In this conversation with Michael Rossi, associate professor of the history of medicine and author of his recent book about Duke Kahanamoku Capturing Kahanamoku: How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture, we explored how a surfing legend became the subject of a eugenics campaign in 1920s America, and how he resisted it.
Rossi traced his discovery of an archival order form requesting “the cast of David Kahanamoku,” which led him to uncover how eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborne became obsessed with Hawaiian surfers as supposed paragons of masculinity. The discussion revealed Duke’s quiet resistance where he avoided the invasive process of being “cast” in plaster by sending his brother David in his place, a switch that went undetected for a decade. Rossi also underscored the striking irony that eugenicists studying Hawaii’s multiracial society remained so fixated on measuring racial types that they missed the vibrant culture flourishing around them. Connections are also drawn between 1920s eugenic certainties and today’s debates about genetics, identity, and oversimplified solutions to human complexity.
Lecturer bio:
Michael Rossi is a historian of science and medicine in the United States from 1800 to the present. His research focuses mostly on sensation, aesthetics, and the modern (human) body; and also, sometimes, on whales. He is the author of The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America (U Chicago Press, 2019); and Capturing Kahanamoku: How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture (HarperOne, 2025). In addition to the History Department, he is a faculty member in the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science; the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization; and the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.
Prior to Chicago, Michael was a postdoctoral fellow in the Groupe Histoire des sciences de l’homme at the Ecole Normale Superieur de Cachan in France. He received a PhD in the history and anthropology of science, technology, and society from MIT and an AB from Columbia University.
Transcript:
Seth Green: Oh. We are thrilled to have you here for our conversation with Professor Michael Rossi about how a surfing legend and a scientific obsession redefined race and culture. And I am, on an afternoon like this one, especially grateful to say I’m Seth Green, here at the University of Chicago Graham School. And I’ll just apologize in advance that I have a hoarse voice, and Michael has a cold, but we are full of ideas and can’t wait to jump into a discussion with all of you. And so with that, I will just welcome you to our snowy campus, a place where big ideas are born that change the world. And then I will take down my screen so that we can see our guest today… There we go. Hello, Michael. Welcome.
Michael Rossi: ASAP.
Seth Green: For those of you who don’t know Michael Rossi, he is an associate professor of the history of medicine. He is Chair of Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science and the college. And he really is a very unique historian who looks at science and medicine from the 1800s all the way to the present in the United States, and his research focuses on sensation, aesthetics, and the modern human body, as well as sometimes on whales. He originally came out as an author with The Republic of Color, published by UChicago Press, and now he has written with a trade press, and this one to great acclaim, including review in the New York Times. And so, Michael, to get us started in this discussion, as I mentioned, you’re a historian of science and medicine, and I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about what led your interest at that intersection.
Michael Rossi: Oh, thanks, yeah, absolutely, and thanks, Seth, for, for hosting this, and thanks, everyone, for, for taking the afternoon to join us. I’m really looking forward to the… to the conversation that we have. So the… the way that I got into this… so my work always is at the intersection of medicine, human sciences, and, you know, culture anesthetics, generally. And the way I got into it was sort of a peripatetic path, but before coming to graduate school, I was a graphic designer in New York, and I used to work mainly for, mainly for fashion magazines, but I did a brief stint with the New York City Department of Public Health, and so I was the… I was the guy that, you know, made the Get Your Flu Shot posters and stuff that one would see in the subway. And so as part of that, as part of that… that work, I started to go to the… so the New York City, the public library there has a… has an archive of public health posters, or a collection of public health posters. So, just to get inspiration, I would go and look at public health posters of the past. And I remember there was one… one poster in particular, like, really just sort of, got under… my skin, or blew my mind, I don’t know how you’d say that, and that was a syphilis eradication poster from the 1940s that featured a brontosaurus, for… for some reason. It said, you know, like, it said something like, you know, eradicate syphilis, and then there’s a beautiful woodcut of a brontosaurus. And just as someone who is constantly, at that point, thinking about, well, how do you communicate health? This… this really blew my mind. I was like, you know, what does the brontosaurus have to do with syphilis? Does the brontosaurus have syphilis? You know, are we making the brontosaurus as… should we make syphilis as extinct as a brontosaurus? If so, why the brontosaurus and not another dinosaur? And so, the more… and so the… I sort of started to… do more research into that, and long story short, you know, Smash Cut 5… 5 years in the future, I was, I was engaged in a history and anthropology of science program. That interest sort of captivated me enough.
Seth Green: Well, so that’s how you come to this interest with science, medicine, and culture. But now I want to get to where this specific story of a surfing legend began for you. Was there an archival hook? What led you to interest in this particular book?
