THE CHANGING FACE OF THE YELLOW PERIL:
A CASE STUDY OF USING NARRATIVES IN HISTORY EDUCATION
A Project
Presented to the faculty of the Department of History
California State University, Sacramento
Submitted in partial satisfaction of The requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
History
by
Wayne Wang Yip To
SPRING 2012
© 2012
Wayne Wang Yip To
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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THE CHANGING FACE OF THE YELLOW PERIL:
A CASE STUDY OF USING NARRATIVES IN HISTORY EDUCATION
A Project
by
Wayne Wang Yip To
Approved by:
______, Committee Chair Chloe Burke
______, Second Reader Donald J. Azevada, Jr.
______Date
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Student: Wayne Wang Yip To
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credits is to be awarded for the project.
______, Graduate Coordinator ______Mona Siegel Date
Department of History
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Abstract
of
THE CHANGING FACE OF THE YELLOW PERIL:
A CASE STUDY OF USING NARRATIVES IN HISTORY EDUCATION
by
Wayne Wang Yip To
Over 22,000 Japanese Americans and 13,000 Chinese Americans actively served in the U.S. armed forces during the Second World War. While there are numerous historical works on the Japanese American military experience, little research has been developed regarding the service of Chinese Americans in the U.S. military. The first two chapters of this project trace and compare the contributions made by both Japanese
Americans and Chinese Americans through their military service during the First and
Second World Wars. This portion of study also draws upon major periodicals and oral histories to examine how shifts in mainstream racial attitudes changed in favor of
Chinese Americans over Japanese Americans during the early decades of the twentieth century. As most historical studies of recent years are narrow in scope, they have a limited applicability to the high school classroom. The third chapter utilizes the evidence
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from this research project to demonstrate how to apply narrowly-focused historical research to the classroom through construction of historical narratives.
______, Committee Chair Chloe Burke
______Date
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PREFACE
Over six decades after the end of World War II in June of 2000, President Clinton and other members of his administration inducted twenty-two Asian American soldiers into the Pentagon‘s Hall of Heroes and awarded them with America‘s highest military honor, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Clinton remarked, ―It‘s long past time to break the silence about their courage…rarely has a nation been so well-served by a people it has so ill-treated.‖1 After almost two decades of political pressure, Japanese
Americans were finally able to receive much belated apologies and reparations for being unfairly incarcerated during World War II. The political push also set forth an immense effort to preserve and educate others about the experience of Japanese Americans during the war. As a result, there was a renewed interest in the men who served and sacrificed in
100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Combat Regimental Team which led to a reevaluation of the heroic actions performed by these men throughout the course of the war. It was discovered that twenty-two Asian Americans were worthy of the Medal of Honor, but due to the racist tendencies of the time, they had received lesser awards. The ceremony was conducted as a means to right an injustice. Interestingly enough, two of the twenty- two men honored that day were not Japanese American. One was Filipino American
1 Rudi Williams, ―22 Asian Americans Inducted Into Hall of Heroes,‖ American Forces Press Service, June 28, 2000, accessed March 18, 2012, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45241.
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named Rudolph B. Davila, who was still alive to receive his well-deserved Medal of
Honor. The other was Captain Francis B. Wai, a Chinese Hawaiian officer who died in action near Leyte in the Philippine Islands.
The posthumous medal bestowed to Francis Wai raises several major historical and historiographic questions about the role of Chinese Americans during the Second
World War. In contrast to the well-documented Japanese American 100th Infantry
Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team, little has been recorded about the military experience of Chinese Americans. Captain Francis Wai, a man of Chinese descent, fought in an army that was considered racially segregated. Were they, like the Japanese
Americans, forced to form their own units? Were Chinese Americans able to serve in racially-mixed units during World War II or in any other major American war prior to desegregation? If so, in what manner did they serve and did they encounter racism in the course of their service? Francis Wai was a commissioned officer who was promoted twice to the rank of captain. If he was an officer of a racially-mixed unit, which meant that in America‘s supposed segregated army, a non-white officer was commanding white men on the frontlines. Wai thus, upsets traditional historical understandings of race in an army that was not ―desegregated‖ until 1947. What was particular about Chinese
Americans during World War II that appeared to make them more acceptable than
Japanese Americans and African Americans? How then did this contrast with the laws
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and beliefs that restricted rights of Chinese Americans as well as Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century?
These questions expose a sizable gap in American history. Professional historians have only recently started researching Chinese American history in the twentieth century.
The goal of this project is to fill in this gap in history by discussing the agency and determination of Chinese Americans in their struggle for full citizenship in the United
States through military service. The scattered evidence of Chinese Americans serving in the military also reveals changes in mainstream racial attitudes of white Americans toward the Chinese, both overseas and in America. However, racial attitudes toward
Japanese Americans took a turn to the worse as the threat of Imperial Japan loomed large in the interwar period. This difference in racial attitude makes the Japanese American experience a good point of comparison with that of the Chinese Americans because both groups have endured the trials of restricted immigration, challenges over assimilation, generational gaps, social and economic racism. Both groups have also been marginalized by the black and white race dichotomy that has dominated American historical and societal landscape. Additionally, both groups must also be analyzed in a transnational setting where global politics and war play major roles in mainstream racial attitudes toward Chinese Americans and Japanese American alike. This analysis aims, thus, to
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uncover another layer of America‘s past and also to recover a piece of Chinese American history.
E.P. Thompson, often considered the father of modern social history, famously stated in The Making of the English Working Class, ―I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‗obsolete‘ hand-loom weaver, the ‗utopian‘ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.‖2 Thompson hoped to discover the forgotten and the lost causes hidden deep in the past or ignored by previous historians. As opposed to retelling or readjusting the same narratives over and over again, modern historians have followed in Thompson's footsteps to ―present previously disregarded historical subjects, who could give access to a multiplicity of pasts.‖3 The practice of history today, as taught and executed at the tertiary level, revolves around questions of the past being answered through painstaking research, compilation and analysis of data, and narrative writing. History is about a process of discovering and rediscovering the past. Renowned Cold War historian John
Lewis Gaddis argues that historians have overwhelming chosen the narrative as the means ―to simulate what transpired in the past.‖4 It is of the utmost importance that students of history learn the process of communicating the past by writing narratives.
2 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 12. 3 Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 55. 4 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 105.
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There is a major contrast in history education at the secondary and tertiary levels. Former high school history teacher and University of Michigan professor Robert Bain keenly observes, ―history at the university was a discipline…in high school, history was a subject students took and teachers taught.‖5 Take, for example, the state of California‘s history teaching standards. While the California State Standards for History-Social
Science outlines topical and informational knowledge requirements, it fails to define the critical skills that students will need to become lifelong historical thinkers. Additionally, since textbook publishers all align their texts to the state standards, the most popular and easiest way to develop curriculum is to make the textbooks the central driving force for teaching history. In the educational climate of high-stakes testing, the skills that students develop in a history class are mostly limited to obtaining information through secondary textbooks and interpreting primary sources directly associated with the content of the textbook. Student knowledge at the secondary level is assessed through two primary means. The first assessment method consists of written responses in short-answer form
5 Robert B. Bain, ―Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction‖ in Knowing, Teaching and Learning History: National and International Perspectives, ed., Peter N. Stearns et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 331.
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or essays. The second and most commonly-used Who believed that in an ideal are multiple-choice exams which are often society the government should be controlled by a class of unpredictable and often trivial in nature. In the “philosopher kings”?
A. Muhammad California state standards, students are asked to B. Plato C. Lao-Tzu ―relate moral and ethical principles in ancient D. Thomas Aquinas
Greek and Roman philosophy, in Judaism, and in FIGURE 1: Sample question from the California Standards Test – Released Test Christianity to the development of Western Questions from 2003-2005 political thought.‖6 Yet the standard is assessed by asking students to make out a Greek name from an Arabic, Chinese, or English one (Figure 1). Unfortunately, this is the preferred assessment method for teachers due to the ease of grading when compared to stacks of written responses and for education bureaucrats who get tangible numbers to process and report. New teachers have adopted the same methodology from their own experiences as students, their observations of master teachers, and the often uninspiring methods classes in their teachers‘ education courses and continue to structure their courses around multiple choice testing and the textbook.
In direct contrast to history courses at the secondary level, professional historical analysis is constructed through both primary and secondary source research and presented through an argumentative narrative. These narratives are filtered through an
6 California Department of Education, ―History/Social Science Content Standards for California Public Schools,‖ 50.
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open dialogue within the scholarly community over the historical accuracy and feasibility of the text. Professionals show that history is a richly-detailed and complex story that results from interpretation and analysis, not the memorization of details, is the true core of historical understanding. The challenge for history educators is to be able to create an innovative curriculum that fosters and accurately assesses historical thinking in students.
Historian/educators like Sam Wineburg of the Stanford History Education Group, Robert
Bain of the University of Michigan, and famed history education author Dr. James W.
Loewen have led the way in pioneering new pedagogies for history education. This project aims to build on this work by reconstructing pieces of historical research in
Chinese American history to formulate a narrative-writing process in a manner that is usable in a classroom environment. By investigating historical questions within and between the lines of the California state history standards, students will be able to gain a richer and more complex understanding of history. The narrative assessment piece proposed in this project (see Appendix) will, not only enrich a student‘s understanding of the state standards, but also meets the writing criteria of the new Common Core
Standards. Furthermore, teachers will find their historical knowledge stretched by utilizing the lesson and research models.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Preface ……………………………………………………………………………….… vii
List of Tables …………………………………………………………………………. xvii
List of Figures …………………………………………………...…………………… xviii
Chapter
1. THE RAPID AND UNEVEN GROWTH OF ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY …....1
Asian Americans in Immigration Politics and Sociology ...…….…...... 1
Asian American Studies and Ethnic Consciousness ...……………..……. 4
The New Social History and Agency ……………………...………...... … 7
Internment and Oral History of Japanese American Service ……………10
Scarcity of Chinese American Works and Oral Histories …………...... 16
2. THE CHANGING FACE OF THE YELLOW PERIL: HISTORICAL
NARRATIVE OF THE ASIAN AMERICAN MILITARY EXPERIENCE
IN THE WORLD WARS …...…………………………………………..……....…. 20
Methodology …………………………………………………..……..… 21
The Changing Face of the ―Yellow Peril‖ ……………………..…..…... 24
Asian Americans in the First World War ………………………....…… 29
The Interwar Period ……………………………………………………. 38
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The Prewar Draft ………………………………………...………..……. 40
Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans in World War II …....…... 44
Conclusions ……………………………………………………....…….. 53
3. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF THE TEACHING APPLICATION …...... 55
Analyzing ―Macro-Events‖ through Textbooks and Historiography ...... 56
Historical Questions to Fill in Historical Gaps in the Curriculum …...... 59
From ―Macro-Events‖ to ―Micro-Processes‖ in Historical Narratives .... 62
Research and the Narrative – Teacher Workshops ……………..….…... 66
Appendix A ―Micro-Processes‖ within ―Macro-Events‖ ………………………...….… 71
Appendix B1 What Role did Chinese Americans Play in the U.S. Military during the
Two World Wars? (CCWW) – Primary 3-Day Lesson Plan……………...….……….... 73
Appendix B2 CCWW – Student Response Packet ………………….……………...... 79
Appendix B3 CCWW – Resource Packet ………………………………………...... 90
Appendix B4 CCWW – PowerPoint Presentation Slides …………………………...... 104
Appendix B5 CCWW – Differentiated Assessment – Comic Strip .....……………..…107
Appendix B6 CCWW – Sample Timeline …………………….…………….…...... …..108
Appendix B7 What Role did Chinese Americans Play in the U.S. Military during the Two World Wars? (CCWW) – Alternate 1-Day Historiography Lesson Plan ….... 109
Appendix B8 CCWW – Alternate 1-Day Student Response Packet ……..……...…….112
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Appendix B9 CCWW – Alternate 1-Day Resource Packet …….……….………..…....115
Appendix C1 What Effects did Internment have on Northern Californian Japanese
Americans? (NCJI) – Alternate 3-Day Lesson Plan .…………..………….….……...... 117
Appendix C2 NCJI – Student Response Packet ……………………….…………..…..122
Appendix C3 NCJI – Resource Packet ……………………………………………...... 133
Appendix C4 NCJI – PowerPoint Presentation Slides ……………….…………..…....141
Appendix D1 Comparing the Chinese American and Japanese American Military
Experience in the World Wars (CJCOMP) – Alternate 3-Day Lesson Plan ………..…143
Appendix D2 CJCOMP – Student Response Packet …….…………………………….149
Appendix D3 CJCOMP – Resource Packet ……………………………………....…....160
Appendix D4 CJCOMP – Differentiated Assessment – Comic Strip ……….….…...... 166
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………...... 167
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LIST OF FIGURES
1. Sample Question from California Standards Test …………………….……….. xii
2. Full-page Spread of Chan Chong Yuen …………………..……..……………... 40
3. Melting Pot Soldier ……………………………………..………..………..…… 41
4. The Recruit of the Day ……………………………….…...….…...……………. 46
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LIST OF TABLES
1. Inclusion and Exclusion Guide ……………………………..…………..…….... 61
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1
CHAPTER ONE
THE RAPID AND UNEVEN GROWTH OF ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY
Once a subject ignored by the American academic community, the study of Asian
Americans has grown immensely in both history and the social sciences since the 1980s.
Modern-day researchers of Asian American have delved into popular topics such as gender roles, generational conflicts, immigration experiences, class cleavages, transnational identities, and military history. However, the growth of scholarship in
Asian American studies has been uneven. Not only were historians late in entering into the field, much of the historical study of Asian Americans has been driven by civic action and politics. This section traces the historiography of Asian American history and addresses some of the remaining gaps in the scholarship that remain today, including the role played by Chinese Americans in the military during the First and Second World
Wars.
ASIAN AMERICANS IN IMMIGRATION POLITICS AND SOCIOLOGY
While numerous pieces have been written about Asians in the United States, it was not until the latter part of the twentieth century that professional historians began to write the history of Asian Americans. All of the earlier works swirled around the heated
Asian immigration issue that was debated at the turn of the century. ―In general, the highly charged polemics against the presence of Asians in America appeared in pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, popular novels, and…legislative documents and government reports, while apologias for continuing…immigration…were usually well-
2 reasoned, but biased books.‖1 The first to write about Asians in America were politicians, diplomats, missionaries or sociologists. Mary Roberts Coolidge, a sociology professor from Stanford, wrote an impassioned defense of the Chinese and railed against opponents of immigration in her book, Chinese Immigration (1909). Coolidge portrayed the Chinese as victims, stating ―the Chinaman, predestined by helplessness to be the convenient puppet of politics, had become, to the ignorant and antipathetic Workingmen of California, the obvious causes of all his grievances.‖2 California politicians responded by describing Coolidge‘s work as ―a mosaic of falsehood and misrepresentation‖3 and forced the book‘s publisher, Henry Holt & Company to be withdrawn from circulation.
With the passage of restrictive immigration policies in the 1920s, social scientists shifted the focal point of study from the immigrants to the second generation of Asian
Americans. The foundational study of this period was led by sociologist Robert Park whose University of Chicago group conducted a Race Relation Survey of Asian
Americans on the West Coast. By gathering oral histories from over six hundred
Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Indians between 1924 and 1926, Park and his researchers formulated a widely-accepted theory of race relations based on the ―notion of the cycle of contacts, competition, accommodation, and eventual assimilation‖ and concluded that
Asian Americans ―did not fit into this paradigm.‖4 Park and his team hoped to explain why immigrants from Asia had a difficult time assimilating into American society.
However, most of these researchers did not speak the languages of their research subjects
1 L. Ling-Chi Wang, ―Asian American Studies,‖ in American Quarterly, Vol.33, No.3 (1981), 341. 2 Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 125-126. 3 ―Book Charging Anti-Chinese Injustice is Withdrawn,‖ New York Times, 16 October 1909, p.9. 4 Wang, 345.
3 and had to rely on translators. Park and his contemporaries solved this issue by training
Chinese American and Japanese Americans to become the experts in the study of their heritage through Park‘s framework. As the ―only scholars studying Asian communities in America at the time, their work has had an impact far beyond what their small numbers would suggest…the coherent language and definitions that these sociologists espoused dominated scholarly discourse about Asian in America for decades.‖5
Two of the foremost Asian American scholars to come out of the Chicago School were Rose Kum Lee and Frank Miyamoto. Both authors wrote primarily about the interactions and social organizations within the Asian American communities. Rose
Kum Lee‘s two primary works, The Growth and Decline of Chinese Communities in the
Rocky Mountain Region in 1947 and The Chinese in the U.S.A. in 1960, ―remain among the most insightful writings on the Chinese in the United States‖6 in describing various aspects of Chinese American life from a sociological perspective. Similarly, Miyamoto‘s
Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle (1941) explores the process of assimilation of the Japanese in America but also the ―subtle means by which the
Japanese…retained their cultural integrity.‖7 When Roosevelt‘s Japanese internment orders were issued the following year, Miyamoto responded by ―suppressing his anger
5 Henry Yu, ―The ‗Oriental Problem‘ in America‖ in Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era, K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan, ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 196. 6 Wang, ―Asian American Studies,‖ 345-346. 7 Richard T. LaPiere, ―Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle‖ in American Journal of Sociology, Vol.46, No.4 (Jan., 1941). 635.
4 and shock…[and] tried to look at it as a grand sociological experiment.‖8 Fortunately,
Miyamoto was recruited by UC Berkeley professor of sociology, Dorothy S. Thomas and given special permission to join her research team. Thomas, co-authored with Richard S.
Nishimoto and The Spoilage (1946) which analyzed the ―social demography of forced mass migration and voluntary resettlement, with special reference to the dislocation of habits and changes of attitudes produced by experience‖9 seen at the camps in Tule Lake,
Poston and Minidoka. The Spoilage and its follow-up, The Salvage, are two examples of the dozens of sociological studies of the Japanese struggle within the camps in the postwar period. However, in alignment with Park‘s assimilationist logic, most of these postwar books tended to defend rather than criticize the government‘s internment policies.
ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Professional historians finally began to write Asian American histories in sizable numbers after the Second World War. Many of these histories adopt ―more moderate perspectives…emphasizing the contributions made by Asians to American history and society…[but] their contributionist stance helped to keep old assimilationist assumptions alive‖10 Betty Lee Sung‘s synthesis of the Chinese American experience in Mountain of
Gold (1967) and its revision, The Story of the Chinese in America (1971), are illustrative
8 Tom Griffin, ―The Stolen Years: Part Two,‖ The University of Washington Alumni Magazine, March 2006, accessed Feburary 27, 2012, http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march06/content/view/13/1/. 9 Dorothy Swaine Thomas and Richard S. Nishimoto, The Spoilage: Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), v. 10 Sucheng Chan, ―Asian American Historiography‖ in Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 65, No.3 (Aug., 1996), 370-371.
5 of the moderate consensus perspective of this historiographic phase. Sung describes the arduous Chinese emigration experience from Guangdong province in Southern China to the struggles of life in America as the Chinese dealt with issues such as discriminatory legislation, gender imbalances, social racism and economic survival. Sung argues that, with the closure of China by the Communists, the Chinese in America actively embarked on ways to integrate into mainstream society. Sung tellingly concludes The Story of the
Chinese in America by describing a number of economically and socially successful
Chinese Americans, many of whom followed the path of being ―thrifty, hardworking, eager for knowledge, ambitious, devoted to the rights of the average man and eminently successful in climbing the ladder of opportunity.‖11 S.W. Kung‘s Chinese in American
Life: Some Aspects of Their History, Problems, and Contributions (1962) follows a similar thread in recapping the history of the Chinese in America and then stating contributions made by specific Chinese Americans.
A similar approach was used by historians of Japanese American history. Bill
Hosokawa was wrote the first full-length narrative of the Japanese experience in America in his groundbreaking historical synthesis, Nisei: The Quiet Americans (1969).
Hosokawa aimed to ―tell the inspiring tale of the Japanese community‘s social ascension, despite the exceptional level of exclusion and discrimination its members had faced relative to other immigrants.‖12 At the same time, University of California, Los Angeles professor and internment camp survivor Harry Kitano wrote a hybrid historical and
11 Betty Lee Sung, The Story of the Chinese in America (New York: Collier Books, 1971), 239. 12 Greg Robinson, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 241.
6 sociological monograph, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture. Kitano pays particular attention to the interactions and differences between each Japanese generation as they navigated through a long history of racial and legal discrimination.
Both Hosokawa and Kitano conclude their narratives by lauding the successful economic assimilation of the Japanese Americans, stating that the Japanese have made tremendous progress in terms of middle-class standards ―for a group who came to the wrong country and the wrong state (California) at the wrong time…with the wrong race and skin color.‖13
Authors like Sung, Kung, Hosokawa, Kitano and other early Asian American historians such as Him Mark Lai, Harry Kitano and Francis Hsu, penned historical narratives that ―reclaimed contributions of the Chinese [and Japanese] to American socioeconomic life;‖ their ethnic background helped them to attain a stronger measure of legitimacy than ―European American scholars [who] remained wedded to the unbalanced perspectives of the past.‖14 Most of these early landmark historical works became the primary texts used in the new Asian Americans studies courses being created at major universities. However, these early histories would also set the foundation for the ―model minority‖ stereotype that would be used to marginalize Asians who do not fit this representation and to place blame on other minorities who have not attained the same level of socioeconomic success.
13 Harry H.L. Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1969), 70. 14 Benson Tong, ―Reclaiming the Chinese American Past,‖ in Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol.16, No.3 (Spring, 1997), 122.
