CALIFORNIA LOOKS WEST
By D. W. BROGAN
Los Angeles, May 17th.
IBEGAN getting silver dollars, the old cartwheels, in my change, and the olives in the shop were labelled " super-colossal." It undoubtedly California, basically unchanged, although " super- colossal " is perhaps a little too much of a meiosis for the Golden State. I had not been on the coast since the two great new epochs had begun for the northern and southern ends of the State. I was pre-bridges " in San Francisco and pre-talkies in Los Angeles. But a change more important than talkies, bridges, floods or earth- Fakes had come over the ebullient California I had known. War was at its doorstep.
It is true that war isn't near in miles ; even Pearl Harbour is two thousand miles off, and the Coral Sea six thousand ; but the Pacific is the doorstep of California, and the war seems nearer re than it did on the Atlantic Coast, which has only the Atlantic tween it and the other end of the Axis. I stood in the living- of my friend's house in Berkeley, looking right into the Golden e. Under the lovely bridge that frames and does not spoil e entrance to the great bay a light shone. A ship? A lighthouse?
No one seemed to know ; but there lay Japan. Below lay the
'niversity of California, round which the city of Berkeley had grown , and the eponymous hero of the city is the Irish philosopher- hop who wrote: " Westward the course of empire takes its way." oday, if only for a moment, that advance of the West is halted ; the est is in retreat, and the East (or, as Americans put it, the Orient) still mysterious but not unchanging.
All this has been brought home to California in ways that are dramatic if not all equally impressive. It was at San Francisco the wounded from Pearl Harbour were landed. It is from the its on this coast that men and ships and 'planes are being sent .th increasing momentum to the battlefront where Americans are ctly engaged, to Asia and Australia. It is this coast that Japan well attack, if only for prestige reasons. In the great game hide-and-seek now being played on the Pacific it is possible, haps more than possible, that a Japanese raider, a Japanese carrier, slip through. The great summer fog-bank that for centuries San Francisco Bay from explorers coming from the sea may e the Japanese long enough for them to do some damage. To North, Alaska leans over to Asia, a potential jumping-off ground attack on Asia, and a possible target of a desperate Japanese mpt to get in first.
Air-raid precautions are more serious here than elsewhere in rica. There are alerts, although the one I experienced in San cisco was due to an accidental misidentification of a 'plane and excessive zeal of a siren-tender. The people in the 'bus looked each other with a wild surmise as the 'bus stopped and as the n went, just as we did in London in the summer of 594o. n the all-clear signal was given, there was the same mingled of and disappointment ; an experience had been missed (a mood doners have probably forgotten, but which existed all the same). In other ways, the war comes home to the business and bosoms the dwellers on the coast. In face of the unknown dangers of corsage and fifth-Column work, persons of Japanese birth or estry have been removed from the coastal areas. And this has uced a double problem, economic and political. The im- nce of the Japanese colony varies in various regions. They e far more numerous in Seattle than in Portland to the South ; were far more numerous in and around Los Angeles than in Francisco to the North. And—I give the hasty observation for t it is worth—fear and anger are in inverse proportion to the ber of Japanese. People in Portland are far more convinced every Japanese is a spy or a traitor than are people in Seattle, re there were far more of them. People in San Francisco are more certain. that the deportation policy is right than are people Los Angeles, where the real problems of deportation arose. There are economic reasons for this difference as well as social s. In Seattle and Los Angeles the Japanese were indispensable the smooth running of the life of the community, whether as
servants, market-gardeners, fishermen or traders. Clubs and private houses have had to find substitutes for Japanese house-boys. The railroads have had to import negro porters to take the place of the Japanese. Round Los Angeles thousands of acres of expensive irrigated land are in danger of relapsing into desert for want of the careful tending they got from their Japanese owners or tenants. One small town which voted with alacrity for the complete removal of all Japanese began to wonder when it was pointed out that the lands they could no longer till would fall into the hands of the great ranch-owners who have made California the classical example of capitalist agriculture, of the " factory in the field." And if the capitalists decided to grow alfalfa instead of garden crops there would be little to do for the doctors, shopkeepers and the rest.
There is another side to this question which touches some tender, and some not so tender, American consciences. By forcibly deport- ing native-born American citizens because of their ancestry the United States has been forced to violate one of its primary principles and one whose observance is necessary to the health of the body politic. It is all very well for Hitler to apply the principles of the Volksgemeinschaft and to raise or depress whole races. But the American Union was formed on very different principles, and to inject this question into its life is to endanger the ideally perfect union of so many peoples under one government. "La recherche el la paten:he est interdite " is a basic principle of American political
wisdom. have heard no one who was not distressed by the necessity of violating this principle, but also no one who doubted the necessity. Again and again I have heard Americans assert their complete confidence in this Japanese or that. I have heard a dis- tinguished American soldier express complete confidence in the Japanese soldiers in Hawaii. But, as one of the leading American experts on Japan put it : " Most of the American-born Japanese are all right. But you can never be quite sure if one of them got a flower from Hirohito what he would do." So with regret, although with all the consideration possible, the Japanese have been removed. And, ironically, two other Oriental races have benefited. Chinese have begun to take over Japanese farms, and in one region last summer a strike of Filipino farm-labourers was broken by Japanese imported by the capitalist farmers. The Filipinos are now heroes, and the local magnates are having quite a lot of explaining to do.
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