Michael Rossi: Yeah, so, there was… there was a, there was this moment where I was in graduate school, it was probably 2010, I would guess, maybe even before that, 2008, and I was doing some research on a totally different topic at the American Museum of Natural History. And I found… and historical research is just largely, largely just reading people’s old mail, you know, so you’re just, like, going through boxes and boxes and boxes of people’s, you know, letters and 9… 9 tenths out of the time, they’re not very interesting. They’re… they’re lists of things that they need to do, or… you know, notes that someone called and will call back, or sort of the banalities of everyday life, but in one of these boxes, I found a… an order form from the Peabody Museum at Yale to the Museum of Natural History asking for what they called the cast of David Kahanamoku, which I… which I took to be… was a cast of a person, from the anthropology, you know, made from one anthropology department to another. And this struck me as sort of unusual, because it’s rare for the subjects… it’s rare for anthropological subjects to be named at all in this period. So this was from the 1920s. And, even more rare, I discovered, so I did some following up on who this David Kahanamoku person was, and I discovered he’s the brother of Duke Kahanamoku, who’s a famous surfer, so he’s known in the 1920s as an Olympic swimmer and a movie star, but he’s really known today mostly as the person who popularized surfing beyond Hawaii, particularly in the mainland U.S. and in Australia. And so that’s, you know, so again, it was kind of, kind of a… not… not unlike the dinosaur question in a way, I just… I just suddenly… I started thinking, well, why is this… why do… why do… why is this person in the archive? Why is… why is he… why is there an anthropological sculpture of him? And so I started teasing that thread apart. And then… Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Seth Green: Well, yeah, so it’s a perfect segue to the next question. I know everyone on the Zoom is going to read the book eventually, but if they haven’t yet read the book, can you talk a little bit about the snapshot of the story, just to kind of lay out… what’s happening, and then we’ll dig into pieces of it and why it matters, but I just want to give everyone, essentially, like, a plot overview of what happens for Duke and kind of how he becomes, unexpectedly, at the center of this eugenicist movement.
Michael Rossi: Great, yeah, so, so the book is… so the book is sort of a… it has two… tells two parallel stories that… that sort of keep crossing and then diverging, crossing and then diverging. The first story is the… it’s a very sort of human story of, of this fellow Duke of Hanamoku and his, and his family, too. So his brother David, and his… his brother Sargent, especially. It’s a family, family of, of watermen, of people who are famous surfers and swimmers. They’re sort of renowned as, as athletes. And, so that’s… one part of the story tells their story, and then the other part, sort of… the story really picks up where their… their lives continually intersect with these eugenicists, mainly from the Field Museum… mainly from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but also the Field Museum. So basically, this clique of physical anthropologists becomes, obsessed with the Kahanamoku family in particular, and with surfers in general as… as paragons of… of masculinity. You know, like these, these very, you know, like, as though they are the… some sort of ideal form of… of human, and so, if you’re a eugenicist in the… and museum exhibitor in the 1920s, you know, you… the people that were obsessed with them view them almost as, like, living fossils, and so if you’re a museum exhibitor, what do you do? Well, you dispatch a team to go and, and sort of, capture these people, both in… both by measurement, by photography, and also at its… at the… at the most extreme by, by covering, you know, so they’re very interested in covering people entirely with plaster and taking plaster casts, because that’s how you can replicate a person, fully. And so the book just follows these two, you know, the, the lives of the common brothers as these, eugenicists attempt to measure them and, and objectify them, and sort of, tells, like, the ways that they variously turned this program back against itself and managed to, ultimately, I suppose, managed to escape the, you know, the worst of the objectification.
Seth Green: All right, well now let’s walk through this story in a little bit more detail, and so I want to start where you do, Michael. You open with a primer on Hawaiian surf history. and really the rise of modern surf culture. What did you want readers to understand about surfing before jumping into Duke’s story, and how eugenics come to see surfing? In the context of their goals.
