Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 1971"

The Political Context of a New Indian History

Abstract: Power" only shortly after social scientists became aware of "PanIndianism" and the "Urban Indian." People learned that Indians rather than having disappeared through extermination or assimilation number more today than they have for perhaps a century and a half and that their representatives employ new techniques to assert old demands. To some scholars all this appeared to be nothing short of a "renascence" in Indian life and affairs.' In line with these trends, the great desideratum in writing Indian history becomes putting more of the Indians into it. In short, American Indian history must move from being primarily a record of white-Indian relations to become the story of Indians in the United States (or North America) over time.

Filibustering to Formosa: General Charles LeGendre and the Japanese

Abstract: Japan's expedition to Formosa in 1874 was apparently neither successful nor significant. A group of restless samurai were temporarily provided with an outlet for their aggressive tendencies; a portion of the island inhabited by aborigines was subdued at some cost by Japanese forces but then restored to China; and the Meiji government seemed to disavow any intention of further expansion at China's expense. However, an examination of the causes and consequences of the event sheds some light on the origins of Japanese expansionism during the Meiji period, China's position in international affairs, and the growing American role in East Asia. Of special interest is the role played by a naturalized American citizen, General Charles W. LeGendre, who served as a counsellor in the Japanese Foreign Office and military adviser to the Formosa expedition. Although LeGendre held no official American position, his role in this incident is illustrative of the expansionist tendencies of many Americans in east Asia who promoted an imperialist course against China--or any weakly governed area-by any power strong enough to effect it.1 The expedition grew out of Japan's turbulent domestic scene and

The Indian and the Civilian Conservation Corps

Abstract: A RECENT STUDY OF the Negro in the Civilian Conservation Corps gives an appalling picture of racial prejudice and discrimination in a program which is usually considered as the most enlightened and progressive of the New Deal. The author shows that Negroes had suffered terribly from the depression before 1933 because of job displacement and lack of welfare facilities. Even after the advent of the New Deal, southern administrators refused to select a fair share of Negroes for the CCC, and the black enrollees, when admitted, faced constant hostility and segregation both within the organization and from whites near the camps. Robert Fechner, director of CCC, consistently accepted such conditions and refused to support Washington subordinates who sought to remove at least some of the discrimination against Negroes.1 Did Indians in CCC, like the Negroes, demonstrate an acute need for the economic and rehabilitative benefits of CCC only to receive a token share in the program? In terms of depression privations, the Indian's condition often paralleled or exceeded that of the Negro. Indians, with few exceptions, lived in chronic poverty even during the prosperous 1920s. The Meriam Commission reported in its voluminous independent study of 1928 that 46.8 percent of American Indians lived on a per capita income of $100 to $200 per year, while only 2.2 percent received incomes over $500 per year.2 The Indians' situation became worse when the depression

MacArthur and the Missionaries: God and Man in Occupied Japan

Abstract: As THE VIRTUAL SOVEREIGN of Japan from 1945 to 1951, General Douglas MacArthur played an active role in reorienting Japanese religious life. "I had to be ... a theologian of sorts," he noted shortly before his death in 1964; the Japanese "needed spiritual leadership as well as material administration."1 Thus far, historians of the occupation have refrained from discussing the religious role of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP).2 Yet MacArthur considered the religious aspect of his work to be of great significance. Addressing a group of his admirers in 1955, the general stated: "No phase of the occupation ... has left me with a greater sense of personal satisfaction than my spiritual stewardship."3 Surely it is time to examine this relatively unknown facet of MacArthur's career. Both before and after taking command of the occupation forces in

The Hindu Conspiracy in Anglo-American Relations During World War I

Abstract: WHEN THE SO-CALLED "Hindu conspiracy" of 1914-1917 was emphasized for the first time in the pages of this journal in 1948, Giles T. Brown offered two explanations for the fact that this important Indian revolutionary movement was so little known.1 First, it had failed, and its failure had plunged it into the obscurity with which the short range perspective of contemporary history so naturally clouds abortive political movements. Second, the conspiracy had been unearthed just at the time when the United States entered World War I and this coincidence caused it to be quickly overshadowed by more stirring events. Certainly the long neglect of this remarkable episode in IndianAmerican relations required some explanation in view of its denouement in a spectacular trial in San Francisco in 1917-1918. During 1917 the federal government indicted 105 persons of various nationalities for violating the neutrality of the United States by using American territory as a base for German supported schemes to promote a rebellion against British rule in India. Only thirty-five of the accused were apprehended and brought to trial, but the number would have been larger if many conspirators had not escaped indictment by serving as witnesses or informants for the prosecution. Of those tried, nine were German citizens. They included the former consul-general at San Francisco, the vice-consul, the military attache, and two minor consular officials. The remainder consisted of nine American citizens (four of