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THE NEW SOCIAL HISTORY AND AGENCY
The meteoric growth of Asian American social history in the 1980s developed dozens of subtopics as a result of the adaptation of two conceptual frameworks: the anti- assimilationist approach which challenged earlier assumptions of the normative path of assimilation, and scholarship which emphasized the importance of individual agency. In her review of Asian American historiography, University of California, Berkeley professor Sucheng Chan argues that the assimilationist model of the postwar consensus era was difficult to break because Americans have been steadfast in the ideology that all immigrants can and should adapt to the mainstream where Asian Americans stand as the
―model minority.‖ Chan states that:
The facile assumption that all immigrants can and should transform themselves overlooks the fact that people of color have encountered enormous hurdles—legal, political, social, and economic—whenever they have tried to enter mainstream society. Thus, before the assimilation model can be dismantled, scholars must demonstrate convincingly that American society has never been the egalitarian paradise it is said to be.15
In challenging the assimilationist model, several notable historians actively sought to illustrate the systemic racism rooted in American society that helped to define the character of the varied Asian experiences in the United States. Historian Roger Daniels was one of the leading advocates for Asian Americans and two of his early works, The
Politics of Prejudice (1962) and Concentration Camp USA (1971) convincingly show the insurmountable racial and legal barriers faced by Japanese Americans. In Politics of
Prejudice, Daniels traces the long history of anti-Japanese sentiment at the turn of the twentieth century, revealing that ―the generators of much of California‘s antidemocratic
15 Chan, ―Asian American Historiography,‖ 371-372.
8 energy were those groups supposedly dedicated to democracy: the labor unions, the progressives, and other left groups.‖16 According to Daniels, Japanese Americans could not assimilate under any circumstances because of the overwhelming legal barriers and popular hatred brought about by white exclusionists. Concentration Camp USA was the first full-scale historical narrative of the Japanese American internment camps. In this text, Daniels rejects ―earlier, monocausal explanations for the decision to evacuate‖ and argues that the decision to intern Japanese Americans was based upon ―political decisions by civilians, in and out of uniform…and a racist ideology.‖17
Daniel‘s contemporaries also began to analyze the pivotal role of racism in denying full citizenship to Chinese Americans. Columbia University‘s Stuart Creighton
Miller‘s The Unwelcome Immigrant (1969) argues that Sinophobia was complete and widespread in the United States and particularly in California. Miller states that the mainstream image of the Chinese by the end of the nineteenth century was of ―deceit, cunning, idolatry, despotism, xenophobia, cruelty, infanticide, and intellectual and sexual perversity‖18 and this became the national attitude which was instrumental in the Chinese
Exclusion Acts and also of the negative treatment received by Chinese Americans.
Likewise, historian Robert McClellan analyzes the predominant role of racial attitudes toward the Chinese, but instead focuses on the post-exclusion period in his book, The
Heathen Chinee (1971). McClellan argues that there was actually a ―decrease in anti-
16 Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), viii. 17 Roger Daniels, ―American Historians and East Asian Immigrants,‖ in Pacific Historical Review, Vol.43, No.4 (Nov., 1974), 468. 18 Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 201.
9
Chinese feeling and…increase in expressions of sympathy‖19 due to the effectiveness of exclusion legislation which calmed the America‘s ethnocentric fears of an incoming horde of a Chinese immigrants. In both cases, McClellan and Miller explore the centrality of racial construction and attitude in the struggles of the Chinese in America.
As historians were breaking down the assimilationist model of the consensus period, the new social history of the 1980s gave rise to a multiplicity of new Asian
American historical research, primarily based on a growing reservoir of oral histories.
From the numerous testimonies of Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americans, historians were able to move from general histories to writing about the agency of individuals who were ―capable of weighing alternatives, making choices, asserting control over the circumstances they face, and helping to change the world in which they live.‖20 Asian American Studies programs that were started in the 1960s and 1970s around the nation began to bear academic fruit in the 1980s and onward as numerous graduate theses and doctoral dissertations expanded into hundreds of monographic studies and syntheses. These histories explore, not just the history of immigration and race, but topics relating to class, labor, women, gender, and transnationalism.
Furthermore, scholars also began to explore the American experiences of other previously-ignored Asian groups such as Koreans, Filipinos and Vietnamese. The size and scope of Asian American history continues to grow at a rapid pace and is too expansive to be surveyed here.
19 Robert McClellan, The Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes toward China, 1890-1905 (Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 112. 20 Chan, ―Asian American Historiography,‖ 375.
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INTERNMENT AND ORAL HISTORY OF JAPANESE AMERICAN SERVICE
One of the primary subsets of Asian American social history revolves around
Japanese American experience in World War II relating to both internment and the Nisei war record as made possible by a wealth of oral histories collected in the last four decades. For almost all Japanese Americans who endured the internment camps or fought in the military during World War II, there were cultural, traumatic, personal, or religious reasons why they chose not to recollect those past experiences. It was not until
Edison Uno, assistant dean and co-creator of the ethnic studies curriculum at the
California State University, San Francisco, introduced a resolution in 1970 for government redress over internment did Japanese American start talking about their experiences during the war. One observer called it ―a quiet birth of what would become the single most burning issue in the Japanese American community.‖21 The drive to collect oral evidence to take a case to Congress meant that growing numbers of oral histories were accumulated, not just to secure redress but also for historians to write a variety of narratives surrounding the Japanese American controversies of World War II.
Occurring at the same time as historians were breaking out of the assimilationist models and the rise of social histories, most of these narratives aimed to show that Japanese
Americans were not mere victims of a set of unjust government policies, but were active agents of their own fate during dire circumstances. Following Roger Daniel‘s seminal
Concentration Camps USA and his subsequent book, The Decision to Relocate the
Japanese (1975), on the military and political choices that led to internment, dozens of
21 John Tateishi, ―The Japanese American Citizens League and the Struggle for Redress,‖ in Japanese Americans: from Relocation to Redress (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), 191.
11 new narratives from amateur and professional historians and compilations of oral histories have been published in the last three decades.
Unlike the sorrowful and controversial accounts the internment camps, the story of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team has emerged as a popular mainstream tale of loyalty and bravery that was covered extensively by war reporters during and writers after the war. Major narratives of the 442nd‘s experience came out immediately after the war, the first one being Orville C. Shirey‘s Americans, the Story of the 442nd Combat
Team (1946), followed by Thomas D. Murphy‘s history of the 100th Infantry Battalion
Separate in Ambassador in Arms (1955). The most famous mainstream account of the
Nisei soldiers came, not in a book, but in the motion picture Go for Broke (1951), written by Oscar-winner Robert Pirosh, which focused on a racist white officer who was assigned to command a company of Nisei and has a change of heart as he experiences the devotion and valor of the Japanese American men in combat. Shirey, Murphy and Pirosh‘s narratives followed the traditional themes of military history by chronologically tracing combat actions and evaluating decisions made by officers as the primary means of telling the tale of the 100th/442nd.
The fight for redress not only uncovered a vast array of narratives and debates over internment, it revived and brought forth many new and untold stories of the famed
Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and other major contributions made by Japanese Americans during World War II. One of the first of the new wave of texts came from an amateur historian and former chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy, Joseph
Harrington. When Harrington discovered the story of the Japanese Americans serving
12 with the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) Language School, he found the topic intriguing and was inspired to fill ―this hole in American history.‖22 Yankee Samurai
(1979) was primarily based on oral histories obtained by Harrington and his friend
Shigeya Kihara, a Japanese American pediatrician. Together, they ―coaxed, cajoled, harassed, nagged, persuade and…threatened aging graduates of the Military Intelligence
Service Language School until these normally-reticent Nisei told…their stories.‖23 While
Harrington‘s narrative is disjointed and unpolished, his research helped many former enlisted soldiers to start speaking about their experiences in the war. One such Japanese
American who boldly spoke up about his experiences in World War II was James Oda, a
Kibei (Japan-educated American-born individual) who served as a lieutenant in Military
Intelligence Service. Oda‘s Heroic Struggles of Japanese Americans (1980) is a rare, unabashed autobiographical account of his experiences as an enlisted language instructor with the MIS. Oda combines personal narrative, opinions, essays and newspaper editorials to ―emphasize the Nisei soldier as a positive contributor to Japanese-American rights‖ and to tell the story of what he calls a ―self-righteous and self-sacrificing breed of people.‖24
The volume of oral histories produced since the 1970s gave social historians in the following three decades the means to analyze the impact and relations across categories of race, regions, nations, and class through the experiences of the Japanese
American soldiers. Masayo Umezawa Duus, an expert in Japan-U.S. relations, wrote a
22 Joseph D. Harrington, Yankee Samurai: The Secret Role of Nisei in America’s Pacific Victory (Detroit: Pettigrew Enterprises, 1979), 7. 23 Harrington, 6. 24 James Oda, Heroic Struggles of Japanese Americans: Partisan Fighters from America’s Concentration Camps (Los Angeles: KNI, Inc., 1980), i.
13 series of articles in Bungei shunju, a literary magazine in 1982. These articles led to the publication and translation of the English version of Unlikely Liberators in 1983. Instead of following the military triumphs of the 442nd, Duus utilizes hundreds of interviews with
Nisei veterans to document the tales of individuals. Through their stories, Duus depicts
Japanese Americans as both ―the symbol and victim of [the U.S.-Japan] relationship‖25 and that the efforts made by individuals in the 442nd helped to secure equality for future generations. She credits the men of the 442nd for the postwar political and economic achievements of the Japanese Americans because their service ensured that ―they would never again put up with being treated as second-class citizens.‖26
Thelma Chang, who was honored by the Hawaii State Legislature for her work in preserving the history of the Japanese American men who served in World War II, wrote a similar narrative based on oral histories. Chang‘s I Can Never Forget (1991) weaves together interviews and accounts of the memories of the men who served with the 100th
Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. She sorts through the ―various voices and perspectives‖ ranging from the ―philosophical,‖ the ―matter-of-fact,‖ to the ―long held feelings‖ of anger over the war and its injustices to create a narrative of the Nisei men at war.27 Through the tales of the Japanese American soldiers, Chang ―is particularly good at describing the relationship between men from Hawaii and the mainland‖ when the two culturally differentiated groups joined together to form the
442nd. Her book is ―especially noteworthy…for its frank discussion of racism against
25 Masayo Umezawa Duus, Unlikely Liberators: The Men of the 110th and 442nd (Tokyo: Bungeishunjusha, 1983), x. 26 Duus, 234. 27 Thelma Chang, I Can Never Forget: Men of the 100th/442nd (Tuscan: University of Arizona, 1991), 20.
14
Japanese Americans before, during, and after the war‖ and the race relations the Japanese
American men had with their officers, blacks in the South, and with the French villagers that they liberated.28
By the 2000s, the sheer number of narratives of the Japanese Americans in military service during World War II not only grew more plentiful, they also became much more nuanced. One such example is No Sword to Bury (2004) by Franklin Odo, the acclaimed professor of Occidental College and founding director of the Smithsonian‘s
Asian Pacific American Program. Odo writes about a small group of Japanese Hawaiians who volunteered for service after Pearl Harbor but were deemed ―unfit‖ by the government. Despite this setback, these men formed the 169-member body called the
Varsity Victory Volunteers (VVV) and offered to perform manual labor instead until they were finally allowed to join the 442nd and MIS. Although this was a very small group,
Odo uses the VVV as a ―case study of cultures in conflict and …to call into question simplistic notions of ethnic culture, identity and acculturation.‖29 Assimilation and agency have been the two primary analytical themes used in the historical construction of
Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Through his narrative of the VVV,
Odo criticizes the ways that the Japanese American narrative during the war was used as the ―incubation period for the contemporary model-minority myth…that other minorities still mired in poverty had only themselves or their cultures to blame.‖30 Even though much has been said about the Japanese American military contributions in World War II,
28 Alice Yang Murray, ―Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II‖ in Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol.17, No.4 (Summer, 1998), 103. 29 Franklin Odo, No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawai’i during World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 4. 30 Odo, 5.
15
No Sword to Bury shows that there are still select groups with a story tell that could
―spark reconsideration of Japanese history…[by] bringing in new data and concepts‖31 to the overarching narrative.
The vast corpus of historical literature of internment and the Japanese American soldiers at war is only one piece of the growing collective memory of the Japanese
American experience during World War II. The JACL and other civic groups have organized and developed numerous educational exhibits, both virtually through websites and oral history databases and physically through the sites of the former camps and in local museums. Additionally, the public and academic attention drawn by the quest for redress has helped to embed the Japanese American experience into state history education standards. For example, the eleventh-grade California History-Social Science
Content Standards specifically calls for students to ―identify the…unique contributions of special fighting forces…[such as] the 442nd Regimental Combat team…[and] discuss the constitutional issues and impact of events on the U.S. home front, including internment of
Japanese Americans.‖32 In contrast, Chinese Americans are not specifically mentioned in the eleventh grade U.S. History standards and are discussed generally within the category of ―Asian American.‖
31 Roger Daniels, ―No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i during World War II‖ in Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol.24, No.2 (Winter, 2005), 133. 32 California Department of Education, 50.
16
SCARCITY OF CHINESE AMERICAN WORKS AND ORAL HISTORIES
In major Asian American historical syntheses, the experiences of Chinese
Americans and Japanese Americans in World War II are pigeonholed by historians into two major themes: historians of Chinese Americans have focused on the war efforts made on the homefront by the Chinese in Chinatowns and the political debate over the Chinese
Exclusion Acts, while Japanese American narratives have centered on the struggle and controversy over internment and the combat experience of the segregated 100th Infantry
Battalion, 442nd Combat Regimental Team and the members of special Military
Intelligence Service. Take for instance, Roger Daniels‘ chapter on the Chinese American and Japanese American experiences in World War II in his groundbreaking synthesis,
Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States. Daniels calls the war ―a crucial turning point in the history of each community…Japanese America was simply destroyed…Chinese America, although less obvious and less dramatic, was perhaps as decisive.‖33 Despite its pivotal importance, Daniels says little about efforts made by
Chinese Americans in aiding the American war effort or even in repealing Chinese
Exclusion legislation. According to Daniels, Chinese gains during the 1930s and 1940s were brought about by people like Pearl Buck, who was instrumental in ―reshaping…the
American image of the Chinese,‖34 and her husband Richard Walsh, who with other white Americans headed the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion and Place
Immigration on a Quota Basis. Chinese Americans, therefore, are represented as passive
33 Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 187. 34 Daniels, Asian America, 188.
17 recipients of goodwill from mainstream America. In contrast, Daniels depicts the
Japanese Americans fighting for the survival of their communities and details the work of the Japanese American Citizens League and dozens of other individuals who strove to fight for their rights within the internment camps, in the courts and also overseas with the
Military Intelligence Service. Prestigious scholar of history and ethnic studies Ronald
Takaki‘s Strangers from a Different Shore provides a much more balanced view of the contributions of Chinese Americans during World War II. According to Takaki, Chinese
Americans initiated local bond drives, served in the war industries and even highlighted the fact that ―altogether 13,499 Chinese were drafted or enlisted in the U.S. Armed
Forces—22 percent of all Chinese adult males.‖35 However, Takaki does not mention specific individuals nor does he describe any major contributions made by Chinese
Americans in armed service during the war.
Despite numbering enough to fill an American army division, little formal history has been written about the Chinese American military experience during World War II.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, controversy is a magnet for historians. The debate over internment and the right of Japanese Americans to serve in the military were two controversies that have attracted researchers and readers alike. The major controversy for Chinese Americans during the war revolved around the Exclusion Acts but they were enlisted and drafted alongside the general population. Secondly, the unfortunate order to racially-segregate the Japanese into the 100th Battalion and 442nd
Combat Regimental Team aided future research by creating a base of military documents
35 Daniel Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 373-374.
18 and records. Other than the non-combat 407th Air Service Squadron, most Chinese
Americans were dispersed into various racially-mixed units. Lastly, powerful civic organizations such as the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) have been instrumental in documenting and creating oral histories of the lives of Japanese
Americans who had undergone the challenges of the Second World War. Chinese
American groups are smaller in number and have not been as active in politics as their
Japanese American counterparts.
However, there have been a few localized efforts to document the Chinese
American war experience. Christina and Sheldon Lim, children of 407th Air Service
Squadron veteran Harry Lim, privately published In the Shadow of the Tiger (1993), a book of the all-Chinese unit. This book includes a short narrative of the unit‘s history and a collection of primary documents including photographs and copies of the unit‘s newsletters. Another effort to document the Chinese American military experience came from the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California in 1998. University of
California, Los Angeles librarian Marjorie Lee and Chinese American Museum curator
Suellen Cheng published a historical scrapbook called Duty and Honor, which includes a compilation of photos, biographical sketches and news articles of the Southern California
Chinese American war veterans. So far, the only major historical work on the Chinese
American military experience during World War II was written by Williams College professor K. Scott Wong. In Americans First, Wong warns, ―this almost exclusive focus on [Japanese Americans] has narrowed the subsequent memory of the war to a bipolar discourse of injustice and achievement, ignoring the complex experiences of other groups
19 of Asian Americans during this period of…social transformation.‖36 Thus, Wong demonstrates through his narrative that ―Chinese Americans contributed to all aspects of the war effort and suffered and benefited as much as anyone from the deprivations and changes wrought by the war.‖37 There is still much left unsaid and undiscovered about
Chinese Americans during World War II. The primary goal of the following chapter is to provide a small entry into this particular gap in history by discussing the role played by
Chinese Americans in military service from the First World War to the Second World
War through the framework of racial attitudes of mainstream American toward Asian
Americans.
36 K. Scott Wong, Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3. 37 Wong, Americans First, 4.
20
CHAPTER TWO
THE CHANGING FACE OF THE YELLOW PERIL: HISTORICAL NARRATIVE OF THE ASIAN AMERICAN MILITARY EXPERIENCE IN THE WORLD WARS
When the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it not only prohibited immigration on the basis of race for the first time, it reinforced the growing notion of whiteness and made race the primary mode of denying rights to immigrants and barring the entry of classes of foreigners. The American press and general public viewed the Chinese specifically as barbaric invaders who would come in hordes to overrun
Western civilization. ―In many ways, Chinese immigrants became the models against which other [foreigners] were measured,‖1 and the virulent racial hatred applied to the
Chinese was often duplicated and used against other newcomers, including the Japanese.
In his analysis of racial attitude in American policymaking, historian John Dower, describes the Second World War as ―a race war…[which] exposed raw prejudices and was fueled by racial pride, arrogance, and rage on many sides.‖2 Thus, in interactions between the United States, China, and Japan, racial attitudes were a principal factor in the development of government policies and actions in the first half of the twentieth century.
Racial hatred between Americans and the Japanese resulted in a cruel and savage war in the Pacific and also served as the primary rationale for specific American policies such as the segregation of Japanese Americans into concentration camps and segregated military units. On the other hand, with greater American sympathies toward China in the interwar
1 Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 46. 2 John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon Books: New York, 1986), 5.
21 period and the Sino-American alliance during the Second World War, Chinese
Americans were generally treated with less racial contempt than their Japanese counterparts. Americans of Chinese descent were more freely recruited and were given greater opportunities to serve in the U.S. military in racially diverse units whereas the
Japanese Americans were purposefully placed in segregated units under white commanders and were forced to demonstrate loyalty to the nation of their birth by serving extraordinarily in combat. Comparative analysis of the Chinese American and Japanese
American experiences in the military from World War I to the end of the Second World
War allows us to see how racial assumptions and representations can change over time to fit political needs and also how both sets of Asian Americans actively pursued and defended their rights to citizenship.
METHODOLOGY
Growing out of the new social history, Asian American history has developed rapidly since the 1980s and has primarily3 concentrated on the long struggles over labor, immigration, and citizenship of Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans.3
Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Second World War, new research on Asian
American legal and political history has resulted in an enormous corpus of works in the last two decades on Japanese internment and the military experience of Nisei (second- generation Japanese Americans) soldiers during World War II by both historians and vibrant Japanese American civil rights groups. In contrast, without influential groups
3 Sucheng Chan, ―Asian American Historiography,‖ in Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Aug., 1996), 363.
22 such as the Japanese American Citizens League, powerful men like Daniel Inouye, or national media controversies such as the debate over internment reparations, little public or academic attention has been paid to the comparable number of Chinese American men who served in the Second World War.
From the arming of blacks in the Civil War to Truman‘s integration order in 1948, history has shown that the American military has been consistently at the forefront of changing American race relations. However, the narrative of race relations in the
American armed forces is dominated by the struggle of both African Americans and
Japanese Americans to prove their worth in segregated units. It is widely believed that the American armed forces were not racially integrated, until Truman‘s Executive Order
9981 officially started the process of integrating the military in 1948. What the traditional story excludes are the experiences of other non-white groups such as Latinos and Chinese Americans who served in integrated units prior to Truman‘s order. Like the celebrated Japanese American soldiers in the 442nd and Military Intelligence Service,
Chinese Americans served loyally and valiantly in the armed services. Yet unlike their
Japanese counterparts, the Chinese were given the opportunity to peaceably serve alongside, and even in some cases to command white troops, and serve as officers in the what amounted to a partially-integrated American military. The differential treatment of the Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans in terms of military service signifies the extent to which American racial attitudes are often shifting and inconsistent. This chapter explores how dominant American conceptions of race took form alongside changing
23 political sentiments that shaped government policies toward China and Japan and were expressed by a national press determined to meet the ―ideal of objectivity.‖4
American racial attitude can be analyzed by examining the writing of national press organs, mainly widely-circulated magazines and major metropolitan newspapers.