Michael Rossi: Well, I think that one thing that I really wanted to… people to understand about… about, first of all, you know, about surf culture in Hawaii, but also about, sort of, the history of Hawaii and its interactions with the U.S, was just the… the richness of, the richness of… not just surf culture, but of, of, you know, Hawaiian, artistry and architecture and agriculture, you know, before, before the coming of Europeans. And, you know, particularly vis-surfing, you know, we think about, and certainly the first Europeans to encounter surfing, we’re sort of baffled by this… they were sort of baffled by this act. I think now surfing is a well-known sport, and of course, you know, it’s a major industry, but for ancient Hawaiians, it was also a, you know, it was a source of, of spiritual pleasure, or it was a spiritual act. Surfing was a spiritual act. It was a show of political power in some cases. It was a, you know, an activity that you do to, to, to flirt, or to, it was part of seduction, and, and of course, it was also, it was also, fun. It was a source of communal gatherings, so it had this really rich, it had this very, sort of, deep and integral place, with Hawaiian culture, and then, you know, it goes into… notionally, it goes into notional decline after the coming of Europeans, and particularly after American annexation, although I’d be at pains to say it never disappears, of course, because there are practitioners who sort of keep it alive, and then by the time Duke hits the… hits the scene, it’s coming back into… sort of coming back into a spotlight.
Seth Green: Well, so Duke hits the scene, and so you’ve already given a little bit of this, but give us the full picture of Duke, who he is. You mentioned Olympian, you mentioned popularizer of surfing. But, you know, he really held an iconic status, and I’m wondering if you could just describe, you know, this iconic 1920s figure.
Michael Rossi: So, yeah, he’s this… he’s this sort of fascinating figure. He’s, so at the time, he was known for being just, an Olympic gold medalist. He’s just an incredibly fast swimmer, actually generally a really incredible all-around athlete, and sort of… put, you know, sort of, put Hawaii and Indigenous Hawaiian people, like, in the forefront of certainly the American and perhaps the world imagination through his athletic feats. Within Hawaii, he was also known as just a spectacular surfer, although the connoisseurs would say that actually David and his brother, Sam might have even been better surfers, but that’s… that’s, that’s neither here nor there. And, and even more fascinatingly, you know, and so these are two things that he’s mainly known for. He also had a film career briefly, so he tried to break into Hollywood, so he is, he’s incredibly charismatic, if you ever have a chance to see any, him on film. He’s just, the man really shines on camera. One of these ironies is that he’s very, by all accounts, very, very shy. So, you know, he would, didn’t like to talk to reporters. He was… when someone would ask him to… to… give a toast or something, he would play a ukulele and sing a song instead, right? He really didn’t like to, like to orate, but on film, he just, you know, he really comes to life. And so that’s… that’s who he is. And then, I should, I should also add, and so this is what he’s known for, but then he has all this, this other, this other facet to him, where he’s also this… a sort of a… almost, I would say, like, an economic innovator in some ways, so he’s… growing up in… so Hawaii in the 1920s is this outpost of… it’s like an American colonial outpost, and it has this sort of booming monopolistic sugar economy, and it’s at the… at the crossroads of the Pacific. And yet, there’s not a lot of… there’s not a lot of economic opportunity for, for Indigenous Hawaiians, and so he’s, one of the things that Duke was innovative in was, sort of, hustling a living with his, with his, with his various, associates, so they would… they called themselves, or they were called Beach Boys, so there’s sort of the original Beach Boys, before the 19… the 1960s singing group, and so they would just, you know, they would sing at night, they would teach people surfing and fishing and swimming, to the increasing numbers of tourists, and they basically managed to sort of carve out this really, improvisational, but quite organized, quite structured living, in this sort of… in the maelstrom of American colonial capitalism in the 1920s, which was… not something he’s credited with a lot, but it’s really quite impressive, too. To, to, to find out about.
Seth Green: Okay, so if our main character is Duke. There is another character in this book who looms large in a, I guess, more insidious way, and that’s Henry Fairfield Osborne. And, of course, you know, he had been the leader of the museum that you worked at. Maybe you can talk a little bit about him, and then tell us what he was doing in Hawaii in 1920, and what his role is in this story.
