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

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FIGURE 2. Ford used his Mid-Pacific Magazine to promote Hawai‘i as the center of a U.S.-led Pacific stretching from Asia and Australia to the Americas. Surfing, as prominently featured on the cover of its inaugural issue, could, he believed, help lure those white settlers he thought necessary to cement American rule in the islands. Credit: Courtesy of the Hawaiian Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

Months later Ford penned a sequence of enthusiastic articles for Van Norden Magazine intended to entice white migration. “Hawaii is to-day the land of opportunity for the quick, active, courageous white man, and everyone from President Taft down wishes to see it conquered for and by Anglo-Saxon Americans,” he proclaimed.⁹⁹ In a piece entitled “Hawaii Calls for the Small Farmer,” Ford insisted that the “richest land in all the world . . . must be Americanized.” With the erection of “monster fortifications” for the U.S. military and the Panama Canal under construction—a canal that would only enhance the “strategic and commercial importance” of the Pacific islands—it was the duty of every “loyal citizen” who “understands something about the fundamentals of farming” to cooperate in America’s colonial endeavor. Ford approvingly quoted Charles W. Fairbanks, the second-term vice president to Theodore Roosevelt: “I would like to see this American territory occupied by those whose blood is the blood that ran through the veins of our ancestors.” He then proceeded to lay out how profitable Hawai‘i could be for the small farmer and invited him to accomplish the “patriotic result” of white dominance under eventual Hawaiian statehood.¹⁰⁰ “Here is the business center where Occident and Orient meet,” Ford had written a couple of months earlier. “[I]t is for the white man in America to say whether or not the opportunities, but beginning to open up, shall ripen and fall into his hands, or into those of the alien.”¹⁰¹