While it has been suggested that newspapers and national magazines helped to create the hostile environment and exaggerated fears of a Japanese invasion which led to internment, prominent Asian American scholars Gary Okihiro and Julie Sly argue that
―the role of the press in society [is that] they are reflectors and not creators of public opinion.‖5 Okihiro and Sly discovered that large audience newspapers like the San
Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times demonstrated both tolerance and hostility at differing times toward Japanese Americans during World War
II—this ―shift in editorial opinion reflected a similar shift in the public opinion.‖6 In other words, these newspapers gained readership by truthfully writing what they saw to accommodate a consumer public that wanted papers that reflected their own opinions.
This was consistent with the new professionalism of major newspapers like the New York
Times following World War I, which showed that ―a high-class paper could build a large circulation merely by being a good newspaper…[with] full and trustworthy coverage of governmental and political news.‖7 True objectivity, however, is impossible. In the attempt to just ―report the facts,‖ the press of the early 20th century dealt with an
4 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (Basic Books: New York, 1978), 120. 5 Gary Y. Okihiro and Julie Sly, ―The Press, Japanese Americans, and the Concentration Camps,‖ in Phylon, Vol.44, No. 1 (1st Qtr., 1983), 71. 6 Okihiro and Sly, 71. 7 Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism (New York : MacMillan Company, 1962), 549-551.
24 assortment of challenges. Many news stories, as much as ―60 percent…in the New York
Times‖ in the early 1930s, were written by government-influenced press agents or public relations groups as opposed to professional journalists.8 Additionally, the growing political and economic complexity of news events meant that news could not just simply be recorded, but had to be interpreted by columnists. Thus, the major newspapers of the time exhibited the tension between the objectively-minded daily reporters, government publicists and opining editorialists, each attempting to convince both middle and working class readers of the truth. Recognizing this tension within the national press can be useful for finding a middle-ground between the distorted racial images found in yellow journalism, government propaganda, and the popular media, when read alongside the experiential evidence found in oral history accounts.
THE CHANGING FACE OF THE ―YELLOW PERIL‖
One of the primary portraits of white American racism toward Asian Americans was embodied in author Sax Rohmer‘s famous villain, Dr. Fu-Manchu. In both popular text and movies of the early twentieth century, Rohmer‘s fictitious Fu-Manchu was an evil mastermind who treacherously plotted global domination with an inexhaustible horde of Asians at his disposal. The press called Fu-Manchu ―the most exotic and diabolic of contemporary villains in the annals of crime‖9 and the character‘s enormous popularity helped to reinforce the popular image of Asians as the ―yellow peril‖ threatening to destroy white civilization. Although the Fu-Manchu‘s persona was originally Chinese,
8 Schudson, 144. 9 ―Specialists in Crime,‖ Vanity Fair, September 1930, 56.
25 his character was liberally applied to all peoples of Asian origin. With China consumed by internal turmoil in the early twentieth century and most Chinese immigration shut off by the Exclusion Acts, the face of the sinister Fu-Manchu began to look more and more
Japanese as Japan‘s industrial modernization made it the strongest nation in the Pacific.
In the 1930s, America‘s ―sympathetic media coverage of China‘s resistance to the
Japanese created an even greater surge of pro-Chinese sentiment after Pearl Harbor,‖ leaving the Japanese alone as the Oriental menace to Western civilization.10 Racism toward the peoples of Asia was already deeply entrenched within the American psyche prior to the Second World War and played a major role, not just in the nature of the war, but also in the treatment of Americans of both Chinese and Japanese descent in the period leading up to and during the Second World War.
The success of Rohmer‘s Dr. Fu-Manchu series demonstrates the long-standing popular acceptance of an Oriental ―yellow peril‖ for the better part of the early twentieth century. As Japan modernized into an industrial power and China continued its rapid decline into international political obscurity at the turn of the century, Americans began to make greater racial distinctions between the Japanese and the Chinese. Whereas the
American press portrayed China, mostly due to its immense population, as an economic peril, the Japanese threat loomed as a military aggressor. Even the conservative New
York Times advised Americans to not just ―talk vaguely about the ‗yellow peril‘‖ but to
―give themselves the trouble of first ascertaining and then declaring which yellow peril it
10 Dower, 159.
26 is that they mean.‖11 Fear of a Japanese threat grew with Japan‘s victory in the Russo-
Japanese War of 1904-05. The American public was further exposed to Japan‘s rapidly expanding industrial capacity during the 1910s and 1920s by the ever-expanding foreign coverage in the national press. In 1915 George Bronson Rea, the editor of the Shanghai- based Far Eastern Review and a nationally-published China specialist, warned of a
Japanese threat that was ―feverishly arming, laboring night and day in the ceaseless work of enlarging, strengthening and polishing her already ponderous military machine against the inevitable day of conflict…and America sleeps.‖12 In subsequent articles, Rea went on to indict Japanese Americans as ―acting as agents to conceal with malicious intent from American eyes actual facts about Japan and thus proving…[Japanese Americans] as traitors to wherein [they] reside.‖13
While America started to fear the growth of Japanese imperialism in the Pacific,
American attitudes toward the Chinese became both more paternalistic. Once the primary target of American anti-Asian movements in the nineteenth century, many
Americans became more sympathetic with the plight of China and the ensuing chaos after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. Due to the concessions made after the Boxer Rebellion and the subsequent Revolution of 1911, western political and religious ideas were able to flow freely and penetrate into China. Americans politicians, armed forces and missionaries were also able to experience and influence the Chinese first-hand and their reports became more compassionate to the plight of the Chinese peoples. The New York
11 ―Japan and China,‖ New York Times, 17 February 1904, 8. 12 ―Japan and ‗The Yellow Peril,‘‖ Los Angeles Times, 28 August 1915, II2. 13 Toyokichi Iyenaga, ―Forward,‖ Japan’s Real Attitude toward America: A Reply to Mr. George Bronson Rea’s ―Japan’s Place in the Sun—the Menace to America‖ (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1916), iii.
27
Times published an exposé of famed sociologist and race theorist Professor Edward A.
Ross‘s prolonged tour of China. Ross proclaimed that the Chinese were ―equal mentally and superior in vitality to the White Race, and predict[ed] a great future for the
Chinese…[and that] their destiny is that of the white race.‖ The Chinese potential, he argued, had been limited by the medieval backwardness of Imperial China and that with the introduction of Western politics and Christianity, the world would soon witness the
―renaissance of a quarter of the human family.‖14 The experiences and writings of Ross and authors such as Pearl Buck helped to formulate a new Chinese racial type as a reasonable and stoic Confucian farmer who perseveres despite the environmental difficulties surrounding him rather than ―the Mongolian octopus‖15 that had threatened to overrun white America just decades prior. At the same time, Ross juxtaposed the
Chinese soldier as a peasant who was ―unaggressive‖ and ―mild‖ to the Japanese peasant who had the ―bold air of the soldier.‖16 By the 1920s, it was clearly the Japanese who fit perfectly into the image of Dr. Fu-Manchu‘s ―Asiatic horde‖ in place of the Chinese.
The belief in a looming Japanese threat helped exacerbate racial tensions between white Americans and Japanese Americans and altered the perception of the latter by the former. While Chinese exclusion and anti-Chinese work and residency laws kept the declining population of Chinese Americans confined within urban ethnic enclaves, the
Japanese American population steadily increased in the early 1900s with the birth of the
Nisei, causing alarm and unrest from nativists and white supremacists on the West Coast.
14 ―The Chinaman‘s Destiny is that of the White Man,‖ New York Times, 29 October 1911, SM2. 15 ―Chinese Invasion.‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 21 July 1878, 5. 16 ―The Chinaman‘s Destiny is that of the White Man,‖ New York Times, 29 October 1911, SM2.
28
In 1915, California Senator John D. Works hoped to raise a 200,000-man permanent reserve army to defend his state against a possible Japanese invasion. Works stated that
―there are 30,000 Japanese Reserves in California and that they may rise up at any time‖ to overwhelm the 8,000 regular and 5,000 American reservists on the entire West Coast.17
Considering there were just over 40,000 Japanese Americans in California in 1910,
Works apparently assumed that the entire Japanese American male population of
California was part of a trained Japanese army what would automatically turn against
America in time of war.18 Works would later address the Senate to demand an army and navy on the Pacific Coast and the exclusion of the Japanese ―as an act of self- preservation...of the white race.‖19 Similarly, the Japanese Hawaiians were seen as the primary threat to that territory in 1923. After a visit to the Pacific Islands, Senator Irvine
Lenroot of Wisconsin declared that ―within ten years the Japanese voters, by right of their birth there, will far outnumber the natives and Americans, thus gaining control of the
Territory…[and] charged that…Japanese children attending Japanese schools…are taught allegiance to the land of Mikado rather than the United States.‖20 American newspaper readers were regularly exposed to the argument, and many believed that the danger posed by the Japanese came both from abroad and from the Japanese Americans within.
17 ―Asks 200,000 for California Guard,‖ New York Times, 17 December 1915, 8. 18 U.S. Census Bureau, Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910-, ―Population—California: Table 17 – Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Population, by Counties,‖ Washington DC: Bureau of the Census, 1911. 19 ―Wants Japanese Shut Out,‖ New York Times, 15 July 1916, 14. 20 ―Fears Japan in Hawaii,‖ New York Times, 12 May 1923, 17.
29
ASIAN AMERICANS IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR
The growth of anti-Japanese and pro-Chinese sentiment coincided with America‘s involvement in the First World War, which brought about the first military draft since the
Civil War. Performing combat service for one‘s country has historically been seen as the consummate civic duty and a defining element of citizenship in the modern nation-state but major legal barriers made it an unequal experience in the United States. For instance,
Jim Crow and other anti-black laws meant that many who were called to service were treated as second-class citizens with partial rights. Chinese exclusion laws and the
Gentlemen‘s Agreement with Japan meant that there existed a population of legal aliens who were eligible for military service but not citizenship. Additionally, that American- born Chinese and Japanese were not classified as ―white‖ and were barred from voluntary service raised questions as to the legitimacy of their citizenship. Still, many non-white men, despite the racial barriers placed before them, patriotically volunteered for military service during World War I as a means to prove their loyalty to their country.
Americans of both Japanese and Chinese descent attempted to volunteer for military service and the response given to them by local recruitment officials was often disappointing. Ah Fong, a Chinese merchant who lost land and resources to Pancho
Villa‘s uprising in Mexico, convinced his four sons to answer the recruitment call to join
General John Pershing‘s expedition across the Mexican border in 1916. However, the regional recruiting officer decided that ―the nationality of Fong‘s boys was a bar to their enlistment‖ and rejected their applications.21 This setback did not dim the enthusiasm of
21 ―Four Chinese Boys Anxious to Fight,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 16 April 1916, 43.
30 many young Chinese men who continued to offer up their services to the war effort. A civic organization, the Chinese American Citizens‘ Alliance (CACA), organized an effort to create a segregated Chinese regiment for the United States Army immediately after the declaration of war in April of 1917. Columbia University student and member of the
Officers‘ Reserve Corps, Tien Tow Liu led the effort to recruit other Chinese Americans, many of whom were students or graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia into this special unit. The proposed Chinese unit would even include many Chinese businessmen who fought in the revolutionary struggles in China in the past years. Liu explained in a letter to President Woodrow Wilson that his regiment, unlike many of the inexperienced white citizen soldiers being recruited, could be ―fitted for action…on short notice…[as] many of the men have had instruction in military schools and colleges, while many are hardened warriors, veterans of various uprisings in China.‖ Liu and the CACA were able to recruit 600 native-born men within the first month to show that the
―Chinese…who are citizens of this country will always fight for democracy against militarism.‖22 Unfortunately, President Wilson ignored the request. Liu himself never entered into the service and finished his degree at Columbia in the spring of 1918.23
Some Japanese Americans showed a similar determination to demonstrate their loyalty by volunteering for service. Kiichi Kanzaki, General Secretary of Japanese Association of America, wrote in a special feature in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1919, of a young
Japanese American friend who saw it as ―his duty to fight for the country which gave him shelter and education‖ but was turned down by recruitment officials. Kanzaki stated that
22 ―600 Ready to Form Regiment,‖ New York Times, 30 April 1917, 7. 23 ―List of Degrees Given to Columbia Students,‖ New York Times, 6 June 1918, 8.
31 this was ―merely a typical case‖ and that Japanese American volunteers were turned down all over the country.24
Conscription of Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans was another matter.
Since Chinese and Japanese nationals were aliens and could not legally obtain citizenship in the United States, they were given draft exemptions. Not surprisingly, many of them chose to waive these exemptions and entered the draft. In June of 1917 the San
Francisco Chronicle reported that although half of all the young men from Stockton,
California who registered with Selective Services requested some form of exemption, all of the Chinese Americans in the city waived their exemptions to enter into the draft.25
Five hundred Chinese Americans from Los Angeles, described by the president of the
Chinese Chamber of Commerce as ―willing to shoulder a rifle and…will fight as valiantly as any‖ also waived exemptions and willfully registered for the draft.26 Many
Japanese Americans also waived their exemptions and entered military service during
World War I. The first American-born Japanese to begin active duty declared, ―It is an honor…I will do my very best and when duty calls me I will lay down my life for the cause of humanity and democracy. I will pledge that I will bring no dishonor either to the land of my birth nor to the country of my forefathers.‖27 By January 1918, 280 out of the
7,170 Chinese Americans registered and 554 of the 15,336 Japanese Americans registered had waived their exemptions and were accepted for service.28
24 ―American-Born Japanese Loyal to United States,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 16 June 1918, 19. 25 ―Registration in State Exceeds Total Forecast,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 6 June 1917, 2. 26 ―Young Chinese to Register for Draft,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 2 June 1917, 2. 27 ―American-Born Japanese Loyal to the United States,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 16 January 1918, 19. 28 ―First Complete Official Record of Draft,‖ New York Times, 20 January 1918, 43.
32
While the draft lottery was indiscriminate in whose number was called into the military, American racial ideology of white supremacy meant that the new Selective
Services and the U.S. War Department had to create a policy to cope with the racial diversity of the draft. With larger numbers drafted into service, the American military chose to segregate black and Hispanic men into separate maintenance and support units that were kept away from frontline combat duty. However, with numbers too insignificant to be formed into special segregated units, Chinese and Japanese who were drafted were thus integrated into service alongside whites. Kaytaro Tsukamoto was one of the initial draftees and joined D Company of the 263rd Infantry Division. Tsukamoto, who later fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918,29 stated at the time of his assignment, ―he is glad to be the first Japanese to report at the camp…[and] glad of the opportunity to fight for Uncle Sam.‖30 A number of Chinese Americans also found themselves in racially-integrated units that fought on the frontlines in Europe. A detachment of Chinese American soldiers from the Army 90th Division training in Camp
Travis, Texas, was specifically singled out as a ―pleasant surprise‖ and demonstrated a
―fine sense of duty and discipline…in training.‖ The 90th would see frontline combat in both the St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne offensives in 1918. Chinese Americans were similarly regarded in a glowing report at the New York-based Camp Upton, the training site of the renowned 77th Division, which became the famous ―Lost Battalion.‖31
29 ―Center Has Active Legionnaire Group,‖ Tanforan Totalizer, 20 June 1942, 6. – Although Tsukamoto was one of the first to be drafted and served combat duty in Europe, he was interned at the Tanforan Racetrack in San Francisco and the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah. 30 John Condon, ―San Francisco Japanese Glad to Fight in National Army,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 19 September 1917, 3. 31 ―Army and Navy Notes,‖ New York Times, 9 June 1918, 47.
33
The New York Times described the 77th as a ―melting pot‖ and nicknamed it the
―cosmopolitan division‖ for its racially diverse makeup of men from all over metropolitan New York.32 In describing the heroism of one of the 77th‘s Chinese
American soldiers, unit historian Captain Julius Adler proudly, that ―it was only one more evidence of the fact that in the cosmopolitan composition of the Division lay its strength.‖33 Chinese American soldiers, like Henry Chinn of 305th Infantry Battalion,
77th Division not only fought courageously but died in the line of duty alongside white soldiers.34 Many others were honored, both in print and also with medals for their achievements in combat.
The American press specifically singled out Chinese Americans for their service to the United States. The most famous Chinese American soldier of World War I was
Sing Kee, a California resident who fought with the 77th Division‘s 306th Infantry
Battalion. Kee was the first Chinese American to be decorated for bravery and was eventually promoted to sergeant, the highest rank obtained by any Chinese American during the First World War. The U.S. War Department honored Kee with the following citation describing his heroics in France:
Private Sing Kee, although seriously gassed during a terrible shelling by both high explosives and gas shells, refused to be evacuated and continued practically single-handed to operate the regimental message center relay station during August 14, 15 and 16, 1918. Throughout this critical period he showed extraordinary heroism, high courage and persistent devotion to
32 ―Cosmopolitan Heroes,‖ New York Times, 4 May 1919, 49. 33 Julius O. Adler, ed., History of the Seventy Seventh Division: August 25th, 1917, November 11th, 1918 (New York: Wynkoop Haldenbeck Crawford Company, 1919), 44. 34 ―Names of the 1,646 Officers and Men of the 77th Division Who Perished Overseas,‖ New York Times, 27 April 1919, 19.
34
duty by his determination and coolness materially aiding the regimental commander in communicating with the front line.35
Not only was Kee recognized by his home country, but he was presented with the Croix de Guerre by the French government for ―extraordinary heroism and constant devotion.‖36
It was not just medal recipients who were highlighted by the press; other Chinese
American soldiers were mentioned for their bravery. The Los Angeles Times reported the courage of Chew Lung Sit, one of the first Chinese soldiers to waive his draft exemption, while in combat with the American 4th Division. Commanding officer General John
Hines stated that Sit and a few other soldiers ―stuck to the guns…under extremely heavy shell fire‖ for over a week and a half of action. Sit was later wounded in action and hospitalized. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the procession and burial of
―Chinese War Hero‖ Hong Chow Lee, who had fought and died in the Argonne Forest.
Lee was honored by the American Legion as a ―soldier and citizen.‖37 Neither Sit nor
Lee were from prominent families and nor were their heroic actions honored with a medal or citation. Yet their particular stories and Chinese identities were specifically singled out amongst thousands of feats of gallantry by the American doughboys in
Europe.38 These stories suggest how the American press represented Chinese Americans, though few in number, as capable soldiers who fought bravely and valiantly like their white counterparts. In contrast, the major newspapers were relatively silent about the
35 ―Chinese Hero Slips into City Like a Civilian,‖ San Francisco Chronicle 14 June 1919, 6. 36 ―France Decorates Chinese Boy Hero of American Army,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 19 July 1919, 5. 37 ―Chinese Hero Buried with Honors,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 21 January 1921, 2. 38 ―Cited for Bravery,‖ Los Angeles Times, 1 January 1919, II8.
35 contributions made during World War I by the larger group of Japanese Americans who served in the armed forces. Rather, most news regarding the Japanese addressed possible threats posed by further Japanese immigration and the rise of Japanese military and international power. Fear over the Japanese ―yellow peril‖ seeped into the debate over the claims to citizenship through armed service by Japanese Americans.
The First World War was not the first instance in which Asian Americans who had served loyally in combat requested naturalization as citizens. In 1857 Edward Day
Cahota (originally Sing-Loo from Shanghai39), was adopted by Sargent S. Day, a captain who sailed out from Gloucester, Massachusetts. On a journey to China, Captain Day adopted the eight-year old, full-blooded Chinese cabin boy and returned home with him.
At the age of 15, Cahota enlisted with the Massachusetts 23rd Infantry Regiment and served in Grant‘s Grand Army of the Republic. He is credited with evacuating a wounded man from the brutal battlefield during the Battle of Cold Harbor in 1864.
Cahota continued his career in the regular army for a total of 30 years before retiring to
Nebraska where he desired to take on a homestead.40 However, while filing the paperwork, government officials found that Cahota was not a citizen and thus was not eligible to receive and own property. Congressman Moses Kinkaid appealed for a special act of Congress before the House of Representatives on behalf of Cahota in 1912, but one was never granted.41 Cahota died in 1935 without ever obtaining citizenship in the country he served for over three decades.
39 ―Age No Barrier to Enjoying Thrills,‖ The Pittsburgh Press, 7 April 1929, 8. 40 ―Civil War Veteran, Only Chinese Enlisted Visits Boyhood Home,‖ Cumberland Evening Times, 33 August 1928, 7. 41 ―Veteran is Not a Citizen,‖ Oelwein Daily Register, 16 January 1913, 3.
36
Like Cahota, other Asian Americans hoped to obtain citizenship through military service. Under the immigration statutes passed through the wartime Naturalization Act of May 9, 1918, aliens who served the U.S. armed forces during America‘s involvement in World War I were for the first time given the privilege of naturalization. Several hundred aliens of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent who had served in the U.S. military applied for citizenship. Men like Sassunoka Tokunaga, a former personal valet to Admiral George Dewey and naval serviceman in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire naval yard, applied for citizenship and was naturalized less than a year after the 1918 law was passed.42 At the same time, scores of veterans of Chinese and Japanese descent from the Hawaiian Army Reserves applied for and obtained citizenship. As naturalized citizens, many immediately set off for the U.S. mainland to exercise their newfound right to purchase property which alarmed many nativists on the West Coast. Other states, however, would continue the debate over granting citizenship to Asian American war veterans. Unlike a court decision in Hawaii that upheld the 1918 Naturalization Act, courts in Oregon and Texas refused to grant citizenship to Asian Americans. When a
Korean American member of the company stationed in San Francisco‘s Presidio and a
Chinese American veteran wounded at Verdun applied for citizenship in Northern
California, Judge Frank H. Rudkin complied with the May 9, 1918 Act. However,
Rudkin himself was unsure of the decision and stated that if ―the Government is not satisfied, it can obtain legal redress.‖43
42 ―Japanese and Chinese are Made Citizens,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 30 March 1919, W4. 43 ―2 Asiatics Who Fought in Army made Citizens,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 20 May 1919, 8.
