Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 1998"

The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan's Decision to Surrender: A Reconsideration

Abstract: (1) Today 3 B-29s flew over Hiroshima at a high altitude at about 08:25 and dropped several bombs.... A terrific explosion accompanied by flame and smoke occurred at an altitude of 500 to 600 meters. The concussion was beyond imagination and demolished practically every house in the city. (2) Present estimate of damage. About 80% of the city was wiped out, destroyed, or burned.... Casualties have been estimated at 100,000 persons.1

Racial Struggle, Immigrant Nationalism, and Ethnic Identity: Japanese and Filipinos in the California Delta

Abstract: On the evening of February 8, 1930, Japanese in Stockton, California, were stunned when Filipinos boycotted their businesses, resulting in a virtual shutdown. According to the local Japanese press, this clash between the two ethnic groups resulted from "a personal affair"-the secret marriage of an American-born Japanese (Nisei) woman and a Filipino laboring man.1 The woman's father had strongly opposed the marriage, telling her that "racial and cultural differences" between Japanese and Filipinos doomed the relationship. She soon left her Filipino husband, an action that he, his friends, and his relatives blamed on the entire Japanese community, because Japanese allegedly believed "the Filipinos [we]re inferior."2 Infuriated, Filipinos called their "sympathy boycott." As the boycott dragged on for a second week and merchants' losses escalated, frustrated Japanese immigrant (Issei) residents came to see the conflict as a "war" between two

"You Understand My Condition": The Civil Rights Congress in the Los Angeles African-American Community, 1946-1952

Abstract: In 1946 Johnie J. Mullins wrote a frustrated letter to the editor of People's World, California's premier communist newspaper: "I have sold the [People's] Daily World at all the union meetings in Los Angeles.... I was one that helped get it started. Sold the Peoples' World on the WPA." But, he went on, it was no longer the "same old paper": "All I... read was of some Negro case.... It seems to me that you are putting the Negroes first."1 While the California Communist Party and its most important affiliate, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), gave increasing attention in the late 1940s to defending their own civil rights in the face of virulent anticommunism, they nonetheless launched aggressive campaigns to defend the city's rapidly expanding black working-class population. Indeed, the CRC, which essentially operated as the civil rights wing of the Communist Party, did "put Negroes first." Motivated by both a sincere belief in racial equality and the hope that the wartime in-migration of African Americans would provide a solid base for the Communist Party, the CRC launched a dramatic civil rights campaign in the Los Angeles black community. Though historians describe the 1930s as the heyday of communist ac-

In Quest of Autonomy: The Northern California Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union and World War II

Abstract: (NCACLU), traveled from San Francisco to the Oregon border in the heat of summer, 1944. His purpose was to interview Japanese Americans held in the stockades at the Tule Lake camp without charges, hearings, or counsel. Besig never completed his task. First the camp director imposed limits on Besig's access to prisoners; ultimately, Besig was ordered off the premises. Moreover, on the way back to San Francisco, Besig's car malfunctioned. A visit to a mechanic revealed that salt had been poured into his gas tank. Convinced that the vandalized car, the illegal restrictions imposed on the stockaded men, and the camp director's behavior all bespoke "Gestapo methods," he immediately contacted the ACLU's executive director, Roger Baldwin. "The WRA [War Relocation Authority, the civilian administrative agency for the camps] is running a private prison," he reported in a telegram urging Baldwin's immediate intervention and his presence at the camp.

Tattered Shirts and Ragged Pants: Accommodation, Protest, and the Coarse Culture of California Wheat Harvesters and Threshers, 1866-1900*

Abstract: Between the end of the Gold Rush and the beginning of the twentieth century, Euroamerican wheat harvesters and threshers comprised one of the largest segments of California's agricultural labor force. Although treated sparingly in most accounts of the state's farm workers, their experiences help delineate the strains and tensions developing in rural California. Pushed to the margins and forced to endure a harsh and exhausting environment, wheat harvesters and threshers crafted a counterculture difficult to imagine. Fighting, drinking, playing, and whoring, they battled through their problems, ordered their world, softened its harsh edges, found diversions, and developed ways to relax and forget the mean circumstances under which they worked, making the best of a situation they could not alter.1

'A Good, Bad Deal': John F. Kennedy, W. Averell Harriman, and the Neutralization of Laos, 1961-1962

Abstract: Historians have devoted considerable attention to John F. Kennedy's Southeast Asian diplomacy. Yet the vast majority of these studies have focused narrowly on Vietnam when, in fact, it was Laos to which the president devoted the bulk of his attention during his first two years in office.1 In Laos, Kennedy faced a precarious situation, strikingly similar to the crisis soon to arise in Vietnam. Defying many of his advisers and risking political peril, Kennedy decided to pursue the formation of a neutral

Nothing New under the Sun: Continuities in the West

Abstract: on a book that is smart, beautiful, entertaining, and useful. Framed by thoughtful essays by Charles Wilkinson and Patricia Limerick, the volume's definitions of a geographical region and unapologetic exclusion of the Pacific Coast region are sensible and convincing. The Interior West takes distinctive shape in the book's maps and text. However, I'm instantly suspicious when anything announces that it is new. Having believed that this time the sea monkeys really would come to life and that this time fat-free ice cream would taste good, I now attempt skepticism about novelty. When I looked at the title, Atlas of the New West: Portrait of a Changing Region, I wondered at its claim of newness. The title assumes that there is an Old West and that something fundamentally different has happened to make the region new. In the preface, the editor asserts that a transformation has occurred-one in which a unique region is battling cultural homogeneity. The Old West of "feed stores, cowboy bars, and greasy spoons" has evolved into a New West of "cookie cutter subdivisions," "espresso bars," and "mountain biking meccas"

"Let the Women Get Their Wages as Men Do": Trade Union Women and the Legislated Minimum Wage in California

Abstract: In 1996 Californians voted on the issue of raising the minimum wage, bypassing an obscure government agency, the Industrial Welfare Commission (IWC). In the November election, critics of the commission's consistent failure to raise the state minimum wage won an initiative campaign by a large majority.2 Ironically, both the initiative and the ostensibly independent commission of experts that it circumvented were progressive reforms of the early twentieth century. The IWC has been controversial from its founding in 1913, when it was surrounded by conflict over the constitutionality of a minimum wage law for women and opposed by the state's labor establishment at the urging of its female members. Their concernsbureaucratic inefficiency, lack of public accountability, and partisanship in governmental appointments-remain live issues,

Sitka versus Kodiak: Countering the Tlingit Threat and Situating the Colonial Capital in Russian America

Abstract: Here [Sitka] it is just as if we were in a kind of wasteland where the voice of cultured people is rarely heard. While sojourning here I have become intimately acquainted with everything and have become convinced that the devil is not as terrible as he is depicted, and if it were not for the isolation from the rest of the world and such a foul climate, it would be possible to live here. All the same, thank God that I do not.... Captain Pavel Golovin, 18611