Impacts of The New Deal and World War II Discussion One discussion The New Deal and America’s mobilization for World War II represented an unprecedented in

Impacts of The New Deal and World War II Discussion One discussion The New Deal and America’s mobilization for World War II represented an unprecedented increase in the influence of the federal government in the lives of Americans. In the Globalyceum essay, historian Linda Gordon suggests that “although Americans did not realize it in 1932, the election of Roosevelt would usher in the establishment of the modern federal state–one that would significantly expand the role of the federal government and spread wealth to more of its citizens.” (Introduction) During the war, the government increased this expansion of the government, taking control of wartime production, encouraging women to enter the workforce, and offering opportunities to some minorities through wartime service or defense work.In your first post for the discussion, draw on course resources (readings, videos, and document problems) to answer the following questions in a substantial (1-2 paragraph) response by Thursday night at 11:59pm. Return to the forum to make at least two substantial follow up posts by Sunday night at 11:59pm. You should use parenthetical citations to indicate when you are referring to a course resource i.e. (Takaki, 99)In what ways did the New Deal and World War II expand the influence of the federal government in the lives of Americans? To what extent did the New Deal and the war create opportunities for women and minorities or to what extent did these events represent the continuation of existing oppressions or inequalities? 2
A
DIFFERENT
MIRROR
A History of
Multicultural America
REVISED EDITION
Ronald Takaki
3
Copyright © 1993, 2008 by Ronald Takaki
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no
part of this publication may by reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
First revised edition, December 2008 Originally published in hardcover by Little,
Brown and Company, June 1993
4
This book is dedicated to
my wife,
CAROL,
for our forty-nine years of friendship,
our joyous journey through a lifetime of scholarship,
and our ceaseless collaboration
in recovering and writing American
history’s missing chapters.
5
Acclaim for Ronald Takaki’s
A DIFFERENT MIRROR
“In our increasingly diverse society, the issues of race, ethnicity, and religion are
often at the forefront of American consciousness, and always in the backs of our
minds, shaping our own identity and our views of others. They reverberate in our
voting booths, town halls classrooms, and popular culture. In this timely update of
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Professor Ronald Takaki
examines the challenges we face in reconciling our differences and forming a
secure, sustainable future for our country. Now more than ever, it’s essential that
we understand and embrace our diversity if we are to grow together as a nation.”
—President Bill Clinton
“A valuable contribution to the discussion of America as a multicultural society.”
—Boston Globe
“Takaki’s book is nothing less than an attempt to a view all of American history
from a multiculrual perspective. It is a laudable effort—humane, well informed,
accessible, and often incisive. It is clearly not intended to divide American but
rather to teach them to value the nations’ inescapable diversity.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A groundbreaker…. It’s fascinating to watch Takaki weave these multifaceted
strands into a single narrative text.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“While Takaki’s subtitle is ‘a history of multicultural America,’ his book is also a
manifesto for the future.”
—New York Review of Books
“A Different Mirror demonstrates that employing a multicultural approach to
American history is a necessary first step toward the binding together of our
disunited nation.”
—Detroit Free Press
“A Different Mirror advances a truly humane sense of American possibility.”
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—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
7
Also by Ronald Takaki
A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade
Violence in the Black Imagination: Essays and Documents
Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America
Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii
From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America
Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
Hiroshima: Why American Dropped the Atomic Bomb
A Large Memory: A History of Our Diversity with Voices
Debating Diversity: Clashing Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America
Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II
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CONTENTS
Copyright
1 A Different Mirror: The Making of Multicultural America
PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS
Before Columbus: Vinland
2 The “Tempest” in the Wilderness: A Tale of Two Frontiers
Shakespeare’s Dream About America
English Over Irish
English Over Indian
Virginia: To “Root Out” Indians as a People
New England: The “Utter Extirpation” of Indians
Stolen Lands: A World Turned “Upside Down”
3 The Hidden Origins of Slavery
A View from the Cabins: Black and White Together
“English and Negroes in Armes” : Bacon’s Rebellion
“White Over Black”
PART TWO: CONTRADICTIONS
The Rise of the Cotton Kingdom
4 Toward “the Stony Mountains” : From Removal to Reservation
Andrew Jackson: “To… Tread on the Graves of Extinct Nations”
The Embittered Human Heart: The Choctaws
“The Trail of Tears” : The Cherokees
“American Progress” : “Civilization” Over “Savagery”
5 “No More Peck o’ Corn” : Slavery and Its Discontents
“North of Slavery”
Was “Sambo” Real?