37
As anti-Japanese sentiment grew in the Interwar period, decisive action was taken by some white Americans to revoke the veterans‘ citizenship earned through military service. California Senator James Phelan led the charge against the naturalization of veterans of Asian descent based in fear of the Japanese ―yellow peril.‖ In 1919, Phelan described the citizenship request made by Japanese Americans veterans in Hawaii as a
―form of deception…to control legislation and hold all the municipal offices.‖44 A year later, Phelan explained that Japanese naturalization ―would give [the Japanese] not only control of the land, but also a dangerous political power…The Japanese invasion has taken the form of land purchase…[and a] studied plan of increasing their numbers.‖45 In the decades prior to World War I, the ―grave and impending danger of an overwhelming invasion‖46 was believed to come from the massive hordes of Chinese coolies. However, with the fall of Imperial China and the Chinese Exclusion Acts in full effect, the Japanese had become the new ―yellow peril‖ that would overrun white Western society. In the eyes of Phelan and other advocates of racial homogeneity, the Japanese, not the Chinese, were the primary target of Asian exclusion. The conflicting bureaucratic and judicial decisions by state and federal courts led to a final appeal to U.S. Supreme Court in 1925.
In the case Toyota Hidemitsu v. U.S., the court decided that while the Naturalization Act of May 9, 1918 could grant citizenship for World War I veterans, it could not naturalize non-white aliens. Thus the citizenship earned by all Asian American veterans in service
44 ―Phelan Bares Japanese Plot,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 30 July 1919, 2. 45 ―Fear Citizenship of Japanese Here,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 23 November 1920, 11. 46 ―A Chinese Invasion,‖ San Francisco Chronicle, 18 April 1892, 4.
38 to their adopted country was revoked and would not be reinstated until a decade later by the passage of the Ney-Lea Bill in 1935.
THE INTERWAR PERIOD
After the First World War, most American citizen soldiers returned to civilian life and the U.S. military dwindled to its miniscule pre-war size. Most of the Asian
Americans who remained in the regular army after the war were stationed in Hawaii with the territory‘s multiracial National Guard. In 1929, a total of 191 Japanese Americans and 170 Chinese Americans served alongside ―fifty different nationalities or combination of nationalities‖ including Puerto Ricans, Portuguese, Filipino, native Hawaiian and whites.47 The Hawaiian Guard also produced the first Asian American officer,
Lieutenant Kinichi Sakai, who was commissioned in 1917 in Oahu‘s Schofield Barracks and was promoted to the rank of captain by the end of the war.48 However, questions over the loyalty of Japanese Americans brought about strict limitations on the number of
Issei (first generation Japanese Americans) and Nisei men who could enroll in the
National Guard during the interwar period. Furthermore, continued enrollment of
Japanese Americans into officer training programs was highly discouraged. Major
General Charles G. Morton, commander of the Hawaii department, ―opposed giving either training or responsibility to a people that might join the invaders‖ and stated, ―no individual of Japanese blood should be permitted under any circumstances to obtain [a]
47 ―Hawaii National Guard is Cosmopolitan,‖ New York Times, 15 December 1929, SM10. 48 ―Japanese is Officer in American Army,‖ New York Times, 12 December 1917, 11.
39 commission or to enlist in…the Army of the United States.‖49 Despite Morton‘s protest, the necessity of keeping a fully-staffed reserve regiment gave way to further Japanese
American enlistment to the armed forces in Hawaii.
Disdain of the Japanese increased with Japan‘s invasion of Manchuria and China outright in the 1930s, again resulting in a relatively greater sense of sympathy for the
Chinese peoples in the mainstream American press. Historian John Dower states that by this time, ―missionaries and popular writers…had helped create a countervailing tide of respect for the long-suffering common people of China.‖50 Newsreels and images were captured from the Second Sino-Japanese War and relayed back to the United States, illustrating the horrors of war and excessively brutal treatment of the Chinese at the hands of the Japanese. Many American organizations, especially the U.S. Army Air Corps, responded to aid the Chinese war effort. In anticipation of the oncoming Japanese threat,
China sent a number of pilots to the United States for aerial training during the 1930s.
The first to complete this was Chia-Mei Hu, a Chinese college graduate from Shantung
Province. Hu had originally come to the United States through a scholarship from the
Chinese government to attend South Carolina‘s Citadel Military Academy and then later
U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning. Despite being a student in the Jim Crow
South, Hu and other Chinese students were not discriminated against because of the color of their skin. When asked whether or not the Chinese cadets were treated differently,
Eleanor Pringle Hart, one of Hu‘s hosts in Charleston said, ―they were treated as white‖
49 Brian McAllister Linn, Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 154. 50 Dower, 39.
40 and ―only poor whites, ignorant people might have treated them differently.‖ Hu even enjoyed an adoptive mother-son relationship with a white woman, Laura Bragg, during his stay in Charleston. 51 Chia-Mei Hu later completed the final year of his scholarship at the U.S. Army Air Corps School of Advance Flying where ―Mr. Hu proved the peer of the other members of his class‖ and scored ―unusually high…on the sheaf of instructors‘ reports.‖52 Other Chinese nationals would follow in Hu‘s footsteps and many came to the
United States to train as pilots to fight against the Japanese.
THE PREWAR DRAFT
As the prospects for war increased, the
United States Congress reinstated Selective
Services and issued the first peacetime draft in
American history. Both Chinese American and
Japanese Americans were called to duty with little regard to their race and were placed in integrated units alongside white draftees. In
October 1940, about 16,500,000 Americans were called to register for the draft and 900,000 physically fit Americans were selected for the Figure 1- Full-page spread of Chan Chong Yuen at the shooting gallery after his draft selection armed forces later that month. Registered men (Life Magazine, 11 November 1940, 35) holding the number 158 were the first individuals randomly selected into the service.
51 Eleanor Pringle Hart, quoted from ―A History of the Chinese in Charleston,‖ Jian Li, The South Carolina Magazine, Vol.99, No.1 (January 1998), 62. 52 ―Chia-Mei Hu, Chinese Student, Has High Marks in Kelly Field Course,‖ New York Times, 14 December 1930, XX8
41
Chan Chong Yuen, a Chinese American laundryman was the first man on the 158 list in
New York City and became an instant celebrity for holding that status. Chan never held back his enthusiasm to serve his country, stating that ―he wanted to fight Japan, [was] ambitious to be a soldier and that his friends considered him a crack shot with a rifle.‖ In a full page spread, Life magazine proudly displayed a picture of Chan holding a rifle in a
New York City shooting gallery and declared in the caption: ―Yuen Chong Chan, most famous draftee, gets practice to defend his country.‖ Life and other major news sources were eager to present a picture of American diversity represented by the randomized draft drawing. Immediately following Chan‘s image in the November 11th edition of Life was a short pictorial essay titled ―Great Lottery of the Draft Turns Up All Kinds of
Americans‖ which featured pictures of excited and patriotic white men such as meteorologists, factory workers, cooks, janitors and newlyweds. Like never before, a Chinese American man was inclusively illustrated alongside mainstream white
53 Americans. The New York Times used the Figure 2 - "Melting Pot Soldier" Chan Chong Yuen is sworn in by World War I hero, Sing Kee (Los Angeles term ―Men in All Walks‖ to describe the Times, 9 November 1940, 3) composition of the first draft, including the ―two Chinese in No.1 draft district of New
York City and Chicago.‖54 Along similar lines, the Los Angeles Times featured a large
53 ―Picture of the Week,‖ Life Magazine, 11 November 1940, 34-37.
42 photograph of Chan Chong Yuen being sworn in by Sing Kee, the decorated Chinese
American veteran of World War I and described Chan as a ―Melting Pot Soldier‖ directly above an article about the first draft contingent reporting for duty.55
Unlike Japanese Americans, Chinese American draftees could also display their loyalty toward their native country of China without compromising their American identities. At the time of the July 1941 draft, Wong Yee Choy had just recently arrived from England after escaping the Japanese assault on Hong Kong and Canton. Despite having been in the United States for only a half year and being unable to speak the
English language, Wong was ―displayed to the press…[as] he posed holding an American flag in one hand and a Chinese flag in the other.‖56 As long as China remained a respected ally, dual American and Chinese identities were acceptable. In contrast, a dual
Japanese and American identity was not. Hideo Henry Wakimote and Hiromu Bud
Tsuboi, both of Chino, California, were seen off at the railway station in Ontario by a large group of Japanese Issei and Nisei relatives and friends holding both American and
Japanese flags. The Los Angeles Times described the Japanese onlookers as ―exhibiting a patriotism which might well put Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent to shame…[as] more than 50…gathered…to bid farewell to two of their number departing for Army training.‖57 Instead of the celebratory tone that was used in other reports of draftees leaving for service, however, the Times writers chose to use the patriotism of the
54 ―Men of All Walks Hold the First Number; Brothers Nos.1 and 2 Among 6,000 Called,‖ New York Times, 30 October 1940, 13. Chan Chong Yuen was the one from New York; Eng Seong Hong, a waiter who was unsure of his citizenship status, was the one from Chicago. 55 ―Draft Instructions Will Go to Registrants Next Week,‖ Los Angeles Times, 9 November 1940, 3. 56 ―First in Board 1 is Wong Yee Choy,‖ New York Times, 18 July 1941, 9. 57 ―Japanese Alone Present to Bid Draft men Farewell,‖ Los Angeles Times, 20 February 1941, A3.
43
Japanese to shame white Americans to be more supportive of white draftees. Likewise, an editorial by respected writer Tom Treanor denounced the first-generation Japanese
Issei at the sendoff of lacking ―the psychology of the situation‖ by ―waving...not only the
American, but also the ―JAPANESE‖ flag (emphasis original.)58 Although Japanese
Americans were also drafted into the armed forces by the prewar lotteries like all other white and Chinese Americans, they left home without the similar public fanfare and were looked upon by the press with wary and suspicious eyes.
Fortunately, as Japanese draftees and enlistees entered into the training phase of their pre-war service they were often treated with greater respect. Minoru Tsubota voluntarily enlisted for service in the U.S. Army in March 1941 and was assigned, with a few other Nisei, to the 160th Infantry Regiment. Determined to remain in the infantry despite his struggles to keep up with the rigors of training, Tsubota found an outlet with the regimental band, which was composed of professional musicians who were drafted into service. Although he was both a Japanese American and an amateur musician,
Tsubota stated that the white musicians ―treated me real, real good…rather than to discriminate me as some other band members would have…they were top people with top quality and they just accepted me on that basis.‖59 George Matsui was one of the original draftees from Washington who served most of the war as a Japanese linguist and would later win the Silver Star in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Matsui was initially deployed with the racially-mixed 40th Division in California before the war where he first
58 Tom Treanor, ―The Homefront,‖ Los Angeles Times, 29 March 1941, 3. Treanor would leave the homefront to become a war correspondent in Europe. He would lose his life in the brief Battle of Paris, 1944. 59 Minoru Tsobota, interview by Tom Ideka and Tetsuden Kashima, August 18, 2003, Segment 22, transcript, http://archive.densho.org/main.aspx [accessed November 11, 2011].
44 encountered white boys from Texas and rattlesnakes; fortunately for Matsui, the ―couple of guys from Texas [are] good friends and they know where the rattlesnakes [are] hiding.‖ Matsui recalls another instance in which he was leading a reconnaissance squad and got lost. Matsui‘s squad was out of water when they sought refuge in a farmhouse where a kind white woman provided kindly breakfast for the entire squad.60 Harry
Umeda, one of the original draft class members of the Military Intelligence Service, was also conscripted before the war. While in training at Camp Savage near Minneapolis,
Umeda and other Niseis entered into a bar for cold drinks when the bartender informed them that he did not serve Indians. However, when Umeda informed him that he and his comrades were Japanese, the bartender laughed and congratulated them for serving in the army. Umeda recalls that the bartender was ―so proud, so proud that the Japanese
Americans [were] in uniform and served in the United States [army.]‖ Harry Umeda was especially complementary of the people of Minneapolis for their kindness and understanding during a time of pervasive racism against Japanese Americans.61
CHINESE AMERICANS AND JAPANESE AMERICANS IN WORLD WAR II
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment intensified and resulted in Executive Order 9066 and other major changes in military policy toward Japanese Americans. Most Japanese Americans were reclassified from the draft status of 1-A (draft eligible) to 4-C (enemy aliens) and thus, Japanese Americans were denied the opportunity to enlist in the military and were once again, exempted from
60 Takashi Matsui, interview by Marvin Uratsu, December 11, 1997, Segments 3-4, transcript, http://archive.densho.org/main.aspx [accessed November 11, 2011]. 61 Harry Umeda, interview by Tom Ikeda, June 18, 2009, Segment 9, transcript, http://archive.densho.org/main.aspx [accessed November 11, 2011].
45 the draft. Additionally, both military authorities and other soldiers began to view the prewar enlistees and draftees of Japanese descent with greater suspicion and the process of segregating the Japanese Americans from their original racially-mixed units began.
Ben Kuroki, one of the few Japanese Americans who remained with his original Air
Force detachment remembered the change in attitude among white Americans, ―it seemed like everyone was cold,‖ and recalled other soldiers staring at him glumly and being isolated in a barracks corner away from all of the white servicemen.62 In an attempt to move all Japanese American servicemen away from the West Coast, most were transferred away from their original units and were assigned noncombat roles in menial, quartermaster or medical duties further inland. Minoru Tsubota recounts being moved with other Niseis and Kibeis (American-born Japanese who were mostly educated in
Japan) to Fort Bliss, Texas. Tsubota recalls that when Japanese American men were placed on guard duty, many white draftees within the camp said, ―We‘re fighting the
Japs…but we‘re being guarded by Japs and we can‘t sleep.‖ So the Japanese American guards were disarmed and given police sticks instead. Tsubota agreed that
―discrimination was there and…all these new people…have never seen Japanese before and so they just picture us as people from Japan on the same ‗enemy alien‘ basis…and so it made it a little tough.‖63 Most Japanese Americans who were not attached to special linguistic or intelligence units would remain isolated in noncombat roles for most of
62 Army & Navy – HEROES: Ben Kuroki, American,‖ Time, 7 February 1944. Ben Kuroki would fly numerous missions in a B-24 bomber crew over Europe and was later given special permission to fly in a B-29 flight crew in the Pacific Theater, making him the only Japanese American to fight in both theaters of operations. 63 Minoru Tsobota, interview by Tom Ideka and Tetsuden Kashima, August 18, 2003, Segment 24, transcript, http://archive.densho.org/main.aspx [accessed November 11, 2011].
46
1942. It was not until January 28, 1943 when Secretary of War Henry Stimson declared,
―it is the right of every faithful citizen, regardless of ancestry to bear arms in the nation‘s battle‖ and moved to create ―a special unit of the Army in which [Japanese Americans] could have their share in the fight against the nation‘s enemies.‖64 Even then, Japanese
Americans were not able to serve in the U.S. Navy because ―their presence would ‗create collateral racial problems of a complex nature which cannot be handled adequately under war conditions‖ and few were allowed into the Army Air Force.65
While the prospect for Japanese Americans to prove their loyalty through military service was diminished in 1942, more opportunities were opened up to Chinese Americans than ever before. Not only was the service of Chinese
Americans in the armed forces celebrated in the mainstream press, they were also allowed to enlist in the other major branches of the armed forces.
Donald Poy was an aeronautical student who was accepted by the Army Air Corps to become an army mechanic in early 1942. The Chicago Daily Figure 3 - "The Recruit of the Day" section featuring Donald Poy (Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 January 1942, 12) Tribune made the 21-year old Chinese American the ―Recruit of the Day‖ and even included a large photograph of Poy along with the article.66 Another ―Recruit of the Day‖ was pilot Tom You Quon, a 34-year old who had
64 ―Army Opens Ranks to Japanese Units,‖ New York Times, 29 January 1943, 9. 65 ―Navy Reiterates Ban on U.S. Japanese,‖ New York Times, 21 August 1944, 17. 66 ―The Recruit of the Day,‖ Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 January 1942, 12.
47 previously fought in China against the Japanese before moving to the United States.
Quon, who had just learned that his wife and three children had been killed by the
Japanese, declared that he ―shall be happy to get into action.‖67
The ability to become a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Force was especially significant because an officer‘s commission was given upon graduation from flight school, allowing Chinese Americans to become officers in the armed services. In 1940,
Wah Kau Kong became the first commissioned Chinese American officer in the U.S. military services when he graduated from the ROTC program at the University of
Hawaii. Kong was the first and only Chinese American pilot to be stationed in Europe in
1943. When asked about this particular circumstance by a reporter, Kong jokingly responded by saying he was the ―handsomest Chinese fighter pilot in the European
Theater of Operations.‖ Kong received national attention when he became the subject of a Time magazine article that recounted Kong‘s first ―kill‖ over a German FW-190 aircraft. Sadly, Kong never saw his name in print as he was killed in combat after downing another enemy plane, one week prior to the magazine article‘s publication.68
Other Chinese Americans would continue Kong‘s legacy. First Lieutenant Stanley Lau from Hawaii flew P-38 fighter-bombers in the Southern European Theater with the 27th
Fighter Squadron. In fifty missions in the Mediterranean, he endured numerous bombing
67 ―Recruit of the Day,‖ Chicago Daily Tribune, 27 January 1942, 9. 68 ―AIR: Kong Gets a German,‖ Time, 28 February 1944.
48 missions over the dangerous Ploesti Oil Refinery in Romania and was credited with shooting down four enemy aircraft.69
A few Chinese Americans left distinctive marks as commanding officers in the
U.S. Army. Francis Wai was born to a Chinese father and a Hawaiian mother. Wai briefly attended Sacramento Junior College before becoming a scholar athlete in at
University of California, Los Angeles. After college, Wai joined the Hawaii National
Guard. After graduating from Officer Candidate School, Wai earned a commission as a lieutenant, becoming one of the ―few Asian Americans…assigned to combat leadership roles.‖70 In 1943, Wai fought with the 34th Regiment of the 24th Division and was promoted to captain. After a campaign in New Guinea, the 24th Division was one of the first to assault the beachhead at Leyte in the Philippines in 1944. When ―finding the first four wave of American soldiers leaderless, disorganized, and pinned down…[Captain
Wai] immediately assumed command…the men, inspired by his cool demeanor and heroic example, rose from their positions and followed him‖71 in the assault of fortified enemy positions. Unfortunately, Francis Wai died in the attack of the final Japanese entrenchment. The Chinese American army officer was posthumously awarded the
Distinguished Service Cross, which was later upgraded to a Congressional Medal of
Honor in 1996. Similarly, First Lieutenant Robert Chinn was a platoon leader in the 30th
Infantry Battalion. For bravery in combat in North Africa, Chinn was awarded two
69 K. Scott Wong, Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 155-156. Stanley Lau would go on to become a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force before retiring to become an educator and administrator back in his home state of Hawaii. 70 James H. Willbanks, ed., America’s Heroes: Medal of Honor Recipients from the Civil War to Afghanistan (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 345. 71 ―Medal of Honor Recipients, World War II, T-Z,‖ Center of Military History, U.S. Army, http://www.history.army.mil/html/moh/wwII-t-z.html [accessed November 12, 2011].
49
Bronze Stars. He died leading an attack during landing operations in Sicily in 1943.72
Both Robert Chinn and Francis Wai earned the distinction of being one of the few, Asian
American officers given the opportunity to lead a racially-mixed unit into combat.
Many Japanese American men also bravely and sacrificially fought for their country, but in a segregated combat unit led mostly by white officers. In 1942, many
Americans continued to doubt the loyalty of the Japanese Americans on the mainland.
The New York Times defended Executive Order 9066 by stating it was easy to
―understand why [Japanese Americans]…had to be removed from Pacific coastal areas and…why there has been hesitation about enlisting them into the army…[since the Nisei] still look Japanese…it was hard to tell whether or not they still thought Japanese.‖73
Most Japanese Americans already in uniform were men of the 298th and 290th Regiments of the Hawaiian National Guard. After a brief debate by the leading military commanders, the Hawaiian Japanese were sent to Wisconsin and trained as the segregated 100th Infantry Battalion. In contrast to the anti-Japanese fervor that was raging on the West Coast, the people of Wisconsin were ―curious at first…then grew to admire them, and invited them to their homes for meals and music and conversation.‖74
Many of these friendships would live on after the war. A number of Wisconsin whites came to the aid of Nisei soldiers as many returned to the United States jobless and broke.
It was not until the late summer of 1943 before the 100th Infantry was shipped out to the
72 Marjorie Lee, ed., Duty & Honor: A Tribute to Chinese American World War II Veterans of Southern California (Los Angeles: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, 1998), 86. 73 ―Japanese-American ‗Yanks‘,‖ New York Times, 30 January 1943, 14. 74 Lyn Crost, Trial by Fire: Japanese Americans at War in Europe and the Pacific, (Novato: Presidio Press, 1994), 16.
50
Mediterranean. In the meantime, officials from both the U.S. Army and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation watched the Nisei men closely as they trained.
