haole elite, with its membership rolls populated by judges, political leaders, and many of Hawai‘i’s leading businessmen.75 Ford was its first elected president; the annexationist Sanford B. Dole was its second.76 There is a good deal of uncertainty about precisely how the Outrigger came about.77 There is less doubt, however, about why it was created. The “main object” of the club was “to give an added and permanent attraction to Hawaii and make Waikiki always the Home of the Surfer, with perhaps an annual Surfboard and Outrigger Canoe Carnival which will do much to spread abroad the attractions of Hawaii, the only islands in the world where men and boys ride upright upon the crests of the waves.”78 Or, as Ford wrote in 1910, the club began when “several malihinis, or newcomers, . . . recognized the picturesque charm to the tourist of surf-board riding, an art that was rapidly dying out owing to the fact that Waikiki beach was becoming closed to the small boy of limited means.”79 Given the steady construction of beachfront hotels and residences, the Outrigger would ensure coastal access to people of “limited means.” This ability of locals to reach the water would encourage the practice of surfing, which in turn, Ford believed, would attract free-spending tourists to Hawai‘i. And he was right. The tourists did show up, though Ford would later come to rue his success. Surfing, he wrote in 1931, had been “one of the greatest assets toward bringing the confounded tourists to our over hospitable shores,” where they were becoming a “nuisance” and a “calamity,” though an “inevitable” one.80 But this frustration was years away. In 1908 the future looked bright.
There was, moreover, an additional and more immediate reason for the Outrigger’s founding. With the planned visit to Hawai‘i of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet in the summer of 1908, the club, it was believed, could provide an excellent showcase for what was uniquely Hawaiian. This meant the Pacific islands’ most popular water sports. “What better way to demonstrate the charm and culture of old Hawai‘i than for the Navy men to experience first hand [sic] the regal sports of surfing and outrigger canoeing!” one history of the club proclaimed. The Outrigger thus organized two major efforts in anticipation of the visit. It “placed dozens of surfboards and some forty outrigger canoes at the disposal of the Navy men,” and it sponsored a “water carnival” for the visiting personnel—an event that was, by all accounts, a tremendous success. The carnival featured a “surfboard contest” between approximately twenty surfers, the most impressive of whom seemed to be Harold Hustace, whose wave-riding skills prompted cheers from the beach.81 There was also an organized regatta that, together with the “most thrilling event,” the surfing competition, drew an estimated four to five thousand spectators. This was a remarkable turnout; one press report called it “probably the largest crowd that has ever gathered at the swimming beach.”82 The success of the planned activities undoubtedly pleased two of the Outrigger’s charter members, territorial secretary (and Theodore Roosevelt appointee) A. L. C. “Jack” Atkinson and Hawaii Promotion Committee member Hart P. Wood. Both men had assumed leading roles in the fledgling club, allowing their offices to host its first organization al meetings. In the wake of the July events, the future looked promising. Yet these developments were notable not only for the details of what transpired but also for what they collectively represented: an early confluence of the histories of surfing, tourism, and the military.83 Indeed, Ford believed surfing to be favorably linked to American military power. The water sports pursued at the Outrigger Canoe Club, he later ghostwrote for the U.S. secretary of the interior, had made “the boys of Honolulu grow up into great[,] strong[,] athletic[,] and daring men” who proved “most valuable” to the United States in the First World War.84
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