Frederick Douglass: Son of His Master
Martin Delany: Father of Black Nationalism
“Tell Linkum Dat We Wants Land”
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6 Fleeing “the Tyrant’s Heel” : “Exiles” from Ireland
Behind the Emigration: “John Bull Must Have the Beef”
An “Immortal Irish Brigade” of Workers
Irish “Maids” and “Factory Girls”
“Green Power” : The Irish “Ethnic” Strategy
7 “Foreigners in Their Native Land” : The War Against Mexico
“We Must Be Conquerors or We Are Robbers”
Anglo Over Mexican
8 Searching for Gold Mountain: Strangers from a Different Shore
Pioneers from Asia
Twice a Minority: Chinese Women in America
A Colony of “Bachelors”
A Sudden Change in Fortune: The San Francisco Earthquake
“Caught in Between” : Chinese Born in America
PART THREE: TRANSITIONS
The End of the Frontier: The Emergence of an American Empire
9 The “Indian Question” : From Reservation to Reorganization
The Massacre at Wounded Knee
Where the Buffalo No Longer Roam
Allotment and Assimilation
The Indian “New Deal” : What Kind of a “Deal” Was It?
10 Pacific Crossings: From Japan to the Land of “Money Trees”
Picture Brides in America
Tears in the Canefields
Transforming California: From Deserts to Farms
The Nisei: Americans by Birth
11 The Exodus from Russia: Pushed by Pogroms
A Shtetl in America
In the Sweatshops: An Army of Garment Workers
Daughters of the Colony
Up from “Greenhorns” : Crossing Delancey Street
12 El Norte: Up from Mexico
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Sprinkling the Fields with the Sweat of Their Brows
Tortillas and Rotis: Mixed Marriages
On the Other Side of the Tracks
The Barrio: A Mexican-American World
13 To “the Land of Hope” : Blacks in the Urban North
“The Wind Said North”
The Crucible of the City
Black Pride in Harlem
“But a Few Pegs to Fall” : The Great Depression
PART FOUR: TRANSFORMATIONS
The Problem of the Color Lines
14 World War II: American Dilemmas
Japanese Americans: “A Tremendous Hole” in the Constitution
African Americans: “Bomb the Color Line”
Chinese Americans: To “Silence the Distorted Japanese Propaganda”
Mexican Americans: Up from the Barrio
Native Americans: “Why Fight the White Man’s War?”
Jewish Americans: A “Deafening Silence”
A Holocaust Called Hiroshima
15 Out of the War: Clamors for Change
Rising Winds for Social Justice
Raisins in the Sun: Dreams Deferred
Asian Americans: A “Model Minority” for Blacks?
16 Again, the “Tempest-Tost”
From a “Teeming Shore” : Russia, Ireland, and China
Dragon’s Teeth of Fire: Vietnam
Wars of Terror: Afghanistan
Beckoned North: Mexico
17 “We Will All Be Minorities”
Author’s Note: Epistemology and Epiphany
Notes
12
Index
13
A DIFFERENT MIRROR
14
15
1
16
A DIFFERENT MIRROR
The Making of
Multicultural America
I HAD FLOWN from San Francisco to Norfolk and was riding in a taxi. The driver
and I chatted about the weather and the tourists. The sky was cloudy, and twenty
minutes away was Virginia Beach, where I was scheduled to give a keynote
address to hundreds of teachers and administrators at a conference on multicultural
education. The rearview mirror reflected a white man in his forties. “How long
have you been in this country?” he asked. “All my life,” I replied, wincing. His
question was one I had been asked too many times, even by northerners with
Ph.D.’s. “I was born in the United States,” I added. He replied: “I was wondering
because your English is excellent!” Then I explained: “My grandfather came here
from Japan in the 1880s. My family has been here, in America, for over a hundred
years.” He glanced at me in the mirror. To him, I did not look like an American.
Suddenly, we both became uncomfortably conscious of a divide between us. An
awkward silence turned my gaze from the mirror to the passing scenery. Here, at the
eastern edge of the continent, I mused, was the site of the beginning of multicultural
America. Our highway crossed land that Sir Walter Raleigh had renamed
“Virginia” in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. Taking lands from the Indians,
the English colonizers founded Jamestown in 1607, and six years later they shipped
the first four barrels of tobacco to London. Almost immediately, tobacco became an
immensely profitable export crop, and the rise of the tobacco economy generated an
insatiable demand for Indian land as well as for labor from England, Ireland, and
Africa. In 1619, a year before the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, a Dutch
slave ship landed the first twenty Africans at Jamestown. Indeed, history saturated
the surrounding landscape.