Even before the Nisei of the 100th had the chance to prove their loyalty through combat, many other Japanese Americans had already put themselves in harm‘s way for their country in the Military Intelligence Service (MIS). Ironically, Nisei who were devalued by both white Americans for their race and by the Japanese for their birthplace, were desperately needed for their dual language skills. Many prewar draftees who were bilingual ended up with transfer orders to the MIS. Richard Sakakida was already assigned as a counterintelligence officer in the Philippines when the Japanese struck at
Pearl Harbor. In the first year of the war alone, he was accused and acquitted of being a
Japanese spy, worked to decipher Japanese radio codes, broadcasted radio propaganda messages to invading Japanese troops, and interrogated Japanese prisoners of war. After he was captured by the Japanese in 1942, Sakakida was tortured for information by the
Japanese military police and then was used by Japanese Army as an interpreter. At enormous risk to himself, Sakakida passed on important Japanese messages from the
Japanese 14th Army Headquarters, including troop movement and shipping records, to
Filipino rebels and eventually, to American intelligence officials until the end of the war.
In recognition of Sakakida‘s bravery and service, the American military drew up records
―of his commission as an officer in the U.S. Army…if he survived‖ his imprisonment in
Japanese captivity.75 Honoring Sakakida in 1996, Senator Akaka argued, it was the
75 Lyn Crost, Honor by Fire, 25-30. Sakakida would continue to send messages to American intelligence until 1945. Despite being sick with dysentery and malaria and wounded by Japanese artillery while trying to escape, he made it back to American lines and was eventually awarded the Bronze Star for exceptional bravery.
51 bravery shown by the Sakakida and other members of the MIS ―that helped to pave the way for the thousands of other Japanese-Americans who would make their own contributions to the war effort as members of the famed 100th/442d Regimental Combat
Team.‖76
Most Nisei and Kibei who entered service as part of the 442nd knew the scrutiny that they would endure as the most visible sign of Japanese American allegiance to the
United States. Despite early favorable reports of Japanese American serving in both the
Mediterranean and the Pacific, questions over the loyalty of Japanese Americans remained and the War Department continued to refrain from drafting Nisei men into service. When the Senate Military Affairs Committee finally made the recommendation for Japanese American men to be drafted in July 1943, it came with a caveat. Since most
Americans still believed that some Japanese Americans were disloyal, the New York
Times assured its readers by explaining that the ―Army has way[s] to screen out ‗bad ones.‘‖77 The drafting of Nisei men was reported as something that was born more out of necessity than for reasons of justice. When the Pasadena Draft Board finally allowed
1,100 interned Japanese American draftees and volunteers to enter military service, draft chairman J.A. Byrne stated that it was because the Draft Board was ―‗scraping the bottom‘ of the barrel‖78 of available manpower. As the men of the 442nd knew and the
New York Times acknowledged the Japanese Americans ―have perhaps more at stake than the average soldier.‖ One Nisei stated that he was ―anxious to show what real lovers of
76 Senator D. Akaka (HI), ―Tribute to the Late Lt. Col. Richard Sakakida,‖ Congressional Record 142, Issue 12 (30 January 1996), S548. 77 ―Asks Draft of Japanese,‖ New York Times, 17 July 1943, 6. 78 ―Draft of Japanese Americans to Give Pasadena Dads Delay,‖ Los Angeles Times, 22 January 1944, 1.
52
American democracy will do to preserve it [and that] our actions will speak for us more than words.‖79
The actions of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team clearly demonstrated to the
American public the loyalty of Japanese Americans. The men lived true to the motto of the 442nd, ―Go for Broke,‖ by earning 9,486 Purple Hearts, 21 Medals of Honor and an unmatched eight Presidential Unit Citations while in combat in Italy, Southern France and Germany. The 442nd received high praise from Allied commanders, their white officers, and war correspondents alike. Major Casper Clough Jr. of the 100th Battalion, described the Japanese Americans under his command as ―exceptionally good…the best soldiers [he had] ever seen.‖80 By the last year of the war, the 442nd had won the admiration of the press. It was one of the few regiments that received constant coverage from war correspondents and received universal praise for being unrelenting, disciplined, and cool under fire. In describing the postwar dilemma over the nation‘s treatment of
Japanese Americans, one New York Times writer stated, ―thus far [the Japanese
Americans] have won every fight they have been in. But their hardest fight is still ahead…the fight against prejudice roused by skin and slant of eye. It is easy to admire them while they are still in uniform. It would be kinder to remember and reward them when the battle is over.‖81
79 ―Japanese Excel in U.S. Combat Unit,‖ New York Times, 6 June 1943, 33. 80 ―U.S. Japanese Win Praise at Cassino,‖ New York Times, 26 February 1944, 3. 81 ―Action in Italy,‖ New York Times, 11 April 1945, 22.
53
CONCLUSIONS
Although Japanese Americans had won favor with the major press corps, racism that was encouraged by wartime propaganda remained in the hearts and minds of many
Americans after World War II. As internment orders were revoked and the government focused on restoring citizenship of Japanese Americans, the press continued to applaud the service of Nisei soldiers as they returned home. Lieutenant Willie Kiyota, winner of a battlefield commission and a bronze star, was called a ―Nisei Hero…[who] was too modest to explain his promotion or his decorations and ribbons‖82 so his white comrades had to expound on Kiyota‘s heroics. Similarly, Nisei who served in the Pacific with the
MIS and the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section were described as ―worthy, as individuals and as a group, for the highest possible praise for their invaluable contribution to the success of Allied arms.‖83 Although many Japanese Americans continued to encounter racial discrimination, especially in housing and employment, the attention garnered to Nisei soldiers by the American press helped to positively reshape the public image of the Japanese Americans.
By the war‘s end, the Chinese in the United States were not only seen by the public as more American, but they finally felt like citizens as well. Charles Leong, editor of the Chinese Press recalls, ―the pride of the time in feeling that the Chinese
American—who frankly, wore the garb of inferiority—was a part of the great patriotic
U.S. war machine out to do battle with the enemy.‖ Not only did Chinese Americans feel like citizens, they also attained the legal right of naturalization. Despite the U.S.
82 ―Nisei Hero Lauded by Comrades Here,‖ New York Times, 12 September 1945, 8. 83 Associated Press, ―U.S. Bares Exploits of Nisei in Pacific,‖ 14 October 1945, 9.
54 government‘s show of support for China, the Chinese government reasonably ―decried the humiliation of being allied to a country which deemed them unfit for citizenship.‖ 84
The patriotism demonstrated by Chinese Americans in combat and on the home front, combined with the pressures from the Chinese government, led to renewed debate over the infamous Chinese exclusion acts. Finally, on October 21, 1943 the Magnuson Act was passed by the House of Representatives to eliminate the exclusion acts and to provide the right of naturalization for Chinese Americans. The following day, the New
York Times declared ―that about fifteen acts…directed against that mythical creature the
‗Heathen Chinee‘ are scheduled to disappear…the modern Chinese, a people innately democratic…courageous enough to stand up for more than six years against an enemy…as tough as he is brutal, will be admitted…like other nationals.‖85 It is significant that the Times juxtaposed the ―mythical creature‖ seen in past images of the
―yellow peril‖ and ―Dr. Fu-Manchu‖ with the new public image of the Chinese as a people who are ―modern,‖ ―democratic‖ and ―courageous.‖ In other words, the press now saw them as distinctively American. Although many challenges in the pursuit of equality remained for Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans alike, the honorable service of its men in the armed forces helped to reshape the public perception of Asian
Americans.
84 Dower, 5. 85 ―A Vote for Free China,‖ New York Times, 22 October 1943, p.16.
55
CHAPTER THREE
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF THE TEACHING APPLICATION
Gaps in our understanding of history exist because of a combination of deficient evidence, an absence of interest and a lack of perceived significance. The recent works produced by Christina and Sheldon Lim, the Marjorie Lee, Suellen Cheng, and K. Scott
Wong demonstrate that there is evidence, interest and significance in the Chinese
American military experience. Their works have produced stories of men, like Stanley
Lau and Robert Chinn, who defied racial stereotypes and the norms of their time to become commanding officers in racially-mixed units. Such accomplishments are significant stories that deserve historical attention and further academic research.
However, the scope of most social histories is often too narrow and will most likely be omitted from the curriculum or standards of a general high school U.S. history course. After all, what significance do Chinese Americans, making up only one-tenth of one percent of the sixteen million men who served during World War II, have on the overarching history of the war and American society such that it needs to be included in a year-long, high school curriculum? Similar questions can be asked about Ella Baker‘s role in the Civil Rights Movement, the unionization of Mexican American women in
California canneries and gender relations in colonial Virginia.1 However, historians have proven to us time and time again the lived experience of individuals formulate the building blocks of the political, economic and social societies that help us to form the big
1 In reference to Barbara Ransby‘s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, Vicky Ruiz‘s Cannery Row, Cannery Lives, and Kathleen Brown‘s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, respectively.
56 pictures of history. Carlo Ginzburg skillfully demonstrates in The Cheese and the
Worms, the power of examining individuals as a means to gain an understanding of the past in his narrative of a sixteenth century miller. Ginzburg explains that ―consequently, an investigation initially pivoting on an individual, moreover an apparently unusual one, ended by developing into a general hypothesis on the popular culture…of preindustrial
Europe, in the age marked by the spread of printing and the Protestant Reformation— and by the repression of the latter in Catholic countries.‖2 Famed historian John Lewis
Gaddis concurs arguing that that the ―great macro-events—the decline of Rome, the
Mongol invasions, the European conquest of North and South America—can‘t be satisfactorily explained apart from the workings of micro-processes we‘ve only come to understand in the last hundred years.‖3 Thus, it is important for teachers to teach and students to learn the ―macro-events‖ through the examination and analysis of the ―micro- processes.‖ [Appendix A: list of ―micro-processes‖ for each major ―macro-event‖ for the
California State History/Social Science Standards]
ANALYZING ―MACRO-EVENTS‖ THROUGH TEXTBOOKS AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
Textbooks have been unfairly criticized because they do not contain all of the information that we expect they should possess. Minority groups are upset because they do not receive the attention that the groups deserve. Many balk at how little women are mentioned and, if they are mentioned, it is usually through the ―special‖ pages and insets
2 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), xii. 3 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25.
57 that most students (and teachers) skip as they blaze through the curriculum. In all fairness, the textbook is like any other historical narrative—it is necessarily limited in size and scope. Textbooks, in fact, accomplish what John Gaddis argues are the essential tools historians rely on to produce narrative: ―select from a cacophony of events what they think is really important; they can be at several times and several places at once; they can zoom in and out between macroscopic and microscopic levels of analysis.‖4 Our criticism is that textbooks do not ―zoom in and out‖ as far as we would like on some topics. Their limitations in size and scope mean that our expectation as teachers for a comprehensive text needs to change. Just because it is the only text provided by school administrators does not mean that it is exhaustive and that it possesses all that teachers need to engage students in history. The textbook is simply one historical representation that is readily available to teachers to depict a version of history that can and should be challenged. It is extremely useful as a tool that can be used to set the stage for more in- depth historical work by students.
Textbooks remain a very effective way of providing historical context for students because they chronicle history in a logical fashion using specified themes and follow a chronological structure. The California state standards that most current textbooks are derived from are written with macro-events and major historical themes in mind. For example, the California History-Social Science Content Standards exhorts students to perform tasks such as to ―trace the rise of the United States to its role as a world power in
4 Gaddis, 22.
58 the twentieth century‖5 or to ―analyze the economic boom and social transformation of post-World War II America.‖6 These major themes create a framework of study that provides a chronological beginning-middle-end, thus enabling students to study conceptual topics, such as American imperialism or postwar conformity, while analyzing change over time. Few other academically-reviewed sources provide the breadth of information that will allow students to create timelines that focus on a particular theme and a set beginning and end time. Without a textbook, primary documents will thus
―appear to students as a string of disconnected facts, without a coherent‖7 chronology.
James Loewen suggests using different editions of the same textbook as an
―inexpensive introduction to historiography.‖8 Shifts in national and regional values are often reflected through the content of textbooks. Take, for instance, the case of John
Brown in one of the best-selling textbooks in the 1960s and 1970s, Rise of the American
Nation. Loewen noted that in the 1961 edition, John Brown‘s raid of Harper‘s Ferry was called a ―wild idea, certain to fail,‖ but in the 1986 edition, the raid was described as ―a bold idea‖ instead. This particular sample demonstrates how the Civil Rights Movement and other similar social changes can alter how history is studied and written. Modern- day political and social cleavages over the rights of homosexual persons, the teaching of evolution and immigration will inevitable spill over into the realm of textbook writing.
Thus, most state standards are controversial because they are formulated, not only by
5 California State Board of Education, ―California History-Social Science Content Standards,‖ 41. 6 California State Board of Education, 43. 7 Robert B. Bain, ―Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction‖ in Knowing, Teaching and Learning History: National and International Perspectives, ed., Peter N. Stearns et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 341. 8 James W. Loewen, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010), 71.
59 historians and teachers, but also by politicians and special pressure groups. While the debate over what should be taught will most likely continue indefinitely, it gives the students a glimpse of how the study of history changes over time. Once students recognize that the textbook is just one version of history, they are free to make value- judgments on the validity of the textbooks, the topics chosen (and not chosen) to be in the state standards and the importance of primary sources in recording history. Loewen states, ―critiquing offers an easy way in to doing history, because the storyline situation has already been structured by the work being examined.‖ (See the ―Historiography
Exercise‖ in both Appendix B3 and C3 – Resource Packet)
HISTORICAL QUESTIONS TO FILL IN HISTORICAL GAPS IN THE CURRICULUM
Analyzing someone else‘s interpretation of history is, however, only be the starting point. The process of learning history should also include developing and utilizing skills to discover new knowledge of the past. Teachers are frequently evaluated by district administrators on their application of standards as a means of building higher- order thinking skills. Knowledge is seen as a rigid foundation used to build levels of understanding upward along the vaunted Bloom‘s Taxonomy pyramid. Noted experts in the field of history education Sam Wineburg and Jack Schneider believe that the famed
Bloom‘s Taxonomy pyramid should be flipped upside-down when applied to the history classroom. Wineburg and Schneider argue the by placing ―knowledge at the base implies that the world of ideas is fully known and that critical thinking involves gathering known facts to cast judgment.‖ Instead, the complexity, scope and mystery of human beings
60 over time mean that there is always an unknown to be solved and an expanse of knowledge to be discovered.
Thus, one major unintended consequence of content-based standards is that it presupposes a fixed set of historical knowledge. Examine the following example regarding Americans in military service during World War II. According to the
California state standards:
The American military was segregated during World War II (Standard
11.10.1)
Minorities fought in the war in ―special fighting forces‖ (Standard 11.7.3)
Japanese Americans fought in the separate 442nd Combat Regimental Team
(Standard 11.7.3)
Native Americans served as Navajo Code Talkers (Standard 11.7.3)
African Americans served as Tuskegee Airmen (Standard 11.7.3)
State standards are useful because they help to narrow down a vast range of history into a reasonable number of topics that have been chosen with thoughtful consideration and debate. But predictably, many different sub-groups are left out of the master historical narrative as defined by the standards. However, with a strong understanding of historiography, teachers and students can take advantage of this by asking strong questions about inclusion (What was the significance of the Navajo Code Talkers in
World War II?) and exclusion (Why were the Navajo singled out? What about other
Native American tribes?) to lead to further historical investigation. Furthermore, students
61 can use the following graphic organizer (Table 1) to discover missing narratives according to the standards and what they have read about in the textbook.
TABLE 1: INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION GUIDE
Figure A: Template GENDER RACE CLASS AGE REGION Men White Wealthy Children New England Women Black Middle Class Teenagers South Latino Working Class Young Adults Midwest Japanese Poor Middle-Age Southwest Native American Elderly Northwest Chinese
Figure B: Americans in Military Service During World War II GENDER RACE CLASS AGE REGION Men White Wealthy Children New England Women Black Middle Class Teenagers South Latino Working Class Young Adults Midwest Japanese Poor Middle-Age Southwest Native American Elderly Northwest Chinese
Working with the chart we are able to pose several major questions about missing narratives that would help to create a clearer picture of the ―roles and sacrifices of individual soldiers.‖9 Did women play a role in military service? Were American soldiers of all classes? Did either teenagers or elders find their way onto the battlefield?
If America‘s military was segregated, where did Latino Americans fit into the racial picture? What about the Chinese Americans? Since these topics are not mentioned in most standards-based textbooks, they become an excellent opportunity for both teachers and students to deepen their understanding of the ―macro-event‖ by creating narratives, essays or research reports [see Appendix A] of each ―micro-process‖ to help students
9 California State Board of Education, 42.
62 generate a stronger understanding of the roles race, gender, class, age, and region play in
American society. Even if there is not enough time to undertake the proposed assessment tools provided in the appendix, the exercise will demonstrate to students that historical knowledge is an ongoing process of change and discovery in which they can actively play a part. The study of history, therefore, ought not to begin with a series of factual fixed goals, but to start with an evaluation of primary documents used to frame ―questions that would help [the historian] understand the fullness of the historical moment.‖10
FROM ―MACRO-EVENTS‖ TO ―MICRO-PROCESSES‖ IN HISTORICAL NARRATIVES
One of the major trappings of history at the K-12 level is the overgeneralization of ideas and characteristics. Teachers are often guilty of making universal generalizations—
Puritans were pious prudes, Native Americans are solemn and brave, progressive women were quiet activist, Communists were heartless oppressors and Germans are ruthlessly efficient—in order to make a historical point in a short amount of time. While generalizations are often partially true and even ―dangerous, these concepts are indispensable…and of central importance to the history curriculum…we cannot avoid and should not seek to avoid all generic statements.‖11 Generalizations are useful because they help people to find what was typical of a time in history. George Lukas, a literary critic, who sought to use ―the concept of typicality as a key analytical tool…wrote ‗a character is typical…when his innermost being is determined by objective
10 Sam Wineburg and Jake Schneider, ―Was Bloom‘s Taxonomy Pointed in the Wrong Direction?‖ in The Phi Delta Kappan, No.4 (Dec.,2009-Jan.2010), 61. 11 Gordon Geoffrey Partington, ―Historical Generalization‖ in The History Teacher, Vol.13, No.3 (May, 1980), 392-393.
63 forces at work in society.‘‖12 It is enormously helpful for students to understand the
Industrial Revolution by knowing the various challenges—dangerous working environments, low pay, challenges to unionization, squalid homes—of a ―typical worker‖ during this time. However, those useful generalizations that fit so perfectly in textbook tables or PowerPoint charts, do not tell of the complexity of society that existed in urban
England and America during the late nineteenth century. Similarly, while there are general terms that can be used to describe ―the roles and sacrifices of American soldiers‖13 in World War II, these generalizations are not as effective as knowing there the ―typical‖ experience of American servicemen varied drastically depending on his ethnicity, military branch, and theater of operation.
One way that we can both utilize generalizations and demonstrate historical complexity is through the construction of historical narratives. Historians
―embed…generalizations…within…narratives…to show how past processes have produced present structures.‖14 In other words, ―macro-events,‖ concepts and eras like the Industrial Revolution and the Progressive Movement are derived from historians tracking ―multiple interrelated [micro] processes over time‖15 through numerous historical narratives. Historians, teachers, and students can gain a stronger understanding of the ―roles and sacrifices of American soldiers‖ if they can trace the stories of multiple groups of soldiers. We can thus give depth and meaning to generalizations set by the state
12 Partington, 393. 13 California State Board of Education, 57. 14 Gaddis, 62. 15 Gaddis, 69.
64 history standards by creating lesson plans and assessment tools that engages students in investigating and creating narratives associated with those generalizations.
Formulating historical narratives require skills that are useful in the real world.
According to Gaddis, narratives are,
…reconstructions, assembled within the virtual laboratories of our minds, of the processes that produced whatever structure it is we‘re seeking to explain. They vary in their purposes, but not in their methods. For in them, we ask ourselves: ‗How could this have happened?‘ Then we proceed to try to answer the question in such a way as to achieve the closest possible fit between representation and reality.16
In other words, to reconstruct the past, a student/historian must create and defend an argument, tell a story by utilizing historical skills such as understanding bias, interpretation of sources, tracing chronology, and placing the narrative within the scope of historiography. This method meets the proposed Common Core Standards which seeks to promote stronger writing skills to prepare students for college by defining expectations for each year of study. The two major expectations for high school students are to ―write arguments focused on discipline-specific content‖ and to ―write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events.‖17 The
Common Core Standards aims to address the primary weakness of traditional analytical essays by including historical chronology and sequencing. The historical narrative doesn‘t just ask what the causes and effects were in a historical moment, but require a
16 Gaddis, 105. 17 California‘s Common Core Content Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects, 54-55.
65 student to demonstrate cause and effect by reconstructing the past through their understanding of primary and secondary source documents.
The primary lesson plan (see Appendix B1) proposed by this project, demonstrates how the ―micro-process‖ of Chinese American experience in the U.S. military can be used to enhance student understanding of the ―macro-event‖ of World
War II and how race relations changed over time. Through this lesson, students will evaluate historiography of Chinese Americans by examining how different textbooks describe the experience of the Chinese in America (see Appendix B3). This will reinforce the notion that their textbooks are a useful but not the only tool that should be used in doing history. The greatest benefit of history textbooks is that they are extremely useful in providing concise descriptions of hundreds of events and is a practical source for students to acquire historical context. Students will use the textbooks to generate a timeline (see Appendix B6 for a sample timeline that students will produce) to provide historical and chronological context to the primary source documents (see Appendix B3) that they will analyze. After interpreting and evaluating a series of primary source documents (see Appendix B2), students will be assessed on their understanding of the
Chinese American experience in the U.S. military in the World Wars by writing a historical narrative. This narrative will not only trace the little-known Chinese
Americans contributions in war, but also demonstrate the big-picture changes in
American racial attitudes through the progression of time.
