Empire in Waves. Scott Laderman

Such legal shortcomings did not prevent the United States from working to consolidate its territorial land grab in the decades that followed, however. And as Hawai‘i became American, so, too, did surfing.

      ALEXANDER HUME FORD AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE PACIFIC EMPIRE

      However much the number of surfers had fallen by the end of the nineteenth century, surfing began to once more flourish as the twentieth century unfolded. As with its decline, this was due, at least in part, to the immediate concerns of the American imperial project. Just as contact had physically decimated the native population while the missionary onslaught had sought the cultural transformation of those who survived, following Hawai‘i’s annexation by the United States in 1898, a number of Americans sought to profit from the islands’ tropical climate by further opening up the territory to tourists as what one promotional booklet called “a marvelous out-of-door wonderland, a picnic ground from the earth.”⁴¹ Their objectives were obvious. For years tourism’s economic potential had been apparent. In 1888, for instance, a Honolulu newspaper, noting the considerable sums expended by visitors, argued that inducing “people to come and see us is wise policy and promotive of our own material interests.”⁴² As the twentieth century dawned, surfing would prove instrumental in marketing the “out-of-door wonderland” image.⁴³ Robert C. Allen, who served for thirty-five years after World War II as the islands’ most tireless and effective booster, identified the sport as the first of four “entities” that provided an isolated Hawai‘i “with publicity far beyond any paid advertising could possibly have generated.”⁴⁴ But even decades before Allen assumed his postwar leadership role, a middle-aged South Carolina– born journalist had seized upon the idea of using surfing to sell the archipelago as an exotic, though safely American, tropical retreat.

      Alexander Hume Ford was an unlikely champion of the sport. Orphaned at an early age, Ford spent much of his early professional life as a writer in New York and Chicago. After stints as a dramaturge and staff journalist, he became a roving freelance reporter. At roughly the same time that the United States was annexing Hawai‘i, Ford was tramping across Siberia and eastern Europe as a foreign correspondent for a handful of American magazines. Before long, however, his career began to decline. Then, in 1907, at the age of thirty-nine, Ford arrived in Honolulu.⁴⁵ “It was the thrill of the surfboard that brought me to Hawaii,” he later wrote. As a schoolboy he saw a picture in his geography book of “Hawaiian men and women . . . poised upon the crest of monster rollers,” and, he said, he “longed” to join them.⁴⁶ Almost immediately upon his arrival he took to the waves. The reason was simple: “There is a thrill like none other in all the world as you stand upon [a wave’s] crest,” he gushed in the pages of Collier’s.⁴⁷ Ford was in fact rather late in his discovery; others had already uncovered and touted the “pure joy” and “spiritual intoxication” to be found in the waves off Waikiki.⁴⁸ But Ford pushed it further than most. After nearly three months of daily four-hour sessions, the journalist could claim to “ride standing.”⁴⁹ He quickly emerged as surfing’s leading evangelist, corralling Hawaiian “beachboys” and visiting Americans alike into his cause—most notably among the latter, the celebrated author Jack London, whom Ford introduced to surfing in 1907. “Learn to ride a surfboard,” Ford advised the readers of St. Nicholas magazine. “[I]t is the king of sports.”⁵⁰