Michael Rossi: Sure, yeah, so, yeah, Henry Fairfield Osborne is, as near as there can be an antagonist, I suppose, in history, because, you know, is the, is the person who is… who becomes… he’s a… he’s the president of the American Museum of Natural History. He’s, you know, the scion of a… of a wealthy, ultimately wealthy, like, railroad-attached family, so, like, he’s one of these… comes from one of these families that, made a tremendous amount of money in the Gilded Age, and he’s sort of at the pinnacle of New York society. He’s a… he’s a paleontologist by training, and so, that’s, you know, that’s sort of… and he revolutionizes museum display, and then he’s also an ardent, ardent eugenicist. So, and in this case, I should say, like, eugenicists are people, sort of, you know, from 18… well, I mean, we… there’s… we could talk about whether there is still eugenics today, but the sort of high eugenics were these… the premise… the premise of eugenics, I should say, is that society can be perfected by, by refusing to let, certain people reproduce, and by accentuating reproduction in other people. And so eugenicists believe that, desirable qualities like thriftiness or industry… actually, they believe that most human qualities are heritable rather than teachable, and that the, the elites of society are elite because of their, their genes, and, so society, you know, society can be perfected by, manipulating its genetic stock, which is what they would say, or their… its heritable stock. And of course, desirable stock tended to be, tend to be the… the kinds of qualities in people that most lined up with, elite, wealthy white people, and less desirable people would be, immigrants and non-white people. And, and so, this is… Osborne is one of the… is a eugenicist, so he’s a person who believes that the future of society is in its… is in its genes, and he’s also very worried about what they would call race mixing at the time, so he’s, you know, if you’re in the 1920s, you see, there’s, you know, America is a land of immigrants, of course, but, particularly if you live in New York, there’s… there’s mass immigration, you know, following the Civil War, there’s, you know, emancipation of… of, Black Americans, and so, all this really freaks eugenicists out. And so, one of the ways that Osborne thinks that you can sort of research, eugenics is by going to Hawaii, because Hawaii, again, recently acquired by the U.S, is, I don’t want to be too Pollyannish, but by mainland lights, it’s a functioning multiracial democracy, so people from all over the world come to Hawaii, you know, there, of course, there are, of course. Indigenous Hawaiians, there’s white people, there’s Portuguese, or there’s white Americans, rather, there’s Portuguese people, there’s Black Americans, there’s people from Japan, people from China, people from the Philippines, and, you know, and they all… again, there’s… I don’t want to paint too Pollyanna a picture, but, you know, there’s plenty of, sort of, like, labors organized on ethnic lines, and there’s plenty of strife, but there’s also people from all over the world living together, having children together, you know, sending their kids to school, and… in Hawaiian society doesn’t collapse because of this, and so eugenicists like Osborne are very, they want to know, they want to know why, and so Osborne goes to Hawaii to investigate this, this phenomena. He meets Duke, more or less, as I can tell by… sort of by happenstance, and takes a surfing lesson from him, and becomes just, obsessed with… with Duke as this, as a, again, as a paragon of masculinity, as the sort of, like, what humankind used to look like in its past, and maybe, hopefully, what white humankind could become.
Seth Green: Well, so during this time, the eugenics movement is growing, and I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the anxieties that you’ve already described a bit, but that are really on the minds of a lot of individuals in this 1920s period, and how that leads to eugenics growing, because in some ways, that’s connected to then what happens with Osborne, and how he then thinks of Duke, and the casting, and all these other pieces. I’m curious if you can… we’ll kind of come into the story, then come back for context now, and then we’ll come back into the story.
Michael Rossi: Yeah, so, I mean, I think that, yeah, so eugenics was, the term eugenics was coined by the, British statistician Francis Galton in, 1883, I believe, if you got that date right. And, you know, as I said, it was… it referred to, like, the perfect… the… what do you call the perfectibility of humankind by manipulating its, its genetic stock. And I should say that the United States was not the only place that had a eugenics movement. Eugenics was sort of a worldwide movement. Obviously, if, outside the United States, different people had different ideas of what an ideal person would be, so there’s… not all eugenicists were into the perfection of white humanity, but certainly in the United States, that was the… that was the goal. And I think the appeal was really, like, you know, so I touched on some of the anxieties, you know, sort of massive demographic shift, massive industrialization, you know, the urbanization, like, all these things sort of had, had sort of… worked on the imaginations of, of white elites, and I think eugenics just offered a really… it was popular because it offered a simple… a simple solution to complex problems, right? So it’s… it sort of held out the idea that, well, you know, we have this complex, pluralistic society, but, you know, anxieties about crime, anxieties about, what they would call degeneration, anxieties about, you know, the place of America and the world, all can be dealt with just by, just by, again, manipulating, genes and genetics. So kind of a monocusal solution to a panoply of problems, which are really much more complex. And so, it offered a… it offered a… easy solution. That also happened to, flatter the prejudices of its adherents, so.
Seth Green: Well, so coming back now to the story. So, that’s the context. People like Osborne are looking for… this kind of perfect specimen. He takes a surfing lesson, sees Duke as such. Talk about, now, they want to cast Duke. They want to use Duke as the aspirational role model. What happens, and how does it end up that you later see the cast of his brother? As the outcome.
