The American West

by Robert V Hine

  Prosperity brought people. More than a hundred thousand new residents arrived each year during the early 1920s, part of the massive national relocation taking millions from farms to cities. From states like Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas came thousands of poor folk in search of work. “Like a swarm of invading locusts,” wrote essayist Mildred Adams, “migrants crept in over the roads. They had rattletrap automobiles, their fenders tied with string, and curtains flapping in the breeze; loaded with babies, bedding, bundles, a tin tub tied on behind, a bicycle or a baby carriage balanced precariously on top. Often they came with no funds and no prospects, apparently trusting that heaven would provide for them. They camped on the outskirts of town, and their camps became new suburbs.”36

  The migration to southern California included thousands of African Americans, Mexicans, and Japanese, who collectively by 1930 made up approximately half of the unskilled workforce at the base of the region’s industrial economy. The rapid rise in the proportion of these groups in the population—from 6 percent in 1910 to nearly 15 percent in 1930—alarmed many of the region’s white residents. “Negroes: We Don’t Want You Here,” screamed the headline in one local paper in 1922. “Now and forever, this is to be a white man’s town.” Local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan staged nighttime rallies in public parks and organized auto caravans through minority neighborhoods, “to put us in our place,” one Mexican immigrant told his son. In the area surrounding the downtown campus of the University of Southern California, homeowners formed the Anti-African Housing Association (later renamed the University District Property Owners Association), a coterie of respectable citizens who specialized in burning crosses on the lawns of the black transgressors of the association’s “color line.” White residents harassed Japanese families moving into white neighborhoods, and in one particularly frightening case, vigilantes burned one Japanese family out of their home. Silent “restricted covenants” were more common and insidious. Written into the deeds of homes in most sections of the city, these covenants excluded “Negroes, Mongolians, Indians, and Mexicans” from occupancy. By the 1920s, 95 percent of the city’s housing had been declared off-limits to racial minorities. Minority home buyers brought suit to challenge the legality of these deed restrictions, but local courts continued to uphold them until 1948.37

  Restricted housing tract, Los Angeles, c. 1940. Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research.

  The African American population of Los Angeles—which grew from eight thousand in 1910 to nearly forty thousand in 1930, making it the largest in the West—was confined to an area along Central Avenue in the southern section of the city and to a rural district farther south initially known as Mudtown. The writer Arna Bontemps, who attended school in L.A. in the 1920s, remembered the black neighborhood as an agrarian place complete with “pigs and slime holes.” Most of the black residents had emigrated from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, and Mudtown “was like a tiny section of the deep south literally transplanted.” After World War I, the area was renamed Watts, for real estate agent C. H. Watts, who developed a tract of inexpensive bungalows there for black families.38

  Southern California was a space divided by race. Segregation marked (and marred) public education and transportation, parks, swimming pools, hotels, restaurants, and theaters. Edward Roybal, a social worker who in 1949 became the first Mexican American elected to the Los Angeles City Council, remembered that during the 1930s it was common to see signs in the city’s establishments warning, “No Mexicans or Negroes Allowed.” Los Angeles, of course, was not uniquely racist. The western states of Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona wrote segregation into law. “Nowhere in the United States did minorities enjoy complete equality and integration,” writes historian Robert Fogelson. “But in Los Angeles, where they were distinguished by race rather than nationality, the majority subjugated and excluded them even more rigorously.” Dwight Zook, for many years a member of the county’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, put it more boldly in an interview in 1965. Los Angeles, he declared, was “probably the most segregated city” in the United States.39

  . . .

  Mexican Americans made up the largest and fastest growing of the minority communities in Los Angeles, climbing from only six thousand in 1910 to nearly one hundred thousand in 1930. Their experience illustrates another dimension of the centuries-long conflict over acculturation and assimilation that lies at the heart of the history of the American West. The Mexican immigrants arriving in the city during the 1910s and 1920s first settled in the old city center, near the nineteenth-century Catholic church. But as that area filled up, they began streaming eastward, over the Los Angeles River and into the area that has become known as East L.A.—the Mexican American capital of the West. By the late 1920s East L.A. had stabilized into a durable community, a place where, as historian George Sánchez discovered, 44 percent of Mexican families owned homes. “Home ownership,” Sánchez writes, “symbolized adaptation: permanent settlement in the city.”40