Questions like the one that my taxi driver asked me are always jarring. But it
was not his fault that he did not see me as a fellow citizen: what had he learned
about Asian Americans in courses called “U.S. history” ? He saw me through a
filter—what I call the Master Narrative of American History. According to this
powerful and popular but inaccurate story, our country was settled by European
immigrants, and Americans are white. “Race,” observed Toni Morrison, has
functioned as a “metaphor” necessary to the “construction of Americanness” : in the
creation of our national identity, “American” has been defined as “white.”1 Not to
17
be “white” is to be designated as the “Other”—different, inferior, and
unassimilable.
The Master Narrative is deeply embedded in our mainstream culture and can be
found in the scholarship of a long list of preeminent historians. The father of the
Master Narrative was Frederick Jackson Turner. In 1893, two years after the
Census Bureau announced that Americans had settled the entire continent and that
the frontier had come to an end, Turner gave a presentation at the meeting of the
American Historical Association. Entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in
American History,” his paper would make him famous. Turner would become the
dean of American history, his influence spanning generations of historians to come.
In what would be hailed as the “frontier thesis,” Turner declared that the end of
the frontier marked “the closing of a great historic movement”—the colonization of
the Great West. He explained that the frontier had been “the meeting point between
savagery and civilization.” At this intersection, the Europeans had been
“Americanized” by the wilderness. Initially, “the wilderness masters the colonist. It
finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel and thought. It
takes him from the railroad car and puts him in a birch canoe. It strips off the
garments of civilization, and arrays him in the hunting shirt and moccasin. It puts
him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois.… Before long he has gone to
planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes
the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.” But “little by little he transforms the
wilderness” ; in “a series of Indian wars,” the “stalwart and rugged” frontiersman
takes land from the Indians for white settlement and the advance of “manufacturing
civilization.” “The outcome is not the Old Europe,” Turner exclaimed. “The fact is
that here is a new product that is American.”2
In Turner’s footsteps came Harvard historian Oscar Handlin. In his 1945
prizewinning study The Uprooted, Handlin presented—to use the book’s subtitle
—The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. In his
introduction, Handlin wrote: “I once thought to write a history of immigrants in
America. I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”3 However,
Handlin studied only the migrations from Europe. His “epic story” overlooked the
indigenous people of the continent and also the “uprooted” from Africa, Asia, and
Latin America.
Contrary to the views of historians like Turner and Handlin, America is a nation
peopled by the world, and we are all Americans.
The Master Narrative’s narrow definition of who is an American reflects and
reinforces a more general thinking that can be found in the curriculum, news and
entertainment media, business practices, and public policies. Through this filter,
interpretations of ourselves and the world have been constructed, leaving many of
us feeling left out of history and America itself.
Today, our expanding racial diversity is challenging the Master Narrative.
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Demography is declaring: Not all of us came originally from Europe! Currently,
one-third of the American people do not trace their ancestries to Europe; in
California, minorities have become the majority. They already predominate in
major cities across the country—Boston, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit,
Houston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Diversity is emerging as America’s
“manifest destiny.”
Within the lifetime of young people today, Americans of European ancestry will
become a minority. Indeed, we will all be minorities. How can we prepare
ourselves for this future, when the Master Narrative is such a powerful force in our
thinking about the past? Analyzing the problem, fourteen-year-old Nicholas Takaki
reported that his American history course had taught him “next to nothing about the
significance of Asian Americans. I believe our education system as a whole has not
integrated the histories of all people into our education system, just the Eurocentric
view of itself, and the White-centered view of African Americans, and even this is
slim to nonexistent. What I find is that most people don’t know the fact that they
don’t know, because of the complete lack of information.”4
Increasingly aware of this ignorance, educators everywhere have begun to
recognize the need to recover the missing chapters of American history. In 1990, the
Task Force on Minorities for New York stressed the importance of a culturally
diverse education. “Essentially,” the New York Times commented, “the issue is how
to deal with both dimensions of the nation’s motto: ‘E pluribus unum’—‘Out of
many, one.’” Universities from New Hampshire to Berkeley have established
American cultural diversity graduation requirements. “Every student needs to
know,” explained University of Wisconsin chancellor Donna Shalala, “much more
about the origins and history of the particular cultures which, as Americans, we
will encounter during our lives.” Even the University of Minnesota, located in a
state that is 98 percent white, requires its students to take ethnic-studies courses.