Michael Rossi: Right, so, so what happens is that Osborne, you know, gets back from Hawaii and is completely fixated on Hawaii, in general as a great place to study this quote-unquote problem of race mixing. There’s so many quotes, problem, quote-unquote, quote-unquote, race mixing. And he dispatches this young anthropologist, a guy named Sullivan, to the, to the, to Hawaii to… to take casts of people, so if you’re… so, I should… I should back up and say that, at this point, the concept of a gene is fairly new, right? So, there’s no DNA. People are kind of, like, they know what a gene is, but, even people like Thomas Hunt Morgan, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the, you know, the chromosomes are genetic material. Even Thomas Hunt Morgan’s like, it’s really hard to explain what a gene is in this period. And so, if you want to capture the same way that we take a… that we’d, you know, take a DNA sample from a person that we wanted to, catalog their genetic matter. They don’t really do that, but you can cover someone’s face in particular in plaster, and then, you know, you have the… this fine, a fine recording of their features, which was really important to Eugenesis, because they were constantly trying to correlate things with, like, things, basically, they’re… that you’re trying to correlate things that can be measured with things that can’t be measured. So, like, I don’t know, distance between eyes, does that say… if we can measure that, does that say correlate to someone’s capacity for thrift, or… civic society, or musical ability, or whatever. I mean, you could sort of spin these out endlessly. And so, yeah, so they send this team of anthropologists to go and cast, Duke. Duke is not into it at all. He doesn’t leave… he doesn’t leave lots of written records, but from what I can tell, he was just… he’s just creeped out by it, I mean, it seems like. And so, for a year, this, these anthropologists sort of, you know, kind of, you know, sort of chase him around, try to, try to, coerce them to come in, and to come into their studio and be cast. All the while, they’re also doing this sort of survey, and they’re casting other Hawaiian people, and they’re taking a lot of photographs, and they’re taking lots of measurements. And luxury sort of, eventually the… territorial governor of Hawaii leans on Duke to come in and get cast, because another part of the story is that Duke is sort of… he’s a celebrity, but he’s sort of permanently short of money, like, he’s… he can’t… he can’t parlay his Olympic status into anything, all that lucrative, and so the governor of Hawaii says, listen, I’ll give you a job as the official Hawaiian greeter. But first, you have to go and get cast. And then at the last minute, Duke sends his brother, David, who looks a lot like him, and they… cast David instead, the eugenicists cast David instead, and, he has such a bad experience that, that he… that David says, okay, no more, like, none of my… none of my other family members are… are working with, eugenicists ever again. And, and so they box up this cast of David and send it back to the Museum of Natural History, and Osborne is none the wiser, so Osborne only finds out, like, maybe 10 years later that that’s not actually a cast of Duke, and is quite miffed about it.
Seth Green: Well, so, Michael, this is a great story in its own right, it’s fascinating, it’s got a narrative quality, but I want to dig into what lessons you think it speaks to more broadly. And so, I’m curious if you could talk about some of the themes. I mean, one for me is that a narrow lens can really obscure reality. And I don’t know if that, you know, was something that really felt, thematic to you, but I’m worried if you could talk a little bit about that.
Michael Rossi: Yeah, very much. I mean, I think it’s that… that is, again, when I… it’s a… very much a parable for our… for our own time, quite unintentionally, when I first started working on this, I wouldn’t have thought… I wouldn’t have thought that that would marry up quite so well with lived experience in, you know, that 1920 would seem so much like, the 2020s. But I think that is… one of the big lessons is that, for… for Osborne, and for these, these people who are so fascinated with measuring people and so fascinated with, you know, the state of society. They really only see the state of society in terms of a very narrow sense of what a human is. That a human is just their genetic stock. And so, one of the things that emerged when I was researching this book that was just, kind of head-spinning to me, was just the ways in which, these eugenics have spent so much time, in Hawaii, and so much time interacting with Hawaiian people, and, like, that could have immersed themselves in this, amazing, sort of, improvisational, social and cultural world, but all they were interested in, and all they could see was just, you know, Hawaiian people as… all they… all they could do is objectify Hawaiian people as racial types, and that’s the sole thing that they were interested in, and so, even while they, you know, thought that they were… they thought that they were thinking about society, but, he, but instead, they were really thinking, you know, they just had such narrow blinkers that they missed this, I mean, they sort of missed the popularization of surfing, they missed the creation of this whole new, this whole new economy, they missed the social and, you know, the dynamic social upheavals that were going on all around them, and so, and of course, I think that was, you know, to the… obviously, certainly to the detriment of, people in Hawaii, but also, I think, to the detriment of, of, science, and of course, insofar as, you know, eugenics then, exploded into, World War, you know, led to World War II, I’d say that, you know, there was a, to the detriment of humanity more broadly.
Seth Green: Well, so I’m gonna start some of the questions in the chat. We have one from Jerry. Do you see the Duke vs. Osborne confrontation as an investigation into temperance, a spiritual practice of science and medicine?