66
RESEARCH AND THE NARRATIVE – TEACHER WORKSHOPS
The foundation of most historical narratives is based on thorough primary source research and analysis. Since we are teaching ourselves and students to become
―historians, not novelists…we‘re obliged to tie our narratives as closely as possible to the evidence that has survived.‖18 However, as all professional historians know, constructing a major research narrative is an arduous and difficult process that involves time and resources is not readily available to most students in a traditional history classroom setting. Thus, it is up to teachers to investigate the ―micro-processes,‖ draw connections with the ―macro-event‖ and find the associated primary sources that students will explore in the classroom. This takes, not only time and effort, but it requires teachers who understand the modern approaches to historical research and analysis.
Unfortunately, many credentialed teachers of social studies may be unprepared to prepare lessons on historical narratives because they either do not possess a degree in history or have never engaged in primary source research in their undergraduate experience. The U.S. Department of Education‘s National Center for Education Statistics found in 1998 that in grades 9-12, ―49.4 percent of those who teach two or more classes of history or world civilization do not have a history major or minor.‖19 Research professor of education Diane Ravitch explains that the immensely-high rate of out-of- field teaching in history is due to ―the popular view that anyone can teach history…that teaching history requires no special skills beyond the ability to stay a few pages ahead of
18 Gaddis, 107. 19 Cited from Diane Ravitch, ―The Educational Background of History Teachers‖ in in Knowing, Teaching and Learning History: National and International Perspectives, ed., Peter N. Stearns et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 148.
67 the students in the textbook‖ and that ―state certification requirements…favor pedagogical preparation and courses in social studies education rather than history degrees.‖20 Many excellent teachers are able to mask their content-knowledge deficiencies through pedagogical skills. However, only a fraction of credential teachers of history and social studies know much more beyond what they themselves have read in the same history textbooks that they offer to their students. Even for the teachers who have already attained an undergraduate degree in history, most have not flexed their historical investigation muscles in years.
It is suggested that every few years, school districts provide the funding for history teachers to enroll in semester or quarter-long classes at the local university and engage with professors, both in learning and relearning history and in discussing pedagogy as fellow educators. It might even be beneficial for districts or a cooperative of districts to conduct their own classes focused on bringing depth-of-knowledge to teachers based solely on the content standards. For example, World History teachers are asked to teach ―students compare and contrast the Glorious Revolution of England, the American
Revolution, and the French Revolution and their enduring effects worldwide on the political expectations for self-government and individual liberty.‖21 While teachers are probably knowledgeable regarding the American Revolution, few possess an intensive understanding of ―macro-events‖ such as the English Glorious Revolution or the French
Revolution. By gaining a depth of knowledge through academic classes, teachers may be
20 Ravitch, 148-49. 21 California State Board of Education, 42.
68 inspired to create a ―micro-process‖ less based on the various subsequent worldwide liberal revolutions in the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe.
This project addresses these issues in history education in several ways. The lesson provided is not just a series of activities to engage students in primary and secondary source analysis and narrative writing, but also a research template for teachers.
Many history teachers enter into the profession with their own personal historical interests. Unfortunately, in the textbook-centric curriculum, a teacher‘s personal passion may never see the light of day in the classroom. This project, as presented through a series of workshops, provides methodology for teachers to develop their own ―micro- process‖ lesson plan based on their subjects of interest that applies to the state history standards and is aligned to the new Common Core Standards (see Appendix E for template material). In instructional workshops and teacher workdays, history teachers will utilize both web resources such as the vast search databases such as Cambridge
Information Group‘s ProQuest, Google Books, and the Time and Life Magazine archives along with local university and oral history databases to conduct primary source research.
For many teachers, this may be the first time that they have conducted their own primary source research so it may be beneficial for them to work in cooperative teams or guided by local researchers or history professors. Once primary sources are selected and abridged, they can be integrated into the lesson template for use in the classroom (the lessons provided in Appendix C-D employs the same template format through a different body of primary sources.)
69
Famed historian Fernand Braudel once stated that in writing his extensive history of the Mediterranean world, ―to draw a boundary around anything is to define, analyse and reconstruct it.‖22 For teachers, the bounds of history have been set by the authors of state history standards and history textbooks and thus, history is presented as having been analyzed and constructed for teachers. In creating their own lessons on historical ―micro- processes‖ and conducting their own research, teachers will be able to reshape the boundaries of teaching history and exercise their abilities to define, analyze and reconstruct history. More importantly, this project provides a process by which both teachers and students are actively ―doing‖ history together.
22 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 18.
70
APPENDICES
All the pages in the appendices are meant to be reproduced and utilized by instructors and
students at the full 8.5 inches by 11 inch format. Therefore, follow pages have been
resized to fit this bound edition. Please contact the author for full-sized copies.
71
Appendix A ―Micro-Processes‖ within ―Macro-Events‖
Table 2: ―Micro-Processes‖ in ―Macro-Events‖ using the 11th Grade California State
“Historians have the capacity for selectivity, simultaneity, and the shift of scale: they can select from the cacophony of events what they think is really important; they can be in several times and places at once; and they can zoom in and out between macroscopic and microscopic levels of analysis…” (John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, 22)
History/Social Science Standards Std.# Content Standard: The Micro-Processes Macro-Events 11.1 Students analyze the significant The Founding Fathers and slavery events in the founding of the Changes and Continuities in how the Civil nation and its attempts to War in American public memory realize the philosophy of government described in the Declaration of Independence. 11.2 Students analyze the Comparison of living conditions in the relationship among the rise of cities and suburbs industrialization, large-scale Immigration experience of Italian, Greek, rural-to-urban migration, and and Slavic Americans massive immigration from Case study on the political machines Southern and Eastern Europe. Changes in neighborhood demographics (e.g., various New York Boroughs) during the Industrial Revolution Changing attitudes toward a specific corporation 11.3 Students analyze the role The rise of the Social Gospel movement religion played in the founding Changing sentiments of the Catholicism in of America, its lasting moral, America social, and political impacts, Role of women in Protestant America and issues regarding religious liberty. 11.4 Students trace the rise of the Treatment of Filipinos and Filipino United States to its role as a Americans world power in the twentieth Comparison of newspapers during the century. Spanish-American war Attitudes toward German Americans before, during and after the First World War 11.5 Students analyze the major African American in transition during the political, social, economic, 1920s (Migration, Harlem Renaissance,
72
technological, and cultural Washington vs. DuBois, etc…) developments of the 1920s. Temperance, prohibition and ideas over drinking Rise of American popular culture 11.6 Students analyze the different Struggles of minority groups during the explanations for the Great Great Depression Depression and how the New Mexican American women in the cannery Deal fundamentally changed industry the role of the federal American viewpoints on ―big‖ government government. 11.7 Students analyze America's Military experience of Chinese, Latinos, participation in World War II. Japanese, Native Americans, and African Americans Experiences in the Bracero and other labor movements from Mexico Comparison of the Isseis and Niseis during Japanese internment 11.8 Students analyze the economic Racial integration of schools across regions boom and social transformation and over time of post-World War II America. Racial attitudes towards Mexicans and Mexican Americans in California Post-internment experience of Japanese Americans 11.9 Students analyze U.S. foreign Change and continuity over time along the policy since World War II. Mexican-American border Attitudes toward Socialism and Communism in American history Communism and the film industry Integrated armed forces in Korea and Vietnam 11.10 Students analyze the Racial attitudes in baseball towards blacks development of federal civil and Latinos rights and voting rights. Accounts of the ―foot soldiers‖ of the Civil Rights Movement Changing views of the role of women in American history Viewpoints of the ―model minority‖ stereotype 11.11 Students analyze the major American experience for new immigrant social problems and domestic groups (Southeast Asia, Middle East, Sub- policy issues in contemporary Saharan Africa, South Asia, South American society. America) Women in American politics Changes in urban America
73
Appendix B1 What Role did Chinese Americans Play in the U.S. Military during the Two World Wars? (CCWW) – Primary 3-Day Lesson Plan
PART I: ASSOCIATED STANDARDS
California State History/Social Science Standards: Std. Standard Description Justification 11.2.2 Describe the changing landscape, including the growth of This lesson investigates the role of cities linked by industry and trade, and the development of economics, race and ethnicity used as cities divided according to race, ethnicity, and class justification for Chinese exclusion 11.7.3 Students analyze America‘s participation in World War II Students will write a narrative and identify the roles and sacrifices of individual illustrating the role of Chinese American soldiers, as well as unique contributions of the Americans in war, both in the First and special fighting force s (e.g., the Tuskegee Airmen, the Second World Wars and discuss the 442nd Regimental Combat team, the Navajo Code Talkers) historiography of the World War II
California Common Core State Standards: Std. Standard Description Justification 1 Write arguments focused on discipline-specific The final assessment piece for this lesson content. (Including developing claims, counterclaims, involves the writing of a historical narrative supplying evidence, clarifying relationships between that creates an argument, supports claims by claims, establishing a formal style, and a concluding supplying evidence from primary and statement) secondary source documents through a formal writing style (the narrative). 2 Write informative/explanatory texts, including the The final assessment will be a short, formal narration of historical events historical narrative. 4 Produce clear and coherent writing in which the The historical narrative will be a formal development, organization, and style are appropriate writing assessment that utilizes the narrative to task, purpose, and audience. format based on the concept of change and continuity over time. 8 Gather relevant information from multiple Students will analyze at least fourteen authoritative print and digital sources (primary and primary and secondary source documents and secondary), using advanced searches effectively; determine the documents that they will use in assess the strengths and limitations of each source in order to create a historical narrative that terms of the specific task, purpose, and audience; follows a chronological timeline. integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source and following a standard format for citation. 9 Draw evidence from informational texts to support Students will utilizes multiple primary analysis, reflection, and research. documents and their textbooks to research, organize into graphics and write a historical narrative.
PART II: LESSON ABSTRACT
In addition to learning the contributions made by Chinese Americans during the First and Second World Wars, this lesson seeks to teach students the skills of historiographical analysis and the basics of organizing and writing historical narratives. Through this three-day lesson, students will develop their own historical narrative based on the history of Chinese Americans and their contributions in both World Wars. Students will utilize both the textbook (the most- readily available secondary source) and analyze thirteen primary source documents to create a narrative timeline. Then they will use the evidence from the sources and the timeline to write a brief historical narrative that demonstrates the Chinese American experience in the military during the World Wars.
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PART III: LESSON PLAN
Time Required: Three 60-minute class periods (with 90-minute block option), preferably after the completion of the World War II unit.
Materials Required: 1. Holt‘s American Anthem: Modern American History or another modern United States history textbook 2. Computer with Microsoft PowerPoint (or equivalent) installed 3. An overhead projector or an LCD projector 4. The document packet and related student documents 5. 11‖x14‖ paper (with timeline template printed, if possible) for each student 6. Scissors 7. Glue stick 8. Coloring material (optional)
Objectives: To understand the racial attitudes towards and the contributions made by Chinese Americans in the World Wars by: 1. Creating a sequential timeline using a history textbook and a series of primary sources 2. Analyzing a series of primary source documents 3. Writing a short historical narrative that demonstrate change and continuity over time
Background Information: (See historical narrative sample and PowerPoint presentation)
Lesson Overview: DAY ONE: Historiography and Secondary Source Research TIME REQUIRED Intro and How to Tell Chinese from a Jap/Race Relations Discussion 10 Historiography Exercise and finding the missing Chinese American narrative 15 Sample Narrative, PowerPoint, and Preliminary Thesis 25 Secondary Source Timeline Research – Introduction 10 Secondary Source Timeline Research and Timeline Construction Homework DAY TWO: Primary Source Document Analysis TIME REQUIRED Intro and Quoting Exercise – Using Political Cartoon (Document #2) 10 Narrative Document Set, Part I (#1-8) and Timeline Strips 50 Narrative Document Set, Part II (#9-13) Timeline Strips Homework DAY THREE: Data Organization and Narrative Writing TIME REQUIRED Intro and Quoting Exercise – Using Oral History (Document #13) 10 Chronology to Grouping 15 Revised Thesis and Narrative Outline 35 Assessment: Written Narrative Homework
Detailed Lesson Procedure:
DAY ONE: Historiography and Secondary Source Research Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to Reviewed the material regarding World War Place RESOURCE PACKET, the STUDENT class II as advised by the teacher RESPONSE PACKET and the 11‖x17‖ TIMELINE paper in a location where the students can pick up material as they enter into the classroom. 00:00 – Enter into the classroom and pick up the Place Slide* ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ 02:00 RESOURCE PACKET, the STUDENT on the screen RESPONSE PACKET and the 11‖x17‖ TIMELINE paper 02:00 – Observe the ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ Inform the students they will respond orally 04:00 slide (also page 1 of the RESOURCE (through raised hands or called randomly at PACKET) and think about responses to the teacher‘s discretion). Use time to take roll.
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questions provided on the bottom of the page. 04:00 – Discuss ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ Call on students and discuss the questions 10:00 with the class through voluntary or forced provided on the slide or any other topics that participation come to mind 10:00 – Listen to the teacher talk about Discuss with the class about what historiography 25:00 historiography. Then read both accounts in is and why it is important. The key point to get the ―Historiography Exercise‖ document across is that (1) textbooks change over time and describing the immigration experience of for varying purposes, (2) textbooks are just a Chinese Americans during the nineteenth single interpretation of history and that there are century. Write down the answers in the others, and (3) students can take on the role of ―Historiography Discussion Questions‖ the historians and provide their own portion of STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, interpretations using documents—thus, creating PART I (page 1) and be ready to discuss with their own historical narrative the class when the teacher leads the discussion. 25:00 – Follow along on pages 2-3 in the RESOURCE Introduce the concept of the historical narrative 35:00 PACKET as the teacher presents the sample by demonstrating the sample narrative on p.2-3 narrative on ―The Chinese in America during of the RESOURCE PACKET. Present the the Nineteenth Century.‖ narrative using the images provided on the ―Sample Narrative‖ PowerPoint presentation. 35:00 – Using the information from the sample Introduce the primary research question and have 40:00 narrative and prior knowledge of both world the students write a preliminary thesis wars, students will write a preliminary thesis hypothesizing the Chinese role in the world wars (similar to a hypothesis) on the following based on what they have learned in the narratives question: ―What role did Chinese Americans and from their prior knowledge. Remind play in the U.S. military during the world students that this is just a hypothesis and that wars?‖ on page 3 of the STUDENT historians usually begin their research with a RESPONSE PACKET, PART III preliminary thesis based on their prior knowledge. 40:00 – Take out textbooks and read the short passage Discuss the necessity of using secondary sources 50:00 on ―Railroads expand‖ on p.150-151. Then like the textbook to gather background take bullet point notes on significant points in knowledge and create context. Then have the the graphic organizer found in page 1 of the students turn to the short passage on ―Railroads STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, PART II. expand.‖ Lead them in creating bullet point notes in the graphic organizer found on page 1 of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. 50:00 – Using the 11‖x14‖ TIMELINE paper, draw a Using the SAMPLE TIMELINE provided, 60:00 line from left-to-right about 4 inches from the demonstrate to the students how to create the top. Label 1850 as the starting date and 1950 SECONDARY SOURCE TIMELINE. as the end date. Then using the ―Railroads Additional information can be found on page 6 expands‖ sample, students will place the first of the RESOURCE PACKET. Afterwards, go two events, the ―Gold Rush‖ and ―Building around the classroom to ensure students are the Transcontinental Railroad‖ and a doing the work correctly. Allow students who descriptive sentence of each onto the timeline. have completed the placing ―The Gold Rush‖ and ―Building the Transcontinental Railroad‖ to pack up the material. HOME They will continue this process at home for (60:00- homework and in preparation for the 90:00)** document analysis the next day. *Can be done using the overhead transparency, PowerPoint through LCD projector, or electronic document camera **In 90-minute block classes, the last half hour can be used to accomplish the task assigned for homework. This will allow students to get help from classmates and the teacher as they complete the requirements for the historical narrative
DAY TWO: Primary Source Document Analysis Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to For homework, students should have completed Pre-select students to work in groups of 2-3, class the pages 1 and 2 on the STUDENT RESPONSE based on ability level. Before class place the PACKET and the top-half of the TIMELINE. As TIMELINE STRIP handout (found on page
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they enter into the classroom, pick up the 11 of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET) TIMELINE STRIP handout (found on page 11 of in a location where the students can pick up the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET.) material as they enter into the classroom. 00:00- Turn page 9 of the RESOURCE PACKET. Then Place the slide QUOTING EXERCISE, found 10:00 participate in the discussion explaining the on page 7 of the RESOURCE PACKET on significance and historical context of the political the screen and direct the students to the cartoon. On page 3 of the STUDENT RESPONSE image. Explain to the students the PACKET, find QUOTING EXERCISE A and fill importance of quoting sources in an essay or in the blanks provided using the ―Chinese narrative. Then discuss with the students the Question‖ political cartoon by quoting specific significance and historical context of the parts of the cartoon and also writing a short political cartoon. Direct them to page 3 of explanation of the significance of the quotes. the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET and have the students fill in the blacks in ―Quoting Exercise A.‖ As they spend 2-3 minutes selecting quotes and writing a short analysis of the quotes, take roll and go around the classroom to check that homework was adequately completed by stamping the box located on page 3 of the STUDENT RESOURCE PACKET to indicate work done on-time. 10:00 – Turn to page 8 of the RESOURCE PACKET and Have them turn to page 8 of the 15:00 page 3 of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. RESOURCES PACKET and remain on page Then they will listen for directions on how to 3 of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. perform the document analysis before moving. Then, either orally or through a graphic, Students will join their assigned groups. inform the students that they will be working in groups of 2-3. Instruct them on the process of analyzing the documents and summarizing each document on the TIMELINE STRIP. 15:00 – Begin analyzing the PRIMARY DOCUMENT Make sure that students are seated together so 60:00 SET using the questions provided in the that they can help one another. Then go STUDENT RESPONSE PACKETS and around the classroom to answer any summarizing each document on the TIMELINE questions, keep the class focused and to STRIP. They will complete Documents #1-8 by provide ideas and clarifications for students. the end of the class period. If they complete Prior to the end of the period, allow students Documents #1-8, then they will move on to who have finished the first eight documents Documents #9-13. to pack up.
HOME Students should have all documents analyzed (60:00- before class the following day and have their 90:00)** TIMELINE STRIPS glued onto the bottom half of their TIMELINES. **In 90-minute block classes, the last half hour can be used to accomplish the task assigned for homework. This will allow students to get help from classmates and the teacher as they complete the requirements for the historical narrative
DAY THREE: Data Organization and Narrative Writing Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to For homework, students should have completed class the pages 3-8 (minus the ―Quoting Exercise B‖ box on page 8) in the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET and have all of the TIMELINE STRIPS placed on the bottom half of their TIMELINES. 00:00- Turn page 14 of the RESOURCE PACKET. Place the slide QUOTING EXERCISE, found on 10:00 Then participate in the discussion explaining page 7 of the RESOURCE PACKET on the the significance of oral histories. On page 6 of screen and direct the students to the oral history. the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, find Explain the positives and negatives of using oral ―Quoting Exercise B‖ and fill in the blanks histories as primary sources. Repeat to the
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provided using the ―Thomas W. Chinn: A students the importance of quoting sources in an Historian‘s Reflections on Chinese American essay or narrative. Direct them to page 6 of the Life in San Francisco‖ oral history by quoting STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET and have the specific parts of the document and also writing students fill in the blacks in ―Quoting Exercise a short explanation of the significance of the B.‖ As they spend 2-3 minutes selecting quotes quotes. and writing a short analysis of the quotes, take roll and go around the classroom to check that homework was adequately completed by stamping the box located on page 6 of the STUDENT RESOURCE PACKET to indicate work done on-time. 10:00 – Turn to page 7 of the STUDENT RESPONSE Using the SAMPLE TIMELINE demonstrate 25:00 PACKET and find PART IV: FROM possible ways to divide the content into three CHRONOLOGY TO GROUPING. Observe distinct time periods—a ―beginning,‖ ―middle,‖ the timeline and find the best possible way to and ―end‖ in order to demonstrate change and divide the content into three distinct time continuity over time. Then aid the students in periods—a ―beginning,‖ ―middle,‖ and ―end‖ filling out their GROUPING graphic organizer. in order to demonstrate change and continuity over time. Fill out the graphic organizer by listing the dates, placing the Document numbers, and a descriptive sentence of each time period in the appropriate boxes. 25:00- Using the information assembled, write a thesis Aid the students in writing their thesis statements 30:00 statement that answers the question: ―What role by using their GROUPING graphic organizers. did Chinese Americans play in the U.S. Remind them that the thesis statement should military during two World Wars?‖ address change and continuity over time. 30:00- Utilizing the SAMPLE NARRATIVE and the Have the students turn to pages 7 and 8 of the 60:00 GROUPING NARRATIVE, students will STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. Have the complete the NARRATIVE OUTLINE student begin writing their NARRATIVE provided on pages 7 and 8 of the STUDENT OUTLINES. Go around the classroom to aid RESPONSE PACKET. Once students have students in the writing packets. Gather students completed the NARRATIVE OUTLINE, then who need more help in forming their thesis they will start writing their HISTORICAL and/or grouping into small groups. Provide NARRATIVES. sample theses and groupings, if necessary. HOME Complete writing the HISTORICAL (60:00- NARRATIVE. 90:00)** **In 90-minute block classes, the last half hour can be used to accomplish the task assigned for homework. This will allow students to get help from classmates and the teacher as they complete the requirements for the historical narrative
Assessment: (See Historical Narrative above)
Digital Education Component: 1. PowerPoint Attachment: Teachers will be all 2. Documents will be available in .pdf and .mobi formats for e-readers
PART IV: DIFFERENTIATION For students who have not attained the necessary writing skills and will require a differentiated assessment piece, an alternate option has been developed. The lesson plan for this assessment differentiation will remain the same during the first two days of instruction. However, the lesson‘s third day will be altered to incorporate the differentiation strategy.
