Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 1997"

Home and Abroad: The Two Wests of Twentieth-Century United States History

Abstract: Where lies the twentieth-century American West? The question goes beyond simple geography to historical sensibility. Take the case of oil extraction in the Amazon region of Ecuador since the 1960s. The similarities between petroleum development there and contemporaneous activities in Alaska, America's "last frontier," underscore the profound connections between western development and the role of the United States in international capitalist expansion. Many of the processes, people, and institutions that actively shaped the

"A Case of Democratic Contagion": Direct Democracy in the American West, 1890-1920

Abstract: With the recent battle over Proposition 187 in California (an initiative to cut state services for illegal immigrants), direct democracy has once again claimed center stage on the American political scene. The instruments of direct democracy, in particular the power to create legislation via the popular initiative, have enjoyed increasing appeal since the 1970s when a California tax revolt culminated in 1978 with the

Tejana Radical: Emma Tenayuca and the San Antonio Labor Movement during the Great Depression

Abstract: In the 1930s Mexican Americans fought their first major battles for worker rights and racial equality when they joined the revitalized labor movement.1 In many instances of labor upheaval on farms, at mine sites, and in factories in the United States, Spanish-speaking workers took the lead. They created separate labor unions that were rooted in the tradition of mutual aid societies and workers' leagues, joined unions of mixed racial-ethnic composition, or sought national union affiliation. What emerged was a style of unionism that drew notjust on the courage and militancy of Mexicans but also on their rich historical and cultural traditions, refashioned to fit the immediate labor struggle. From these shared social and cultural experiences emerged a collective identity and class-consciousness. Im-

Wilsonian Idealism and Japanese Claims at the Paris Peace Conference

Abstract: the "Old Diplomacy," practiced by imperialists of the Old World, and the "New Diplomacy," advocated by idealistic internationalists under the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson.' This dichotomy, however, does not fully explain the antagonism between Japan and the United States at the end of World War I. This study explores further possible explanations of President Wilson's failure to fend off the Japanese challenge to the principles of Wilsonian internationalism as set forth in his Fourteen Points. It argues that Japanese-American differences were more than either simple disagreements over diplomatic principles or particular disputes over economic, territorial, or political concessions. Hidden behind the conflict was another dichotomy-between America's universalism and unilateralism, on the one hand, and, on the other, an incipient particularistic regionalism and pluralism derived from Japanese leaders' assessment of

"Dam Building Still Had Some Magic Then": Stewart Udall, the Central Arizona Project, and the Evolution of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, 1963-1968

Abstract: Thirty-two years ago Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall embarked on a program of "water statesmanship" to resolve what he then saw as the "overwhelming political issue" in Arizona, the need for a project to deliver Colorado River water to farmers and cities in the central part of the state. Today, Arizonans have a long-desired aqueduct to provide water that they seemingly do not want, or cannot afford. On October 1, 1993, the Bureau of Reclamation officially declared the Central Arizona Project (CAP) aqueduct complete. Far from providing a cause for celebration, the aqueduct added to a sense of crisis facing rural Arizona irrigators and municipal water users. The announcement meant that CAP water users were obligated to begin repayment of the "reimbursable" portions of interestfree federal loans used to finance the construction of the $4.4 billion project.' Arizona farmers found themselves in severe financial

Factories in the Field Revisited

Abstract: The raisin situation... is more than a private business question. The welfare of this whole community is so bound up in the prosperity of the raisin business, and the progress of that business is so dependent on organized and more or less public action, that raisin affairs have always been treated, and properly treated, as public affairs.... The raisin industry, in this community, can not be treated, and never has been treated, as "business" in that narrowly private sense. Chester Rowell

Willard Straight and the Paradox of Liberal Imperialism

Abstract: Willard Straight used to be a favorite of historians. The sometime diplomat and full-time imperialist promoter enjoyed a brief glory period after his death in the influenza epidemic of 1919. His friend Herbert Croly eulogized him in a full-length life-and-letters biography, portraying him as an energetic and tragic figure.1 A later historiographical generation awarded him even more prominence as a stock villain in the drama of expanding capitalism. After all, he worked for E. H. Harriman, J. P. Morgan, and National City Bank; served in the Department of State under Elihu Root and then Philander Knox; and had the approval of Theodore Roosevelt. He popped up at all the key moments of American expansionism, and he was likely to say, flat out, "I am a borne [sic] imperialist," a "rank imperialist," an "Imperialist confirmed and deep dyed."2 Straight's eager

Advocacy or Assessment? The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany and Japan

Abstract: Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. USSBS, Summary Report (Pacific War) (1946)

Cholera, Community, and Public Health in Gold Rush Sacramento and San Francisco

Abstract: On August 3, 1849, President Zachary Taylor called on the nation to pray for those suffering from cholera. As victims succumbed in virtually every major American city, the medical and public health communities seemed powerless to stop the onslaught. Although other diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and consumption took more lives, none was as dreaded as Asiatic cholera. The 1849 epidemic coincided with the years of the California Gold Rush, 1848-1850, when cholera followed the course of migration from the Old World to New Orleans, up the important navigable rivers, and along the various trails heading west. However, the impact of cholera on the cities of the Trans-Mississippi West, in particular the gold rush cities of Sacramento and San Francisco, has received scant attention from chroniclers of frontier history.'