Michael Rossi: Can you clarify what you mean by temperance?
Seth Green: We’ll see if he can put that in the chat. While we wait for that, maybe I’ll go to Evan Ho’s question. Did Osborne, as a eugenicist, only study physical characteristics and not intellectual, etc?
Michael Rossi: Oh, so he… yeah, so he was… these are physical anthropologists, but no, they were very interested. The goal of eugenics is… is to correlate physical characteristics with, what I would call, like, social or cultural characteristics. So… they would be very interested in something like, and a lot of the time, physical characteristics were just glossed as race, so they’re very interested in questions of race and intelligence, for instance. But they’re also interested in, again, things like musical ability, or scientific genius, or, you know, like, I encountered one index of the kinds of intellectual traits that they’re in that… people were into, this guy, Charles Davenport, he was, you know, a tendency to go to sea was, like, tendency to be a sailor was something else that… eugenicists thought was genetic, a love of weird, quote, and I quote directly, a love of weird things is also genetic, apparently. So… so yeah, they were very interested, in things like… in trying to figure out correlations between physical traits and mental traits. I will also say, and especially, like, things like intelligence, so they were early adopters of intelligence tests, but of course these traits are… really difficult to measure, so this is why… it’s, you know, this is… it’s a pseudo-scientific effort, I should say.
Seth Green: Michael, can you talk a bit about your sources? And, you know, how you… kind of validate, you know, the intentions of Duke and others in this story.
Michael Rossi: That’s a great question, yeah, it’s… so that’s… that’s something that I’m very careful about, because one doesn’t want to, it’s very easy, it’s very easy and very tempted to sort of psychoanalyze people from the past. But fortunately, and, but fortunately, you know, the… particularly for scientists, so scientists leave a lot of writings, where they talk about their intentions. So, the intentions of eugenicists are absolutely clear, and they, they publish newsletters, and they write letters back and forth, and so, you can really get a good sense of, you know, the internal debates among eugenicists. Much harder to study someone, like Duke, who is, you know, he’s not, he doesn’t… he doesn’t… hasn’t left that big of a written record. As I said, he doesn’t love doing interviews, so there aren’t that many interviews with him. I was able to find there are some, like, some fragments where, he talks about political things, so he is… he’s a… he is… you know, he’s not a… he’s an athlete, but he’s not… he’s not a meathead, right? He’s not, he’s… he’s interested in the world around him, he’s interested in politics, he’s interested in improving, lives for, for Hawaiian people, but it’s much harder to get a sense of his motivations. And for that, for that, a lot of it comes from interviews with his family members, the, his brother David… actually, I interviewed his, his, David Konamoku’s son, so David Kanamoku has a son who’s, who’s alive, so he was generous enough to, to talk about his dad, and so that seemed to say, a reliable… a reliable source. And then finally, there’s some… one of the highlights was there’s a spectacular series, the University of Hawaii did a series in the 1980s, I think 1986 or thereabouts, of interviews with people who had grown up in Waikiki, in the 1920s, and so, Waikiki in the 1920s was kind of a swampy backwater, and so, again, you get the sense of this really, rich, multiracial community where, you know, it’s… they sort of recall just, like, being roving gangs of kids, and, you know, you get a sense of the industry and the way people interacted, and so that was, again, mainly just from people reminiscing, which was really it. Really a wonderful spotlight on… on what life was like.
Seth Green: So I want to turn a bit, Michael, to the writing of the story, because your first book was with an academic press. This one is with a trade press. Talk to us about that change, why you wanted to, make that transition, and then how. you know, how did it differentiate your writing process? How did it change the way that you wrote and what you wrote compared to if it had been for an academic audience alone?
