravely above all others.