The "Warfare State": History of a Concept

Abstract: AN ACCUSATION IS ABROAD in the land which, if unfamiliar until recently, is far from as unprecedented as is often supposed. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the assertion that political, military, and industrial interests are conniving to perpetuate crisis is frequently taken today to be a new phenomenon and, like the "complex" it purports to attack, the product of an extraordinary "cold war" situation. Yet charges of this kind, either in whole or in part, have many times been heard before in other contexts, and in words strikingly similar to those in use at present. This essay is intended to point up the considerable history of such ideas and their developing interrelationships. Thus, the focus is primarily upon the concepts themselves and not upon the forces that shaped them nor upon the objective reality of what observers thought they saw. In pursuing this emphasis, I desire in no way to denigrate the importance or the seriousness of the sociostructural changes which were and are occurring, but simply to assist the further definition of a field in which there has been an astonishing lack of dependable scholarly work.1 At

The Fatal Confrontation: Early Native-White Relations on the Frontiers of Australia, New Guinea, and America: A Comparative Study

Abstract: MOST INVESTIGATORS who have given serious study to man in prehistory tell us that Stone Age peoples in many parts of the world evolved a culture that gave them a reasonably satisfying life largely governed by the ecology of their habitat. On the Pacific islands, in Australia, and in North America, although patterns of life varied, native cultures seem to have put little strain on the land and biota. The beliefs and institutions of native people encouraged them to live in balance with the natural resources. For example, there are few instances of native peoples killing off animals that were a part of their food supply. The Pacific islanders who lived in delicate balance with plant and animal life evolved a culture governed by specialized tropical and oceanic environments. To a degree, the same generalization can be applied to the aborigines of Australia and to many North American Indians. In fact, all three peoples, including the ancestors of the native people of Papua-New Guinea, possessed a remarkable knowledge of plants and animals in their habitat and generally lived a life that today's conservationists would praise very highly indeed.'

Empires in Conflict and Cooperation: The Bostonians and the Russian-American Company

Abstract: THE FIRST INSTANCE Of Russian-American convergence in the Pacific area occurred along the shores of present-day Alaska toward the end of the eighteenth century. Trade was the primary motivation and furs were the enticement that impelled Russians and Americans alike to sail thousands of miles to reach this fog-enshrouded and Indianpopulated coast. The men who sailed from the former British colony of Massachusetts and those who sailed from the Russian colony of Siberia were both of that breed best described as merchant-adventurer. The history of their relations is a curious mixture of competition and cooperation. It was not long before both the Russians and the Americans were requesting their respective governments to protect their trade in this remote area then known as the Northwest Coast.1 This first convergence of Russia and the United States in the Pacific that began in the 1780s with the meeting of Russian and American merchants in Alaskan waters ended in 1824 with the meeting of Russian and American plenipotentiaries in St. Petersburg. American scholars have been interested primarily in the competition between the Russians and Americans and the negotiations that

The Protestant Mission and the Opium War

Abstract: IN THE SPRING OF 1834, at the moment when the East India Company had just lost its monopoly of the China trade, and the several score private English merchants at Canton were at last free to buy and sell as they pleased, the Protestant Mission in China consisted of exactly seven persons. There was Robert Morrison, who had come to China in 1807 for the London Missionary Society; E. Coleman Bridgman, who had arrived in 1829 for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Karl Gutzlaff, a German, once sponsored by the Netherlands Missionary Society, now on his own; Edwin Stevens, of the American Seaman's Friend Society; two more Americans, S. Wells Williams and Ira Tracy, sent out by the American Board; and a single Chinese, Liang Afa. These were the seven. Five years later, on the eve of the Opium War, when resident English, Parsee, and American merchants formed a community of well over two hundred, there were still only a dozen. "A feeble band," one of the missionaries had early called it, "ridiculous in the world's eye, going to convert China"; and facing, one might add, difficulties so thick and insurmountable that nothing seemingly could cut a path through them save an act of God.1

The Writing of American Indian History: A Status Report

Abstract: NEARLY TWENTY YEARS AGO, in a conference on early American Indian and white relations sponsored by the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, William N. Fenton looked forward to the day when an Institute for American Indian History and Culture might "arise from the smoke of prairie fires" with perhaps an L. H. Morgan chair in American ethnology and a Sequoia Press for American Indian languages. He even suggested forming a new conspiracy to promote a Pontiac lectureship in American Indian history. The era hoped for by Fenton has not yet arrived but we have, nevertheless, come a long way toward the goal. The writing of American Indian history is thriving. Organizations for those involved in the writing of Indian history have been formed. Indian studies programs have been established at a number of universities. True, much of the impetus for the recent support of Indian studies comes not for historical but for racial reasons. Nevertheless, the movement is, I think, a healthy one, and one that will not die with the waning of racial animosities or concern. Because of the wide diversity and varied histories of the numerous "tribes, bands, or other identifiable groups of American Indians" (to use the catchall phraseology of the Indian Claims Commission Act), the bulk of the ethnographic and historical literature on the American Indian is devoted to individual tribes rather than to the Indian or to Indian-white relations generally. I will cite a few examples of such works-those primarily historical in content-written by both his-

