Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 1967"

The Impact of the Cold War on the Economies of California and Utah, 1946-1965

Abstract: IF A "DEFINITIVE" HISTORY of the post-World War II period in the United States is ever written, few subjects will loom larger in importance than the multifarious efforts of the federal government to maintain and enhance its defense posture in response to the cold war. To accomplish this purpose, 62 per cent of the national budget, or $776 billion, was spent on national defense from 1946 throught 1965.1 The full impact of this very substantial sum is impossible to measure precisely and difficult to imagine meaningfully, but all will agree that whatever its effect on the international "balance of terror," defense spending has been shaping, often dramatically, the growth patterns of several important regions of the United States since the cold war began. This fact has assumed special significance for the thirteen far western states.2 Although less than one-sixth of the nation lives in that region, in recent years one-fourth of all Department of Defense (DOD) military and civilian personnel,3 one-third of all military prime contract awards, including one-half of all DOD research and

The Montana Lumber Strike of 1917

Abstract: ON A SULTRY AUGUST DAY in 1917, United States Senator Henry L. Myers received a terse and dramatic telegram from five of his constituents in Missoula, Montana. The Industrial Workers of the World, they said, threatened the property and the lives of all the decent citizens of western Montana. "They are insulting the flag, belittling the authority of the government and are increasing in numbers. For weeks they have terrorized the lumber camps." The Missoula businessmen demanded that federal troops be sent at once "to disperse or arrest these.., .traitors."' The frightening telegram came as no surprise to Senator Myers. All spring and summer letters had streamed into his office predicting a reign of terror in western Montana. Federal troops had to be sent, something had to be done about brash, young United States Attorney, Burton K. Wheeler and the finely woven legal strictures of Federal District Judge George M. Bourquin. Citizens from Oregon, Washington, and Idaho likewise besieged their congressmen for action by the national government to suppress the Wobblies. Underlying the demand for action was the most spectacular and widespread lumber strike ever to occur in the United States.

The Russian Ukase and the Monroe Doctrine: A Re-Evaluation

Abstract: 1Ukase of September 4 [O.S.], 1821, Alaskan Boundary Tribunal, Proceedings (Washington, 1904), II, 25; for original text, see P. Tikhmenev, Istoricheskoe Obozranie Obrazovanie Rossiysko Amerikanskoi Kompaniy [Historical Survey of the Formation of the Russian American Company] (St. Petersburg, 1861-1863), I, approx. p. 27. The Ukase was signed by Count D. Guriev, Minister of Finance. The Italian mile is equal to one minute of latitude or 1,620 yards (4,860 feet); it is, therefore, 420 feet shorter than the English mile. It is also the same distance as the ancient Roman mile which Russia had carried over into the modern era. One hundred Italian miles is approximately thirty marine leagues, a limit chosen because of precedents found in both the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and the Treaty of Ghent (1814). George Davidson, The Alaska Boundary (San Francisco, 1903), 44-45. 2 Harold Temperley erroneously gives September 28 as the date of this decree, having added twelve days to the New Style date of the 16th; see The Foreign Policy of Canning, 1822-1827 (London, 1925), 104.

The American Trader's Image of China, 1785-1840

Abstract: A PERSISTENT ASSUMPTION in American historiography dealing with Sino-American relations is the belief that Americans held Chinese civilization in high esteem during the early years of the China trade, roughly 1785-1840. Recently, Harold Isaacs, in an introduction to his study of contemporary American images of the Chinese, characterized this period as one of "respect," followed by an "age of contempt" between 1840 and 1905.1 Given the treatment of Sino-American relations by American historians, it is difficult to imagine Isaacs coming to any other conclusion. The pioneer works on the subject by Kenneth Latourette and Tyler Dennett conceived of the period before 1840 as one during which China "inspired something of awe and even of envy" in the traders and missionaries in Canton, if not in Americans in general.2 This interpretation has been reiterated by George H. Danton and Foster Rhea Dulles and appears in many diplomatic histories of the United States.3 The first Anglo-Chinese conflict in 1840 dramatically destroyed the esteem enjoyed by the "Middle Kingdom," according to Latourette:

A Working Hypothesis for the Study of Migrations

Abstract: ALTHOUGH PORTLAND has become, in many other respects, more urbane than it once was, it has a long tradition of being a quiet, early-to-bed town. The story is told that in December, 1941, when practice emergency black-outs were ordered at a designated hour, the gay cosmopolites of San Francisco ignored the order and the lights, though dim in the bars, burned bright on the hills. Seattle's citizens so successfully blacked out that shops were looted, everyone had a riotous time, and, when the lights came on, life went on as usual. In Portland, the citizens turned out their lights and went to bed as they always did. For their idiosyncracies, Portlanders have no apologies. They are of the opinion that folk who live on the Willamette are "different" from those who live on Puget Sound, on San Francisco Bay, and in Greater Los Angeles. In turn, the residents of each of these areas would protest that they, too, are "different" from each other and from the provincials who live here. Observers have noted that Portland has been dominated by a village mentality that has made its citizens reluctant to face the facts of urban life. They have a tradition of being cautiously liberal in matters political. Oregon was "progressive" and accomplished progressive reforms before there was a Progressive party; there have been few major scandals in either state or city affairs. Portlanders are inclined to be publicly articulate, argumentative, and ambivalent with regard to community problems. As witness to our dilemmas, I mention a half-completed bridge across the Willamette which has been suspended in mid-air for two years while the public debated highway hookups. On the other hand, a citizens' committee tackled the problem of de facto segregation in the schools before there was an outright crisis, and apparently its plan has been

Shamans and Padres: The Religion of the Southern California Mission Indians

Abstract: THE PROCESS OF SECULARIZATION began in Alta California in 1834; soon the economic structure of the Franciscan missions collapsed, leaving only clusters of decaying mission buildings, the lands around them scattered among various landowners, and the Indian population dispersed and bewildered. Looking at only the materialistic aspects, even the Catholic historian of the mission period, Fr. Zephyrin Engelhardt, admits that the appearance was one of complete failure. He softens this conclusion by pointing out that these structures were only the "material means employed by the missionaries to accomplish their real object"-the conversion of the Indians.' And in this conversion, he states, the missionaries were successful. The Indians were not merely nominal Christians but continued the Catholic rites after the mission period, often without clerical aid.

The Most Thankless Task: Bryan and the California Alien Land Legislation

Abstract: SECRETARY OF STATE William Jennings Bryan's first contact with a problem involving the Far East arose on March 5, 1913, when the Japanese ambassador, Viscount Sutemi Chinda, spoke with him about renewed Japanophobia on the west coast and forwarded copies of anti-Japanese bills being considered by the legislatures of California and Washington.' Noting that there was no antiJapanese disturbance anywhere in the United States except on the west coast, where Japanese had congregated in numbers large enough to create what he believed was economically motivated unhappiness, Bryan wrote to President Woodrow Wilson that he could solve the problem by getting Japan to agree to "the dispersion of the Japanese in this country so as to relieve the economic pressure which has aroused the protest." Wilson thought the plan would spread rather than eliminate the problem and wisely vetoed it.2 On March 11 Bryan took home for study a draft on the subject prepared by Robert Lansing, aide to Counselor John Bassett Moore.3 On March 23, at Wilson's request, he wrote to Governor Ernest Lister of Washington

Scylla and Charybdis: The Anti-Imperialist Dilemma in the Election of 1900

Abstract: The leaders of the anti-imperialist movement began their attack well before the election year. Writing in May, 1899, Anti-Imperialist League Secretary Erving Winslow, in an attempt to influence party leaders and public opinion, stated "It is already sufficiently obvious to many of us that whatever leader with a single heart opposes imperialism at home and abroad.., .will be the next President of the United States." 1

Woodrow Wilson, the Russian Embassy and Siberian Intervention

Abstract: PRESIDENT WOODROW WILBSON opened one of the more controversial chapters in American-Russian relations when he ordered troops to Siberia in July, 1918. The expedition's announced purposes were simple enough: to guard military stores at Vladivostok, facilitate the evacuation of Czechoslovakian prisoners of war along the Trans-Siberian railway, and steady Russian efforts to defend themselves against the Central Powers. Undertaken in cooperation with the Japanese, it was described officially as part of the war effort. There would be no interference with the political sovereignty of Russia and "no intervention into her internal affairs." ' Before the

