Forget Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 lamentation for the closing of the frontier. As far as Ford was concerned, the frontier had presented itself again. In the wake of his courtship of the Homeseekers Association in Chicago and with white immigrants slowly trickling in to the islands, Ford recognized that his cause would benefit from additional visual enticements. “I wish Hawaii had some slides it could send for use in lectures in Chicago and working up interest in Hawaii for the white man,” he wrote to Governor Frear. Yet even without the slides, the “white man” appeared sold on the vision—or so at least Ford claimed. There was enthusiasm “[e]verywhere along the coast,” he reported of his travels, with people along the western seaboard, just like “the transportation companies,” wanting “to come in & help.”102 But Ford was onto something. Visual representations of Hawai‘i—images that spoke to the exotic splendor unique to the island chain—could go some distance in selling the Hawaiian dream. And nothing spoke more fully to what was uniquely Hawaiian than the indigenous sport of surfing.
Ford had already laid an important foundation in this regard with his opening of the Outrigger Canoe Club in 1908.103 His inauguration of Mid-Pacific Magazine in 1911 should also be understood in this context. It was not for nothing that in 1910 one newspaper account identified Ford as an “arch promoter of surf riding exhibitions and other things for the good of Hawaii.”104 To be sure, he was not the first booster to employ surfing in marketing the islands. An 1898 pamphlet on Hawai‘i produced by the Canadian-Pacific Railway and the Canadian-Australian S.S. Line featured a photograph of a “native . . . with surf board.” The “recent acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands by the United States,” the pamphlet enticed would-be visitors, meant the opening “to the plea sure and health-seeking tourist [of] a delightful semi-tropical country of virgin beauty and unrivalled attractiveness—a new world to Americans and Europeans, in which the resources of modern civilization contribute materially to an easy and pleasurable exploration.”105 Surfing also appeared the following year in the History of the Hawaiian Islands and Hints to Travelers Visiting the Hawaiian Islands published by the Hawaiian Gazette Company.106 By 1915, surfing had made the cover of Ferdinand Schnack’s Aloha Guide, the “standard handbook” of Honolulu and the islands “endorsed” by the Chamber of Commerce and the Hawaii Promotion Committee.107 In Aloha from Honolulu, another 1915 piece of promotional literature, surfing—the “most popular of Hawaiian pastimes”—claimed a full-page photograph.108 Postcards abounded, and the archives are replete with materials from the first few decades of the twentieth century that feature wave riding as one of the islands’ principal draws.109 Nevertheless, probably no individual at the time more fully developed Hawaiian tourism—and used surfing as a marketing tool—than did Alexander Hume Ford.
Perhaps the most ambitious effort in this regard was Ford’s creation in 1911 of the Hands-Around-the-Pacific Club, which was rechristened the Pan Pacific Union in 1917. Endowing his new movement with immediate respectability, the club’s initial honorary officers included the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, the governor of Hawai‘i, and the governor-general of the Philippines.110 Under what ever name it used, the organization was “essentially an outgrowth of the tourist-promotion activities” in which Ford was deeply enmeshed in the first two decades of the twentieth century.111 Indeed, the club’s formation followed Ford’s unsuccessful 1907 at tempt to create, with joint Hawaiian and Australian leadership, a Pan-Pacific Tourist and Information Bureau, and it coincided with his participation in 1911 as a founding board member of the Pan-Pacific Congress, a Honolulu-based multilateral organization created to promote Pacific-area tourism, immigration, and development. Surfing was instrumental to these endeavors. When the congress sponsored the Mid-Pacific Carnival in 1913, its official poster, in a stark departure from the religious conservatism of the nineteenth century, proudly featured a scantily clad Hawaiian poised on the nose of a surfboard. The following year’s poster continued with the surfing theme while tapping into the burgeoning culture of celebrity; it presented Duke Kahanamoku, the “champion swimmer of the world,” casually sliding down the face of a Hawaiian wave. And surfing would again be used in subsequent years.
FIGURES 3A AND 3B. With its exoticism and implication of masculine derring-do, it is not hard to imagine how surfing could serve as a popular draw in selling Hawaiian tourism and settlement, such as in these early-twentieth-century promotional pamphlets. The surfer in the pamphlet on the left is Duke Kahanamoku. Credit: Courtesy of the Hawaiian Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.
FIGURE 4. The Pan-Pacific Congress, which Ford helped launch, was a Honolulu-based multilateral organization that sought to promote tourism, immigration, and development. For the organizers of its Mid-Pacific Carnivals, there was no more attractive means of promoting the magic of Hawai‘i and the progressive vision of the organization than through illustrations of men riding waves. Credit: Postcard for the Mid-Pacific Carnival, February 19–24, 1917, Folder: 9-4-60 Haw. Promotion-Comm. Pan Pac. Congress, Box 662, Central Classified Files, 1907–1951, Office of the Territories, Record Group 126, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.
Ford’s ambitions were grand. Having already worked to promote white domination of Hawai‘i, his more global activities seemed to reflect his belief that whites had global obligations. Like Albert P. Taylor, who directed the Hawaii Promotion Committee and sought to create a Pacific American Union to ensure the “maintenance of American supremacy in the Pacific,” Ford viewed his responsibilities in global terms.112 His was, he assumed, an inherently benevolent vision. “I have learned that where race prejudice has been overcome, race preference remains, and it will never be otherwise, and should not be,” Ford reminisced in his later years. “Race preference will not preclude interracial friendship, interracial understanding. I have found everywhere in Asia that the Nordic is always a powerful, dynamic machine, ever leading, ever envied, ever misunderstood, ever unwelcome, but always bringing to the static Asiatic better things and better government than he has ever known. The Nordic has, in my Nordic opinion, a tremendous mission of leadership to fulfill, an obligation to the entire world, which he cannot escape.”113 Ford, as one such Nordic specimen, did not seek to escape his racial obligations.
THE HAWAIIAN GLOBALIZATION OF SURFING
At roughly the same time that Ford was enacting his vision of white global leadership, surfing began, with Ford’s assistance, to slowly creep beyond the warm Hawaiian shores. Just as it was Hawaiians who spearheaded surfing’s turn-of-the-century resurgence—a resurgence that has since been attributed to Alexander Hume Ford—it was Hawaiians