Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн
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By the latter half of the 1920s, wrote Jane Desmond, “surfing was an established part of tourist iconography and tourist itineraries,” and the covers of national magazines began to feature smiling surfers screaming down waves.133 Visitors who witnessed these water-bound athletes along the Hawaiian shores exclaimed it “hard to find a more graceful or exhilarating sight.”134 Even British artists and small-town New England newspapers saw fit to address this “most fascinating” and “picturesque phase of the island life.”135
FIGURE 5. How central was surfing to the marketing of Hawai‘i? The letterhead used by the Hawaii Promotion Committee during the World War I era is illustrative. Credit: A. P. Taylor to Franklin C. Lane, January 9, 1917, Folder: 9-4-60 Haw. Promotion-Comm. Pan Pac. Congress, Box 662, Central Classified Files, 1907–1951, Office of the Territories, Record Group 126, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.
By the mid-to late 1930s, tens of thousands of people were traveling to Hawai‘i every year.136 Indeed, the territory was increasingly viewed by Washington as a refuge from the Second World War. “I am sure you must be having exceptional success with the tourist business in Hawaii when so many other places are closed at the present time. [ . . . ] May [the war] never come to ou[r] beloved Hawaii,” one official told the executive secretary of the Hawaii Tourist Bureau in late 1939.137 The personal views of the official—the acting director of the Interior Department’s Division of Territories and Island Possessions—were likely representative of many mainlanders at the time. “In this tragic and war-torn world I would like to come back to Hawaii immediately and hole in somewhere on the Kona coast away from wars and rumors of wars,” she confided. But it was not just about escape, argues Jane Desmond. The “uncertain modernity of the 1930s” and the emergent “nostalgia for a pre-industrial past” made Hawai‘i appealing to “elite white mainlanders [who] could experience” a “more authentic life.” After all, the promotional literature suggested, the “paradisical Hawaiian . . . knew how to relax, how to live in gracious harmony with the environment, [and] seemed to have an abundance of plea sure in a time of scarcity.” Americans responded to this “alternative vision.”138 Tourists “keep coming . . . in numbers,” the Hawaii Tourist Bureau announced just days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.139 Once there, they were encouraged to rent a surfboard, ride the waves in an outrigger canoe, or take a surfing lesson.140