Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 2001"

Afterword Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature

Abstract: When I wrote “Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field” for the PaciŽc Historical Review, it was a summer’s work. Seventeen years ago the Ž eld was small enough that my reading had easily kept pace with the literature. Part of a summer Ž lled with other things was enough to survey most of the rest. There were glaring omissions in the article. I suffer lasting embarrassment from having left out the work of Joel Tarr. His scholarship has been fundamental to urban environmental history, which is now arguably the most  ourishing part of environmental history. Such omissions were, however, the result of my neglect, not the size of the Ž eld.1 Environmental history was manageable. When asked by the editors of the Pacific Historical Review to update the article, I demurred. The field has grown too big; it would be far more than a summer’s work, and much would necessarily be omitted. My essay here is merely a comment. It makes no attempt at bibliographic completeness. That the field has grown more crowded is not the same thing as saying it has fundamentally changed. In one sense the

A Prophet Without Honor: Hans Morgenthau and the War in Vietnam, 1955––1965

Abstract: yet he used the language of realism to argue that the war in Vietnam did little to serve American interests. Ideological distinctions between communism and anticommunism, he contended, did little to explain the complex dynamics of Vietnamese nationalism and anticolonialism. He feared that military involvement in Vietnam might provoke Chinese intervention as it had in Korea. Further, the United States needed to set aside what Morgenthau saw as its moralistic tendencies and accept the inevitability of compromise. He urged policymakers to substitute economic for military aid, even while warning of the limits of American in uence. Early on, Morgenthau asserted that linking U.S. policy to the Diem regime in South Vietnam would likely require an extensive commitment of resources and, in the end, prove self-defeating. His early articles sought to instruct policymakers and the public alike on what he saw as the realities in Vietnam, and they bore the marks of his liberalism and his realist perspective. His position as an academic expert granted him both the privilege and the responsibility of “speaking truth to power,” Morgenthau believed. Yet, as the war continued, he became increasingly aware of the limits of his influence, and with this awareness came a more deeply engaged opposition to U.S. policy. Morgenthau castigated the Johnson administration for its efforts to sti e dissent, challenging Cold War notions of consensus and patriotism that equated disagreement with disloyalty. Moreover, by 1965 he increasingly viewed the war not only as ill-suited to American interests but also as morally wrong. Critics had long equated Morgenthau’s brand of realism with an almost cynical amorality, rendering this turn to moral engagement all the more striking. His later articles associated the war with genocide and invoked normative standards of just war. Embracing American exceptionalism, Morgenthau dubbed Vietnam “Metternich’s war fought by the nation of Jefferson and Lincoln.”87 Morgenthau’s views had changed, but so too had antiwar opinion. By the late 1960s a more radical criticism of American politics and society had taken root on the left. These opponents of the war blamed liberalism and an understanding of international relations rooted in power politics and national interests 446 PaciŽ c Historical Review 87. Morgenthau, “What Ails America?” 19. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.200 on Thu, 01 Dec 2016 05:43:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms for American mistakes in Vietnam and elsewhere. Many of them called U.S. power itself, rather than the misguided decisions that led to its use, immoral. Meanwhile, those establishment Ž gures who remained supporters of American policy saw liberal defectors like Morgenthau, no less than members of the radical left, as traitors. As a nationally known intellectual, Morgenthau’s views helped shape public opinion and policy in the 1950s. By the end of the 1960s, however, he found himself ostracized by an establishment bent on victory in Vietnam as well as by a radical antiwar movement that distrusted intellectual liberals and realist theories. Thus, Hans Morgenthau became an outcast in a world he had helped create, a prophet without honor in his own house. Since 1955 he had devoted thousands of words to criticism and warning about the disaster that awaited the American commitment in Vietnam, yet he proved unable to change the policies he opposed. Instead, he watched as his warnings went unheeded, his prophesies came to pass, and his own ideas and beliefs were held responsible. Hans Morgenthau and Vietnam 447 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.200 on Thu, 01 Dec 2016 05:43:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Resistance, Collaboration, and Manzanar Protest

Abstract: On the night of December 6, 1942, Togo Tanaka watched in disguise as a throng of people descended upon his barracks at the Manzanar internment camp for Japanese Americans. Well known for collaborating with government and camp authorities, Tanaka was one of a handful of community leaders marked for death by a small but in uential group of internee protesters. Just the night before, his colleague Fred Tayama, who was also working closely with internment officials, had been severely beaten. And now it was Tanaka’s turn to pay the price for allegedly “selling out” Manzanar internees during these nine long months of confinement. In a fit of outrage, the protest leaders tore Tanaka’s locked door off its hinges, but the former newspaper editor from Los Angeles was not to be found inside. When his wife May, backed by her parents and father-in-law, refused to reveal his whereabouts, the men became even more hostile. Crouching at the back of the commotion, Tanaka could hear cries to kill the young couple’s newborn daughter. Although a committed paciŽ st, he clutched a butcher knife under

