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 Hawaiian Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.
Months later Ford penned a sequence of enthusiastic articles for Van Norden Magazine intended to entice white migration. “Hawaii is to-day the land of opportunity for the quick, active, courageous white man, and everyone from President Taft down wishes to see it conquered for and by Anglo-Saxon Americans,” he proclaimed.99 In a piece entitled “Hawaii Calls for the Small Farmer,” Ford insisted that the “richest land in all the world . . . must be Americanized.” With the erection of “monster fortifications” for the U.S. military and the Panama Canal under construction—a canal that would only enhance the “strategic and commercial importance” of the Pacific islands—it was the duty of every “loyal citizen” who “understands something about the fundamentals of farming” to cooperate in America’s colonial endeavor. Ford approvingly quoted Charles W. Fairbanks, the second-term vice president to Theodore Roosevelt: “I would like to see this American territory occupied by those whose blood is the blood that ran through the veins of our ancestors.” He then proceeded to lay out how profitable Hawai‘i could be for the small farmer and invited him to accomplish the “patriotic result” of white dominance under eventual Hawaiian statehood.100 “Here is the business center where Occident and Orient meet,” Ford had written a couple of months earlier. “[I]t is for the white man in America to say whether or not the opportunities, but beginning to open up, shall ripen and fall into his hands, or into those of the alien.”101
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.