Sir Lala Sukuna and the Establishment of the Fijian Administration

Abstract: cated native (especially one not of a chiefly or warrior caste) who has separated himself from traditional, primitive virtue without (if only by reason of his color) becoming a European; there is indeed a vocabulary and a literature to express the distaste Professor Arthur Lewis once mentioned to a group of colonial service officers when he told them: "I am the kind of native you dislike most: the educated one." But occasionally traditional virtues and educated sensibility combine, especially in "brown" rather than "black" colonies, to earn British respect and so to achieve a dominance in colonial politics. Such was the case with Joseva Lalabalavu Vanaaliali Sukuna, the principal architect and the most eloquent advocate of the Fijian Administration which was set up in 1945. Sukuna was a high, although not the highest, ranking Fijian. In a society which traced descent and status through males, he was the grandson of Adi Asenaca, second daughter by his first legitimate union, of Cakobau, styled "King" of Fiji, who ceded the islands to the British government in 1874.2 Born in 1888, Sukuna was the first

American confrontation with opium traffic in the Philippines.

Abstract: eastern Asia in the early nineteenth century. The consumption of opium was then such a widespread, centuries-old habit in the Orient that most Westerners believed it to be endemic to the region. The Chinese were reputedly the greatest users of the drug, and Western merchants, particularly the English, made huge profits in supplying the Chinese demands. Moreover, the revenue derived from opium discouraged Western powers from making serious efforts to suppress the production and use of the drug in their own territorial possessions in the Far East.'

William Henry Seward and the Basis for American Empire, 1850-1860

Abstract: WITH THIS HASTILY COMPOSED BIT OF VERSE, William H. Seward succinctly expressed his conception of "American Empire." Although his ideas were not always original, Seward was one of the central figures in American expansion during the nineteenth century. The culmination of his career as an expansionist came with the purchase of Alaska in 1867. That event has thrown into the shade his equally significant espousal of "democratic imperialism" for two decades. As United States senator from 1849 until 1861, and thereafter as secretary of state, Seward helped to shape both the ideology and the actual progress of American expansion.2 Expansionism has been viewed as one of the keys to the American character. Indeed, the most important interpretation of American history, the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, posits free land as the main source of American democracy and a unique national experience. More recently, a number of historians have seen

The Demagogue and the Demographer: Correspondence of Denis Kearney and Lord Bryce

Abstract: IN 1870 ON THE EVE of his appointment to the University of Oxford as Regius professor of civil law, James Bryce made his first trip to the United States. Eleven years later and only a year after his election to Parliament for Aberdeen University, Bryce made a second American tour, a trip which took him for the first time to the Pacific coast. Two years later, 1883, a third trip brought him again to the United States. His third American sojourn found him in San Francisco both on his way to and from the Hawaiian Islands. These three visits gave Bryce the basis for one of his most important books, The American Commonwealth,a "an account of American polity." Published in 1888 in a three-volume edition in London and in a two-volume edition in New York, The American Commonwealth was widely acclaimed. The book's pithy and perceptive comments on the American political character and political patterns of behavior quickly earned for it the status of a "classic" in its field. Subsequently, the

The Stikine Territory Lease and Its Relevance to the Alaska Purchase

Abstract: THE REASONS WHY Russia was willing to sell her remaining American colonies in 1867 and those which persuaded the United States to become the purchaser have long been a subject of inquiry. Among the possible motives it has often been suggested that there was a mutual desire to limit British power in North America. Russia, it is claimed, was anxious to prevent her colonies from falling into the hands of the power which she had recently fought in the Crimea, and the United States, at least in the person of Secretary of State Seward, saw the transfer as a logical stage in the evolution of manifest destiny. Seward's motives have seldom been seriously questioned in the face of the abundant evidence he provided in his own speeches, but Russian fears of Britain have been discounted in recent studies. Chevigny, for instance, has commented that "some of the errors made by the old writers remain rooted to this day. The prime one has to do with Russia's motive for selling Alaska, which was not fear of Britain."' Chevigny himself attaches more importance to Russian-American friendship than to Russian-British antipathy: "there is the direct result that we have Alaska, which was for sale only to the United States, with whom the Russian government ... wished to seal forever a friendliness that had prevailed for over sixty years."2 This does not accord with opinions expressed in two recent histories of the Hudson's Bay Com-