Toward Integration in Environmental History

Abstract: My contribution to this forum will be to stress the problem of conceptual integration amid the considerable amount of research and writing that has been accomplished in environmental history. The few attempts at synthesis have had only limited success, and we have not developed a conceptual context to integrate the environmental dimension of society with other facets of history.1 I will take up this problem here for American history and explore several lines of relevant inquiry. We are fully aware of the tremendous influence in environmental history exercised by the conceptual legacy of the earlier conservation movement, especially its interest in nature in uenced by Ž gures such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir in combination with the image of the West. Historians with an urban perspective have challenged this emphasis successfully, but it has been difficult for them to do more than simply carve out room for a few aspects of urban environmental history. A

Global Dimensions of Environmental History

Abstract: An inquiry may make rapid progress when its limits are expanded. This happened in the history profession in America when environmental history swam into its ken in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is also happening within environmental history under the impetus of unfolding investigations of global topics. During the Ž rst formal conference of the American Society for Environmental History, held at the University of California at Irvine in January 1982, Donald Worster gave a banquet talk entitled “World Without Borders: The Internationalizing of Environmental History,” later published in Environmental Review (now Environmental History).1 In it, he called for a “postnationalist synthesis” in environmental history that would take account of predicaments forced on historians by several transitions in modern culture away from the “vernacular” and local and toward the professional and global. Human activities today are less often circumscribed by speciŽ c ecosystems (although even these cross borders) and more often extend throughout the biosphere, transcending every national frontier. In the nineteen years after that talk, environmental historians in America evidently took Worster’s words to heart. Even

Disturbed Landscape/Disturbing Processes: Environmental History for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: On the first weekend of May 2000, the opening act of the nation’s most impressive environmental drama of the summer was staged in Los Alamos, New Mexico. News releases covered a massive forest Ž re, named the Cerro Grande, exploding through forest stands, consuming over 40,000 acres of homes, recreation areas, and wildlands, burning perilously close to nuclear facilities, and threatening religious sites of Santa Clara pueblo. The fire, generated from a Park Service prescribed burn set in Bandolier National Monument and feeding on heavy fuel loads in the Santa Fe National Forest, raged out of control for days. Los Alamos and its neighboring bedroom community, White Rock, were evacuated. Local television news stations provided daily updates of the hundreds of homes lost.1 My husband grew up in Los Alamos. On Father’s Day we drove his parents back “up the hill” to see what was left of the city and its forest setting, to check on their old homes, and to visit some friends who had been through the ordeal. Our con-

An Open Field

Abstract: Perhaps only a poet could capture the bewildering shifts in the climate of south Texas. Sidney Lanier, convalescing there in 1873, sketched out a tale about “those remarkable meteorological phenomena called ‘northers’” that sweep across the region with peculiar fury. Imagine “riding along the undulating plains around San Antonio on a splendid day in April,” he wrote in an evocative essay Ž rst published in Southern Magazine, for that is “when the  owers, the birds, and the sunshine seem to be playing a wild game of which can be maddest with delight, and the tender spring-sky looks on like a mother laughing at the antics of her darlings.” This tranquil moment seemed to stretch on, even as the day heated up. “Presently you observe that it is very warm. An hour later you cannot endure your coat; you throw it off and hang it around your saddle,” but this brings scant relief. “Soon the heat is stifling, thermometer at ninety degrees, which on the windless prairie with the Gulf moisture in the air, is greatly relaxing,” especially for consumptives such as Lanier. Then, while standing “on an elevation in the hope of getting some breath of air, suddenly you observe a bluish haze in the north,” and within a “few moments a great roar advances . . . and presently the wind strikes you, blows your moist garment against your skin with a mortal chill.” Illness lurked for any who did not quickly mount up and “make for a house as fast as your horse can carry you,” or, failing that, seek

Constructing a Radical Identity: History, Memory, and the Seafaring Stories of Harry Bridges

Abstract: From 1934 onward Harry Bridges personiÞed militant, left-wing unionism on the Pacific Coast. Born Alfred Renton Bridges in 1901 in Australia, he began calling himself Harry when he went to sea at age sixteen. By 1922 he was working on the San Francisco docks as a longshoreman. In 1933 the International LongshoremenOs Association (ILA) chartered Local 38Ð79 in San Francisco, and Bridges emerged as leader of its left-wing caucus. In May 1934 ILA members went on strike from Bellingham, Washington, to San Diego, California, in an effort to secure union recognition, a union hiring hall, and improvements in wages and hours. Bridges became a leadingNand uncompromisingNÞgure in the strike. After the strike, he won the presidency of Local 38-79 and then of the ILAOs Pacific Coast

The Case of the Missing Century, or Where Did the American West Go After 1900?

