final review Flashcards
(44 cards)
Japanese Internment
– thousands of Japanese on the west coast were interned between 1942 and 1945
• After the attack on Pearl harbor there were many false rumors of Japanese spies and disoyaly
• Started with the Executive Order 9066
• Removed from there homes and taken to assembly centers
• Were then moved to relocation camps
Asiatic Exclusion League
Perceived three main threats from the Japanese
- Economic – afraid the Japanese would take all their jobs
- Social – afraid the Japanese were would not assimilate into American society
- Biological – white race was going to be absorbed by the Japanese
Gentlemen’s Agreement
After the 1906 earth quake the public school system was reorganized
• Japanese kids were sent to separate, racially specific schools
• Japan filed a formal complaint
• T. Roosevelt negotiated an unofficial gentlemen’s agreement with Japan which said that there would be no segregation within the school system
o In return Japan would limit immigration to the US to immediate family
Picture Brides
- In order to get around immigration limitations, Japanese men in the US would marry girls in Japan so they could immigrate to the US
- This was because the gentlemen’s agreement said that immigration from Japan was to be limited to immediate family only
- The brides were given the name picture brides as their husbands only saw pictures of them before they were married
Heney-Webb Land Law 1913
Said that Asian immigrants could not buy or own land in the CA
• Primarily directed at the Japanses
• Many Japanese immigrants got around this by transferring land deeds to under their American born children’s names
Executive Order 9066
In an atmosphere of World War II hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan.
• gave the military broad powers to ban any citizen from a fifty- to sixty-mile-wide coastal area stretching from Washington state to California and extending inland into southern Arizona. The order also authorized transporting these citizens to assembly centers hastily set up and governed by the military in California, Arizona, Washington state, and Oregon. Although it is not well known, the same executive order (and other war-time orders and restrictions) were also applied to smaller numbers of residents of the United States who were of Italian or German descent.
Korematsu v. US Army
• Korematsu was a young Japanese man born in CA
• He refused to go into an internment camp
• Case was brought to the Supreme court in 1944
• Supreme court ruled that interment of the Japanese was unconstitutional, however, since it was war time internment camps were permitted
o held that the need to protect against espionage outweighed Fred Korematsu’s individual rights, and the rights of Americans of Japanese descent
• Set the precedence that the constitution could be neglected/overturned during times of war
LT. General John L. Dewit
- head of the Western Defense Command
- was at first opposed to the internment of Japanese Americans
- changed his mind, largely as a result of the sensation publicity given to the report of the Pearl Harbor investigating commission
- the report laid the blame mainly on the army and navy commanders in Hawaii saying that the two commanders failed to take adequate precautions for the defense of the island
- also in the report, supreme court justice Owen Roberts says there were spies in Oahu
- many Americans took this as new official evidence of Japanese American disloyalty
- due to public outcry he changed his position and stated that the Japanese were now an enemy race and action against them needs to be taken
442nd Combat Regiment
- US Army was segregated in WWII
- Japanese men assigned to the 442nd combat regiment
- Became the most decorated unit in the history of the US Army
- Also had the highest casualty rate
Redress Payment
US issues a formal apology and a $20,000 redress payment to all surviving Japanese internment victims
Port Chicago Mutiny Trial
• July 1944 a huge explosion happened at Port Chicago
• Killed 320 people, 220 were black
• After the incident white officers were given shore leave while black workers were reassigned to Mare Island
• Navy blamed the explosion on the mishandling of explosives by the black laborers
• A month later, the men were asked to load ammunition on to ships again, but they refused saying they were scared and that the conditions were not safe
• They were threatened but 50 men still refused to load the ships
• The 50 men were charged with mutiny and jailed
• At their trials they pleaded not guilty
• Courts found all 50 men guilty and sentenced them to 15 years in prison
o After the war the sentence was lowered to 2 years
Joe Small
- One of the leaders of the Port Chicago Mutiny
* Refused to unload ammunition
Zoot Suit Riots
• A group of sailors for out on the town one night in LA when the claim a group of latino boys wearing Zoot suits jumped them
• series of riots broke out in Los Angeles, California, between white sailors and Marines stationed in the city and Latino youths
• the next night around 200 sailors hired 20 taxi cabs and crawled through the streets of the Latino community
o jumped some latino kids
• called the taxi cab brigade
o announced to the press that they were out to do what the police could not do
• As the violence escalated over the ensuing days, thousands of servicemen joined the attacks, marching abreast down streets, entering bars and movie houses and assaulting any young Latino males they encountered.