Formation of the California Communist Labor Party

Abstract: IN OCTOBER, 1919, amid the wreckage of what had once been the powerful Socialist party of California, five militant left-wing members of the party's state executive committee met in Oakland to determine the organization's fate. By unanimous vote, with a bare quorum present, the committee endorsed formation of the Communist Labor party of America, sold all physical assets of the California Socialist party to one of their communist sympathizers, and urged all Socialist locals to affiliate with the newly formed communist organization. Within a month they launched the first state-wide communist party in California.' The Communist Labor party evolved from a half-century of Marxist agitation in California, but its immediate origin was to be found in developments in the California Socialist party after 1910. That organization, after a decade of minor achievements, had become a significant force in California politics. Socialist candidates won municipal offices and state assembly seats, and in 1911 the party nearly won control of Los Angeles. By 1914 state party membership reached an all-time peak, over eighty-two hundred members, with some three hundred locals scattered throughout the state, representing both rural and urban regions.2 But coincidental with this peak of activity came the outbreak of World War I and with it a decline in the socialist movement. Ameri-

The Politics of Water and Geography: California and the Mexican-American Treaty of 1944

Abstract: long time in coming, and understandably so, since it dealt with water -the arid West's single and most precious commodity. For nearly three-quarters of a century, the United States and Mexico had sparred with one another over rights to the water of their border streamsthe Colorado, Rio Grande, and Tijuana-until February 3, 1944, when they finally signed a treaty which they hoped would settle their differences. Unfortunately, not everyone shared their optimism and, among the dissidents, Californians proved the most recalcitrant. To them the treaty, particularly the provision giving Mexico Colorado River water, represented an unnecessary sacrifice of national security as well as a threat to the reclamation plans of southern California. Heightening their anxiety even more was the sheer magnitude of the Colorado River grant-1,500,000 acre-feet of water, enough to supply a population and industrial complex greater than that of New York City and Philadelphia combined. Once alarmed, the always water-conscious Californians, including hardened veterans of the Owens River imbroglio and of the Colorado River controversy with Arizona, used every means at their disposal to scuttle the treaty. Although the story of California's campaign and subsequent defeat has recently been told, at least one greatly misunderstood aspect of

The Wilson-McCook Scheme of 1896-1897

Abstract: THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TALE of diplomatic romance between the American republic and Russian tsardom had sufficient charms to soothe even the savage schoolboy. But, to many older Americans of diplomatic and business calling, the narrative, by 1896, had lost its appeal. Determined to use the markets of Cathay as balm for the Panic of 1893, many American political and economic leaders suddenly found in Russia and its Far Eastern policy, not a traditional friend, but a new and formidable foe. Contemporary accounts of pogroms and Siberian prison camps also put Russia in a bad light. Russian actions, culminating in the Li-Lobanov pact of early 1896, had reversed the balance of political power in China. English preeminence, for the moment, seemed gone. Now, instead, Russian diplomats most often prevailed at the Chinese imperial court; Russian engineers reaped the railroad concessions of Manchuria and hastened to complete the Trans-Siberian Railway across Chinese soil; Russian bankers (and their French backers) dominated the financial affairs of Manchuria and fared well in Peking itself in the bitter contest for China's war indemnity loans. In short, Russian power had increased markedly in China, especially in Manchuria, ultimate destination for the bulk of American exports. With this power came a capacity for perniciousness which, if used, might undo the American hope for an Open Door economic frontier in China. Most Americans feared the worst and saw in Russian ac-

Secretary Gresham, Senator Lodge, and American Good Offices in China, 1894

Abstract: ON DECEMBER 3, 1894, Henry Cabot Lodge, the junior senator from Massachusetts, introduced a resolution asking that the state department send to the senate all the correspondence from American diplomats in China dealing with the protection of Japanese subjects. Specifically, the senator wanted to know whether, during the Sino-Japanese War, there was an understanding with the Chinese government as to the assistance that American officers might render to the Japanese who had elected to remain in China. He also wanted to know whether Chinese officials were ignoring American officers who sought to protect Japanese subjects and whether the American consul general at Shanghai had delivered two alleged Japanese spies to Chinese officials for execution.'

The Scientific Source of Henry George's Evolutionary Theories

Abstract: his religious opponents saw. Asa Gray, it is true, felt that purpose might still be traced in the variations upon which Darwin built, although he knew that Darwin disagreed. Gray's continuing suggestions about adaptations and divine foresight eventually provoked Darwin's opposing statement in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.2 Darwin never changed his mind on the point but died convinced that his arguments against Gray had not been satisfactorily answered.