“There are numbers of high-class surf-shooters in Honolulu, and some white people among them,” Kahanamoku told an Australian journalist, “but, as with every other game, a few can do better than the great majority. It was with the few I delighted to be.”130 In Australia and New Zealand, he in fact stood alone.
The young Hawaiian, who also gave surfing demonstrations on both American coasts and would go on to tout surfing’s exhilaration and health-giving qualities to America’s youth, received considerable press coverage during his wave-riding displays.131 More than anything, however, Kahanamoku, like his contemporary George Freeth, allowed his body to serve as his media. While operating within the racial constraints of a brown-skinned athlete in a white-dominated world, Kahanamoku demonstrated what it meant to be a surfer at a time when a common vernacular for the pastime did not exist.132 Some media would speak of “surf-board swimming.” Others would refer to “surf bathing” or “surf shooting.” What ever the term, Kahanamoku and Freeth demonstrated, through their skills in the water, that their ancestral pastime not only had survived the missionary onslaught of the nineteenth century but, spearheaded by these same supposed racial inferiors, would again thrive in the twentieth.
Though not at first. It would not be until after World War II that surfing really began to enjoy explosive international growth. Given the crippling nature of the Great Depression, the slow global expansion of the sport during the interwar period is hardly surprising. Still, in Hawai‘i, people continued to find joy in the waves. This was true during World War I, when the letterhead of the Hawaii Promotion Committee, which was dominated by an image of surfers at Waikiki, happily pronounced that the islands were “Out of the War Zone,” and it remained true in the years that followed.
By the latter half of the 1920s, wrote Jane Desmond, “surfing was an established part of tourist iconography and tourist itineraries,” and the covers of national magazines began to feature smiling surfers screaming down waves.133 Visitors who witnessed these water-bound athletes along the Hawaiian shores exclaimed it “hard to find a more graceful or exhilarating sight.”134 Even British artists and small-town New England newspapers saw fit to address this “most fascinating” and “picturesque phase of the island life.”135
FIGURE 5. How central was surfing to the marketing of Hawai‘i? The letterhead used by the Hawaii Promotion Committee during the World War I era is illustrative. Credit: A. P. Taylor to Franklin C. Lane, January 9, 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.
By the mid-to late 1930s, tens of thousands of people were traveling to Hawai‘i every year.136 Indeed, the territory was increasingly viewed by Washington as a refuge from the Second World War. “I am sure you must be having exceptional success with the tourist business in Hawaii when so many other places are closed at the present time. [ . . . ] May [the war] never come to ou[r] beloved Hawaii,” one official told the executive secretary of the Hawaii Tourist Bureau in late 1939.137 The personal views of the official—the acting director of the Interior Department’s Division of Territories and Island Possessions—were likely representative of many mainlanders at the time. “In this tragic and war-torn world I would like to come back to Hawaii immediately and hole in somewhere on the Kona coast away from wars and rumors of wars,” she confided. But it was not just about escape, argues Jane Desmond. The “uncertain modernity of the 1930s” and the emergent “nostalgia for a pre-industrial past” made Hawai‘i appealing to “elite white mainlanders [who] could experience” a “more authentic life.” After all, the promotional literature suggested, the “paradisical Hawaiian . . . knew how to relax, how to live in gracious harmony with the environment, [and] seemed to have an abundance of plea sure in a time of scarcity.” Americans responded to this “alternative vision.”138 Tourists “keep coming . . . in numbers,” the Hawaii Tourist Bureau announced just days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.139 Once there, they were encouraged to rent a surfboard, ride the waves in an outrigger canoe, or take a surfing lesson.140
Yet the Japanese attack quickly put an end to such visions of pleasant isolation. If the Japanese assault outraged the United States, it was also a reminder that Hawai‘i was not necessarily the pacific refuge that many Americans believed it to be. What had been tourist sanctuaries prior to America’s entry into the war quickly became militarized institutions serving the American war machine. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel on the shores of Waikiki, for instance, began functioning as “a haven for U.S. Navy submarine personnel between forays on enemy shipping”—it was leased to the navy for five years as a rest and recreation center for the Pacific Fleet—while “entanglements of barbed wire” lined the beach.141 Tourism and war quickly became conjoined—or reconjoined, as the case may be—as the islands served the “war time needs of hundreds of thousands of fighting men seeking relaxation between Pacific battles.”142 And Hawai‘i was not alone. California, which in the prewar years was a distant surfing outpost, underwent a similar militarization.
Wave riders in the Golden State numbered in the mere dozens—Matt Warshaw estimated about two hundred—during the 1930s.143 In part this was for structural reasons. The stretch of coast from San Diego to Santa Barbara that is today peppered with multimillion-dollar homes, parking lots, and fast-food restaurants was, prior to the Second World War, a sparsely populated strip of oft en difficult-to-access beaches. Most Americans did not own automobiles, and lifeguards were relatively scarce. And for people of color, the coast was virtually off-limits. Whether through prejudicial municipal codes, segregated housing patterns, or threats of white violence, the beach was—unlike in Hawai‘i—a space reserved almost exclusively for whites. Those white surfers who did venture to the water would spend their days in some combination of surfing, fishing, and diving, especially for the abalone and lobster that were abundant along the Pacific coast. Yet it would not be long before California, and especially Southern California, began to undergo major change. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the West Coast became an important region for American war time preparedness. Industry began cranking out military hardware as Japanese Americans found themselves tossed into isolated concentration camps. Uncle Sam wanted young men in uniform, and rationing and scarcity became the home-front norm. The long coastal strip, meanwhile, was transformed from a welcoming space into a site of potential attack. Indeed, a number of beaches along the California coast that are today popular surf spots—Malibu, San Onofre, and others—were deemed off-limits to the public for security reasons. To try to surf in such places was to flirt with treason. Wave riding could suddenly be illegal.144
Within a few years, however, the restrictions imposed by World War II would be replaced by the flowering of modern surf culture. The end of the war in 1945 heralded momentous developments. Most obviously, materials and technologies developed during the war enabled advances in surfboard design. While solid wood boards that required nearly superhuman strength to carry were increasingly being replaced by hollow boards in the 1930s, war technologies were enabling even newer designs that drew on balsa, marine plywood, fiberglass, polyester resin, and polyurethane foam.145 These lighter boards opened up the sport to countless newcomers. So, too, did the development of wetsuits—another beneficiary of war time technology, and one that was reciprocated when O’Neill began manufacturing “custom-tailored thermal barrier diving and surfing suits for [the] U.S. Navy.”146 The American security establishment benefited from surfing in other ways, too. Agents of the Office of Strategic Ser vices, the war time intelligence agency that preceded the CIA, used paddleboards, which they rode as surfboards, as reconnaissance vehicles.147 And it was announced in 1953 that an “underwater surfboard” had been developed with “potential value
