Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 1976"

Always the Laborer, Never the Citizen: Anglo Perceptions of the Mexican Immigrant during the 1920s

Abstract: I N RECOUNTING THE SAGA of the peopling of the United States, historians have tended to focus on the movement of people across the Atlantic and neglect another significant aspect of American immigration: the migration of workers across the Rio Grande. Perhaps as much as 10 percent of Mexico's population, approximately one and a half million people, trekked northward to the United States between 1900 and 1930.1 Only in the past few years have such scholars as Rodolfo Acunia and Matt Meier and Feliciano

The Command of Gold Reversed: American Loans to Britain, 1915-1917

Abstract: A REMARKABLE FEATURE of the continuing debate over the entry of the United States into World War I has been the virtual disappearance of what was once the most controversial and influential argument-the economic interpretation of American intervention. Like nearly all the historical explanations of foreign policy during World War I, the economic interpretation grew out of contentions advanced in the contemporary debate. Speaking against the declaration of war in April 1917, Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska gave a capsule statement of the argument. "The object in having war and in preparing for war," declared Norris, "is to make money. Human suffering and the sacrifice of human life are necessary, but Wall Street considers only the dollars and cents.... We are going into war upon command of gold." In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, revisionist scholars, many politicians, and large segments of the public were convinced that extensive trade and large-scale loans to the Allied powers had created an economic stake that had drawn the United States into World War I.

Indochina and Anglo-American Relations, 1942-1945

Abstract: involved, and which, it is hoped, eventually will be treated in the book form which they require. There was, for example, the shifting overall relationship between Britain and the U.S.A., in which, from a position of morally, if not materially, equal partnership around 1941-1942, Britain declined to junior status from about the time of the Cairo Conference onwards. Thus, for example, soon after that conference, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. could observe (and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who read what

The British War Debts to the United States and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1920-1923

Abstract: WHY GREAT BRITAIN AGREED to abandon the Anglo-Japanese Alliance has long been the subject of debate among diplomatic historians. According to the most recent studies, it was American pressure which caused England to sever her twentyyear partnership with Japan. What has not been explained satisfactorily is the nature of that pressure. Though scholars have long recognized the influence exerted by Britain's fear that the United States would outdistance her in a naval arms

Humanitarian Imperialism: David Prescott Barrows and the White Man's Burden in the Philippines

Abstract: attitudes in the 1890s, and more particularly on the background of important, specific decisions, such as the annexation of the Philippine Islands.' Few of these scholars have looked beyond the acquisition of territory to assess imperialism in operation or to examine the motivations and attitudes of those Americans who actually went to the new colonial possessions.2 Until fairly recently, virtually the only accounts of early American involvement in the Philippines were those of participants whose presentations served better as source materials

An Unlikely Peace: American Missionaries and the Chinese Communists, 1948-1950

Abstract: ON OCTOBER 1, 1949, when the government of the People's Republic of China was officially established, some four thousand missionaries resided on the mainland of China. The missionary community lacked internal unity; it was a mixture of Catholics and Protestants, fundamentalists and modernists, pro-Nationalists and pro-Communists. But to outsiders, on the other hand, the community formed an easily identifiable and readily defined group: it was foreign, though it had sizeable property holdings and other vested interests in China; it was Christian, attempting to proselytize Chinese in a state with a godless ideology; it symbolized, at least in part, the influence of governments hostile to the new regime. The shattering events of World War II and the upheaval caused by revolution in 1949 have overshadowed historical writing about China during the 1940s. This is particularly true of the annals of missionary endeavor. While the literature describing individual experience is plentiful,' serious appraisal of missionary activities

The Problem of Consciousness in the Woman Suffrage Movement: A California Perspective

Abstract: HOW TO MAKE WOMEN want to vote? This was a fundamental question confronting American suffragists. No matter how dedicated and energetic suffrage leaders might be, they could not convince male legislators and voters to grant women the ballot unless women signified that they wanted it. Without the commitment of thousands of followers it was impossible for the suffragists to organize effective campaigns. Yet, initially, suffrage leaders noted a distressing apathy among the women they claimed to represent.' This essay describes how the leading suffragists in one state tried to make women sufficiently concerned with inequality that they would ask for the vote. It inquires into the suffragists'

The War Hawks and the Question of Congressional Leadership in 1812

Abstract: FEW GROUPS in early American history have captured the fancy of historians as have the War Hawks of 1812. They are mentioned in most textbooks, and each scholar writing about the origins of the War of 1812 has taken his turn at assessing their significance. In recent years, the vast majority of historians have portrayed them as the main war agents: a young, vociferous, aggressive, anti-British, optimistic, nationalistic, frontier-oriented, and small Republican faction that seized control of the House and Senate in late 1811; elected Henry Clay Speaker of the House; hammered out the major war legislation; and badgered President James Madison and harangued pacifist colleagues until Congress declared war. As Reginald Horsman concludes, "The true enthusiasts [for war] were remarkably few, but they were able to enlist a solid group of Republicans to vote with them on most of their measures and eventually obtained enough beyond this solid core to pass a declaration of war."'

Why Historians Change Their Minds

Abstract: A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO a psychologist friend of mine asked me to read a proposal he had drawn up for revamping American society. It included, among other things, the obliteration of state lines, the elimination of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the substitution of a plural executive for a single one. My reaction to his proposal was that he had ignored history, that his whole approach to the reformation of society was nonhistorical. His response, in turn, was that he did not think history was relevant to the matter because historians never agree among themselves about the past, and besides, they are always changing their minds. If you have ever given an historiographical analysis to a group of nonhistorians you have probably run into similar objections or at least into puzzlement as to what historians do and why they cannot arrive at definitive conclusions about what they think about the past. Even students in our classes, I think, are never quite clear as to why there are "changing interpretations." My remarks are addressed to those who wonder why historians change their minds. I do not mean why the content or subject matter included in the field of history changes; that is another issue, though, as I think you will agree, not unrelated to my present concern of why our interpretations of the past alter. My intention is to explore this rather philosophical question through a concrete example of one historiographical transformation. For, as has been said, history is philosophy teaching by example.