Michael Rossi: Thanks. I mean, yeah, so I was, I was back and forth on whether to do this with an academic press or a… or a popular, like, a trade press. I think ultimately, you know, I… What’s the Milton line about not praising fugitive and cloistered virtue? Is that the… some words to that effect. I feel like it’s very… I would say this, I feel like now, more than ever, it’s important, where possible, to… to try to reach wider audiences, and, you know, especially in, you know, I mean, I… I… I don’t wanna… rely too much on cliches of, you know, like, low attention span and, like, you know, like, news coming in from Instagram and from social media sources, but I really do think it’s… more necessary than ever to make a case for why history’s important, what… what history can tell us, and really how… you know, my ultimate hope would be that, you know, in reading a book like this, people would, get an expanded… expanded view of the possibilities for, you know, I don’t know what existence or life could mean for, you know, for just people personally and communities. beyond, you know, beyond just surfers and Hawaii and… and scientists. So that was the… that was the motivation behind you can go with the trade press, and then, but the process is really different, so, it’s a lot harder. I mean, that’s the… my takeaway is it’s a lot harder to write for trade press, because, in academic writing, you have a lot more free reign, to sort of really, well, as you can tell, like, I’m a professor, so I can talk endlessly, right? And same… similarly, I can write endlessly, and you know, I would… I wrote, like, a… for part of the book, I wrote this, you know, 12,000-word, treatise on, on surfing in Hawaiian history, and, you know, my editor was like, this is great, but can you make it, like, 500 words? 200 words? And I was like, you know. And, you know, some whole chapters were cut that I thought were, you know, that at first I thought were essential, but now I understand that, you know, the goal is, the goal is partially to, to deliver a more immersive experience and a less analytical one. So, it was a humbling experience, but in… love it in the best of ways.
Seth Green: One, you know, one thing I notice is that you tell the story, it strikes me intentionally to engross the reader. So, you know, you don’t give us everything at once, as you’ve maybe done here. You really kind of walk us through the moments. You feel, viscerally, some of these encounters. Can you talk about how you thought about structuring this and really bringing in the human element so deeply?
Michael Rossi: Yeah, I mean, that was, I think, one of the… one of the really important parts, especially as I was, you know, because this is a really personal story about this… about this family, and, you know, actually, in some ways, you know, two families maybe putting it to, it’s maybe a too superficial use of the word family to describe eugenesis as that, too, but there’s two communities, right? There’s a family in Hawaii, and then there’s this community who are, you know… also constantly… also constantly bickering, and who, you know, really… I think it’s… and I’ve… I’ve been criticized about this at talks before, but I really wanted to give a sense of what eugenicists were thinking, not to… not to validate their, not to validate their program, but really to show that, you know, a lot of, a lot of, people who are perpetrating what I think is pretty… I mean, it’s… I don’t use the word evil lightly, but it’s an evil program. I nevertheless thought that they were… thought that they were doing good. You know, and again, because they had such a blinkered view of what humankind should be, they really, you know, they, you know, they thought that they were on the side of Ray, which, was just… continually blew my mind, and so I really wanted to give people, an immersion into, both what it’s like to be, you know, what it was like to live in Hawaii and have this sort of, like. This sort of eugenic threat from the mainland, sort of looming, and, and yeah, and again, since it’s a very human story, you know, one could tell a really analytic story, or a… structural story or a political story, but I think, you know, the people… the people really came through, in… in the archival record, so I was hoping to give readers a sense of, I guess, what I was feeling when I was sort of identifying with some people and, you know, really, recoiling from others, and so…
Seth Green: Well, so you talked about some of the themes. I’m curious if you could talk about how you think this idea set may be relevant to today. I mean, you know, in the sense of how we perceive others, how we think about aspirational identities. You know, we’re obviously in a moment where we are in a very, you know, hot contestation of how to think about identity. whether to think about identity. I’m curious, you know, what lessons you draw from this book to debates that we are currently engaged in.
Michael Rossi: Well, yeah, I think that, I mean, I… I… I think that we are currently in a moment of, once again, you know, falling into this sort of… falling into the danger of simple solutions for really complicated problems and, or really complicated questions, right? And so, I think one thing that the story… I mean, so one thing, of course, is that there’s, just a sort of a persistent drumbeat of, which tries to sort of speak about humans in terms of genetics, which is way more sophisticated than the… in 2026 than in 1926, but still has some of the same, in my view, some of the same faults of, you know, trying to correlate, well, a particular gene, or a cluster, you know, clusters of genes with things like academic success, or income, or even, you know, things like IQ, which is a notoriously spurious measure, because who knows what intelligence is anyway. But, it’s still, people… still use it, people still post about it, we have, and especially, I mean, especially now, we have figures in high government and… and business, sort of, re… regenerating, eugenic ideas, in a sort of unvarnished and unapologetic way. So, in part, I mean, in part, I think that this story holds a… you know, it’s sort of one of the lessons of the story is that this stuff didn’t go away, it sort of reverberated into our own time. But the more optimistic thing is that also, I think that Duke’s story in particular is one about negotiating identity, and how, you know, he was very, he was… and again, this is… this is one thing I can say, that his… his own words and thoughts come out very clearly. He was very proud of being, of being Hawaiian, right? He has a very strong sense of Hawaiian identity, but he was also, he was also very, like, improvisational as well, right? And so, so in many ways, you know, he is… you know, this is… people were trying to sort of pin down or quantify his identity for this entire story, and his own… his own actions continually, eluded that effort, in ways that I think are… we could… we could take, for us today, for ourselves today.
