Hawaiian statehood without Pearl Harbour?

Let's say WWII happens almost exactly the same as OTL, but the Japanese don't attack Pearl Harbour. Say another incident somewhere is a casus belli used by an angry Roosevelt in January 1942 or something.

Handwavium aside, how will Hawaii's journey to statehood now go, if it will even happen at all? Or would it be totally unchanged?
 
Don't think I quite agree there. The mainlander presence in the archipelago was a lot more significant than it was in Puerto Rico up to that time, especially with respect to agriculture and the US Navy. The culture was a lot closer to the US mainland than is Puerto Rico as a result. Likewise, the relationship between the archipelago and the mainland was a lot less offhand than that with Puerto Rico at the same time. Thus, I could see statehood, absent Pearl Harbor, delayed by perhaps five years at most. Let's say this: there would be a lot of agitation and tub-thumping for statehood once Alaska got it.
 
Suposing that Something like Pearl happened at the Philipines,would that change somehow the staus of the islands to the main land?Would a surprise attack at the Philipines have a similar efect as the Hawayan one?To the american people and it´s perception of the war i mean.
 
I think it might go the way of Puerto Rico.

I wish that had been true, but not at all. As mentioned before American culture and society had already taken deep unfortunate roots in Hawaii. There is no connection between the attack on Pearl Harbor and statehood. The connection is the Pacific War in general and the impact that all those service men had on Hawaii and how much impact Hawaii had on those service men.

If the US Pacific Fleet had not been move from San Diego to Hawaii I would consider that a Japanese attack on the Philippines would have the same effect. It is the surprise attack itself, the bolt out of the blue, that angered the American public the most.
 
I don't see how the Pearl Harbor attack had any effect, one way or another, on eventual statehood for Hawaii. Nor do I believe a "sneak attack" on an equivalent US naval base in the Phillipines would have altered its eventual status as an independent nation

(1) Regardless of the attack, Pearl Harbor was essential to the overall US naval presence in the Pacific. WW2 would have demonstrated this even more, especially after the Japanese conquest of the Phillipines. As opposed to Subic Bay or any major base the US might establish in the Phillipines or Guam, Pearl Harbor could be much more easily defended.

(2) The territory of Hawaii was already becoming "Americanized". Although mainland white Americans were stilll a demographic minority (still are, actually), many already viewed themselves as permanent residents and had put down roots. This was very different from the Phillipines, which was viewed and goverened much more as a colony by rotating white American residents. Prior to WW2, the US had already decided to place the Phillipines on a track for independence. I don't see how events in WW2 would have changed this.
 
If the US Pacific Fleet had not been move from San Diego to Hawaii I would consider that a Japanese attack on the Philippines would have the same effect. It is the surprise attack itself, the bolt out of the blue, that angered the American public the most.

This does raise an interesting speculation. Could the Japanese have considered starting the Pacific War with a major "sneak attack" on San Diego? Was this even logistically possible for a carrier task force sailing from Japan? Was it militarily possible? Could the Japanese fleet have avoided being brought into combat? If a sneak attack on a naval base in a US territory had such a major positive effect on US wartime morale, what would have been the impact of a major (and devastating) attack on California have been?
 
I think if you get rid of Hawaii you also have to get rid of Alaska as a state.

The general assumption at the time was that Hawaii was solid red Republican while Alaska was solid blue Democrat, so there was something of a compromise to let both states in together to balance out.
 
This does raise an interesting speculation. Could the Japanese have considered starting the Pacific War with a major "sneak attack" on San Diego? Was this even logistically possible for a carrier task force sailing from Japan? Was it militarily possible? Could the Japanese fleet have avoided being brought into combat?

Only if they'd been willing to use every fleet oiler they had, probably load parts of their hanger decks with drums of fuel oil to boot, and leave behind the battlewagons (fuel hogs). You'd wind up with a much more vulnerable fleet much more likely to be detected (both longer time at-sea and moving closer to major shipping lines and patrols), and launching a weaker strike.

All in all you have an operation that goes from risky to flat-out insane. I say that the IJN HAD to take risks to even have a chance in the war, but even I wouldn't say an attack on San Diego would have been a good idea.
 
Hawaiian statehood seems inevitable by 1941. Remember, it was annexed to the U.S. itself under McKinley, albeit not as a state.
 
Hawaiian statehood seems inevitable by 1941. Remember, it was annexed to the U.S. itself under McKinley, albeit not as a state.

