Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 1994"

Lessons in Conquest: Towards a Greater Western History

Abstract: On the hundredth anniversary of Frederick Jackson Turner's paper on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History:' Turner-busting has superseded Turner-bussing as the lingua franca of western American historiography. Early in the twentieth century, Turner's thesis energized the study not simply of the winning of the West, but of the whole of American history. Building on Turner's vision, his many disciples formulated the history of the "West"' which was used synonymously with the frontier, as the history of America. After Turner's death in 1932, however, a new generation of historians exposed the imprecisions, simplifications, overgeneralizations, contradictions, exclusions, and outright errors of the frontier thesis. The assaults robbed the frontier of much of its intellectual vitality, of its role in Americanizing Europeans and in democratizing Americans. For a time, western historians, lacking an alternative paradigm to give meaning to their field, lagged in the attack on Turner and his thesis. Instead, they carped about the condescension they suffered at the hands of colleagues and bemoaned the declining scholarly audience for the history of the American West. But in recent years specialists in western American history have joined-

The Impact of the Second World War on Los Angeles

Abstract: Nowhere was the war's mixed legacy seen more graphically than in the nation's cities. While bread lines gave way to crowded factory gates, municipal authorities frequently found themselves nearly overwhelmed by the magnitude of changes unprecedented in their scope and impact. The legacy of these changes often proved to be completely transforming. Most dramatically, the war spelled prosperity for many urban centers as aging, rustridden factories gave way to new modernized manufacturing plants, whose design and assembly technologies were often the envy of the world. In addition, the industrial production demands of the war created record numbers of new jobs that

Chicano History: Transcending Cultural Models

Abstract: 1. Chicano historiography made impressive strides over the past twenty years. See, among others, the following studies: Pedro Castillo, "The Making of a Mexican Barrio: Los Angeles, 1890-1920" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1979); Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); Juan G6mez-Quifiones, "The Origins and Development of the Mexican Working Class in the United States: Laborers and Artisans North of the Rio Bravo, 1600-1900," in Elsa C. Frost, ed., El trabajo y los trabajadomes en la historia de Mixico (Tucson, 1979), 463-505; Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1890: A Social History (Berkeley, 1979); Mario Garcia, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans ofEl Paso, 1880-1920 (New Haven, 1981) and Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960 (New Haven, 1989); Robert J. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest (Austin, 1981); Rodolfo Acufia, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (2nd ed., New York, 1981); Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: A History of a Barrio (Austin, 1983); Richard Griswold del Castillo, La Familia: Chicano Families in the Urban Southwest, 1848 to the Present (Notre Dame, 1984); Antonio Rios-Bustamante, Los Angeles: Pueblo and Region (Los Angeles, 1985); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin, 1987); Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque, 1987). See also Carlos Cort6s, "Mexicans," in Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin, eds., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 699; Arnoldo De Le6n, The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 (Albuquerque, 1982); Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in California: A History of Mexican Americans in California (San Francisco, 1984); John R. Chivez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque, 1984); Arnoldo De Le6n and Kenneth L. Stewart, Tejanos and the Numbers Game: A Socio-Historical Interpretation from the Federal Censuses, 1850-1900 (Albuquerque, 1989); Thomas E. Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941 (Tucson, 1986).

Popular Sovereignty, Vigilantism, and the Constitutional Right of Revolution

Abstract: The focus of this article is the interplay of an indigenous American idea-popular sovereignty-and two American traditions: vigilante justice and constitutional conventions during the nineteenth century. While the traditions may seem unconnected, they are linked by the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which was based on the notion that "the people" are the ultimate and only legitimate basis for government and that "the people" possess the right to reform, alter, or abolish their government at any time. What emerged in the debates over both the proposed California constitution of 1849 and the San Francisco vigilante activities of the 1850s were conflicting views about both the scope and means whereby the people could exercise this sovereignty. It is a commonplace that the American legal and constitutional order rests on the idea of a government "of laws and not of men:' The phrase implies the primary role that law plays in ordering and maintaining order in American society as well as the close identification of lawyers with that process. It would seem anomalous today to identify members of the legal profession with a vigilante movement that expressly denies the validity of the existing legal system. This reaction is a measure of the distance between our contemporary legal culture and

California Cities and the Hurricane of Change: World War II in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego Metropolitan Areas

