Common Ground

Reimagining American History

Gary Y. Okihiro

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691070070, 9780691070063
• eBook ISBN: 9781400844364
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In Common Ground, Gary Okihiro uses the experiences of Asian Americans to reconfigure the ways in which American history can be understood. He examines a set of binaries--East and West, black and white, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual--that have structured the telling of our nation's history and shaped our ideas of citizenship since the late nineteenth century. Okihiro not only exposes the artifice of these binaries but also offers a less rigid and more embracing set of stories on which to ground a national history. Influenced by European hierarchical thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo Americans increasingly categorized other newcomers to the United States. Binaries formed in the American imagination, creating a sense of coherence among white citizens during times of rapid and far-reaching social change. Within each binary, however, Asian Americans have proven disruptive: they cannot be fully described as either Eastern or Western; they challenge the racial categories of black and white; and within the gender and sexual binaries of man and woman, straight and gay, they have been repeatedly positioned as neither nor.

Okihiro analyzes how groups of people and numerous major events in American history have generally been depicted, and then offers alternative representations from an Asian-American viewpoint--one that reveals the ways in which binaries have contributed toward simplifying, excluding, and denying differences and convergences. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, from the Chicago Exposition of 1898 to The Wizard of Oz, this book is a provocative response to current debates over immigration and race, multiculturalism and globalization, and questions concerning the nature of America and its peoples. The ideal foil to conventional surveys of American history, Common Ground asks its readers to reimagine our past free of binaries and open to diversity and social justice.

CHAPTER 1

West and East

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is foremost an American fairy tale. The story, briefly, is about how Dorothy, a young Kansas girl, is displaced by a midwestern cyclone, deposited in the land of the Munchkins, and searches for the Wonderful Wizard of Emerald City in Oz, who, she believes, can help her get back to Kansas. On her journey, Dorothy meets and is joined by the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion, each of whom seeks something, like Dorothy, from the Wonderful Wizard. When they finally meet the Wizard, they discover that he is a fraud, not a wizard at all but a former circus performer from Omaha, a fellow midwesterner. He, nonetheless, shows how each of his supplicants—the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion—already possess what they had sought, and tells how Glinda the Good, the sorceress of the South, reveals to Dorothy that she, too, already has the means by which to return to Kansas—her silver shoes. After clicking her heels, Dorothy and Toto are transported home to Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. “I’m so glad to be at home again!” exclaims a contented Dorothy in the end.

The book was written, according to its author L. Frank Baum, “solely to pleasure children of today.” But, published in 1900, it was more than a child’s story. It reflected the historical circumstances that swirled around Baum, like the Kansas winds that swept Dorothy and Toto to Munchkin country. Born in central New York in 1856, Baum grew up in a well-to-do home, spent most of his life in Chicago, and moved to Hollywood, where he died in 1919. In writing children’s stories, according to his publicist, Baum sought to move away from a European motif and create a distinctively American genre.¹ Kansas provided that most American of places for Baum.

The American heartland surely sets the stage for this saga, along with its virtues of family and home, companionship, sympathy for the underdog, practicality and common sense, and self-reliance. But it is also juxtaposed with the apparent utopia of Oz. Kansas, we are told at the story’s beginning, is a flat, desolate place, a “great gray prairie” without a tree or house in sight. The sun bakes the soil dry, burns the grass, and blisters the paint on the house. “When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife,” the story goes. “The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now.” Uncle Henry, like Aunt Em, “never laughed,” and he worked hard from morning till night and rarely spoke.²

In contrast, Oz was filled with bright sunshine and was “a country of marvelous beauty.” Instead of the treeless gray of Kansas, there were “lovely patches of green sward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plummage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks. . . .” That stark contrast between Kansas and Oz was just one of several dualisms within Baum’s story. Oz itself was divided into north and south, east and west, each with their respective witches. His contemporaries no doubt recognized Baum’s contrasts and dualisms. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry’s condition surely resonated with the plight of the midwestern farmer who not only faced the ravages of nature but also the bondage of eastern capital. Baum was a supporter of the Democratic party’s 1896 standard bearer, William Jennings Bryan, who trumpeted the call for the “free coinage of silver” (recollect the color of Dorothy’s magical shoes) as beneficial to farmers and the working class, and who opposed the capitalists’ “cross of gold.” The Tin Woodman had once been a hardworking human being, but, by the very necessity of labor (each swing of his axe had chopped off a part of his body), Eastern witchcraft, or the industrial machine, had transformed his body into metal (smiths had replaced his bodily parts with tin). The urban factory of the East encounters the agrarian ideal of the West.³

Fig. 1. American Gothic, by Grant Wood (1930).

”Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small. . . . [Aunt Em] was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. . . . Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was.” Quotation from Michael Patrick Hearn (ed.), The Annotated Wizard of Oz (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973). American Gothic (oil on beaverboard, 74.3 x 62.4 cm) courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection, and VAGA, New York, NY, 1930.934. All rights reserved.

The contrasts were more apparent than real. It was like the discoveries made by Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion: what seemed real was illusion, and what they had set out to find they already possessed. Dorothy wears the shoes that take her home, the Scarecrow exhibits much common sense, the Tin Woodman weeps after stepping on a beetle, and the Cowardly Lion learns that fear is normal. What appears absent is really present. Similarly, the plainness and gray of Kansas only seemed at odds with the greenness and light of Oz; they also bore like features. The cornfields, peach trees, crows, beetles, wildcats, storks, and field mice of Kansas populate the landscape of Oz, and both places are rural and filled with farmers and woodsmen. And despite the misery of Kansas, Dorothy comes to the conclusion after her wonderful mystical journey that “there is no place like home.” “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are,” Dorothy explains to the Scarecrow, “we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful.” The utopian attractions and possibilities of Oz were always present in Kansas and the American heartland.⁴

Two of the most persistent and pervasive myths of America’s past are the idea of the West and the idea of the West as the nation’s frontier. America’s history, indeed its uniqueness and national identity, is rooted within that imaginary space, the unturned sod, the “virgin land” of the portable frontier that moved from the Atlantic seaboard to the Alleghenies, to the Mississippi, the Great Plains, the Rockies, and California’s golden shore, and to the Pacific and Asia. According to the myth, that “westering”—imagining and mapping, expanding and conquering, settling and building—tamed a howling wilderness, brought light to darkness, and molded a “new man.” No longer a European, he was an American, as original and distinctive as the environment that shaped him.

In the West, along the frontier or the divide between civilization and barbarism, “the wilderness masters the colonist” wrote historian Frederick Jackson Turner, giving him “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inventiveness,” a “practical, inventive turn of mind,” a “dominant individualism,” and a “buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” These were among the core American virtues that were distilled within the crucible of the frontier.⁵ A young, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at the time, Turner outlined his frontier hypothesis in a paper presented at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, coinciding with that city’s hosting of the 1893 World’s Fair. The timing and place of those events were propitious. The temper of the times—as Turner had written earlier in an observation that applies equally to historians and storytellers—conditions the choice of historical subject matters and their interpretations. “Each age,” he had perceptively declared, “tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to conditions uppermost in its own time.”⁶

The late nineteenth century, as is evident in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, saw the rise of agrarian populism—the revolt of western farmers against the perceived tyranny of eastern capital that was fueled by class as well as by regional antagonisms and interests. Chicago’s selection over cities of the eastern establishment as the site for the 1893 World’s Fair was significant, along with its theme—a celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas. And though by 1893 the course of empire, with its frontiers to America’s south in Cuba and Puerto Rico and to its west in the Philippines and Hawaii, had yet to be fully run, that destiny of European peoples had long been envisioned, at least since the Republic’s founding and, in truth, since Columbus’s expedition to India and the regions beyond.

Turner’s immediate concern was the report of the 1890 U.S. Census, which declared that because of settlement, “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” “The frontier has gone,” in Turner’s words, “and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” The frontier’s closing, however, meant more than the end of an epoch; it foreshadowed a denial of access to the generative lands that gave Americans their rugged individualism, their unrestrained exuberance, their sinewy toughness. “This, then, is the real situation: a people composed of heterogeneous materials, with diverse and conflicting ideals and social interests, having passed from the task of filling up the vacant spaces of the continent, is now thrown back upon itself, and is seeking an equilibrium,” explained Turner in an 1896 essay. “The diverse elements are being fused into national unity. The forces of reorganization are turbulent and the nation seems like a witches’ kettle.”⁷

An aspect of that “witches’ kettle” were the diverse and unprecedented masses of immigrants who were streaming to America’s eastern shores during the late nineteenth century. Unlike America’s traditional immigrants, the 25 million who migrated to the United States between 1865 and 1915 did not come from Britain, Ireland, or northern Europe alone, but also from Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia, China, Japan, Korea, India, and the Philippines, and they totaled more than four times the number of those who had arrived during the previous fifty years. They flocked to the Northeast and West, where factories, in cities and fields, were humming, and where barons of industry and agriculture were monopolizing chunks of land, natural resources, and capital, and accumulating great wealth.

