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Empire in Waves. Scott Laderman
Читать онлайн.Название Empire in Waves
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520958043
Автор произведения Scott Laderman
Серия Sport in World History
Издательство Ingram
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
Yet the Japanese attack quickly put an end to such visions of pleasant isolation. If the Japanese assault outraged the United States, it was also a reminder that Hawai‘i was not necessarily the pacific refuge that many Americans believed it to be. What had been tourist sanctuaries prior to America’s entry into the war quickly became militarized institutions serving the American war machine. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel on the shores of Waikiki, for instance, began functioning as “a haven for U.S. Navy submarine personnel between forays on enemy shipping”—it was leased to the navy for five years as a rest and recreation center for the Pacific Fleet—while “entanglements of barbed wire” lined the beach.141 Tourism and war quickly became conjoined—or reconjoined, as the case may be—as the islands served the “war time needs of hundreds of thousands of fighting men seeking relaxation between Pacific battles.”142 And Hawai‘i was not alone. California, which in the prewar years was a distant surfing outpost, underwent a similar militarization.
Wave riders in the Golden State numbered in the mere dozens—Matt Warshaw estimated about two hundred—during the 1930s.143 In part this was for structural reasons. The stretch of coast from San Diego to Santa Barbara that is today peppered with multimillion-dollar homes, parking lots, and fast-food restaurants was, prior to the Second World War, a sparsely populated strip of oft en difficult-to-access beaches. Most Americans did not own automobiles, and lifeguards were relatively scarce. And for people of color, the coast was virtually off-limits. Whether through prejudicial municipal codes, segregated housing patterns, or threats of white violence, the beach was—unlike in Hawai‘i—a space reserved almost exclusively for whites. Those white surfers who did venture to the water would spend their days in some combination of surfing, fishing, and diving, especially for the abalone and lobster that were abundant along the Pacific coast. Yet it would not be long before California, and especially Southern California, began to undergo major change. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the West Coast became an important region for American war time preparedness. Industry began cranking out military hardware as Japanese Americans found themselves tossed into isolated concentration camps. Uncle Sam wanted young men in uniform, and rationing and scarcity became the home-front norm. The long coastal strip, meanwhile, was transformed from a welcoming space into a site of potential attack. Indeed, a number of beaches along the California coast that are today popular surf spots—Malibu, San Onofre, and others—were deemed off-limits to the public for security reasons. To try to surf in such places was to flirt with treason. Wave riding could suddenly be illegal.144
Within a few years, however, the restrictions imposed by World War II would be replaced by the flowering of modern surf culture. The end of the war in 1945 heralded momentous developments. Most obviously, materials and technologies developed during the war enabled advances in surfboard design. While solid wood boards that required nearly superhuman strength to carry were increasingly being replaced by hollow boards in the 1930s, war technologies were enabling even newer designs that drew on balsa, marine plywood, fiberglass, polyester resin, and polyurethane foam.145 These lighter boards opened up the sport to countless newcomers. So, too, did the development of wetsuits—another beneficiary of war time technology, and one that was reciprocated when O’Neill began manufacturing “custom-tailored thermal barrier diving and surfing suits for [the] U.S. Navy.”146 The American security establishment benefited from surfing in other ways, too. Agents of the Office of Strategic Ser vices, the war time intelligence agency that preceded the CIA, used paddleboards, which they rode as surfboards, as reconnaissance vehicles.147 And it was announced in 1953 that an “underwater surfboard” had been developed with “potential value as a compact submarine for the [U.S.] Navy’s daring frogmen who swim in close to the enemy’s shores and ships.”148
But perhaps the most obvious explanation for surf culture’s explosive postwar growth was economic. With the massive expansion of the middle class in the 1950s there emerged a large demographic of American consumers who sought plea sure and leisure at the beach. Nearly all of them were white. For a number of these new beachgoers, especially after Gidget hit the big screen in 1959, surfing became a favorite, if still subcultural, pastime. The beaches of California—not to mention Hawai‘i, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere across the planet—soon resembled an endless sea of bronzed skin. It was, depending on one’s perspective, either a propitious beginning or a dismal end.
TWO
A World Made Safe for Discovery
TRAVEL, CULTURAL DIPLOMACY, AND THE POLITICS OF SURF EXPLORATION
PETER TROY WAS A LEGENDARY EXPLORER. His name may not resonate outside portions of the littoral world, but, to surfers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, it is every bit as weighty as those of Columbus, Cook, and Magellan. A thin, blond-haired Australian, Troy emerged as a highly regarded surfer when still in his teens, winning the Victorian novice surfing title in 1955. He might have remained a mere local figure had it not been for the postwar globalization of surf culture. In 1956, Troy’s Torquay Surf Life Saving Club hosted the International Surf Life Saving Carnival to coincide with that year’s Olympic Games in Melbourne. The carnival included teams from Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), South Africa, England, and the United States, and Troy, as the local titleholder, was asked to give a surfing demonstration. An estimated fifty thousand spectators were on hand to see the young Victorian work his way across the waves on his sixteen-foot hollow board. But it was the American contingent, riding shorter, lighter, and more maneuverable equipment—their “Malibu” boards were approximately nine feet long—that made the biggest splash. These American board designs inspired Australian replication, and the result was equipment capable of tackling breaks, such as Bells Beach, that had previously been considered unrideable.
This heralded a new era in the history of Australian surfing. The sport metamorphosed from an activity undertaken by lifesavers patrolling a particular beach to one in which individual surfers set out along the coast in search of the best possible waves. For some of these surfers, the local beaches were soon not enough. Working at the time as an accountant for Price Water house in Melbourne, Troy’s global yearnings—the seeds of which, he said, had been planted by the Americans in 1956—only intensified. “I had no desire to be an accountant but I wasn’t sure how to leave my job,” he recalled. “When I saw my first Surfer magazine, I saw a glimmer of hope. . . . I realized that here was another way of life.”1
Troy was twenty-four years old in 1963 when he left Australia, surfboard in