  The prosperity of the 1920s was short-lived. The Great Depression hit Los Angeles hard, with a third or more of the county’s workforce unemployed by 1931. Clamor grew for the deportation of Mexicans. In several neighborhoods of the Los Angeles barrio, immigration agents went door to door, demanding that residents produce documents proving their legal residency, summarily arresting and jailing those unable to do so, many of them American citizens. “It was for us the day of judgment,” one resident wrote in 1931 in the pages of the local Spanish-language newspaper, La Opinion. “The marciales, deputy sheriffs, arrived in the late afternoon when the men were returning home from working the lemon groves. They started arresting people. . . . The deputies rode around the neighborhood with the sirens wailing and advising people to surrender themselves to the authorities. They barricaded all the exits to the colonia so that no one could escape.” Raids like this one frightened many Mexicans into joining voluntary programs of repatriation by officials of Los Angeles County, and between 1930 and 1933 tens of thousands of Mexican citizens boarded buses and trains for the border. There are not reliable statistics on the total number of Mexicans deported from Los Angeles, but in the authoritative study, Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez estimate that at least a million Mexican citizens from the Southwest were repatriated during the 1930s.41

  Mexican deportation: “Sometimes I tell my children that I would like to go to Mexico, but they tell me, ‘We don’t want to go, we belong here.’” Photograph and caption by Dorothea Lange, 1935. Library of Congress.

  Intended to exclude Mexicans from America, the deportations ended up binding the next generation more to the United States. “What had been largely an immigrant community before the Depression,” argues George Sánchez, “became one dominated by the children of immigrants. While maintaining their Mexican identity, these children had grown up in the states, absorbing American culture. The conflict between generations often focused on gender. “Here the old women want to run things,” grumbled one Mexican immigrant, “and the poor man has to wash the dishes while the wife goes to the show.” One young woman, pointing out that her parents had been “born in old Mexico,” complained to an interviewer that “as soon as I was sixteen my father began to watch me, and would not let me go anywhere or have my friends come home.” Another boasted that the first thing she did when she left home was bob her hair in the fashion of the day. “My father would not permit it and I have wanted to do it for a long time. I will show my husband that he will not boss me the way my father had done all of us.”42

  Impatient with their immigrant parents, yet outraged by racism and segregation, Mexican American youths created a pachuco subculture, a defiant style of talking, dressing, and behaving that included talking in a slang “Span-glish,” dressing in the long coats and pegged pants of the zoot-suiter, joining gangs, and rumbling in the streets. During World War II, pachuco gangs roused public controversy, and in 1943 hundreds of sailors from the port of Long Beach invaded East L.A., a
ssaulting young Mexican Americans and African Americans, stripping them of their clothes, and beating them senseless as the police stood by and white bystanders cheered. As sociologist Alfredo Guerra Gonzalez suggests, what have been called the Zoot-Suit Riots should actually be remembered as Serviceman’s Riots. For the Mexican American community, which sent its sons to fight in the war in greater proportion than any other group in the West, these riots would remain a bitter memory. A young Mexican American, arrested in 1943 as a public nuisance, eloquently expressed the feelings of his generation to the judge. “Pretty soon I guess I’ll be in the army and I’ll be glad to go. But I want to be treated like everybody else. We’re tired of being pushed around. We’re tired of being told we can’t go to this show or that dance hall because we’re Mexican, or that we better not be seen on this beach front, or that we can’t wear draped pants or have our hair cut the way we want to. . . . I don’t want any more trouble and I don’t want anyone saying my people are a disgrace. My people work hard, fight hard in the army and navy of the United States. They’re good Americans and should have justice.”43

  . . .

  In Los Angeles, justice could be as scarce as a rain shower in August. Crowded into Little Tokyo in the downtown section of the city, the immigrant Issei and their Nisei children seemed willing to ignore discrimination and dedicate themselves to hard work and prosperity. “Scratch a Japanese American,” writes scholar Harry Kitano, “and find a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” Until the 1920s, the Japanese in America seemed headed for assimilation and a weakening identification with Japan, but the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, completely barring Japanese immigration, “was a stinging rejection of their hopes for economic and social assimilation,” according to historian Brian Masaru Hayashi. “We are not whole-heartedly accepted by the country we reside in,” one Nisei concluded. “True, we are American citizens, but only in a statutory sense. Socially we are just another foreigner, compelled to huddle into a small quarter of our own, unable to take part in American social activities, and above all denied positions in American firms, simply because of our race.”44

  During the 1930s, Japan’s aggressive expansion into China sparked considerable controversy within the Japanese American community. Nisei Monica Sone later remembered bitter debates with her Issei parents. “I used to criticize Japan’s aggressions in China and Manchuria while Father and Mother condemned Great Britain and America’s superior attitude toward Asiatics and the interference with Japan’s economic growth,” she wrote. “During these arguments, we eyed each other like strangers, parents against children. They left us with a hollow feeling in the pit of the stomach.” The Japanese American Citizens League, a Nisei organization formed in 1930 to promote assimilation, was critical of Japan. But allegiances didn’t break cleanly along generational lines, for other Nisei publicly supported the empire. “I cry for joy over the Imperial favor that is now extending to the 400 million Chinese people,” wrote a Japanese leader in Los Angeles. Another Nisei condemned the idea that “American culture was the only possible lifestyle.” In the coming “Era of the Pacific,” he wrote, the Japanese should seek less “Americanization” because Americans would have to pursue more “Pacific-ization.”45

  Troops supervise the evacuation of Japanese families from Los Angeles to Manzanar. Photograph by Russell Lee, 1942. Library of Congress.