Seth Green: So, we have a number of questions that have populated the chat. A few minutes left, so we’ll make these power rounds, Michael. Yeah. The golden men in James Meichner’s Hawaii, I don’t know if you came across it, but the question is, is that a response to the eugenics movement?
Michael Rossi: Oh, I don’t know. That is a… that is a 100% don’t know.
Seth Green: David Yamada, has a maybe similar question in that he’s trying to wrap his head around the thought of eugenicists plopping themselves in the rich melting pot of Hawaii. His family, both sides, are from Hawaii, going back to the early 1900s. Could you say more about how the eugenicists regarded the people of Hawaii generally?
Michael Rossi: Sure, well, so they regarded the people of Hawaii with, I mean, I guess, in general, it was a sort of a trepidation and bafflement, right? So they were… they… again, they were unsure how, how such a community… how such a, you know, a community… which, again, I… I keep saying this, not… not… not an ideal or not a… not a utopia by any means, but, certainly it was a well-functioning society, and so eugenicists were like, well, how can such a well-functioning society, how can we, you know, be composed of so many races? Like, you know, what… how is this even possible? So, so that, is, you know. what, that’s what spawned this whole research project. And then reciprocally, one of the really interesting things about research is that the people of Hawaii didn’t.
Seth Green: Michael, can I ask, was there a goal, though, in some ways, as far as you can tell, to show it wasn’t actually successful? Like, I would think that they would be worried about a counterexample that could disprove their entire… Meaning.
Michael Rossi: So this is the thing, is, like, eugenicists, they are… they consider themselves scientists. So, one of the… again, one of the very pernicious things about eugenics, and we still see this in scientific racism of today, is that they consider themselves scientists, and they thought that they were asking… they thought they were being open-minded, and they were going in asking just a question. And yet, of course, they calibrated all their… you know, anytime they would look at the data, they would just sort of re, it would re, reconfirm their prejudices, yeah. And in fact, just the last fact about this is that their study really did show that actually there’s no degeneration to… to society. I mean, this is not going to be news to anyone here, but there’s no degeneration to society when, people of many races live together. But the data from Hawaii was used… was misused, in front of Congress when they were passing restrictive 1924 legislation, so they put up a big chart and said, look, the data shows that Hawaii’s a degenerating society, and we shouldn’t let any more immigrants to the United States, because ours will… and of course, it’s not a… that’s not what the data said at all, but they were able to just say that.
Seth Green: So final question, Michael, comes from Madeline. She asks. Osborne didn’t question his views in light of Duke, essentially. I mean, so, I think it’s fair to say he saw Duke, even though this is not necessarily accurate, almost as, single race, is that right? And so, Duke was viewed… as almost the exception, just place Duke within that broader storyline.
Michael Rossi: Oh, yeah, so Duke was, so Duke was descended from, so Duke was descended from, retainers to Hawaiian royalty, and, so, eugenicists are also obsessed with purity, and so Duke was seen as a… as a rare example of a pure Hawaiian specimen, to use the… to use the terms that they would. And so, yeah, and so… so the question, though, is… yeah, Osborne did not change his mind. He was… he was really just very fixated on, the idea that… that surely, you know, again, he had this… there’s the myth of the disappearing Indigenous person. He thought certainly, you know, the Hawaiian race was due for extinction, because it couldn’t quite come to grips with modernity, and, you know, no matter how, you know, no matter how much he, interacted with Hawaiian people, or, you know, or even followed Duke’s exploits in the newspapers, of which they’re all over. There’s no evidence that he ever… no evidence that Osborne ever stopped and said, well, maybe I’m getting this wrong. Again, because it’s sort of a… a very, a very tightly focused and kind of immovable view of humanity.
Seth Green: Well, Michael, thank you. This has been an extraordinary conversation. It’s about a sobering story, but you tell it well, and you help us all understand it, and… bring that insight into our own world. So, thank you, and thank you for two talks this week. Michael was kind enough to talk in person with our community at the Cleecher Center on Tuesday, so we’re grateful for a doubleheader with you on a great book.
Michael Rossi: Well, really my pleasure. Thanks so much, thanks so much, everyone, for attending, and thanks for the great questions, and I look forward to reading them more, too.
Seth Green: Alright, well, you, I hope, feel better, I hope all.
Michael Rossi: I do as well.
Seth Green: what both of us appear to have, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with future events with everyone here. Have good afternoons, everyone.
Michael Rossi: Afternoon, everyone.
