Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II

by Ronald Takaki Narrated by Edward Lewis

Overview

In Double Victory, a broad spectrum of American voices emerges to illustrate the country's multicultural struggles and victories during World War II. We hear from a Japanese-American at an internment c& a Native American code breaker using the Navajo language for the first time; a Mexican-American woman, “Rosarita, the riveter,” who was able to work a job during wartime other than as a housecleaner or a maid. Takaki also considers the racial biases that influenced important American government actions during the war, like the bombing of Hiroshima and the refusal to admit Jews into the US. Double Victory clearly demonstrates that World War II helped to transform American society and advance the cause of multiculturalism throughout the country.

Editorial Reviews

San Francisco Chronicle

...Takaki has assembled a lively pastiche...rich in humanity and inclusiveness...offer ample resources fir those who wish to delve further...
—(8/6/00)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A significant number of Americans fought WWII on two fronts, according to Berkeley ethicist Takaki (A Larger Memory; A Different Mirror; etc.): the Axis powers were one enemy; the other was racism on the home front. This is by now a conventional argument that Takaki's anecdotal narrative does more to illustrate than to develop, though the book does demonstrate more clearly than ever the degree to which America in the 1940s was a white man's country, as opposed to a melting pot. It shows as well the wartime responses of a variety of ethnic and cultural communities--Mexicans, African-Americans, Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Jews and Italians. Japanese-Americans get a full chapter to themselves, concluding with an analysis of Hiroshima as a manifestation of racism. Takaki shows how the combination of military service and war work simultaneously opened horizons and raised consciousness. Black women who left white kitchens for assembly lines gained economic autonomy and faced new patterns of racial slights. Mexicans who had spent their lives in barrios found communicating in English essential for the better-paying jobs that opened more rapidly than Anglos could fill them. More significant, however, is the extent to which Takaki's anecdotal evidence challenges a fundamental element of historical multiculturalism: rather than clinging to ethnic identities in response to American involvement in the war, those recorded here asserted their American identity in order to share in the war's patriotic spirit as well as its economic spoils. (The principal exception to this drive for assimilation were the nisei, who even before Pearl Harbor sought to "embrace their twoness" with a greater vehemence than other marginalized ethnic groups.) Takaki compellingly argues that these experiences prefigured the civil rights revolution. This book thus depicts, forcefully and clearly, the first steps toward an America that could be color-neutral. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

World War II signifies more than an international struggle. In Double Victory, professor Takaki (UC-Berkeley) uses a spectrum of American voices to illustrate the struggles on the home front: the minority efforts to win recognition in the U.S. military, the minority men and women who left farm and domestic jobs and joined the larger economy, the histories of Asian Americans during the war, and the fight by American Jews to get President Roosevelt to intervene for European Jews. The author's lucid prose enlists narrator Edward Lewis's enthusiasm, and the work shows that the genesis of America's power in the world and the advancement of multiculturalism at home occurred in tandem. Highly recommended. James L. Dudley, Westhampton Beach, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169523461
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/2007
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Double Victory

A Multicultural History of America in World War II

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By Ronald T. Takaki Blackstone Audiobooks

Copyright © 2001 Ronald T. Takaki
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780786195213

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Chapter One

INTRODUCTION A Different Memory

WORLD WAR II has been a part of my memory for most of my life. On that Sunday morning of December 7, 1941 my family was living only ten miles from Pearl Harbor. Fragments of my childhood recollections remain vivid-the screams of the air raid sirens interrupting the pitter-patter lullaby of the nightly rains, the dark green window shades, the gas masks in our bedroom closets, the newsreels of the war flickering in black and white on huge theater screens, the streams of soldiers in the red-light district of Hotel Street, and my father's nearby photography studio, where young soldiers had their pictures taken before being shipped off to islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa to fight and possibly die. Finally, over the radio came the news of the end of the war. Into the streets rushed the neighborhood kids-Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, Korean, and Hawaiian, all of us jumping joyously, shouting, "We won the war! We won the war!" Of course, I was too young then to ask what we had fought for and what we had won.

Looking backward as we enter a new millennium, we see World War II jutting out as the most significant event of thetwentieth century. In this immense warring of nations, 100 million men bore arms and over 30 million civilians died. The Nazi-engineered Holocaust was the most massive program of "ethnic cleansing"-the extermination of 6 million Jews. The war ended with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima-an event that changed the world and may yet lead to the end of the world. Today, decades later, we still find ourselves witnessing wars of extreme ethnic nationalisms and hatreds. Borrowing William Faulkner's insightful phrase, the most terrible armed conflict of all history is "a past that is not even past."

Our memory of World War II continually contours the cultural landscape of our identity as Americans-who we are and what our nation stands for. But how do we remember this "past"? History is our remembering of what happened, directly through personal recollections and indirectly through scholarship. For the study of World War II, whose stories will we retell?

The history of the war has been told through the lives of our nation's military and political leaders, or through the battlefield actions and heroism of American soldiers of European ancestry, or through the experiences of a specific minority such as African Americans or Japanese Americans.

