CALIFORNIA : A HISTORY BY KEVIN

STARR

Thunyarath Munyukong

War And Peace

The WWII formally began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.

Californians in support of the “America First” movement, dedicated to keeping the U.S. out of war, included: Publisher William Randolph

Hearst Novelist Kathleen Norris Film and stage star Lillian Gish Stanford University president

Ray Lyman Wilbur.

War And Peace The War Department had been

increasing its presence in California, upgrading its installations, purchasing property, commissioning the construction of fifty thousand war planes in an effort to make the U.S. the “Arsenal of Democracy.”

The attack of Pearl Harbor threw California, indeed the entire Pacific Coast, into a panic—a state compounded on February 23, 1942, when Submarine I-17 of the Japanese Imperial Navy, under Commander Kozo Nishino, surfaced in the Santa Barrbara Channel and fired 25 inch shells across the Pacific Coast Highway into oil storage tanks at Elwood, causing minor damage but effecting a psychological blow of some magnitude.

War And Peace This California-Japanese War, as

Carey McWilliams described it, was part of a larger “Yellow Peril” movement that brought with it a virulent “White California” crusade led by former San Francisco mayor James Duval Phelan, who was elected to te U.S. Senate in 1914.

Politicians such as Phelan took a hard line against the Japanese to please de Young and the Chronicle.

In early 1905 the Chronicle led a campaign to segregate Japanese children in the public schools of San Francisco through a series of virulently racist editorials that one dare not even quote.

War And Peace

Through the 1930s, despite the fact that in other ways Californians admired Japan and—in architecture and landscape design especially—were doing their best to assimilate its culture.

David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford and an ardent Nipponophile, traveled to Japan in 1900 and 1911 to recruit Japanese students.

Japanese immigrants to California didwell. They worked effectively as agricultural laborers, skillfully brokering their contracts through appointed leaders.

Arnold!

In the nineteenth century, California Republicanism was conservative and oligarchic.

The California Progressives distrusted big government, big corporations, and big labor.

Thanks to the Progressive reforms of the pre-World War I era, the voters of California could place proposed laws directly on the ballot through petition, express their opinion on laws passed by the legislature, or recall public officials without cause or judicial procedure.

Arnold! By 1964 the radical component of

the Bay Area identity, aroused by resistance to the Vietnam War, had taken root on the UC Berkeley campus, as the eruption there of the Free Speech Movement in September 1964.

This provocative restriction tapped into a magma of dissent among many Berkeley students, arising in mixed degrees from their opposition to the Vietnam War, their fear of being drafted, their espousal of various critiques of capitalist society, their desire for more sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, and their general antipathy for what a great big uncaring place UC Berkeley seemed to have become.

Arnold!

In modern times, the most significant environmental wakeup call was the Santa Barbara oil spill of January 28, 1969, when an oil drilling platform five miles offshore malfunctioned, creating a sea of ooze that extended thirty-five miles in diameter and polluted twenty miles of the Santa Barbara coast.