Ford came to his view of the islands early. As a passenger transiting through O‘ahu on his way to Asia a few years before his 1907 relocation, Ford was on the ground long enough to conclude that the Hawaiian people were “happy” but “childlike” and lazy. “[T]he native Hawaiian shirks work if he can on any day of the week,” he maintained.64 Ford especially viewed with concern the many Asians who had made the islands their home. Having accompanied a delegation of two-dozen congressmen on an official visit in 1907, Ford was adamant that the territory “be redeemed from the Oriental, fortified and Americanized as it should be.” This he saw as a form of humanitarianism. In Ford’s mind, “attracting white American settlers” was synonymous with “aid[ing] the islanders.” Colonization thus became a selfless “campaign for the welfare and protection of the islands.”65 Opponents of this American project were, in such an ideological framework, naturally enemies of humanity. Even in these early moments, then, Ford’s disdain for Hawaiian nationalists, and his belief that they ought merely to stand by as American civilization proceeded unabated, was evident.66 He was anything but generous, for instance, in speaking of the deposed queen Lili‘uokalani, “leader of the ‘outs’” and a hypocrite who surrounded herself with “Haolihaters (despisers of the whites).”67 If he could muster only one positive comment about the former monarch, it was a hint of plea sure at her capitulation: she seemed finally to recognize that “she is for all time but a citizen of the land over which she once ruled.”68
Ford also criticized the Hawaiian representation in Congress, lamenting the fact that “[i]t is not possible at present for Hawaii to send a white delegate to Washington.” Passage of the Hawaiian Organic Act of 1900, which restored the voting rights of many indigenous islanders, had seen to that. The best that Ford could say of Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana‘ole, the territory’s representative in Congress (as well as a surfer and recent heir to the Hawaiian throne), was that as “a native he does not stand in the way” of white progress. This was attributable, Ford suggested, to the “particularly fortunate” fact that Kuhio was accompanied in Washington by a Merchants Association–paid secretary, George B. McClellan, “an American-born worker who, as the equal of any in the national capital, is respected by all his coworkers with whom he labors shoulder to shoulder for the Americanization of our island territory.”69 Ford’s concern was not solely with Hawaiian nationalists, however. He especially feared the racial threat presented by the influx of Asians. “The most recent official reports from Hawaii,” Ford wrote in Collier’s in 1909, “indicate that over fifty-one percent of its population is Japanese and that the little brown people there are outracing, births over deaths, all other nationalities in the islands combined. Perhaps seventy-five per cent of the population of Hawaii is of Oriental extraction.” It seemed terrifying that, barring a change in demographic trends, “another generation may see Hawaii a State of the United States, with yellow Senators sitting in our Capital [sic] at Washington.” Of course, Ford reassured his readers, the “hope of the people is otherwise, and a campaign, with limitless capital behind it, is now in progress to repeople the islands with white men.”70
Ford was tireless in championing that cause. This was, of course, a cause that was hardly unique to Hawai‘i. It found expression in Sun Belt development more broadly. Ford’s boosterism in many ways echoed that of his American counterparts in the Southwest, such as those generations of individuals who sought to create in sun-drenched Southern California a model white society centered on leisure and plea sure.71 Yet Hawai‘i had its own special set of challenges. Convincing “the white population so badly needed” to “pour in” was, Ford recognized, an arduous task. Already the sugar industry had “populated the islands with one hundred and fifty thousand Orientals” as “field hands,” he pointed out. If the “consensus of opinion” was that “sugar was the millionaire’s crop,” then “pineapples, coffee, rubber[,] and perhaps sisal” were “the crops that could best be raised by homesteaders.” The problem faced by the 1907 congressional delegation Ford accompanied—and, by implication, the United States more broadly—was “how to help the coffee industry so that the thousands of homesteads offered to American citizens for settlement in Hawaii may be taken up and utilized to a profit by the white man.”72
The islands, after all, were no easy sell. The Hawai‘i of the early twentieth century was not the Hawai‘i of the post–World War II era. The promotion of tourism thus came to play a useful role in encouraging the arrival of that “white population so badly needed” in the American territory. The logic was impeccable. “[A]s California and Oregon and Washington have learned,” a representative of the Marshfield [Oregon] Chamber of Commerce told his hosts during an official visit to Honolulu in 1911, “the tourist of today is the taxpayer and resident of tomorrow.”73 Or, as the Hawai‘i Tourist Bureau stressed while “induc[ing] travelers to visit us,” “we cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that Hawaii is not only a wonderland to visit but[,] far more important, an ideal country in which to establish a residence.”74 Tourism, in other words, would be an important first step in enticing white settlement.
And surfing, with which Ford became obsessed, might go some distance in encouraging this effort. Having learned to “ride standing” just months earlier, in 1908 the former South Carolinian founded the Outrigger Canoe Club on the beaches of Waikiki. The club, which quickly began to “flourish,” soon emerged as an important social venue for the islands’ haole elite, with its membership rolls populated by judges, political leaders, and many of Hawai‘i’s leading businessmen.75 Ford was its first elected president; the annexationist Sanford B. Dole was its second.76 There is a good deal of uncertainty about precisely how the Outrigger came about.77 There is less doubt, however, about why it was created. The “main object” of the club was “to give an added and permanent attraction to Hawaii and make Waikiki always the Home of the Surfer, with perhaps an annual Surfboard and Outrigger Canoe Carnival which will do much to spread abroad the attractions of Hawaii, the only islands in the world where men and boys ride upright upon the crests of the waves.”78 Or, as Ford wrote in 1910, the club began when “several malihinis, or newcomers, . . . recognized the picturesque charm to the tourist of surf-board riding, an art that was rapidly dying out owing to the fact that Waikiki beach was becoming closed to the small boy of limited means.”79 Given the steady construction of beachfront hotels and residences, the Outrigger would ensure coastal access to people of “limited means.” This ability of locals to reach the water would encourage the practice of surfing, which in turn, Ford believed, would attract free-spending tourists to Hawai‘i. And he was right. The tourists did show up, though Ford would later come to rue his success. Surfing, he wrote in 1931, had been “one of the greatest assets toward bringing the confounded tourists to our over hospitable shores,” where they were becoming a “nuisance” and a “calamity,” though an “inevitable” one.80 But this frustration was years away. In 1908 the future looked bright.
There was, moreover, an additional and more immediate reason for the Outrigger’s founding. With the planned visit to Hawai‘i of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet in the summer of 1908, the club, it was believed, could provide an excellent showcase for what was uniquely Hawaiian. This meant the Pacific islands’ most popular water sports. “What better way to demonstrate the charm and culture of old Hawai‘i than for the Navy men to experience first hand [sic] the regal sports of surfing and outrigger canoeing!” one history of the club proclaimed. The Outrigger thus organized two major efforts in anticipation