Kiowas, Comanches, and Cattlemen, 1867-1906: A Case Study of the Failure of U.S. Reservation Policy

Abstract: IN THE DECADE from 1865 to 1875 the United States government located most of the Plains Indians on reservations. There was almost unanimous agreement among the whites that this was the native American's best hope of survival. Friends of the Indian outdid each other in praising the reservation as an incubator in which the evolution of the primitive tribesmen might be accelerated. Yet a quarter-century later there was ample evidence that the reservation had not done the job. What had gone wrong? Perhaps the concept had fundamental faults, but also it is true that the conditions considered necessary for success were rarely all present. One of these was isolation. There were two and a half centuries of ex-

Tradition and Opportunity: The Japanese Immigrant in America

Abstract: IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY Japan began experiencing far-reaching demographic changes which manifested themselves in a wide variety of ways. One of these was the Japanese attempt to gain political hegemony in Asia; another was the development of "a continuous and ascending movement of Japanese emigration."I The thrift and perseverance of those migrants whose ultimate destination was the United States are well known, as is the hostility shown them by white America. But the story of the internal differentiation of the JapaneseAmerican community has been, in the main, untold.2 This paper, based on retrospective evidence gathered by a structured interview schedule administered in the early 1960s to a representative sample of Issei (Japanese immigrants) living in the continental United States, will attempt to examine statistically the circumstances of the migration and some of the long-term consequences for those who undertook

Josiah Royce, Historian in Quest of Community

Abstract: LAST YEAR, WHEN the Pacific Coast Branch met at San Diego, our hosts were celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of Spanish settlement. The anniversary applied not only to San Diego and California but to all the Pacific Coast north of Mexico as well. Since the Spaniards came first after the various nations of what we used to call prehistory, it was also the anniversary of European settlement, and some spoke of two hundred years of California history. The history of the written history of California and of the Pacific Coast is somewhat shorter. One hundred years ago, in the spring of 1870, Hubert Howe Bancroft moved into the quarters that he had built for his historical library on Market Street in San Francisco, and the next year his assistants began to copy and arrange notes from which he hoped to prepare a history.1 He published the first volume of his Pacific States of North America in 1882, the first volume of his History of California in 1884. The first histories of the Pacific slope that significant numbers of people still read as well as consult appeared several years later, in 1885 and 1886: Charles Howard Shinn's Mining Camps and Josiah Royce's California, subtitled A Study of American Character.2

Colonial Origins of the United States: The Turnerean View

Abstract: AT THE 1948 MEETING of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association Max Savelle read a paper on "The Imperial School of American Colonial Historians" which discussed the tendency of scholars writing on early American history to assume either an imperialist or nationalist point of view.1 The Imperialists, among whom were Herbert L. Osgood, George Louis Beer, Charles M. Andrews, and Lawrence H. Gipson, assumed that since the colonies were integral parts of the British Empire, "their history should be studied as the history of parts of the Empire." The Nationalists, including George Bancroft, John Fiske, and Edward Channing, took an entirely different view of early American history. They looked to the colonial period for the origins of the United States. Such is the broad division into which colonial historians had cus-

The Abrogation of the Gresham-Yang Treaty

Abstract: One of the most distinguished scholars on China has pointed out that there is no study of Sino-American relations as seen from the Chinese side. American historians, he notes, have concentrated on those Far Eastern problems of the greatest interest to Americans.' While his observation was intended as a general criticism of the historiography of Sino-American relations, it seems most appropriate when considering our handling of the diplomacy of the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations. In dealing with their diplomacy with China, historians have concentrated on the efforts to protect American treaty rights, promote American trade, maintain the Open Door, and preserve the balance of power in the Far East. As a result, China's grievances against the United States over enforcement of the "exclusion laws" and violations of the Gresham-Yang Immigration Treaty have been largely overlooked.2 Given the extensive correspondence with the Chinese legation on the enforcement of the treaty, it is difficult to understand how American historians could have ignored China's grievances. An examination of the notes, many of which were not printed in Foreign Relations, reveals that China considered the question her most important issue with the United States. The diplomatic record also reveals that Chinese Minister Wu Ting-fang cleverly