An Unusual Monument: Paul S. Taylor's Mexican Labor in the United States Monograph Series

Abstract: DURING THE FIRST three decades of the twentieth century hundreds of thousands of Mexicans left the political upheavals and economic uncertainty of Mexico for the opportunities, real or imagined, that they believed awaited them north of the border. By the 1920s this wave of immigration had come to the attention of a spectrum of Americans that included nativists, social scientists, small-scale farmers, agribusinessmen, and politicians. The arguments of these people over the question of whether to restrict immigration from Mexico generated more heat than light. Although dozens of articles were published in popular magazines, debates conducted, and congressional hearings held, virtually all of the verbiage reflected preconceived positions of self-interest. Agribusiness claimed it could not survive without Mexican labor, while nativists argued that the white race could not survive the unrestricted immigration of an "inferior" people.By 1926 Congressman

The Economic Side of the Good Neighbor Policy: The Reciprocal Trade Program and South America

Abstract: THE SIGNIFICANT CHANGE in the spirit that American presidential administrations exhibited toward Latin America in the 1930s may, upon closer examination, not justify the euphemistic term "Good Neighbor." The United States surrendered the right to intervene at the Buenos Aires Conference of 1936, refrained from interference in the internal affairs of the small Caribbean republics, and freed the five protectorates established prior to and during World War I. This surrender of the most imperialistic aspects of earlier relations won considerable goodwill throughout the Caribbean region and South America. The United States was no longer the threatening and dangerous neighbor. During the first three decades of the century, the situation had been significantly different. The states in the Caribbean area occupied the role of clients, and the United States dominated their foreign relations. Their economies became little more than appendages dependent upon the financial resources and markets of their powerful northern neighbor. Sharp differences in culture, social structure, and values made their yoke heavier. The very success of the Anglo-Saxon oriented Yankee society gave rise to feelings

An International Perspective on American Indian Policy: The South Australian Protector and Aborigines Protection Society

Abstract: THE GENERAL VIEW OF American Indian policy for the early national period is characteristically parochial. In contrast to studies emphasizing British influence on the American abolitionists and important contacts between champions of black colonization on both sides of the Atlantic, the importance of federal Indian policy for the same period is blurred by an insular interpretation. In fact aboriginal people in the nineteenth century were overwhelmed in a variety of places, but the overriding impression one gains from studies on civilizing the natives American style is that policy's uniqueness and, apart from an occasional reference to casual international interest, its apparent irrelevance to policies developed outside the United States. After all, it may be inferred, was not the American experience with savagery, noble or otherwise, peculiar to the frontier experience of the United States? Was not the bureaucratic snarl and human suffering that plagued America's aboriginal policy a regrettable but logical consequence of its

The American Literary West and Its Interpreters: The Rise of a New Historiography

Abstract: TWO SIGNIFICANT books published in 1950 illustrate the major trends in the historiography of the American literary West. Franklin Walker's A Literary History of Southern California exemplifies the most popular approach to western literature before 1950, and Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth became the major paradigm for studies of western writing undertaken after 1950. Taken together these two books and the methods of research they utilize provide important keys to understanding interpretations of the literary West during the present century.'

Dollars over Dominion: United States Economic Interests in Mexico, 1861-1867

Abstract: A NUMBER OF HISTORIANS have examined United States investment in Mexico before and following the American Civil War, but no one has studied the period from 1861 until 1867 in MexicanUnited States economic relations.' In spite of the American Civil War and Mexico's fifty-year history of disorder, revolution, and civil war-capped in 1861 by the intervention of France, England, and Spain-United States speculators launched an intense campaign to gain concessions and investment opportunities during the years from 1861 to 1867. Although their successes were few, the promoters gained considerable business experience and information about Mexico's economy. Why these unlikely years witnessed the unleashing of a pack of American capitalists is not entirely clear. Certainly a key event was the arrival to power of the Republican party, which, in contrast to the Democratic party with its well-known emphasis on territorial expansion, sought to exert United States political influence through

On Writing Literary History

Abstract: FIRST BECAME interested in studying western American writers when I considered them from the vantage point of Oxford University right after the First World War. Three years of student life in England, accompanied by extensive travel on the Continent, had lent to my home environment-California and Arizona-a strangeness and significance which I had not fully realized as a boy. My Rhodes Scholarship, which had taken me to Oxford at the end of my sophomore year, had eventually changed my focus of interest from mining engineering to English language and literature. Thus, I abandoned Herbert Hoover in my growing preference for Geoffrey Chaucer. Though my final examinations at Oxford dealt principally with writers who had done their work before the end of the

Selling the Foreign Service: Bureaucratic Rivalry and Foreign-Trade Promotion, 1903-1912

Abstract: BETWEEN THE 1890s and World War I, the foundations of the modern United States Foreign Service were laid.' Spearheading the movement for reorganization were a few officials of the Department of State, who were keenly interested in expansion of foreign trade and who saw their careers as closely related to growing American activity in the world. Pushing for more efficient foreignrelations machinery, they urged merchants and manufacturers to enter foreign markets and to support appropriations and other legislation for revamping the foreign service.2