Not necessarily, one has to look at Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and even Samoa. Without a doubt there are a great number of differences, especially in population, but statehood is not inevitable. There was a plebiscite, IIRC, which allowed the populace to vote between statehood and continued territorial status.
 
Only if they'd been willing to use every fleet oiler they had, probably load parts of their hanger decks with drums of fuel oil to boot, and leave behind the battlewagons (fuel hogs). You'd wind up with a much more vulnerable fleet much more likely to be detected (both longer time at-sea and moving closer to major shipping lines and patrols), and launching a weaker strike.

All in all you have an operation that goes from risky to flat-out insane. I say that the IJN HAD to take risks to even have a chance in the war, but even I wouldn't say an attack on San Diego would have been a good idea.

Besides, the point of the Pearl Harbor attack was to take out our most advanced base. Well, clearly not the only or even most advanced base--they had to take the Philippines to accomplish that, and neutralize Midway. But the idea was, with the whole fleet based at Pearl gone, and the Philippines taken, Midway alone could hardly stand and the Americans, with a greatly reduced fleet, would have to try and strike all the way from the US West Coast.

Or curl up into a ball and give up. Which may have been the hope of some Japanese.

If they were going to cross the whole bloody Pacific to strike at a West Coast asset, better to close the Panama Canal than merely remove whatever might be available to the Fleet at San Diego. At San Diego, the industries of the whole continental USA stood ready to fix any damage they did, no more than a railway trip away. At Pearl, only the resources available in Hawaii plus whatever the USA could gradually ship there would be available to clean up the harbor. It would presumably take longer and in the short term which is all the plan really considered, American resources were pushed back the farthest. If they had attacked anywhere on the West Coast instead of Pearl, then of course the whole set of fleet elements based at Pearl would be out in force to hunt them down on their way back home, assuming they got to the target and got away from shore-based defenses like Army bombers intact. The Japanese command wanted those ships back, and they wanted them soon, for their real operations once this American sideshow was done with.

No, it had to be Pearl, even if they could have reached the American Pacific Coast, which I doubt too.

And by the way I also agree with consensus for once on another point--HI statehood has nothing to do with the Pearl Harbor attack. I even suppose the place would have become a state if the Pacific War, or indeed all of WWII, were butterflied away completely.

Well, without WWII it is conceivable that the Civil Rights movement and the discrediting of racism as an acceptable publicly acknowledged policy of the US government might have had tougher sledding. I personally think that was one of those tectonic things that had to be addressed sooner or later and the longer it was delayed the worse the social and political earthquakes would be. Certainly failure for the USA to progress in that fashion would tend to shoot our own foot when it came to seeking persuasive hegemony over the newly emerging nations freeing themselves from colonialism, and yes I also think that was another tectonic movement that was going to happen in some fashion or other. Conceivably, without WWII the European empires might have managed to retain possession of their colonies--if and only if they too were to back off from a basically racist and patronizing position and both co-opt large numbers of colonial subjects into their systems and adjust policy so that the interests of the native colonized peoples were being addressed more fairly. If they had done that, maybe it wouldn't be liberated nations the USA would need decent relations with, maybe it would be a newly multiracial face of the old European powers. Either way, either Jim Crow had to go (at least go sort of underground and be plausibly deniable) or the USA would be an irrelevant pariah nation.

Without that, with a USA as casually and unabashedly racist as before WWII, there would have been considerable doubt cast on Hawaii being "ready" for statehood. With the USA anxious to showcase that we really, honest to God, weren't a bunch of racists anymore, not granting Hawaii statehood would be an embarrassment.

WWII certainly did catalyze the process considerably but if the USA didn't stay on a path paralleling South Africa in the 1950s and later, I can't see statehood being delayed more than a decade at the most. They had plenty of people, once American leadership stopped paying attention to what "color" they were.
 
Not necessarily, one has to look at Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and even Samoa. Without a doubt there are a great number of differences, especially in population, but statehood is not inevitable. There was a plebiscite, IIRC, which allowed the populace to vote between statehood and continued territorial status.

True, but again, the legal status is different. Am Sam is unorganized (technically) and unincorporated. It's without dispute a colony. One could argue that by its title, Puerto Rico should be a Caribbean Palau. Indeed, nothing gained from Spain is incorporated; these are organized areas, but none are incorporated territories.
 
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