Centralization in Hawaii: Retrospect and Prospect

Abstract

The Hawaiian Islands, in Mark Twain's words “the loveliest fleet of Islands that lies anchored in any ocean,” offer more than a vista of sub-tropical splendor to the student of government. Hawaii presents also an extreme of centralized administration probably unequaled in any state on the mainland. The century prior to annexation by the United States saw the major islands of the Hawaiian archipelago come under the jurisdiction of a single government which rapidly underwent a metamorphosis from stone-age, native absolutism, through restricted constitutional monarchy, to the status of independent republic. “Adjustment rather than reorganization defines the change in government necessary when Hawaii entered the Union as a Territory.” Allowed by Congress almost all the powers of a state, and wide discretion in erecting its own local structure, the Territory chose to continue the concentrated administration which had characterized government throughout the century of independent rule. Only within the last few years has this centralization been shaken by the introduction of challenging centrifugal forces. Today, Hawaii affords the prospect of an ocean-girt test tube in which can be observed the interplay of these new formative forces with the old causative factors of centripetal tendency; the end product may be a decentralized administration more on the model of the mainland.