Abstract: of the United States, 1953 (Washington, D.C., 1953), 19. The good fortune of the Hoosier state reiterates the fact that the war did not damage, but rather greatly strengthened, the dominance of the East North Central part of the Midwest, the leading industrial area of the country, while not improving that of the West much at all. California was not the industrial pacesetter in new industrial investment in 1947 as a result of the war, and it was not even on the way to becoming the pacesetter. To summarize, neither the absolute number of production jobs, nor the per capita number, nor the investment in new plants and equipment for the future indicates a revolutionary change in the sectional industrial balance of power in the United States. Population change offers perhaps a better case for the transformation hypothesis. Speaking of demographic change, historians have made the argument that "like the Gold Rush a This content downloaded from 73.41.74.183 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:01:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 408 Pacific Historical Review century earlier, World War II was a watershed in Bay area history, ushering in revolutionary changes that dramatically affected the regiorin's subsequent development."17 Like much of the discussion of the war, this statement contains some truth, but by and large it is objectively mistaken. The Gold Rush simile is particularly problematic. The Gold Rush truly did transform California from a largely natural, lightly populated, pastoral, Hispanic, and Native American backwater into a rapidly populating, capitalistic, American growth engine. In contrast, World War II impacted on a mature, modern, and very growth-conscious state of 7,000,000 inhabitants. When a state is born in a Gold Rush, it is not easy to find anything else in its history which is quite so unprecedented. By the same token, when a state has also lived through something as tumultuous as the boom of the 1880s or the explosion of the 1920s, it will be even more difficult to find its subsequent decades very novel. This is especially true of population growth, as the census makes clear. To demonstrate this point, I will have to supply some more numbers, with appropriate apologies in advance for employing such dry and, at the same time, controversial material. Someone once suggested the double entendre that "statistics are a group of numbers looking for an argument."'' Given the contents of the other articles, I fear that my numbers have already found their argument, or are at least looking for it in the right place. To gauge the transformative effect of the Second World War, one ideally should look at two sets of figures, percentage growth and absolute growth. World War II certainly accelerated population growth rates. However, to begin with, it should be remembered that California's population grew vigorously even during the Great Depression. The population increased by some twenty-one percent, which would have been considered potent in almost any other American state. So what the war did was twofold. It accelerated growth rates over the depression and partially restored the robust growth rates of earlier years. I say partially because the growth rates of the 1940s did not equal those of the 1920s. Much of our misreading of the forties occurs because 17. Wollenberg, Golden Gate Metropolis, 241-242. 18. Washington Post, May 24, 1992. This content downloaded from 73.41.74.183 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:01:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Hurricane of Change 409 the war decade is too often discussed out of its historical context. Therefore, in trying to assess the demographic importance of the forties, it is useful to frame the question in comparative terms by placing that decade into the stream of history that includes the two preceding and two succeeding decades. Doing so will indicate that more cities and counties experienced their largest percentage increases, or record growth rates, in the twenties than in the forties. And these include most of the important places: Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, Alhambra, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, Glendale, Long Beach, Inglewood, Monterey, Monterey County, Oakland, Palo Alto, National City, Oceanside, Pasadena, Redwood City, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara County, Santa Monica, and Ventura. Among the state's bigger towns and major cities of the 1970s, only Burbank, Alameda, Fresno, Stockton, and Richmond set percentage growth records in the 1940s. The growth percentages were not even unprecedented, much less revolutionary or cataclysmic.19 The absolute increases were not record setting or beyond the experience of urban Californians either. Historians argue correctly that the war had a more dramatic effect on the suburbs than on center cities.20 Nonetheless, even suburban increases were usually well within the experience of urban Californians. For example, Los Angeles County, a good index of suburbanization, gained 1,366,000 residents during the forties but added almost as many people, 1,272,000, during the twenties, starting from a much smaller population base. The total for the 1940s is only marginally larger. One could hardly argue that the distance between the two figures represents the difference 19. I have elected to discuss population by decades for several reasons. There were intercensal counts done during the war, which estimated population from 1940 through November 1943 and which estimated it from 1940 to 1945. I have decided not to use these wartime censuses because we have no comparable figures for other decades. I could not compare growth from 1940 to 1945 with that from 1920 to 1930. At the same time, the decade figures for the 1940s would seem to give the transformation hypothesis more than its due. Some of the migrants to California after 1945 may have come because they had served there during the war and wanted to return or because their relatives had lured them there based on the initial war boom. However, some of the postwar migrants came for other reasons. So using the decade figures gives maximum justice to the transformation hypothesis. 20. Johnson, "Western Front," 130-176. This content downloaded from 73.41.74.183 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:01:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 410 Pacific Historical Review between ordinary change and revolutionary upheaval. Clearly, California as a whole was accustomed to radical population growth. The experience of urban California in World War II was not all that different from its own past. It was also not that different from its future either, i.e., the Korean War and Cold War decades. Another part of our misunderstanding of the war's contribution to California history stems from largely ignoring the Korean and Cold War periods. In our haste to pay homage to World War II, the Korean War and Cold War impact on population has been generally undervalued, but it was a very significant one. Of the major metropolitan counties in the state, twelve made their largest absolute gains during the era of Dwight D. Eisenhower instead of during World War II. These included Fresno, Los Angeles, Marin, Monterey, Napa, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, or in other words, most of the great growth centers of the post-World War II era. For example, what happened to Orange County in the 1960s is much closer to a boom and much more impressive than any of the absolute increases of the 1940s. In the one decade of the sixties, Orange County grew by 706,000, more than the World War II total of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, Solano, and Sonoma counties put together12' And the absolute growth of Los Angeles County alone in the 1950s was more than three times the advance of the same five counties in the 1940s. Its gain in that period is more than twice as much as all of the counties that set records in World War II.22 Several counties did experience their greatest absolute growth explosion in the decade of World War II. Significantly, these were not scattered at random about the state, but rather confined to two locales: the San Joaquin Valley and the northern and eastern parts of San Francisco Bay. In other words, the boom of the forties was both suburban and exurban.23 Even San Francisco, which would lose people in the next several decades, 21. Bureau of the Census, 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population. California (Washington D C., 1982), pt. 6, pp. 6-8. 22. Ibid. 23. For a discussion of exurbia, settlements beyond the suburbs, but still tied to cities, see Blaine Brownell and David Goldfield, Urban America: From Downtown to No Town (Dallas, 1979), 305, 382-385. This content downloaded from 73.41.74.183 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:01:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Hurricane of Change 411 registered an advance during World War II. The war reversed the stagnant depression growth rates of the city; however, it merely interrupted, but did not change, the long-term course of its demographic history. With the exception of Fresno County, all the record-setting growth areas of the 1950s were in the southern Bay area or in southern California. One of the key assumptions of the transformation hypothesis is based on the fact that the federal government spent lots of money in the West.24 Supposedly, the dollars then produced the unprecedented growth. Yet at this point in our research into World War II and urban society, the relationship of defense spending to population growth is not at all clear. As a matter of fact, the government spent more money in absolute and nearly as much in per capita terms in the North Central States of the Midwest than in the West, yet that area did not experience the same supposedly transformative growth. Throughout the United States, the war-induced expenditure of monies did n

