that he viewed favorably the sort of racist violence popularized by the Ku Klux Klan, but it is incontestable that he embraced the racist suppositions of the post–Civil War era.
Ford’s reporting was peppered with encomiums to the spread of white civilization, and it is hard not to imagine him viewing the Pacific islands as a laboratory in which could be realized his ideal white American society. Ford, to be sure, was hardly alone in embracing this mission.58 A short book published by the American officials who overthrew the monarchy was clear about its authors’ desire “to increase [the islands’] civilized population by accessions from without” and to “attract . . . desirable settlers.”59 Yet Ford rose above most of his contemporaries in being more vocal, per sis tent, and tireless than others. Indeed, by 1917 Sunset magazine was pronouncing him “Hawaii’s best booster and the busiest man in the mid-Pacific.”60 And, crucially, Ford possessed the ideological convictions necessary for such a colonialist project. In his turn-of-the-century dispatches, Ford had already been praising the opening of Asia to American and British industrial influence, a region where, he predicted, “will be expended much restless energy of the Anglo-Saxon race”—so long, that is, as the “Anglo-Saxon push” did not “give way before the wily Slav” or “the agile, hardy Jap.”61 But even such nods to transatlantic racial solidarity would soon be ditched for a capitalist enthusiasm that was distinctly American in character. In a 1901 piece in New England Magazine, for instance, Ford proudly celebrated the displacement of Europe an might by the power of American manufacturing and mechanized agriculture. From the country’s “new colonial dependencies” (“our far off Philippines,” for example) to Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe, the “American idea is making a triumphant sweep the world over.” The “vast and seemingly limitless resources” of the United States “make her prominently the land of promise for all time,” Ford proclaimed. And “when to this is added the intelligent, almost divinely inspired population we possess,” he wondered, “can such a country produce any other than a race of master workmen?”62
In Hawai‘i Ford saw both promise and peril. Shortly before his arrival in 1907 he had rediscovered the “actual practical possibility” of “Christian socialism” at the American Colony in Jerusalem. The Holy Land inspired the South Carolinian. He revered the selflessness, fraternity, and perseverance of the Americans in the Middle East, and he marveled at their willingness and ability to demonstrate American beneficence.63 The United States, Ford believed, was an inherent force for good. This had implications for Hawai‘i, which Ford wished to see populated by waves of white Americans who might marshal the territory into statehood. Peopling the islands with his fair-skinned compatriots would become, for the restless mainlander, a personal crusade of the utmost moral necessity. The onetime South Carolinian not only took to the nation’s press but even set out across the United States itself in an effort to encourage such settlement.
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
