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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