      The extant literature, both print and filmic, has too oft en treated the South Carolina transplant as just some apolitical eccentric who found surfing and got stoked; at the same time, it has considerably exaggerated his contribution to surfing’s early-twentieth-century resurgence. Joseph Funderburg, for instance, maintained that Ford was “the mastermind who was responsible for the revival of surfing and one of the builders of the new Hawaii.” Joel Smith believed it “tempting to think there might not have been a revival at all” if not for Ford. And for Ben Marcus, Ford was one of three haoles—Marcus included the mixed-blood Hawaiian waterman George Freeth in that category—“who led the rebirth” of the sport.⁵¹ But contrary to these and other accounts, and as Isaiah Helekunihi Walker importantly reminds us, surfing was not an extinct pastime resurrected by the recently arrived haole.⁵² It had in fact already been experiencing a re naissance among a new generation of mostly Hawaiian men.⁵³ Walker speculated that this was because “the surf offered escape and autonomy for Kanaka Maoli [Hawaiians] in an unsettling time.”⁵⁴ The United States had recently annexed Hawai‘i in the face of overwhelming Hawaiian opposition, and the islands’ powerful haole elite was rendering the native population increasingly marginal as the annexationists consolidated their wealth, power, and privilege. What ever the reason a number of young Hawaiians took to the ocean at the turn of the century, there is no doubt that Hawaiian surfers were already riding the waves of Waikiki when Ford (followed weeks later by Jack London, who admiringly referred to these Hawaiians as “black Mercury[s]” and “natural king[s],” members of the “kingly species” who have “mastered matter and the brutes and lorded it over creation”) first entered the waters off O‘ahu in 1907.⁵⁵

      FIGURE 1. Alexander Hume Ford saw in surfing a means to further his vision of a “white man’s state.” Ford (right) with Jack London (center) and Charmian London (under umbrella) in 1915 on the beach in Waikiki. Credit: Charmian Kittredge London, Our Hawaii (New York: Macmillan Company, 1917).

      If much of the literature has perhaps ascribed to Ford greater credit for surfing’s revival than his contribution in fact merits—credit that Ford himself helped to foster—it has given almost no attention to the colonialist presumptions that drove the American transplant’s missionary zeal.⁵⁶ These presumptions operated on at least two levels. On one, Ford adopted, as historian Gary Okihiro noted, the “familiar colonial trope of ‘going native’ and, for the sake of natives, enacting cultural and environmental rescue and preservation.” This was a “racialized burden” he and other haoles carried in ensuring the triumph of civilization in the island chain.⁵⁷ On the second—and this has gone almost entirely overlooked in the surfing literature—Ford became a major proponent of not only consolidating America’s imperial grasp of Hawai‘i but of doing so in the interests of whites. Ford, as a South Carolinian, was a product of the Jim Crow South. There is no evidence that he viewed favorably the sort of racist violence popularized by the Ku Klux Klan, but it is incontestable that he embraced the racist suppositions of the post–Civil War era.

      Ford’s reporting was peppered with encomiums to the spread of white civilization, and it is hard not to imagine him viewing the Pacific islands as a laboratory in which could be realized his ideal white American society. Ford, to be sure, was hardly alone in embracing this mission.⁵⁸ A short book published by the American officials who overthrew the monarchy was clear about its authors’ desire “to increase [the islands’] civilized population by accessions from without” and to “attract . . . desirable settlers.”⁵⁹ Yet Ford rose above most of his contemporaries in being more vocal, per sis tent, and tireless than others. Indeed, by 1917 Sunset magazine was pronouncing him “Hawaii’s best booster and the busiest man in the mid-Pacific.”⁶⁰ And, crucially, Ford possessed the ideological convictions necessary for such a colonialist project. In his turn-of-the-century dispatches, Ford had already been praising the opening of Asia to American and British industrial influence, a region where, he predicted, “will be expended much restless energy of the Anglo-Saxon race”—so long, that is, as the “Anglo-Saxon push” did not “give way before the wily Slav” or “the agile, hardy Jap.”⁶¹ But even such nods to transatlantic racial solidarity would soon be ditched for a capitalist enthusiasm that was distinctly American in character. In a 1901 piece in New England Magazine, for instance, Ford proudly celebrated the displacement of Europe an might by the power of American manufacturing and mechanized agriculture. From the country’s “new colonial dependencies” (“our far off Philippines,” for example) to Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe, the “American idea is making a triumphant sweep the world over.” The “vast and seemingly limitless resources” of the United States “make her prominently the land of promise for all time,” Ford proclaimed. And “when to this is added the intelligent, almost divinely inspired population