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 who served as the most notable diplomats for their ancestral sport. Two young men who had distinguished themselves at Waikiki, George Freeth and Duke Kahanamoku, were particularly important in this respect, setting in motion the transformation of surfing from a uniquely Hawaiian cultural activity into a pastime enjoyed by millions of people on every continent. Of these two early emissaries, Freeth remains the least well known. This is surprising, as it was Freeth, a mixed-blood Hawaiian regarded as perhaps the most skilled wave rider of his generation, who firmly planted the seeds of what would become California’s renowned surf culture.114 In 1907, he left Hawai‘i for the Golden State with letters in hand from Ford, Jack London, and the Hawaii Promotion Committee. His objective, wrote the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, was to “give exhibitions of Hawaiian water sports to the people of that section.”115 Within months of his arrival, the media bestowed upon Freeth a national reputation through the work of London, the celebrated author who took to the pages of Woman’s Home Companion that fall to excitedly relate his experiences months earlier in Waikiki. There, London watched Freeth “tearing in on the back of [a wave], standing upright on his board, carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.”116 London appreciated not only the young Hawaiian’s wave-riding skills but also his generosity in providing the celebrated author with a number of pointers when he himself took to the surf. Freeth’s reputation only grew when London’s article was reprinted the following year in England’s Pall Mall Magazine and then, in 1911, as a chapter in London’s travelogue The Cruise of the Snark.
The aquatic skills that had so enamored London, Ford, and the Hawaii Promotion Committee were the same skills Freeth brought with him to California, where he found work for two of the major developers of the period, Abbot Kinney and Henry Huntington. Kinney was the force behind the faux Italian development of Venice, just south of Santa Monica, while Huntington poured his energies into creating what he envisioned as “the great resort of [the] region” in nearby Redondo Beach.117 Both Kinney and Huntington paid Freeth—dubbed “the Hawaiian Wonder” while under Huntington’s employ—to give surfing exhibitions to the thousands of curious residents flocking aboard Huntington’s Pacific Electric Railway to the sandy shores of Santa Monica Bay.118 There, one contemporaneous account reported, “[m]any people daily gather to watch the Hawaiians in the surf . . . showing their skill in aquatic exercises.”119 Such dexterity in the waves, demonstrating how the ocean was a space that could be enjoyed rather than simply feared (as had until then been the case), marked the beginning of Southern California’s beach culture.
Duke Kahanamoku, who graced the 1914 Mid-Pacific Carnival poster mentioned earlier, is by far the better known of surfing’s early ambassadors. A five-time Olympic swimming medalist, the inspiration for the Duke’s chain of restaurants in Hawai‘i and California, and a man who has been immortalized in statuary from Australia to the American Midwest, Kahanamoku took surfing Down Under, offering beachside demonstrations in Sydney in 1914 and 1915 (as well as in New Zealand weeks later) that helped set in motion the creation of what is probably the world’s most vibrant national surf culture.120 Though subjected early to “wisecracks” by white American mainlanders about being “a Red Indian without feathers,” Kahanamoku demonstrated the seriousness with which he would have to be taken when, in August 1911, he shaved multiple seconds off the existing records in the 50-, 100-, and 220-yard swimming races.121 He would go on to win a handful of medals, including three golds, at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, the 1924 Olympics in Paris, and the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, in the process upending many of the white-supremacist beliefs of the era.122
Still, as with Freeth, surfing remained Kahanamoku’s greatest passion. His 1914 and 1915 demonstrations in Australia, while not in fact the first instances of board riding in that country, nevertheless marked what Grady Timmons called “the real beginning of the sport Down Under.”123 When Kahanamoku first took to the Australian waves in late December 1914, the Sun newspaper could not help but be taken by the “thrilling spectacle.” To the Sydney Morning Herald, it was a “magnificent display.” The Sunday Times was perhaps most effusive. “Nothing more remarkable in the way of a natatorial exhibition has ever been seen locally,” the paper declared without equivocation.124 People flocked to the beach to witness Kahanamoku’s “wonderful water feats.” The crowd that gathered for one exhibition “was the biggest that has ever congregated at Dee Why since the inland aboriginals came down to spear fish in the lagoon and dance corroborees round their shell-fish naps on Long Reef”; the estimated four thousand spectators gave Kahanamoku an ovation.125 While by no means solely responsible for the rise of Australian surfing, the Hawaiian went some distance in popularizing it. His wave-riding skills were in fact quickly exploited as a marketing spectacle: an advertisement for two carnivals sponsored by the Queensland Amateur Swimming Association proudly featured Kahanamoku poised on his board.126
Kahanamoku’s surf riding was met with similar enthusiasm in New Zealand. At New Brighton, a coastal community outside the South island city of Christchurch, the Hawaiian was welcomed by a “great gathering of people, the pier and beach being lined with spectators, and the champion got a great reception.” Unfortunately for those present, Kahanamoku had to limit his exhibition to body surfing instead of “standing on the board,” as “the calm day had flattened the sea.”127 Conditions in Wellington were more advantageous. There, recorded the New Zealand Times, an “unprecedented crowd” appeared at Lyall Bay “in anticipation of seeing the world’s champion swimmer . . . perform some of his famous feats on the surf-board. It was estimated that over 5000 were present, and the beach was black with people.” The Wellingtonians were not disappointed, “loudly applaud[ing]” Kahanamoku’s unusual aquatic “feat.”128 Another
