Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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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 He worked with the film production company Pathé to create a surfing motion picture.⁹⁵ He even founded his own monthly publication, the Mid-Pacific Magazine, which ran for twenty-five years. Mid-Pacific’s inaugural issue in January 1911 was dominated by images of surfing on its front and back covers, and its first article, replete with numerous photographs, was entitled “Riding the Surfboard.”

It might seem startling that that first article appeared under the byline of the Hawaiian surfer and swimmer Duke Kahanamoku.⁹⁶ But that inaugural issue also contained a stark reminder of Ford’s racialist and colonialist vision—an acknowledgment, as it were, of the extent to which surfing and the American empire had become entwined. Ford included a posthumous article by the congressman Abraham L. Brick extolling “our outpost in the Pacific.” Strategically and commercially, Brick wrote, the Hawaiian Islands “are destined to become the isles of the ocean,” and it was incumbent upon Americans to ensure that they “eventually come into the union a white man’s state.”⁹⁷