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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