We Are Now Entering a New Era: Federal Reclamation and the Fact Finding Commission of 1923-1924

Abstract: On September 8, 1923, Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work invited a group of prominent citizens to serve on a Fact Finding Commission that would intensively study the Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation Service from 1902 to 1923) and its irrigation projects. In his letter of invitation, Work explained that the government's reclamation program, consisting of projects scattered throughout the West (see map) and comprising 6.3 percent of all irrigated lands in the nation, faced serious problems. Although Congress had granted settlers on the projects an extra ten years to pay for their irrigation systems and although they were charged no interest on the government's investment, many had abandoned the irrigation projects, and those who remained had fallen far behind in their payments to the government. Many of them would probably lose their homes, and the government would never recover its investment unless reclamation laws and policies were overhauled. Work charged the commission with investigating the problem and making recommendations for corrective legislation.1

A Spirit of Resistance: Sioux, Xhosa, and Maori Responses to Western Dominance, 1840-1920

Abstract: Luther Standing Bear, a Lakotal Sioux, was born in the 1860s during the year of "breaking up of camp." In Standing Bear's lifetime he witnessed military defeat, endured reservation life, graduated from the Carlisle Indian School, performed in Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, and acted in Hollywood. Late in life Standing Bear, the consummate "acculturated" Indian, observed that after multitudinous "readjustments to fit the white man's mode of existence," he remained an "incurable hostile."2 For Standing Bear's folk, the Lakota Sioux of South Dakota, as well as peoples like the Xhosa in the eastern Cape of South Africa and the Maori of New Zealand, the wars of the nineteenth century were always accompanied by a contest over

Pioneering Minority Representation: Edward Roybal and the Los Angeles City Council, 1949-1962

Abstract: The efforts of ethnic and racial groups to obtain effective representation are deeply woven into the fabric of the United States. The election of Edward Roybal to the Los Angeles City Council in 1949 exemplifies the opportunities for political change that emerged from local cross-ethnic activism after World War II. It also suggests the limits of such change. Roybal, the city's first Latino council representative in the twentieth century, received support in his quest for office from an unusual combination of Mexican Americans, whites, and African Americans. To liberals and minorities his election was a

"To Dispose of the Prisoners": The Japanese Executions of American Aircrew at Fukuoka, Japan, during 1945

Abstract: At 3:00 in the afternoon of August 15, 1945, a truck filled with Japanese soldiers and seventeen blindfolded and handcuffed Americans drove out the front gate of Western Army Headquarters in Fukuoka, Japan. Three hours earlier, the Japanese guards had listened to the emperor read a statement ending the Pacific war. The truck arrived at the Aburyama execution grounds at 3:30. The soldiers ordered the American prisoners, all captured pilots or flight crew, out of the truck. Weak from six weeks of poor diet and little exercise, the prisoners quietly obeyed. They were led to a neighboring field bordered with bamboo groves and made to sit in the late afternoon sun. After a brief discussion, the Japanese divided into groups and stationed themselves at four different sites around the field. The first three execution squads were led by Lt. Noboru Hashiyama, an officer attached to the headquarters unit, and lieutenants Teruo Akamine and Ichiro Maeda, both assigned to the Air Defense Section of Western Army Head-

The Comstock Urban Network

Abstract: Historians of the nineteenth-century urban West have largely focused on major cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, and Salt Lake City. This approach has correctly portrayed these cities as the engines of subregional growth and political power. However, with the exception of Mel Scott, John Reps, and a few others, the tendency has been to acknowledge only briefly the importance of hinterland towns as support structures or to treat them merely as a given.' In this vein, William Cronon has justifiably complained that "urban historians rarely look beyond the outskirts of cities to the hinterlands beyond; western and frontier and even environmental historians usually concentrate far more attention on rural and wild places than on urban ones."2

John Bassett Moore, Robert Lansing, and the Shandong Question

Abstract: In the early twentieth century, two famous American international lawyers had a China connection that was either unknown or has long since been forgotten by scholars. One of those lawyers was John Bassett Moore, adviser to the Chinese legation in the United States as well as to the Chinese delegates to the Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations. In 1921, Robert Lansing succeeded Moore as counselor to China's Washington legation, and he also proffered his own ideas to the Chinese delegation at the Washington Disarmament Conference. Moore's and Lansing's advice to the Chinese reveals not only their profound disagreements with the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson, but also the limitations of their approaches in trying to help China win back the Shandong (Shantung) region-a hotly contested area that had been leased to Germany under duress in 1898 and then occupied by Japan in 1914. At one time, according to political scientist John Millett, "the study of international relations" and "the name of John Bassett Moore" were synonymous. Born and raised in Delaware, Moore studied law at the University of Virginia before drop-