• Police were ordered not to arrest them
Sleepy Lagoon Murder
• In LA the swimming pools only allowed blacks and latinos to swim on Wednesdays
• So they had their own watering hole which they called the sleepy lagoon
• Henry Leyvas, a member of the 38th Street Gang, gets kicked out of the Sleepy lagoon
o 38th Street Gang – latino gang
• Gets his buddies and they go to crash a party of a rival gang
• The next day the body of Jose Diaz is found
• Leyvas and some of his buddies were picked up and charged for the murder of Diaz
• Have to appear in front of a grand jury
• All the boys were charged with 1st degree murder
o Trial wa a “jok”
o The boys were not allowed to clean up or even change into clean cloths
o Diaz’s friends, who he was last seen with, were never asked to testify
Captain Duran Ayres
- Testifies against latino people
- Says they are descendants of the Aztecs who were pretty barbaric
- Recommends the boys be charged and imprisoned or sent to the army
Carey McWilliams
- Leader of the sleepy lagoon defense committee
- Claimed an injustice had been committed
- Decision was overturned two years later
- Believed in integration and interracial marriages
Hollywood and HUAC
• 1938 congress created the House Un-American Committee
• One of HUAC’s early targets for its anticommunist investigations was the film industry
• 1947 a list was issued of suspected Communist in the industry
o 250 writers, actors, directors barred from further employment
Free speech movement in Berkley
• May 1960 students protest their exclusion from HUAC hearings in SF city hall
• Around the same time black students in southern states begin to attack segregation at lunch counters with sit ins
o Aided during the summer by many Berkley student
• University admin announce that sidewalk area at the southern entrance on campus(previously thought to belong to the city of Berkley) was university property and students were not longer allowed to use it for tabling, recruiting members, or organizing any off-campus political activity
• When the administration tried to enforce the order students organized the Free Speech Movement, called a strike, and used mass civil disobedience against the university
• Edwards v. South Carolina 1963
o Ruling stating “student speakers may even advocate violations of the law provided such advocacy does not constitute a clear and present danger” and “much of the conduct that the public finds objectable is constitutionally protected”
• Another key issue of the FSM – protests against the Vietnam war and the draft
Hippy Movement
- Hippies often described their movement as a subculture or counterculture
- Hippie mystique- social protest and normal feelings of rebellion characteristic of adolescence
- Craved love joy and self-realization which they thought could be satisfied with drugs taken with people who had similar feelings
- LSD was an essential factor in the spread of the hippie movement
- Media described them as “flower children” and “the love generation”
- Hippie leaders maintained that they were seeking to establish a new communal freedom from individual anxieties and to remove themselves from a decent society full of war and oppression and placing themselves into a utopia of peace and love
Ronald Reagan and first term as governor
- Elected governor of CA in 1966
- Pledged that if he was elected he would “clean up the mess in Berkley”
- Repeatedly expressed opposition towards the housing Rumford Act of 1963 but insisted that in doing so he was defending the right to private property but not indulging in racial bigotry
- Said he was going to cut taxes and reduce gov. spending
- Made drastic cuts to higher education and mental health institutes
- Reduced funding to state colleges and universities and proposed significant increases in tuition
Budget Crisis of 1970s
• In the early 1970s higher education seemed overexpanded
• College enrollment was down due a reduction of birthrate (birth control introduced in 60’s) and a decline in migration to CA
• Funds for public education slashed
• State colleges and universities were able to balance their budgets by exploiting part-time teachers
o Paid them low hourly wages
o Assigned large share of their teaching loads to them
1946Nixoncampaign
- In his congressional campaign against Voorhis in 1946, Nixon followed a strategy of innuendo that the Republican National Committee had recommended to the party’s candidates. He accused his Democratic opponent of disloyalty to America, not directly but through guilt by association. He charged that Voorhis was “one of those who front for un-American elements, wittingly or otherwise, by advocating increased federal controls over the lives of the people.
- “Of course I knew that Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist,” Nixon remarked afterward, “but I had to win …. Nice guys and sissies don’t win many elections.”
1950 Nixon campaign
• Nixon won election to the US senate (against Congresswoman Douglas). His most effective campaign weapon against her was the charge that her voting record in the House of Representatives corresponded with the Communist party line (capitalizing on the American public’s fear of the Russians)
UFW (United Farm Workers)
• formed in 1966 by the merging of the AWOC (Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee) and Cesar Chavez’s NFWA (National Farm Workers Association)
• created when the Di Giorgio corporation permitted its workers to decide by ballot if they wanted a union and which one if they did
◦ the workers wanted a union, surprise!
• AWOC started a strike against grape growers in a district around Delano in northern Kern County, NFWA joined 2 weeks later
◦ if the strike was a few years later, it would have failed like all the others
◦ Whites had a new interest in helping minorities get civil rights, so they supported the boycott of the grapes and donated money/supplies to the striking workers
• The Di Giorgio corp decided that it wasn’t worth it to deny a union because of a national boycott effort was destroying their profits
• A few growers of wine grapes signed contracts with the UFW, but the rest of the table grape growers held out
◦ they held out because they were encouraged by the election of Reagan in 1966, he was anti farm union
◦ they eventually were almost brought to ruin, they signed contracts by 1970