Machine Politics in California Agriculture, 1945-1990s

Abstract: Two dominant interpretations appear in academic historical literature on mechanization in California agriculture. The first is a great-man thesis that attributes a special inventiveness to western farmers, manufacturers, and researchers. It portrays the case of California as the culmination of American ingenuity. In its examination of the development of large-scale machines for commercial agriculture, it lauds engineering feats and advanced technology.1 The second is a challenge-response thesis. It contends that large scale farming and machinery appeared because of the unique problems inherent in California agriculture, the incentive to produce more food, and to improve the quality of life for all citizens of the nation.2 The interpretations are consistent with certain realities of California agriculture. First, for successful commercial production under local conditions, California growers could not always copy what worked elsewhere. They had to develop irrigation systems, special machines, and breeds of plants adaptable to local soil and climatic conditions. Second, many California crops did

Timeless Journals: Reading Lewis and Clark with Nicholas Biddle's Help

Abstract: The journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition describe the continental crossing of the first United States Exploring Expedition between 1804 and 1806.1 Under the command of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the explorers followed the Missouri to its source in Montana. They crossed the continental divide at Lemhi Pass hoping to find a short portage to the headwaters of the Columbia River. After the mysterious Wilderness Passage proved to be an illusion, they struggled through the Bitterroot Mountains in northern Idaho and then continued

The Nash Thesis revisited: An Economic Historian's View

Abstract: In a series of influential studies, Gerald Nash has explored the impact of the Second World War on the social and economic development of the West. He has argued that the war transformed the American West from a mordant, economic colony of the East into a dynamic, pacesetting society. The driving forces of this transformation were expanding employment in military-related activities; government-financed investments in military installations and manufacturing capacity, especially in the basic metal industries; and rapid population growth. According to his seminal work, the war effort condensed four decades of development into four short years.' This paper challenges Nash's thesis concerning the crucial role of the war in transforming the economy of California, the largest state in the West. In 1940, its income and population were as large, or larger, than the rest of the West combined. And much of the war activity, especially aircraft production and shipbuilding, was concentrated in the urban areas of the state. Thus, California's experience is central to Nash's interpretation of the impact of the war on the West. Based on a long-term perspective on California's economic

Prohibition in the Borderlands: National Government-Border Community Relations

Abstract: Borderlands are unique places and, as such, present unique problems for historians. Political boundaries frequently separate distinct economic, political, and cultural systems. When they do, typical community problems like increased demand for public services, ethnic tensions, and environmental pollution become bewilderingly complex. In recent years, borderlands scholars have frequently noted the contentious character of historical relations between border communities and national