DAY THREE: Alternate Differentiation Strategy – Comic Strip Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to For homework, students should have completed Before class place the ALTERNATE class the pages 3-8 (minus the QUOTING EXERCISE DIFFERENTIATION-COMIC STRIP B box on page 8) in the STUDENT RESPONSE handout in a location where the students can
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PACKET and have all of the TIMELINE STRIPS pick up material as they enter into the placed on the bottom half of their TIMELINES. classroom. As they enter into the classroom, pick up the ALTERNATE DIFFERENTIATION-COMIC STRIP handout. 00:00- Turn page 13 of the RESOURCE PACKET. Place the slide QUOTING EXERCISE, 10:00 Then participate in the discussion explaining the found on page 6 of the RESOURCE significance and historical context of the political PACKET on the screen and direct the cartoon. On page 6 of the STUDENT students to the image. Repeat to the students RESPONSE PACKET, find QUOTING the importance of quoting sources in an essay EXERCISE B and fill in the blanks provided or narrative. Direct them to page 6 of the using the ―Thomas W. Chinn: A Historian‘s STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET and have Reflections on Chinese American Life in San the students fill in the blacks in QUOTING Francisco‖ oral history by quoting specific parts EXERCISE B. As they spend 2-3 minutes of the document and also writing a short selecting quotes and writing a short analysis explanation of the significance of the quotes. of the quotes, take roll and go around the classroom to check that homework was adequately completed by stamping the box located on page 6 of the STUDENT RESOURCE PACKET to indicate work done on-time. 10:00- Students will be called upon or volunteer to state Review the responses to the TIMELINE 25:00 their answers from their TIMELINE STRIP. If STRIP with the students using the they did not complete or did not understand a TIMELINE STRIP – SAMPLE KEY. Ask particular document, then this is a good time for for student volunteers or call on students for them to input a statement onto their TIMELINE responses. Remind the students that the STRIP. answers provided on the answer key is not the only answer and that their responses are probably valid. 25:00- Students will now do the preliminary work for the Instruct students to prepare their comic strips 45:00 comic strip using the ALTERNATE by using the ALTERNATE DIFFERENTIATION-COMIC STRIP handout. DIFFERENTIATION-COMIC STRIP Have the students observe the completed handout. Use the COMIC STRIP SAMPLE TIMELINE. Then select SIX primary documents to instruct the students on how to form from the DOCUMENT PACKET that closely ―Connection Statements.‖ The sample relates in time and also subject matter to the utilizes Document #2 and the secondary source event provided in the graphic ―Transcontinental Railroad Joined‖ event to organizer. Then write a ―Connection Statement‖ construct a comic strip slide. If necessary, that connects both the secondary source event allow students may work on this in the together with the primary document in the third groups assigned during the previous day. column of the handout. If necessary, students may work on this in the groups assigned during the previous day. 45:00 – Using the ―Connection Statements‖ formed, Leave the COMIC STRIP SAMPLE 60:00 create a chronological comic strip using the back projected on the screen for students to use as side of the ALTERNATE DIFFERENTIATION- a reference point. Walk around the COMIC STRIP handout. Students will use the classroom to aid students and to ensure they remainder of the class period to complete this are working individually on their comic assessment individually. strips.
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Appendix B2 CCWW – Student Response Packet
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Appendix B3 CCWW – Resource Packet
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Appendix B4 CCWW – PowerPoint Presentation Slides
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Appendix B5 CCWW – Differentiated Assessment – Comic Strip
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Appendix B6 CCWW – Sample Timeline
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Appendix B7 What Role did Chinese Americans Play in the U.S. Military during the Two World Wars? (CCWW) – Alternate 1-Day Historiography Lesson Plan
PART I: ASSOCIATED STANDARDS
California State History/Social Science Standards: Std. Standard Description Justification 11.2.2 Describe the changing landscape, including the growth of This lesson investigates the role of cities linked by industry and trade, and the development of economics, race and ethnicity used as cities divided according to race, ethnicity, and class justification for Chinese exclusion 11.7.3 Students analyze America‘s participation in World War II Students will write a narrative and identify the roles and sacrifices of individual American illustrating the role of Chinese soldiers, as well as unique contributions of the special Americans in war, both in the First and fighting force s (e.g., the Tuskegee Airmen, the 442nd Second World Wars and discuss the Regimental Combat team, the Navajo Code Talkers) historiography of the World War II
California Common Core State Standards: Std. Standard Description Justification 1 Write arguments focused on discipline-specific content. The final assessment piece for this lesson (Including developing claims, counterclaims, supplying involves a written addition to the Holt evidence, clarifying relationships between claims, textbook on the contributions of minorities establishing a formal style, and a concluding statement) in the Second World War. 2 Write informative/explanatory texts, including the The final assessment will be a short, formal narration of historical events historical summary of the contributions of Chinese Americans in World War II. 4 Produce clear and coherent writing in which the The historical summary will mirror the development, organization, and style are appropriate to omniscient narration of the textbook. task, purpose, and audience. 8 Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative Students will analyze at least nine primary print and digital sources (primary and secondary), using source documents and will summarize the advanced searches effectively; assess the strengths and documents into a concise textbook-style limitations of each source in terms of the specific task, narrative. purpose, and audience; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source and following a standard format for citation. 9 Draw evidence from informational texts to support Students will utilizes multiple primary analysis, reflection, and research. documents and their textbooks to research, organize into graphics and write a historical narrative.
PART II: LESSON ABSTRACT
In addition to learning the contributions made by Chinese Americans during the Second World War, this lesson seeks to teach students the skills of historiographical analysis and the basics of organizing and writing historical narratives. Through this brief one-day lesson, students will develop their own historical narrative based on the history of Chinese Americans and their contributions in World War II. Students will utilize both the textbook (the most-readily available secondary source) and analyze nine primary source documents to create a narrative summary of the Chinese American experience in the military during the war.
PART III: LESSON PLAN
Time Required: One 60-minute class period (with 90-minute block option), preferably after the completion of the World War II unit.
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Materials Required: 1. Holt‘s American Anthem: Modern American History or another modern United States history textbook 2. An overhead projector or an LCD projector 3. The document packet and related student documents
Objectives: To understand the racial attitudes towards and the contributions made by Chinese Americans in the World Wars by: 1. Creating a sequential timeline using a history textbook and a series of primary sources 2. Analyzing a series of primary source documents 3. Writing a short historical narrative that demonstrate change and continuity over time
Background Information: (See historical narrative sample and PowerPoint presentation)
Lesson Overview: DAY ONE: Historiography and Primary Source Analysis TIME REQUIRED Intro and How to Tell Chinese from a Jap/Race Relations Discussion 10 Historiography Exercise and finding the missing Chinese American narrative 15 Partial Document Set (#5-13) 30 Adding the Chinese American Narrative to the Textbook – Introduction 10 Adding the Chinese American Narrative to the Textbook Homework
Detailed Lesson Procedure:
DAY ONE: Historiography and Secondary Source Research Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to Review reading in the textbook on Japanese Place RESOURCE PACKET, the class Internment. STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET and the 11‖x17‖ TIMELINE paper in a location where the students can pick up material as they enter into the classroom. 00:00 – Enter into the classroom and pick up the Place Slide* ―How to Tell Japs from 02:00 RESOURCE PACKET and the STUDENT Chinese‖ on the screen RESPONSE PACKET 02:00 – Observe the ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ Inform the students they will respond 04:00 slide (also page 1 of the RESOURCE PACKET) orally (through raised hands or called and think about responses to the questions randomly at teacher‘s discretion). Use provided on the bottom of the page. time to take roll. 04:00 – Discuss ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ with the Call on students and discuss the questions 10:00 class through voluntary or forced participation provided on the slide or any other topics that come to mind 10:00 – Listen to the teacher talk about historiography. Discuss with the class about what 25:00 Then read both accounts in the ―Historiography historiography is and why it is important. Exercise‖ document describing the immigration The key point to get across is that (1) experience of Chinese Americans during the textbooks change over time and for nineteenth century. Write down the answers in the varying purposes, (2) textbooks are just a ―Historiography Discussion Questions‖ portion of single interpretation of history and that STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, PART I (page there are others, and (3) students can take 1) and be ready to discuss with the class when the on the role of the historians and provide teacher leads the discussion. their own interpretations using documents—thus, creating their own historical narrative 25:00 – Begin analyzing the PRIMARY DOCUMENT Make sure that students are seated 55:00 SET using the questions provided in the together so that they can help one another. STUDENT RESPONSE PACKETS. They will Then go around the classroom to answer complete Documents #5-13 by the end of the class any questions, keep the class focused and period. to provide ideas and clarifications for students.
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55:00 – After examining the primary source documents in Introduce the writing assignment. Remind 60:00 the RESOURCE PACKET, write a brief summary the students they are making an addition of the Chinese American military contributions on to the textbook. This means they should page 3 of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET write from the omniscient third-person by comparing and contrasting it to the Japanese point-of-view and utilize the same tone American experience in the preceding section. found in the textbook. Once this is Then using Document #10 on page 13 of the understood, allow the students to pack up. RESOURCE PACKET, write a short biographic sketch of Wau Kau Kong. HOME Complete page 3 of the STUDENT RESPONSE (60:00- PACKET in the remaining time or at home. 90:00)** *Can be done using the overhead transparency, PowerPoint through LCD projector, or electronic document camera **In 90-minute block classes, the last half hour can be used to accomplish the task assigned for homework. This will allow students to get help from classmates and the teacher as they complete the requirements for the historical narrative
Assessment: (See Historical Narrative above)
Digital Education Component: 1. Documents will be available in .pdf and .mobi formats for e-readers
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Appendix B8 CCWW – Alternate 1-Day Student Response Packet
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Appendix B9 CCWW – Alternate 1-Day Resource Packet
Only pages #8-9 of the Alternate 1-Day Resource Packet are different than the Primary 3-Day Resource Packet
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Appendix C1 What Effects did Internment have on Northern Californian Japanese Americans? (NCJI) – Alternate 3-Day Lesson Plan
PART I: ASSOCIATED STANDARDS
California State History/Social Science Standards: Std. Standard Description Justification 11.2.2 Describe the changing landscape, including the growth of This lesson investigates the role of cities linked by industry and trade, and the development of economics, race and ethnicity used as cities divided according to race, ethnicity, and class justification for Chinese exclusion 11.7.3 Students analyze America‘s participation in World War II Students will write a narrative illustrating and identify the roles and sacrifices of individual American the role of Chinese Americans in war, soldiers, as well as unique contributions of the special both in the First and Second World Wars fighting force s (e.g., the Tuskegee Airmen, the 442nd and discuss the historiography of the Regimental Combat team, the Navajo Code Talkers) World War II
California Common Core State Standards: Std. Standard Description Justification 1 Write arguments focused on discipline-specific The final assessment piece for this lesson involves content. (Including developing claims, the writing of a historical narrative that creates an counterclaims, supplying evidence, clarifying argument, supports claims by supplying evidence relationships between claims, establishing a formal from primary and secondary source documents style, and a concluding statement) through a formal writing style (the narrative). 2 Write informative/explanatory texts, including the The final assessment will be a short, formal narration of historical events historical narrative. 4 Produce clear and coherent writing in which the The historical narrative will be a formal writing development, organization, and style are assessment that utilizes the narrative format based appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. on the concept of change and continuity over time. 8 Gather relevant information from multiple Students will analyze at least fourteen primary and authoritative print and digital sources (primary and secondary source documents and determine the secondary), using advanced searches effectively; documents that they will use in order to create a assess the strengths and limitations of each source historical narrative that follows a chronological in terms of the specific task, purpose, and timeline. audience; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source and following a standard format for citation. 9 Draw evidence from informational texts to support Students will utilizes multiple primary documents analysis, reflection, and research. and their textbooks to research, organize into graphics and write a historical narrative.
PART II: LESSON ABSTRACT
In addition to learning the hardships of Japanese Americans during World War II, this lesson seeks to teach students the skills of historiographical analysis and the basics of organizing and writing historical narratives. Through this three- day lesson, students will develop their own historical narrative based on the experience of local Japanese Americans from Northern California. Students will utilize both the textbook (the most-readily available secondary source) and analyze fourteen primary source documents to create a narrative timeline. Then they will use the evidence from the sources and the timeline to write a brief historical narrative that describes the changes and continuities of the Japanese American experience during the Second World War.
PART III: LESSON PLAN
Time Required: Three 60-minute class periods (with 90-minute block option), preferably after the completion of the World War II unit.
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Materials Required: 1. Holt‘s American Anthem: Modern American History or another modern United States history textbook 2. Computer with Microsoft PowerPoint (or equivalent) installed 3. An overhead projector or an LCD projector 4. The document packet and related student documents 5. 11‖x14‖ paper (with timeline template printed, if possible) for each student 6. Scissors 7. Glue stick 8. Coloring material (optional)
Objectives: To understand the racial attitudes towards and the contributions made by Chinese Americans in the World Wars by: 1. Creating a sequential timeline using a history textbook and a series of primary sources 2. Analyzing a series of primary source documents 3. Writing a short historical narrative that demonstrate change and continuity over time
Background Information: (See historical narrative sample and PowerPoint presentation)
Lesson Overview: DAY ONE: Historiography and Secondary Source Research TIME REQUIRED Intro and How to Tell Chinese from a Jap/Race Relations Discussion 10 Historiography Exercise and finding the missing Chinese American narrative 15 PowerPoint and Preliminary Thesis 25 Secondary Source Timeline Research – Introduction 10 Secondary Source Timeline Research and Timeline Construction Homework DAY TWO: Primary Source Document Analysis TIME REQUIRED Intro and Quoting Exercise – Using Oral History (Document #6) 10 Narrative Document Set, Part I (#1-8) and Timeline Strips 50 Narrative Document Set, Part II (#9-14) Timeline Strips Homework DAY THREE: Data Organization and Narrative Writing TIME REQUIRED Intro and Quoting Exercise – Using Oral History (Document #14) 10 Chronology to Grouping 15 Revised Thesis and Narrative Outline 35 Assessment: Written Narrative Homework
Detailed Lesson Procedure:
DAY ONE: Historiography and Secondary Source Research Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to Reviewed the Holt textbook‘s narrative of the Place RESOURCE PACKET, the STUDENT class Japanese American experience during World RESPONSE PACKET, LECTURE TIMELINE War II on pages 445-446 (or a similar textbook‘s (OPTIONAL) and the 11‖x17‖ TIMELINE equivalent) paper in a location where the students can pick up material as they enter into the classroom. 00:00 – Enter into the classroom and pick up the Place Slide* ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ 02:00 RESOURCE PACKET, the STUDENT on the screen RESPONSE PACKET, LECTURE TIMELINE (OPTIONAL) and the 11‖x17‖ TIMELINE paper 02:00 – Observe the ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ Inform the students they will respond orally 04:00 slide (also page 1 of the RESOURCE PACKET) (through raised hands or called randomly at and think about responses to the questions teacher‘s discretion). Use time to take roll. provided on the bottom of the page. 04:00 – Discuss ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ with Call on students and discuss the questions 10:00 the class through voluntary or forced provided on the slide or any other topics that participation come to mind 10:00 – Listen to the teacher talk about historiography. Discuss with the class about what
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25:00 Then read both accounts in the ―Historiography historiography is and why it is important. The Exercise‖ document found on page 2 of the key point to get across is that (1) textbooks RESOURCE PACKET describing the internment change over time and for varying purposes, (2) experience of Japanese Americans during World textbooks are just a single interpretation of War II. Write down the answers in the history and that there are others, and (3) ―Historiography Discussion Questions‖ portion students can take on the role of the historians of STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, PART I and provide their own interpretations using found on page 1 and be ready to discuss with the documents—thus, creating their own historical class when the teacher leads the discussion. narrative 25:00 – Take notes using the LECTURE TIMELINE Using the EXCLUDED AND INTERNED 40:00 (OPTIONAL) handout, on a separate sheet of PowerPoint Lecture, present the background paper using the traditional outline form or listen information on the Chinese American and intently. Japanese American experience in the U.S. between 1850-1950. 40:00 – Using the information from the lecture and prior Introduce the primary research question and 45:00 knowledge on World War II, students will write have the students write a preliminary thesis a preliminary thesis (similar to a hypothesis) on hypothesizing the effect of internment on the following question: ―What effect did Japanese Americans based on what they have Japanese Internment have on Japanese learned in the lecture and from their prior Americans from Northern California?‖ on page 3 knowledge. Remind students that this is just a of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, PART hypothesis and that historians usually begin III their research with a preliminary thesis based on their prior knowledge. 45:00 – Take out textbooks and read the short passage on Discuss the necessity of using secondary 55:00 ―Chinese settlers‖ on p.147. Then take bullet sources like the textbook to gather background point notes on significant points in the graphic knowledge and create context. Then have the organizer found in page 1 of the STUDENT students turn to the short passage on ―Chinese RESPONSE PACKET, PART II. settlers.‖ Lead them in creating bullet point notes in the graphic organizer found on page 1 of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, PART II. 55:00 – Using the 11‖x14‖ TIMELINE paper, draw a line Using the SAMPLE TIMELINE provided, 60:00 from left-to-right about 4 inches from the top. demonstrate to the students how to create the Label 1850 as the starting date and 1950 as the SECONDARY SOURCE TIMELINE. end date. Then using the ―Chinese settlers‖ Additional information can be found on page 6 sample from the textbook, students will describe of the RESOURCE PACKET. Afterwards, go the section as ―Chinese turn to farming‖ and around the classroom to ensure students are write descriptive sentence summarizing the doing the work correctly. Allow students who textbook information onto the timeline. See page have completed this first event pack up. HOME They will continue this process at home for (60:00- homework and in preparation for the document 90:00)** analysis the next day. *Can be done using the overhead transparency, PowerPoint through LCD projector, or electronic document camera **In 90-minute block classes, the last half hour can be used to accomplish the task assigned for homework. This will allow students to get help from classmates and the teacher as they complete the requirements for the historical narrative
DAY TWO: Primary Source Document Analysis Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to For homework, students should have completed Pre-select students to work in groups of 2-3, class the pages 1 and 2 on the STUDENT RESPONSE based on ability level. Before class place the PACKET and the top-half of the TIMELINE. As TIMELINE STRIP handout in a location they enter into the classroom, pick up the where the students can pick up material as TIMELINE STRIP handout. they enter into the classroom. 00:00- Turn page 6 of the RESOURCE PACKET. Then Place the slide QUOTING EXERCISE, found 10:00 participate in the discussion explaining the on page 7 of the RESOURCE PACKET on the significance and point-of-view. On page 4 of the screen and direct the students to the image. STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, find Explain to the students the importance of
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QUOTING EXERCISE A and fill in the blanks quoting sources in an essay or narrative. Then provided using the Frank Kageta oral history by discuss with the students the significance, quoting specific parts of the document and also point-of-view, historical context, and language writing a short explanation of the significance of used in the oral history. Direct them to page 4 the quotes. of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET and have the students fill in the blacks in ―Quoting Exercise A.‖ As they spend 2-3 minutes selecting quotes and writing a short analysis of the quotes, take roll and go around the classroom to check that homework was adequately completed by stamping the box located on page 3 of the STUDENT RESOURCE PACKET to indicate work done on-time. 10:00 – Turn to page 8 of the RESOURCE PACKET and Have them turn to page 8 of the RESOURCES 15:00 page 3 of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. PACKET and remain on page 3 of the Then they will listen for directions on how to STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. Then, perform the document analysis before moving. either orally or through a graphic, inform the They will analyze all 14 documents and create students that they will be working in groups of summaries of 10 of the 14 documents provided on 2-3. Instruct them on the process of analyzing their TIMELINE STRIPS. Not all dates are the documents and summarizing each selected provide so students will need to pay attention to document on the TIMELINE STRIP. the historical context of each document to gauge the time being discussed in each oral history. Students will complete as much as they can in their assigned groups. 15:00 – Begin analyzing the PRIMARY DOCUMENT Make sure that students are seated together so 60:00 SET using the questions provided in the that they can help one another. Then go STUDENT RESPONSE PACKETS and around the classroom to answer any questions, summarizing each document on the TIMELINE keep the class focused and to provide ideas STRIP. They will complete Documents #1-8 by and clarifications for students. Prior to the end the end of the class period. If they complete of the period, allow students who have Documents #1-8, then they will move on to finished the first eight documents to pack up. Documents #9-14. HOME Students should have all documents analyzed (60:00- before class the following day and have their 90:00)** TIMELINE STRIPS glued onto the bottom half of their TIMELINES. **In 90-minute block classes, the last half hour can be used to accomplish the task assigned for homework. This will allow students to get help from classmates and the teacher as they complete the requirements for the historical narrative
DAY THREE: Data Organization and Narrative Writing Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to For homework, students should have completed the class pages 3-9 (minus the ―Quoting Exercise B‖ box on page 8 and the ―Chronology to Grouping‖ chart on page 9) in the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET and have all of the TIMELINE STRIPS placed on the bottom half of their TIMELINES. 00:00- Turn page 14 of the RESOURCE PACKET. Then Place the slide QUOTING EXERCISE, found 10:00 participate in the discussion explaining the on page 7 of the RESOURCE PACKET on significance of oral histories. On page 6 of the the screen and direct the students to the oral STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, find ―Quoting history. Explain the positives and negatives Exercise B‖ and fill in the blanks provided using of using oral histories as primary sources. the Document #14 oral history by quoting specific Repeat to the students the importance of parts of the document and also writing a short quoting sources in an essay or narrative. explanation of the significance of the quotes. Direct them to page 7 of the STUDENT
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RESPONSE PACKET and have the students fill in the blacks in ―Quoting Exercise B.‖ As they spend 2-3 minutes selecting quotes and writing a short analysis of the quotes, take roll and go check that homework was adequately completed by stamping the box located on page 6 of the STUDENT RESOURCE PACKET to indicate work done on-time. 10:00 – Turn to page 7 of the STUDENT RESPONSE Using the SAMPLE TIMELINE demonstrate 25:00 PACKET and find PART IV: FROM possible ways to divide the content into three CHRONOLOGY TO GROUPING. Observe the distinct time periods—a ―beginning,‖ timeline and find the best possible way to divide ―middle,‖ and ―end‖ in order to demonstrate the content into three distinct time periods—a change and continuity over time. For ―beginning,‖ ―middle,‖ and ―end‖ in order to example, Pre-WWII, WWII Internment, and demonstrate change and continuity over time. Fill Post-Internment could be used, respectively out the graphic organizer by listing the dates, for ―beginning,‖ ―middle,‖ and ―end.‖ Then placing the Document numbers, and a descriptive aid the students in filling out their sentence of each time period in the appropriate GROUPING graphic organizer. boxes. 25:00- Using the information assembled, write a thesis Aid the students in writing their thesis 30:00 statement that answers the question: ―What effect statements by using their GROUPING did Japanese Internment have on Japanese graphic organizers. Remind them that the Americans from Northern California?‖ thesis statement should address change and continuity over time. 30:00- Utilizing the SAMPLE NARRATIVE and the Have the students turn to pages 8 and 9 of the 60:00 GROUPING NARRATIVE, students will STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. Have the complete the NARRATIVE OUTLINE provided student begin writing their NARRATIVE on pages 8 and 9 of the STUDENT RESPONSE OUTLINES. Go around the classroom to aid PACKET. Once students have completed the students in the writing packets. Gather NARRATIVE OUTLINE, then they will start students who need more help in forming their writing their HISTORICAL NARRATIVES, thesis and/or grouping into small groups. starting on page 10 of the STUDENT RESPONSE Provide sample theses and groupings, if PACKET. Refer to pages 3-4 in the RESOURCE necessary. PACKET for samples. HOME Complete writing the HISTORICAL (60:00- NARRATIVE. 90:00)** **In 90-minute block classes, the last half hour can be used to accomplish the task assigned for homework. This will allow students to get help from classmates and the teacher as they complete the requirements for the historical narrative
Assessment: (See Historical Narrative above)
Digital Education Component: 1. PowerPoint Attachment: Excluded and Interned 2. Documents will be available in .pdf and .mobi formats for e-readers
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Appendix C2 NCJI – Student Response Packet
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Appendix C3 NCJI – Resource Packet
Only pages #2, 8-14 of the NCJI – Resource Packet are different from the Primary 3-Day Resource Packet.
