CAPTURING KAHANAMOKU: How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture, by Michael Rossi
For more than a century, surfing has been more than just a pastime in America — it’s also been an incredibly effective marketing gimmick. In the early 1900s, magazines and pamphlets featured images of sun-kissed macho men, perfectly posed on their surfboards as they cruised toward palm-treed shores, designed to drive Hawaiian tourism. By the 1990s, surf brands like Billabong and Rip Curl had a stranglehold on suburban malls across the country.
So it’s fitting that the science historian Michael Rossi’s latest book, “Capturing Kahanamoku,” isn’t really about surfing. Sure, it opens with a primer on 1,000-plus years of surf lore, and features Duke Kahanamoku, the “father of modern surfing,” but all of this serves as a jumping-off point for an engaging romp through the most consequential period of “race science” — i.e., eugenics — in American history.
In Rossi’s telling, it was a surf lesson Kahanamoku gave to a tourist in 1920 that proved pivotal to the establishment of eugenics as a respectable field of study — and the eventual basis of U.S. immigration policy.
That tourist was Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History and a major booster of the eugenics movement. Osborn became convinced that Native Hawaiians, once the “stateliest of people,” faced extinction in the wake of the “civilizing” influence of American governance; before that happened, he supposed, the superior white race should learn a few things about the health benefits of engaging with an “ancient” environment.
Osborn’s “idiosyncratic understanding of evolution, inflected by his religious upbringing, and cut with a deep admiration for strenuous living and a fear of showing weakness,” writes Rossi, led him to consider Kahanamoku, who was also a record-shattering Olympic swimmer, the “model youth.”
Osborn dispatched his colleague Louis R. Sullivan to catalog Hawaii’s peoples as a part of the museum’s mission to quantify racial “types.” Sullivan went door to door, measuring heads and comparing skin tones to colored glass bricks, flattening each of the roughly 3,000 people into ledger entries like “Haw[aiian] ¼, White ¼, Chi[nese] ½.” The apogee of this work would be a full-body cast of Kahanamoku, to be displayed at the Second International Eugenics Congress.
“Capturing Kahanamoku” is a tacit corrective in both subject and style. Rather than flattening his subjects, Rossi weaves together everything from Jack London’s fiction to plaster-casting best practices to Osborn’s daddy issues. Though at times protracted, these tangents are worth the ink.
That aforementioned ledger entry describes a schoolboy named James Apo, whose face was one of the 40 Sullivan cast to illustrate racial purity and “race mixing.” Whereas Sullivan created “cold, white faces” designed to represent archetypes, Rossi plumbs the archives to find that Apo was a Boy Scout and football player with a knack for building sets for school musicals.
“What Osborn didn’t see — what he couldn’t see, looking at history as a version of biology — were the accretions of everyday human choices and interactions and chance encounters,” Rossi writes. These mundane, ephemeral moments highlight just how bunk and inhumane “race science” really was.
In the end, Sullivan got his Kahanamoku cast, which was presented as a Native Hawaiian “Chieftain type” in the 1921 Eugenics Congress’s Hall of Man. But in one last twist of irony, the sculpture was not Duke Kahanamoku at all. Duke was a global celebrity, coming off two gold medals at the Antwerp Olympics; he had no time, or interest, in becoming a racial case study. At the last minute, his brother subbed for him. Osborn couldn’t tell the difference between the two men, and Sullivan never bothered to correct him.
Rossi’s history concludes with eugenics falling out of favor in America — by the 1930s, anthropologists like Harry Shapiro had convincingly disproved the immutability of racial typology. According to Rossi, Shapiro and his contemporaries would go on to foment the idea that human beings are shaped by culture as much as, if not more than, biology. This is where Kahanamoku’s real legacy resides, Rossi argues: as the good-will ambassador to the surf culture that we see today.
But the upbeat final chapter of “Capturing Kahanamoku” doesn’t fully persuade. Though Shapiro did become a vocal opponent of scientific racism, his role in the rise of cultural anthropology seems overstated. And unveiling Kahanamoku’s cultural legacy as some sort of surprise ending comes off as trite — he’s the subject of a robust biography and a documentary, and a statue of him stands outside the Surfers’ Hall of Fame.
One might forgive this, if surf culture weren’t whitewashed and presented as a panacea to racism and pseudoscience. It appears Rossi fell for the marketing hype.
Yes, the surfing Kahanamoku popularized was shaped by Hawaii’s multiculturalism and aloha spirit. But it was hardly insulated from mainland bigotry. As the sport took off in California, race-coded “locals only” breaks proliferated, and enforcers were a scourge to beaches well into the 1980s.
Despite Rossi’s observation that “we are living through a period of political and scientific revolution that uncannily mirrors the world of a century ago,” by book’s end he satisfies himself with a “Surfin’ U.S.A.” caricature of American progress and a vague proclamation that “the future is unpredictable.”
Still, “Capturing Kahanamoku” could be a valuable tool for navigating that future — as long as you aren’t lulled into believing the underlying prejudices of its story are just rogue waves in the distance.
CAPTURING KAHANAMOKU: How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture | By Michael Rossi | HarperOne | 262 pp. | $32
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