Freedom vs. Tyranny: The 1958 California Election and the Origins of the State's Conservative Movement

Abstract: During the 1950s most Americans admired Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whether they agreed with his politics or not. In addition to being a war hero, Eisenhower blended an affable grandfather image with that of a dignified elder statesman, which made him comforting and congenial, yet serious and resolute. Despite this popular appeal, certain members of the President's own party turned against him early in his second term. This attack came from the conservative "Old

War as Watershed: The East Bay and World War II

Abstract: Since historians first examined the domestic impact of World War II back in the 1970s, they have debated what I call the war-as-watershed issue. From the earliest general studies by Richard Polenberg and John Morton Blum to the more recent studies of labor, women, racial minorities, and economic and regional development, these home-front historians have reached conflicting conclusions about the significance of the war as an agent of historical change. While some argue that World War II was a critical turning point in United States history, others find it merely accelerated existing social and economic trends.1 This debate, like many historical controversies, has been artificially polarized and has blinded historians to more im-

George Maxwell, the Railroads, and American Land Policy, 1899-1904

Abstract: On April 17, 1899, George Maxwell and Elwood Mead met with officials of the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, and Union Pacific railroads in the office of the second vice-president of the Great Northern. The meeting followed in the wake of the depression of 1893-98 and during a drought that lasted from 1898 until 1901, sharply reducing the carrying trade of the northern lines. Maxwell, a lawyer and journalist from California, and Mead, head of the Office of Irrigation Inquiry in the Department of Agriculture and formerly Wyoming's state engineer, outlined a plan to unite the grazing and agricultural interests of the West. The railroad executives had several specific objectives: They wanted the states and national government to construct storage reservoirs in the arid and semi-arid West to protect against future droughts. They also wanted Congress to regulate the leasing of public grazing lands and to allow the railroads to swap their sections for government tracts (so that the consolidated holdings would form unbroken blocks of land more desireable to stockmen, who wanted to fence and segregate herds and thus protect pure blooded cattle). At the end of the meeting, the leaders of four railroads decided to grant Maxwell a subsidy of $30,000-$500 a month from each line-to mount a publicity campaign to put pressure on Congress to adopt the desired legislation. If Maxwell made progress, the grant was renewable. (The Union Pacific initially balked, but later joined the others.) "It was the concensus of opinion that the railroad companies could accomplish little or

The Irony of Memory: Finding a Los(t) Angeles

Abstract: a huge tract of land, one which stretches southward to the Palos Verdes peninsula. This tract, part of two of the grants which Spanish and Mexican rulers awarded to private owners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was purchased in the 1870s by Canadian Daniel Freeman.1 Freeman built a grand Victorian mansion in the middle of his land, in the city of Inglewood, which he founded. And it was in a house across from the

The United States, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1950: A Reappraisal

Abstract: The United States government's perception of the relations between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Soviet Union greatly influenced Washington's policies toward China in the years following the Second World War. Secretary of State George C. Marshall worried that a pro-Soviet CCP with strong military forces might upset the stability of East Asia and damage U.S. security in the Pacific region. To offset the threat, he tried to disarm the CCP and incorporate it into a reformist government of China which would be influenced by the U.S. and dominated by the Guomindang (GMD). The CCP, however, refused to lay down its arms, and the GMD was unwilling to reform itself along American lines. Between 1948 and 1950, Marshall's successor as Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, saw no chance of rescuing Jiang Jieshi's GMD regime from collapse and preventing the CCP from taking over short of massive U.S. intervention. Among the other reasons for his "hands-off" policy was a belief that China under the CCP would likely become another Titoist Yugoslavia in conflict with the Kremlin. But rather than establish a Titoist China, Mao Zedong instead entered into a Chinese-Soviet military alliance in 1950, the year the Chinese Communist invasion of Korea took place. What went wrong? Encouraged by the Sino-Soviet border clash in 1969 and the Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s, some scholars

"A New Federal City": San Diego during World War II

Abstract: As several popular magazines stated at the time, the outbreak of World War II produced a "blitz-boom" in the city of San Diego, California.2 The effects of the boom were readily apparent: as the city's manufacturing enterprises geared up for wartime production, tens of thousands of people swarmed into town in search of jobs, while the local military bases grew markedly in both number and size. Central-city and suburbs alike swelled to accommodate the newcomers, and the city's utility systems and water supply all but failed to keep up with demand. With substantial help from the federal government, San Diegans attacked these and related problems in various ways, and to an extent succeeded in solving many of them. Almost overnight, the war appeared to have turned San Diego into a real metropo-