Abstract: The “Millennium Edition” is how the American Automobile Association (AAA) labeled its year 2000 comprehensive map of the roads and highways of the United States. Perhaps the AAA also intended to use the same designation in 2001, or so sticklers for calendar accuracy might hope. In any case, whether the new millennium dawned in January 2000 or on the Ž rst day of 2001, our annual banquet in August 2000 offers an appropriate vantage point from which to survey the twentieth century and assess its impact, if any, on our popular perceptions of the American West. Let me begin by offering a simple assertion. During the past one hundred years, the American West has changed in numerous and dramatic ways, yet I firmly believe that most Americans today would find it hard to see anything particularly distinctive about the twentieth-century West—at least when it is perceived mainly in terms of popular culture.1

Manuel L. Quezon, Douglas MacArthur, and the Significance of the Military Mission to the Philippine Commonwealth

Abstract: In his posthumously published memoirs, The Good Fight, long-time Philippine political leader Manuel Luis Quezon offered this account of how and why he obtained Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s services as militar y adviser to the soon-to-beestablished Philippine Commonwealth government in 1934: “I had known General MacArthur for many years and a close friendship had grown up between us. . . . I needed the advice of a competent man on whose judgment I could depend as to the feasibility of adequately preparing the Philippines against the day that they should become independent.” He asked MacArthur: “Do you think that the Philippines can be defended after they shall have become independent?” and MacArthur replied, “I don’t think so. I know that the Islands can be protected.” Quezon then inquired if MacArthur would be willing to come to the islands as military adviser. MacArthur answered that, since there was no “further constructive work” he could perform in the United States, there was “nothing [he] would like more” than to help the Philippines “organize [its] own defense.”1 Quezon’s recollection has reappeared in virtually every

Great Western Power, "White Coal," and Industrial Capitalism in the West

Abstract: How did industrial capitalism take hold in the West? The signs point in many directions: to the financial centers of the East, the roving entrepreneurs of the West, and the business networks crisscrossing the continent by the 1860s. The discovery of gold and oil and the application of steam to transportation created much of the industrial West we know today. So, too, did electricity, or “white coal,” a clean and inexpensive source of power produced by water-driven electrical systems. Engineers began to dam western rivers for electricity in the 1890s, just as the hydraulic mining industry declined. Citizens, politicians, and reformers viewed electricity as a necessity that would dramatically uplift the country’s standard of living. It would provide

Robert Hine, Sense of Place, and the Terrain of Western History

Abstract: It is a tremendous honor to praise Bob Hine as a historian and as a person. Although I never took a class from Bob, he has been a true mentor to me—a striking example of what it means to be a teacher and a scholar. He is, without doubt, one of the greatest western historians of our time and one of the very few card-carrying academics whose prose deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with such writers as Larry McMurtry, Bernard DeVoto, or Wallace Stegner. Before focusing on Bob Hine’s astonishing power as a writer and his ability to evoke the spirit of place in history, I’d like to open on a personal note—with two pictures and a story that exemplify the person we’re honoring and that you might hold in your mind’s eye as I discuss his work. The Ž rst picture is an Ansel Adams shot of Bob as a young professor in the mid1960s, teaching his American West seminar in his living room in Riverside. (“Adams was on campus doing photos that day,” Bob told me with his characteristic modesty, “and he just happened into my seminar.”) In the picture, we see an inspiring young professor surrounded by deeply engaged undergraduates in crew cuts and cardigans, plaid skirts and sweater sets—young scholars and their teacher earnestly exchanging ideas in his home. In the second picture, taken in the mid-1970s, Bob is again near idealistic young people, though in a very different setting

The Twentieth-Century Ghosts of William Walker: Conquest of Land and Water as Central Themes in the History of the Colorado River Delta

Abstract: PaciŽc Historical Review, Vol. 70, No. 3, pages 359 –385. ISSN 0030-8684 ©2001 by the PaciŽc Coast Branch, American Historical Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 359 The author wishes to thank William Stueck, Lester Langley, and the referees for the PaciŽc Historical Review for their suggestions. The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Georgia provided funding for the research. 1. Comision Encargada del Desarrollo de los Territorios Federales [Mexican Federal Territories Development Commission], “Cincuenta Pensamientos,” Nov. 11, 1936, RG Lazaro Cardenas (hereafter cited as RG Cardenas), Archivo General de la Nacion [Mexican National Archives] (hereafter cited as AGN), Mexico City, 437.1/413, p. 2, author’s translation (AGN numbers reference volume number/record number). All quotations from Spanish-language documents have been translated by the author.

