In a ceremony at Iolani Palace in Honolulu, the flag of the Kingdom of Hawaii was lowered for the last time and the Stars and Stripes raised in its place, formalizing the annexation approved by Congress that summer. Many Native Hawaiians boycotted the ceremony in mourning. The move followed the 1893 overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani and cemented Hawaii's path toward becoming a U.S. territory and, in 1959, a state.
The ceremony was deliberately understated by American organizers, held at noon to avoid the anniversary's uncomfortable echoes, but for many Hawaiians it was an occasion for grief rather than celebration. Queen Liliuokalani, deposed five years earlier in a coup backed by American businessmen and the U.S. minister to Hawaii, declined to attend. Hawaiian band members reportedly refused to play their national anthem, 'Hawaii Ponoi,' at the transfer, choosing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' with visible reluctance, and some in the crowd wept openly as the Hawaiian flag came down.
The annexation itself had bypassed a treaty vote in the Senate, where two-thirds support was unreachable, in favor of a simple joint resolution—the same legislative shortcut used to annex Texas decades earlier. The Newlands Resolution passed amid the fever of the Spanish-American War, when Hawaii's strategic value as a mid-Pacific naval station became impossible for American strategists to ignore.
Native Hawaiian sovereignty activists have long pointed to August 13, 1898, alongside the 1893 overthrow, as evidence that annexation was imposed rather than chosen. A century later, in 1993, the U.S. Congress passed a formal apology resolution acknowledging that the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy had been illegal—a reckoning that arrived exactly 100 years too late for the queen who lived to see none of it.