This narrative offers a different memory. While powerful policymakers like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman are studied, ordinary men and women from America's minority communities are given special focus. History is told from the bottom up, through the lives of everyday Americans-Joseph Kurihara as he angrily stared at the barbed-wire fence of an internment camp for Japanese Americans, Fred Smith as he joined the all-black Tuskegee squadron because he wanted to "fly and fight" for freedom, Mexican-American Alex Romandia as he enlisted with his Jewish friends in order to show that they were "more American than the Anglos," Snohomish Indian Harriet Shelton Williams as she worked on the assembly lines of Boeing Aircraft in Washington, and Jewish-American soldier Murray Shapiro as he wrote home from "somewhere in Germany" to say he was "knocking on Hitler's doorstep."

Indeed, these people of multicultural America are worthy of study as subjects with names, minds, wills, and voices-what Walt Whitman called the "varied carols" of America. In their autobiographies, oral histories, conversations, letters, poems, and songs, they share an eye-level view of what they experienced; in their own words, they tell us what they felt and thought. They give us a democratic history of World War II-a history of the people, for the people, and also by the people.

Moreover, in their firsthand accounts, the men and women in this study offer us a more complex understanding of what has come to be remembered as "the good war," a description Studs Terkel adopted for the title of his book on the subject. "It is a phrase," he wrote in an opening note, "that has been frequently voiced by men of this and my generation, to distinguish that war from other wars, declared and undeclared." Always alert for the contradictory and the oxymoronic, Terkel explained that he had added quotation marks around the phrase, "not as a matter of caprice or editorial comment," but simply because the adjective "good" mated to the noun "war" was "so incongruous."

But the "good war" also had a different "incongruity." The fervent defense of freedom was accompanied by a hypocritical disregard for our nation's declaration that "all men are created equal." The "Arsenal of Democracy" was not democratic: defense jobs were not open to all regardless of race. The war against Nazi Germany was fought with a jim crow army. During the fight against Hitler's ideology of Aryan supremacy, ethnic enmities exploded in race riots in cities like Los Angeles and Detroit. The President who led the fight for freedom also signed Executive Order 9066 for the evacuation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans without due process of law. Proudly displaying the Statue of Liberty, our nation of immigrants turned away Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi terror. Founded on the "self-evident" truth of the "unalienable right" of every individual to "life," the U.S. government dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing tens of thousands of civilians, most of them women and children.

During the "good war," criticism of this "incongruity" came from intellectuals. Pearl Buck warned in American Unity and Asia that Japan was trumpeting the charge that there was "no basis for hope that colored people" in Asia could expect justice from "the people who rule in the United States, namely, the white people." Buck listed the injustices: "Every lynching, every race riot, gives joy to Japan. The discriminations of the American army and navy and air forces against colored soldiers and sailors, the exclusion of colored labor in our defense industries and trade unions, all our social discriminations, are of the greatest aid to our enemy in Asia, Japan." Similarly, in The Races of Mankind, Ruth Benedict argued that Hitler's anti-Semitism required Americans to challenge their own racism in order to "stand unashamed before the Nazis and condemn, without confusion, their doctrines of a Master Race."

From the grass roots came struggles to confront the "incongruity" between our professed principles and our practiced prejudices. Campaigns against segregation in the U.S. Army broadened into an attack on the color line in society. The threatened march on Washington helped open employment opportunities in the defense industries to African Americans and other minorities. Cultural boundaries were crossed in army barracks and battlefront foxholes as well as on the assembly lines and the cafeterias of defense plants. Demanding equality in "E1 Norte," Mexican Americans battled the negative stereotypes driving the violence of the "zoot-suit" riot. Enlisting in the army, Japanese Americans served bravely in order to protest their unconstitutional internment. Transmitting military messages in an unbreakable code of their tribal language, Navajos demonstrated the value of our society's cultural diversity. Jewish-American criticisms of the Roosevelt administration's failure to do more for victims of Nazi genocide carried a moral message: tardiness and silence in the face of such a horrendous crisis constituted complicity. Truman's announcement of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima provoked cries of moral dismay and outrage from citizens across the country.

Demanding inclusion in the democracy they were defending, the "vast, surging, hopeful" people of America's diverse communities left the tenements of the Lower East Side, the sharecropping farms of Mississippi, the ghettos of Harlem and South Side Chicago, the Chinatowns of California and New York, the barrios of the Southwest, the reservations of Arizona and New Mexico, and the sugar plantations of Hawaii. Roosevelt's war for the "Four Freedoms"-freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear-became for them what black intellectual leader W. E. B. DuBois called the "War for Racial Equality."

Unlike the workers of the world onboard Herman Melville's Pequod, these Americans of "varied" races and ethnicities were actors in history, determined to challenge their "Ahabs," their leaders and policymakers, and make decisions to chart the destiny of their lives, communities, and nation. They insisted that America live up to its ideals and founding principles. From "below deck," they went to war not only for victory over fascism abroad but also for victory over prejudice at home. In their struggle, they stirred a rising wind of diversity's discontent, unfurling a hopeful vision of America as a multicultural democracy.

Continues...

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