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Appendix C4 NCJI – PowerPoint Presentation Slides
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Appendix D1 Comparing the Chinese American and Japanese American Military Experience in the World Wars (CJCOMP) – Alternate 3-Day Lesson Plan
PART I: ASSOCIATED STANDARDS
California State History/Social Science Standards: Std. Standard Description Justification 11.2.2 Describe the changing landscape, including the growth of This lesson investigates the role of cities linked by industry and trade, and the development of economics, race and ethnicity used as cities divided according to race, ethnicity, and class justification for Chinese exclusion 11.7.3 Students analyze America‘s participation in World War II Students will write a narrative illustrating and identify the roles and sacrifices of individual American the role of Chinese Americans in war, soldiers, as well as unique contributions of the special both in the First and Second World Wars fighting force s (e.g., the Tuskegee Airmen, the 442nd and discuss the historiography of the Regimental Combat team, the Navajo Code Talkers) World War II
California Common Core State Standards: Std. Standard Description Justification 1 Write arguments focused on discipline-specific The final assessment piece for this lesson content. (Including developing claims, involves the writing of a historical narrative that counterclaims, supplying evidence, clarifying creates an argument, supports claims by relationships between claims, establishing a formal supplying evidence from primary and secondary style, and a concluding statement) source documents through a formal writing style (the narrative). 2 Write informative/explanatory texts, including the The final assessment will be a short, formal narration of historical events historical narrative. 4 Produce clear and coherent writing in which the The historical narrative will be a formal writing development, organization, and style are appropriate assessment that utilizes the narrative format to task, purpose, and audience. based on the concept of change and continuity over time. 8 Gather relevant information from multiple Students will analyze at least fourteen primary authoritative print and digital sources (primary and and secondary source documents and determine secondary), using advanced searches effectively; the documents that they will use in order to assess the strengths and limitations of each source in create a historical narrative that follows a terms of the specific task, purpose, and audience; chronological timeline. integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source and following a standard format for citation. 9 Draw evidence from informational texts to support Students will utilizes multiple primary analysis, reflection, and research. documents and their textbooks to research, organize into graphics and write a historical narrative.
PART II: LESSON ABSTRACT
In addition to learning the contributions made by Chinese Americans during the First and Second World Wars, this lesson seeks to teach students the skills of historiographical analysis and the basics of organizing and writing historical narratives. Through this three-day lesson, students will develop their own historical narrative based on the history of Chinese Americans and their contributions in both World Wars. Students will utilize both the textbook (the most- readily available secondary source) and analyze thirteen primary source documents to create a narrative timeline. Then they will use the evidence from the sources and the timeline to write a brief historical narrative that demonstrates the Chinese American experience in the military during the World Wars.
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PART III: LESSON PLAN
Time Required: Three 60-minute class periods (with 90-minute block option), preferably after the completion of the World War II unit.
Materials Required: 1. Holt‘s American Anthem: Modern American History or another modern United States history textbook 2. Computer with Microsoft PowerPoint (or equivalent) installed 3. An overhead projector or an LCD projector 4. The document packet and related student documents 5. 11‖x14‖ paper (with timeline template printed, if possible) for each student 6. Scissors 7. Glue stick 8. Coloring material (optional)
Objectives: To understand the racial attitudes towards and the contributions made by Chinese Americans in the World Wars by: 1. Creating a sequential timeline using a history textbook and a series of primary sources 2. Analyzing a series of primary source documents 3. Writing a short historical narrative that demonstrate change and continuity over time
Background Information: (See historical narrative sample and PowerPoint presentation)
Lesson Overview: DAY ONE: Historiography and Secondary Source Research TIME REQUIRED Intro and How to Tell Chinese from a Jap/Race Relations Discussion 10 Historiography Exercise and finding the missing Chinese American narrative 15 Sample Narrative, PowerPoint, and Preliminary Thesis 25 Secondary Source Timeline Research – Introduction 10 Secondary Source Timeline Research and Timeline Construction Homework DAY TWO: Primary Source Document Analysis TIME REQUIRED Intro and Quoting Exercise – Using Political Cartoon (Document #2) 10 Narrative Document Set, Part I (#1-8) and Timeline Strips 50 Narrative Document Set, Part II (#9-13) Timeline Strips Homework DAY THREE: Data Organization and Narrative Writing TIME REQUIRED Intro and Quoting Exercise – Using Oral History (Document #13) 10 Chronology to Grouping 15 Revised Thesis and Narrative Outline 35 Assessment: Written Narrative Homework
Detailed Lesson Procedure:
DAY ONE: Historiography and Secondary Source Research Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to Reviewed the material regarding World War II Place RESOURCE PACKET, the STUDENT class as advised by the teacher RESPONSE PACKET and the 11‖x17‖ TIMELINE paper in a location where the students can pick up material as they enter into the classroom. 00:00 – Enter into the classroom and pick up the Place Slide* ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ 02:00 RESOURCE PACKET, the STUDENT on the screen RESPONSE PACKET and the 11‖x17‖ TIMELINE paper 02:00 – Observe the ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ Inform the students they will respond orally 04:00 slide (also page 1 of the RESOURCE (through raised hands or called randomly at PACKET) and think about responses to the teacher‘s discretion). Use time to take roll.
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questions provided on the bottom of the page. 04:00 – Discuss ―How to Tell Japs from Chinese‖ with Call on students and discuss the questions 10:00 the class through voluntary or forced provided on the slide or any other topics that participation come to mind 10:00 – Listen to the teacher talk about historiography. Discuss with the class about what historiography 25:00 Then read both accounts in the ―Historiography is and why it is important. The key point to get Exercise‖ document describing the immigration across is that (1) textbooks change over time and experience of Chinese Americans during the for varying purposes, (2) textbooks are just a nineteenth century. Write down the answers in single interpretation of history and that there are the ―Historiography Discussion Questions‖ others, and (3) students can take on the role of portion of STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, the historians and provide their own PART I (page 1) and be ready to discuss with interpretations using documents—thus, creating the class when the teacher leads the discussion. their own historical narrative 25:00 – Follow along on pages 2-3 in the RESOURCE Introduce the concept of the historical narrative 35:00 PACKET as the teacher presents the sample by demonstrating the sample narrative on p.2-3 narrative on ―The Chinese in America during of the RESOURCE PACKET. Present the the Nineteenth Century.‖ narrative using the images provided on the ―Sample Narrative‖ PowerPoint presentation. 35:00 – Using the information from the sample Introduce the primary research question and have 40:00 narrative and prior knowledge of both world the students write a preliminary thesis wars, students will write a preliminary thesis hypothesizing the Chinese role in the world wars (similar to a hypothesis) on the following based on what they have learned in the narratives question: How did the experiences of Chinese and from their prior knowledge. Remind Americans and Japanese Americans in the U.S. students that this is just a hypothesis and that military change from World War I to World historians usually begin their research with a War II? preliminary thesis based on their prior on page 3 of the STUDENT RESPONSE knowledge. PACKET, PART III 40:00 – Take out textbooks and read the short passage Discuss the necessity of using secondary sources 50:00 on ―Railroads expand‖ on p.150-151. Then like the textbook to gather background take bullet point notes on significant points in knowledge and create context. Then have the the graphic organizer found in page 1 of the students turn to the short passage on ―Railroads STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, PART II. expand.‖ Lead them in creating bullet point notes in the graphic organizer found on page 1 of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. 50:00 – Using the 11‖x14‖ TIMELINE paper, draw a Using the SAMPLE TIMELINE provided, 60:00 line from left-to-right about 4 inches from the demonstrate to the students how to create the top. Label 1850 as the starting date and 1950 as SECONDARY SOURCE TIMELINE. the end date. Then using the ―Railroads Additional information can be found on page 6 expands‖ sample, students will place the first of the RESOURCE PACKET. Afterwards, go two events, the ―Gold Rush‖ and ―Building the around the classroom to ensure students are Transcontinental Railroad‖ and a descriptive doing the work correctly. Allow students who sentence of each onto the timeline. have completed the placing ―The Gold Rush‖ and ―Building the Transcontinental Railroad‖ to pack up the material. HOME They will continue this process at home for (60:00- homework and in preparation for the document 90:00)** analysis the next day. *Can be done using the overhead transparency, PowerPoint through LCD projector, or electronic document camera **In 90-minute block classes, the last half hour can be used to accomplish the task assigned for homework. This will allow students to get help from classmates and the teacher as they complete the requirements for the historical narrative
DAY TWO: Primary Source Document Analysis Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to For homework, students should have completed Pre-select students to work in groups of 2-3, class the pages 1 and 2 on the STUDENT RESPONSE based on ability level. Before class place the PACKET and the top-half of the TIMELINE. As TIMELINE STRIP handout in a location
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they enter into the classroom, pick up the where the students can pick up material as TIMELINE STRIP handout. they enter into the classroom. 00:00- Turn page 9 of the RESOURCE PACKET. Then Place the slide QUOTING EXERCISE, found 10:00 participate in the discussion explaining the on page 7 of the RESOURCE PACKET on the significance and historical context of the political screen and direct the students to the image. cartoon. On page 3 of the STUDENT Explain to the students the importance of RESPONSE PACKET, find QUOTING quoting sources in an essay or narrative. Then EXERCISE A and fill in the blanks provided discuss with the students the significance and using ―The Chinese Question‖ political cartoon by historical context of the political cartoon. quoting specific parts of the cartoon and also Direct them to page 3 of the STUDENT writing a short explanation of the significance of RESPONSE PACKET and have the students the quotes. fill in the blacks in ―Quoting Exercise A.‖ As they spend 2-3 minutes selecting quotes and writing a short analysis of the quotes, take roll and go around the classroom to check that homework was adequately completed by stamping the box located on page 3 of the STUDENT RESOURCE PACKET to indicate work done on-time. 10:00 – Turn to page 8 of the RESOURCE PACKET and Have them turn to page 8 of the RESOURCES 15:00 page 3 of the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. PACKET and remain on page 3 of the Then they will listen for directions on how to STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. Then, perform the document analysis before moving. either orally or through a graphic, inform the Students will join their assigned groups. students that they will be working in groups of 2-3. Instruct them on the process of analyzing the documents and summarizing each document on the TIMELINE STRIP. 15:00 – Begin analyzing the PRIMARY DOCUMENT Make sure that students are seated together so 60:00 SET using the questions provided in the that they can help one another. Then go STUDENT RESPONSE PACKETS and around the classroom to answer any questions, summarizing each document on the TIMELINE keep the class focused and to provide ideas STRIP. They will complete Documents #1-8 by and clarifications for students. Prior to the end the end of the class period. If they complete of the period, allow students who have Documents #1-8, then they will move on to finished the first eight documents to pack up. Documents #9-14. HOME Students should have all documents analyzed (60:00- before class the following day and have their 90:00)** TIMELINE STRIPS glued onto the bottom half of their TIMELINES. **In 90-minute block classes, the last half hour can be used to accomplish the task assigned for homework. This will allow students to get help from classmates and the teacher as they complete the requirements for the historical narrative
DAY THREE: Data Organization and Narrative Writing Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to For homework, students should have completed the class pages 3-7 (minus the ―Quoting Exercise B‖ box on page 7 and the ―Chronology to Grouping‖ graphic organizer on page 8) in the STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET and have all of the TIMELINE STRIPS placed on the bottom half of their TIMELINES. 00:00- Turn page 14 of the RESOURCE PACKET. Then Place the slide QUOTING EXERCISE, found 10:00 participate in the discussion explaining the on page 7 of the RESOURCE PACKET on significance of oral histories. On page 6 of the the screen and direct the students to the oral STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, find ―Quoting history. Explain the positives and negatives Exercise B‖ and fill in the blanks provided using of using oral histories as primary sources. The New York Times ―Union Limits Nisei to Ex- Repeat to the students the importance of
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Service Men‖ by quoting specific parts of the quoting sources in an essay or narrative. document and also writing a short explanation of Direct them to page 6 of the STUDENT the significance of the quotes. RESPONSE PACKET and have the students fill in the blacks in ―Quoting Exercise B.‖ As they spend 2-3 minutes selecting quotes and writing a short analysis of the quotes, take roll and go around the classroom to check that homework was adequately completed by stamping the box located on page 6 of the STUDENT RESOURCE PACKET to indicate work done on-time. 10:00 – Turn to page 7 of the STUDENT RESPONSE Using the SAMPLE TIMELINE demonstrate 25:00 PACKET and find PART IV: FROM possible ways to divide the content into three CHRONOLOGY TO GROUPING. Observe the distinct time periods—a ―beginning,‖ timeline and find the best possible way to divide ―middle,‖ and ―end‖ in order to demonstrate the content into three distinct time periods—a change and continuity over time. Then aid ―beginning,‖ ―middle,‖ and ―end‖ in order to the students in filling out their GROUPING demonstrate change and continuity over time. Fill graphic organizer. out the graphic organizer by listing the dates, placing the Document numbers, and a descriptive sentence of each time period in the appropriate boxes. 25:00- Using the information assembled, write a thesis Aid the students in writing their thesis 30:00 statement that answers the question: ―How did the statements by using their GROUPING experiences of Chinese Americans and Japanese graphic organizers. Remind them that the Americans in the U.S. military change from World thesis statement should address change and War I to World War II?‖ continuity over time. 30:00- Utilizing the SAMPLE NARRATIVE and the Have the students turn to pages 7 and 8 of the 60:00 GROUPING NARRATIVE, students will STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET. Have the complete the NARRATIVE OUTLINE provided student begin writing their NARRATIVE on pages 8 and 9 of the STUDENT RESPONSE OUTLINES. Go around the classroom to aid PACKET. Once students have completed the students in the writing packets. Gather NARRATIVE OUTLINE, then they will start students who need more help in forming their writing their HISTORICAL NARRATIVES. thesis and/or grouping into small groups. Provide sample theses and groupings, if necessary. HOME Complete writing the HISTORICAL (60:00- NARRATIVE. 90:00)** **In 90-minute block classes, the last half hour can be used to accomplish the task assigned for homework. This will allow students to get help from classmates and the teacher as they complete the requirements for the historical narrative
Assessment: (See Historical Narrative above)
Digital Education Component: 1. PowerPoint Attachment on the Nineteenth Century Chinese American experience narrative 2. Documents will be available in .pdf and .mobi formats for e-readers
PART IV: DIFFERENTIATION For students who have not attained the necessary writing skills and will require a differentiated assessment piece, an alternate option has been developed. The lesson plan for this assessment differentiation will remain the same during the first two days of instruction. However, the lesson‘s third day will be altered to incorporate the differentiation strategy.
DAY THREE: Alternate Differentiation Strategy – Comic Strip Minutes Student Action Teacher Action Prior to For homework, students should have completed Before class place the ALTERNATE
148 class the pages 3-8 (minus the QUOTING EXERCISE B DIFFERENTIATION-COMIC STRIP handout box on page 8) in the STUDENT RESPONSE in a location where the students can pick up PACKET and have all of the TIMELINE STRIPS material as they enter into the classroom. placed on the bottom half of their TIMELINES. As they enter into the classroom, pick up the ALTERNATE DIFFERENTIATION-COMIC STRIP handout. 00:00- Turn page 14 of the RESOURCE PACKET. Then Place the slide QUOTING EXERCISE, found 10:00 participate in the discussion explaining the on page 7 of the RESOURCE PACKET on the significance of oral histories. On page 6 of the screen and direct the students to the oral STUDENT RESPONSE PACKET, find ―Quoting history. Explain the positives and negatives of Exercise B‖ and fill in the blanks provided using using oral histories as primary sources. Repeat The New York Times ―Union Limits Nisei to Ex- to the students the importance of quoting Service Men‖ by quoting specific parts of the sources in an essay or narrative. Direct them to document and also writing a short explanation of page 6 of the STUDENT RESPONSE the significance of the quotes. PACKET and have the students fill in the blacks in ―Quoting Exercise B.‖ As they spend 2-3 minutes selecting quotes and writing a short analysis of the quotes, take roll and go around the classroom to check that homework was adequately completed by stamping the box located on page 6 of the STUDENT RESOURCE PACKET to indicate work done on-time. 10:00- Students will be called upon or volunteer to state Review the responses to the TIMELINE STRIP 25:00 their answers from their TIMELINE STRIP. If with the students using the TIMELINE STRIP they did not complete or did not understand a – SAMPLE KEY. Ask for student volunteers particular document, then this is a good time for or call on students for responses. Remind the them to input a statement onto their TIMELINE students that the answers provided on the STRIP. answer key is not the only answer and that their responses are probably valid. 25:00- Students will now do the preliminary work for the Instruct students to prepare their comic strips 45:00 comic strip using the ALTERNATE by using the ALTERNATE DIFFERENTIATION-COMIC STRIP handout. DIFFERENTIATION-COMIC STRIP handout. Have the students observe the completed Use the COMIC STRIP SAMPLE to instruct TIMELINE. Then select SIX primary documents the students on how to form ―Connection from the DOCUMENT PACKET that closely Statements.‖ The sample utilizes Document #2 relates in time and also subject matter to the and the ―Transcontinental Railroad Joined‖ secondary source event provided in the graphic event to construct a comic strip slide. If organizer. At least two of the six primary necessary, allow students may work on this in documents must be associated with the Chinese the groups assigned during the previous day. American experience or the Japanese American experience. Then write a ―Connection Statement‖ that connects both the secondary source event together with the primary document in the third column of the handout. If necessary, students may work on this in the groups assigned during the previous day. 45:00 – Using the ―Connection Statements‖ formed, create Leave the COMIC STRIP SAMPLE projected 60:00 a chronological comic strip using the back side of on the screen for students to use as a reference the ALTERNATE DIFFERENTIATION-COMIC point. Walk around the classroom to aid STRIP handout. Students will use the remainder students and to ensure they are working of the class period to complete this assessment individually on their comic strips. individually.
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Appendix D2 CJCOMP – Student Response Packet
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Appendix D3 CJCOMP – Resource Packet
Only pages #8,10-14 of the CJCOMP – Resource Packet are different from the Primary 3-Day Resource Packet.
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Appendix D4 CJCOMP – Differentiated Assessment – Comic Strip
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Bibliography
Newspapers and Magazines Chicago Daily Tribune. 1942. Cumberland Evening Times. 1928. Harpers Weekly. 1871. Life. 1940. Los Angeles Times. 1915-1944. Oelwein Daily Register. 1913. San Francisco Chronicle. 1878-1921. Tanforan Totalizer. 1942. The Pittsburgh Press. 1929. The New York Times. 1904-1945. Time. 1944. Vanity Fair. 1930.
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