Asked why multiculturalism is so important, Dean Fred Lukermann answered: As a
national university, Minnesota has to offer a national curriculum—one that includes
all of the peoples of America. He added that after graduation many students move
to cities like Chicago and Los Angeles and thus need to know about racial
diversity. Moreover, many educators stress, multiculturalism has an intellectual
purpose: a more inclusive curriculum is also a more accurate one.5
Indeed, the study of diversity is essential for understanding how and why
America became what Walt Whitman called a “teeming nation of nations.”6
Multicultural scholarship, however, has usually focused on just one minority.
Thus, Cornel West in Race Matters covers only African Americans, Dee Brown in
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee only Native Americans, Irving Howe in World of
Our Fathers only Jewish Americans, Mario Barrera in Race and Class in the
Southwest only Mexican Americans, and even I myself in Strangers from a
Different Shore only Asian Americans. While enriching and deepening our
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knowledge of a particular group, this approach examines a specific minority in
isolation from the others and the whole. Missing is the bigger picture.
In our approach, we will instead study race and ethnicity inclusively and
comparatively. While it would be impossible to cover all groups in one book, we
will focus on several of them that illustrate and illuminate the landscape of our
society’s diversity—African Americans, Asian Americans, Irish Americans,
Jewish Americans, Mexican Americans, Muslim Americans, and Native
Americans.
African Americans have been the central minority throughout our country’s
history. Even fifty years after their first arrival in Virginia, Africans still
represented only a tiny percentage of the colony’s population. The planters
preferred workers from their homeland, for they wanted their new society to be
racially homogeneous. This thinking abruptly changed, however, in 1676, when the
elite encountered an uprising of discontented and armed workers. After quelling the
insurrection with reinforcements of British troops, the planters turned to Africa for
their primary labor supply; the new workers would be enslaved and prohibited
from owning arms. Subsequently, the African population spiked upward, and
slavery spread across the South. African Americans would remain degraded as
unpaid laborers and dehumanized as property until the Civil War. What President
Abraham Lincoln called “this mighty scourge of war” finally ended “the
bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.” But a grim future
awaited African Americans: Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, race riots, and what
W. E. B. Du Bois called “the problem of the color line.” Still, they insistently
struggled for freedom. Joined by people of other races in the sixties, African
Americans marched and sang, “We shall overcome,” winning significant victories
that changed society. Indeed, the history of African Americans has been stitched
into the history of America itself. Martin Luther King, Jr., clearly understood this
truth when he wrote from a jail cell: “We will reach the goal of freedom in
Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.
Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s
destiny.”7
Asian Americans began arriving in America long before many European
immigrants. Seeking “Gold Mountain,” the Chinese were among the Forty-Niners.
Then they worked on the railroad, in the agricultural fields of the West Coast states,
and in the factories of California and even Massachusetts. As “strangers” coming
from a “different shore,” they were stereotyped as “heathen” and unassimilable.
Wanted as sojourning laborers, the Chinese were not welcomed as settlers. During
an economic depression, Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—the
first law that prohibited the entry of immigrants on the basis of nationality. The
Chinese condemned this restriction as racist and tyrannical. “They call us ‘Chink,’”
complained a Chinese immigrant, cursing the “white demons.” “They think we no
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good! America cut us off. No more come now, too bad!” The Japanese also
painfully discovered that their accomplishments in America did not lead to
acceptance. During World War II, the government interned a hundred twenty
thousand Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them citizens by birth. “How could I
as a six-month-old child born in this country,” asked Congressman Robert Matsui
years later, “be declared by my own Government to be an enemy alien?”8 In 1975,
after the collapse of Saigon, tens of thousands of refugees fled to America from the
tempest of the Vietnam War. Today, Asian Americans represent one of the fastestgrowing ethnic groups in America, projected to represent 10 percent of the total
U.S. population by 2050.
Initially, the Irish came here in the early seventeenth century. At that time, many
of them were brought to Virginia involuntarily as captives of the English wars in
Ireland and as indentured servants in the Irish “slave trade.” During the ninete…
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