  The loyalty of some Japanese to their homeland was not unique, and the American proponents of empire should have recognized the Japanese rhetoric, for it echoed their own expansionist propaganda. German Americans belonged to the Nazi Bund party and Italian Americans applauded Mussolini. Members of the American Communist Party backed Stalin, a transnational loyalty made palatable when Hitler broke his nonaggression pact with the Soviets. But Japanese-Americans were the only ones subjected to mass incarceration during World War II. Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, suspending the civil rights of both citizens and aliens of Japanese background in the western states and authorizing the confiscation of property and “removal” of families from their homes and communities. Defended on the grounds of “military necessity,” the order withstood a review by the Supreme Court in 1944, although in 1982 a federal commission concluded that the United States possessed no evidence linking West Coast Japanese Americans with espionage and that internment resulted from “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” The residents of L.A.’s Little Tokyo were rounded up and sent to one of the ten camps set up across the trans-Mississippi West. Many ended up at Manzanar in the Owens valley, left an arid waste by the diversion of water for urban Los Angeles. Manzanar was “the scene of a triple tragedy,” says Richard Stewart, a Paiute Indian who leads tours around the abandoned site of the camp. First native Paiutes and Shoshones lost their homes, then farmers and ranchers lost their water, and finally Japanese Americans lost their rights. A total of 120,000 people entered these detention camps. Some stayed for up to three years.46

  “The evacuation and establishment of relocation centers were actions without precedent in American history,” wrote Dillon S. Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, commander of the operation. The Cherokees and the Creeks, the Shawnees and the Nez Perce, might disagree. Was it mere coincidence that Myer found many of his lieutenants among those historical relocation and reservation specialists in the Bureau of Indian Affairs? Ethnic cleansing and prison camps were not alien concepts dropped into American minds like bombs from Japanese Zeros. They represented a culmination of American fear and racism. “A Jap’s a Jap,” declared General John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command. “It makes no difference whether he is an American.”47

  FURTHER READING

  Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (2011)

  Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (1975)

  William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991)

  Brian Masaru Hayashi, “For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren”: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895–1942 (1995)

  Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (2014)

  George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (1993)

  Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2003)

  Richard Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830 (1959)

  Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (1995)

  10

  New Frontiers

  Frederick Jackson Turner faced the end of the frontier without tears. The young man, after all, was a professional, part of the vanguard of the first academically trained generation of historians in the United States. His argument came from evidence he found in the published report of the 1890 federal census: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement,” it concluded. “But at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” From this, Turner deduced a pattern that, he argued, explained America’s unique development and pointed to an uncertain future. He announced his “frontier thesis” at a meeting of historians held in conjunction with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, a celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to America. “Up to our own day American history has been in large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West,” Turner wrote. “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of settlement westward, explain American development.” But now, he concluded, “four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with it has closed the first period of American histor
y.”1

  There were problems with the notion of a closed frontier. Farmers and ranchers took up far more land in the trans-Mississippi West after 1890 than before. Western settlements continued to expand in the years after 1890, yet on the census map of 1900 and 1910, the “frontier line” made a mysterious reappearance. Settlement was an uneven process, with advances and retreats. In the twentieth century, many rural counties suffered depopulation, as the children of hard-pressed farmers left for the nation’s towns and cities. Using Turner’s own definition of “unsettled,” at the beginning of the twenty-first century there were more than 150 “frontier” counties in the West, and the number continues to grow. The geography that so inspired Turner turned out to be less a work of science than that of the imagination. Well into the twenty-first century, the West has yet to fill up.2

  Homesteading family in east Texas, 1918. Author’s collection.

  But the notion of a closed frontier resonated emotionally with Americans. During the long cycle of economic hard times that began with the Panic of 1873 and lasted through the late 1890s, Americans grew anxious about “the close of the frontier”—an end to the availability of “free land” and the exhaustion of the West’s natural resources. The worry echoed in government reports, scholarly treatises, and ministers’ sermons but was not confined to intellectuals. Western newspaper editor and humorist Bill Nye expressed the fears of ordinary folks: “No, we don’t have the fun we used to,” he quipped. “There ain’t no frontier any more.”3