From the beginning, the promotion of surfing was closely bound to issues of race. Despite Ford’s occasional nod to “the native” in some of his early writing, he appeared determined to render the pastime white. There was, of course, a certain irony in this desire, as the countless hours Ford and his colleagues spent surfing off Waikiki inevitably left them with varying shades of suntanned skin. surfing, in this way, transgressed perhaps the most fundamental signifier of racial identity: color. Assertions of whiteness thus became less a matter of pigmentation than of faith, one in which whiteness was posited rather than marked. This had implications for the organization of Hawaiian surf culture. Haole surfers in the years following annexation were not the imperialist missionaries of the nineteenth century. They were not seeking to simply supplant native culture with their own. On the contrary, they appropriated one of the most beloved pastimes of indigenous Hawaiians, and, in “going native,” they were often left with darkened skin. Yet these haoles still insisted on the maintenance of racial boundaries. The Outrigger Canoe Club, which formed the center of the white surfing community, maintained such boundaries both in its or ganization and in its membership. As late as 1930, Ford was pushing for the Outrigger to be overseen by “a white caretaker,” while an “Oriental group”—from whom, much to Ford’s consternation, “the old spirit of work ha[d] left”—attended to the club’s more menial duties.85 And for years the Outrigger effectively discouraged the Hawaiian people from its membership rolls. “The Outrigger Canoe Club is practically an organization for the haole (white person),” Ford nonchalantly remarked of its de facto segregation.86
He exhibited less nonchalance in celebrating the aquatic ascendance of his white compatriots. White mastery of surfing, Ford claimed, was grounded in the dynamics of race. “[I]t is the white children only who have successfully mastered the Hawaiian sports,” he wrote in 1908. The Chinese in Hawai‘i had not done so. Nor had the Portuguese. “The Japanese seemed never able to acquire the difficult knack.” It was only “the small white boy” who “very quickly became more adept than the native himself.”87 The proof, he suggested, was in the competitions. Hawaiian surfers of course disagreed. Precluded from joining Ford’s club, frustrated by the encroachment of haole surfers in the waters off Waikiki, and “disgusted” with the racism of Outrigger members, Hawaiians officially formed the Hui Nalu (Club of the Waves), which had been loosely organized since 1905, as a surfing and swimming association in 1911.88 The Hui Nalu contained numerous well-known surfers, from champion swimmer Duke Kahanamoku and his brothers to Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana‘ole, the prince who served after 1902 as the territory’s delegate to Congress. It also contained some women, though not in the numbers suggested by their historical prominence in wave-riding accounts.
Surfing competitions became a means through which Hawaiians and the haole elite contested each others’ superiority. Ford, for his part, was unambiguous in his boasting. “[A]t the recent surfing carnivals in honor of the visits of the American battleship and later of the cruiser fleets,” Ford wrote for a national audience in 1909, “practically every prize offered for those most expert in Hawaiian water sports were won by white boys and girls, who have only recently mastered the art that was for so long believed to be possible of acquirement only by the native-born, dark-skinned Hawaiian.”89 He seemed especially proud that “a white boy now fourteen years of age” had won “the medal given to the most expert surfboarder” for the third time. “The white man and boy are doing much in Hawaii to develop the art of surfriding. Games and feats never dreamed of by the native are being tried,” he boasted.90 Indeed, by 1912, “the native” had disappeared from Waikiki altogether, Ford remarkably claimed. It was “white men and boys” who “kept [Surfing] alive.”91 As even those with the most casual knowledge of twentieth-century surfing history will recognize, Ford was patently wrong about the disappearance of Hawaiian surfers. But his statement is instructive. The Out-rigger founder was, in essence, attempting to create his own reality. Not only did Hawaiian surfers still exist but, by nearly all accounts, they excelled over whites. Matt Warshaw called Ford’s boasts “ridiculous,” noting that Hawaiians “usually didn’t bother to enter surfing competitions” or were not invited.92 And when they did, Isaiah Walker wrote, they emerged “victorious.”93
Yet Ford’s objectives were less empirical than political. When he found surfing and the incomparable thrill it represented, Ford found a lure for drawing white immigrants to Hawai‘i. He took to the national press to sing the sport’s praises, writing articles for Collier’s, St. Nicholas, Travel, and Paradise of the Pacific.94 He worked with the film production company Pathé to create a surfing motion picture.95 He even founded his own monthly publication, the Mid-Pacific Magazine, which ran for twenty-five years. Mid-Pacific’s inaugural issue in January 1911 was dominated by images of surfing on its front and back covers, and its first article, replete with numerous photographs, was entitled “Riding the Surfboard.”
It might seem startling that that first article appeared under the byline of the Hawaiian surfer and swimmer Duke Kahanamoku.96 But that inaugural issue also contained a stark reminder of Ford’s racialist and colonialist vision—an acknowledgment, as it were, of the extent to which surfing and the American empire had become entwined. Ford included a posthumous article by the congressman Abraham L. Brick extolling “our outpost in the Pacific.” Strategically and commercially, Brick wrote, the Hawaiian Islands “are destined to become the isles of the ocean,” and it was incumbent upon Americans to ensure that they “eventually come into the union a white man’s state.”97
This colonization of the islands consumed Ford, and, as noted earlier, he worked relentlessly to promote white settlement. By 1908, a year after his arrival on O‘ahu, Ford had been appointed secretary of the Transportation Committee by the territorial governor, Walter F. Frear. It was a wise choice, as Ford would in no time be recognized as Hawai‘i’s greatest booster. As secretary of the committee, he was charged with traveling to the mainland to advance the Pacific territory’s interests. His views of his mission, as well as the fervor with which he embraced them, were made abundantly clear during his journeys. Writing to Frear in January 1909, Ford displayed no ambiguity about the future he envisioned for the islands. “We used to send train loads of people out to look at lands in the good old days & established some very successful colonies,” he noted from Chicago in excitedly reporting the Homeseekers Association’s interest in Hawai‘i.98 Why should the twentieth century be any different?
FIGURE 2. Ford used his Mid-Pacific Magazine to promote Hawai‘i as the center of a U.S.-led Pacific stretching from Asia and Australia to the Americas. Surfing, as prominently featured on the cover of its inaugural issue, could, he believed, help lure those white settlers he thought necessary to cement American rule in the islands. Credit: Courtesy of the