I am not a first day collector per se..but there are exceptions...This Hawaii first day Oct 18 1937 postmarked on a naval vessel goes into my U.S. binders.
The Cachet is a First Day printing but the cancel is not, it's a Ships cancel. The sender may have mailed to himself, note it's addressed to a P.O. Box or it may have been mailed
to a friend by someone that was stationed on the U.S.S. Dent. It is a First Day Cachet mailed on the date of issue. Hope my ramble makes cents
I would have thought that the government of the day would have wanted to keep quiet about annexing another sovereign state. Still no political correctness in those days.
The USS Dent was one of the old "4-stack" destroyers (1917).
From Wiki: "On 18 December (1934), she entered the Rotating Reserve at San Diego and tested ordnance until returning to active commission 10 June 1935. Dent operated along the West Coast and in the Hawaiian Islands until the United States entered World War II. At San Diego on 7 December 1941, she got underway the next day to screen Saratoga in her high speed run to Pearl Harbor."
I just bought this cover from Stamporama member Bulldog:
U.S.S. Philateliphia was the flagship for the American fleet that attended the 1898 annexation of Hawaii after a coalition of American businessmen more or less forced the American government to subsume Hawaii into the the American sphere of influence.
Here's a quote from a Wikipedia article about Philadelphia's role:
"Philadelphia recommissioned 9 July 1898 and became the flagship of Rear Admiral J. N. Miller, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Station. She steamed from San Francisco 2 July to participate in the ceremonies attending the assumption of sovereignty by the United States over the Hawaiian Islands. Flagship Philadelphia arrived Honolulu 3 August, and nine days hence her officers and those of the steam sloop Mohican, with a force under arms from the two warships, represented the US Navy at the ceremonies transferring the Hawaiian Islands to the United States. "
"... I would have thought that the government of the day would have wanted to keep quiet about annexing another sovereign state ..."
If you substitute "Iraq" for "Cuba", the Congressional debate over what would later be called the Spanish-American War (1898) (same year as the annexation of Hawaii) was spookily identical to the Congressional debate over the second invasion of Iraq (2003), some 105 years later.
As a historian friend of mine posits: it would be more interesting to argue why the terms of the debate would be any different.
In both cases, one side argued that, if we failed to act, our allies would know they could never rely on us, and our enemies would know that they could always ignore us; meanwhile, the other side argued that, if we invaded & conquered, our allies would lose all respect for us, while our enemies would be emboldened by the obvious moral equivalency.
In both cases, there were freedom-loving people, yearning to be free. In the case of Iraq, there was the Persian Gulf Oil. In the case of Cuba, there were coaling stations for the US Navy. Does history rhyme a bit, or what?
As to the original point: in 1898, there was a spirited debate about America embarking on an militarist-imperialist path of conquest, and whether we were descending to the level of the corrupt European powers or taking our rightful place in the sun.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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"I collect stamps today precisely the way I collected stamps when I was ten years old."
". . . when President William McKinley advocated annexation of the Republic of Hawaii in 1898, he said that "We need Hawaii as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny." On the other hand, former President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat who had blocked the annexation of Hawaii during his administration, wrote that McKinley's annexation of the territory was a "perversion of our national destiny". Historians continued that debate; some have interpreted American acquisition of other Pacific island groups in the 1890s as an extension of manifest destiny across the Pacific Ocean. Others have regarded it as the antithesis of manifest destiny and merely imperialism."