Robert Hine and Communitarianism

Abstract: In 1963, before I met Bob Hine, I began a review of one of his books by observing: “This brief, brilliantly written biography,” and I went on to write, “ This is western history at its best . . . written . . . with a realization that the West was both a place within a nation as well as a frame of mind.”1 Thirty years later I reviewed another of Bob’s books and began by observing: “Hine writes with such ease and felicity of expression that he makes a complex life and subtle philosophy appear deceptively simple.” I went on to add: “Anyone familiar with Hine’s longstanding interest in communitarian ideas will not be surprised by his sympathetic if almost affectionate treatment of Royce.”2 In between these two reviews, and since then, I have read as much of Bob’s work as I came across. I should point out that it is extremely difficult to separate Bob Hine from his work, and that makes this commentary somewhat tortured. Bob’s nature and temperament Ž t the study of community. Not only is he a splendid writer whose work is impeccably researched, but also he is a gentleman scholar in the truest sense of the expression and among the most civil and humane individuals I have ever met. As a result of mulling all of

A Surprising Amount of Justice: The Experience of Mexican and Racial Minority Defendants Charged with Serious Crimes in Arizona, 1865––1920

Abstract: In early February 1889, Manuel Loterio and Ed Keyes apparently met for the first time near Prescott, Arizona Territory. The men stopped at a tavern where they drank and played cards. By all accounts, they departed on friendly terms but later that night fell into a drunken quarrel that escalated into a Ž st Ž ght along Walnut Creek. During the Ž ght, Keyes tackled Loterio and attempted to drown him by holding his head under water. Lark Pierce, a bystander and friend of Keyes, persuaded him to let Loterio go. But as soon as Loterio rose, Keyes pulled his pistol and Ž red three shots. Loterio was dead before he hit the water.1 In an area of Arizona well known for its anti-Mexican bias, during an era of U.S. history notable for its virulent racism, and within the context of a situation often viewed as self-defense, one might logically assume that Keyes walked away from the killing unpunished. But the aftermath of Loterio’s murder produced surprising results.2 Despite Keyes’s local popularity and

Women's Organizations, U.S. Foreign Policy, and the Far Eastern Crisis, 1937––1941

Abstract: In the spring of 1939, as the Japanese Imperial Army continued its campaign in China and Adolf HitlerOs forces swallowed up what had remained of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Settlement, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on the crucial issue of American neutrality policy. Louise Leonard Wright, the chairman1 of the National League of Women VotersO Department of Government and International Cooperation, was the sole witness to appear before the committee. On April 13, 1939, she testiÞed on behalf of six national womenOs organizationsNthe American Association of University Women, the General Federation of WomenOs Clubs, the National Board of the Young WomenOs Christian Association, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National WomenOs Trade Union League, in addition to her own League of Women Voters. Wright spoke with authority. A writer and lec-

Westward, Utopia: Robert V. Hine, Aldous Huxley, and the Future of California History

Abstract: I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

Releasing the Doves

Abstract: Having the chance to think about the work of Robert Hine has been a profoundly humbling experience for me. Like so many Western historians my age and, er, younger, I have been under the impression that I am the first to discover the Western past as it really was. First to present that past according to a New Light, damning those predestined to predate me. And then handing down the ark of covenant to acolytes who are even now taking their courses and writing their dissertations and scanning the obituaries for job opportunities. All this time I’ve thought I was seeing the elephant. I was more like Piglet hunting the heffalump. I didn’t know. I should have. When I was a master’s student myself, a teaching assistant in Peter Iverson’s Western history survey at the University of Wyoming, I read the course text, The American West: An Interpretive Histor y, by Robert V. Hine.1 The book was Ž rst published in 1973, and I still Ž nd myself dipping into it with some frequency. I didn’t realize, back in 1980, when the book was already in its seventh printing, that I was holding in my hands a document that could, and should, have been printed in microscript on the backs of a thousand doves and released into the air at that very moment. Had we released the doves at meetings of the Western History Association, annually, for the next two decades, it’s barely conceivable that the late and