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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