Ethnic and class conflicts were commonplace. In 1886 Chicago, in America’s heartland, police killed four strikers, and the next day a bomb killed seven officers and injured sixty-seven people. The Haymarket Square bombing came to symbolize, for many Americans, the imagined threat posed by southern and eastern Europeans, immigrants, radicals, and anarchists. “These people,” a Chicago newspaper reported of the Haymarket strikers, “are not American, but the very scum and offal of Europe.” Americans were not solely concerned with Europe’s “rubbish.” In 1882, four years before Haymarket, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act because, in the words of the Act, “the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof.” In 1894, the American Protective Association, a nativist group committed to stopping the immigrant tide, reportedly had a membership of 500,000, drawn from the Northeast and also from the Midwest.⁸ “Thrown back upon itself,” the nation—a “witches’ kettle”—steamed and boiled and bubbled.

In the glare of these new social realities at the close of the nineteenth century, Turner’s frontier hypothesis is forward-looking but also nostalgic, drawing upon a myth expressed at least a hundred years earlier during the late eighteenth century. The agrarian tradition, as described by literary scholar Henry Nash Smith, was a self-image that defined what Americans thought about themselves and their past, present, and future. The tradition was inward-looking, distinctly not European, and captured a hankering for and a faith in an inland empire of near-infinite expanse and untapped wealth that exuded from the fecund and blessed land. That species of American nationalism, wrote Smith, was expressed even before America’s independence and later in countless “rhapsodies on the West” by visionaries who saw the American interior “as a new and enchanting region of inexpressible beauty and fertility,” of stately forests and rich meadows on which roamed vast herds of animals and where a thousand rivers flowed into the mighty Mississippi. And although expansive, the agrarian tradition, noted Smith, “made it difficult for Americans to think of themselves as members of a world community because it has affirmed that the destiny of this country leads her away from Europe toward the agricultural interior of the continent.”⁹

Those romantic ideas of the trans-Appalachian West had precedents one hundred years earlier at the close of the eighteenth century, despite indications of a contrary, nonagrarian future evidenced in the rise of British industrialism and America’s first modern factory—a spinning mill erected in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1790. And like its 1890s version, the agrarian tradition of the 1790s helped galvanize a national identity that in the late eighteenth century contributed to the fall of the Federalists and the rise of the Republicans and Jeffersonian democracy in the election of 1800. The Federalists, who favored government by a powerful elite over a passive citizenry, were tied to Europe, hereditary rule, and the Old World by their opponents, the Republicans, who united disparate groups and classes around the notions of popular sovereignty and democracy that they claimed as distinctively American and native to the New World.¹⁰ It is not surprising, thus, that the singular hero of Jeffersonian democracy was the intrepid, independent pioneer and farmer who fled Europe, cleared America’s forests, settled, cultivated an abundance, and brought forth a new man and nation. And the Republican geographical distinctions of Old World and New World, Europe and America, East and West, paralleled the agrarian tradition’s domestic orientations of old and new, the Atlantic seaboard and the interior, East and West, and its associations of rebirth, plenitude, and the American identity with the West.

Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803, doubling the nation’s size and extending its western frontier, was in one sense an affirmation of the agrarian ideal. According to Henry Nash Smith, Jefferson was “the intellectual father of the American advance to the Pacific.”¹¹ He collected information on Louisiana from the British, Spanish, and French when he served as an American diplomat in Paris from 1784 to 1789, and as President he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1803 to find a route to the Pacific “for the purposes of commerce.”¹² Although impractical at the time as an economic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter 1: West and East
• Chapter 2: White and Black
• Chapter 3: Man and Woman
• Chapter 4 Heterosexual and Homosexual
• Chapter 5: American History
• Notes
• Index