Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II [Audio Cassette]

Ronald Takaki (Author), Edward Lewis (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2001

Acclaimed historian Ronald Takaki asserts that for many Americans, World War II was fought for a "double victory": on the battlefront as well as on the homefront. Takaki explores Roosevelt's military policy, as well as personal stories like that of an army chaplain arriving at Buchenwald and a Navajo codetalker who used his native language to transmit battle messages. He explains how different ethnic groups experienced the war in widely different ways. He asserts that such political acts as the bombing of Hiroshima and the failure of the American government to intervene on behalf of Jewish victims of Nazism were deeply informed by racial biases. Takaki's revealing new history shows that there were more struggles -- and more victories -- in World War II than we had previously imagined.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

America's entry into World War II made comrades-in-arms of men and women from every region and every walk of life, united in the battle for freedom and against fascism. It is no small irony, historian Ronald Takaki observes, that the armed struggle for democracy abroad "was accompanied by a disregard for our nation's declaration that 'all men are created equal'" in the form of institutional racism of many kinds, from the segregation of African American units to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans and the refusal to grant asylum to Jewish refugees.

In Double Victory, Takaki examines the many contributions of America's minorities to the war effort, celebrating the work of Mexican farm laborers and Anglo women welders, of Navajo code talkers and Filipino foot soldiers, who proclaimed themselves to be "men, not houseboys," of Chinese American combat nurses and Asian Indian gunners. These men and women, Takaki writes, made extraordinary sacrifices in their battle against enemies without and enemies within. Although their efforts were not always appreciated at the time, they helped set in motion the struggle for civil rights that would explode two decades later. Takaki's book is a welcome and much needed entry in the recent literature on the World War II era, and it merits the widest possible audience. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers 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 communitiesAMexicans, 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 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks (November 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078612041X
• ISBN-13: 978-0786120413
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,310,372 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

My grandfather emigrated from Japan to work on the cane fields of Hawaii in 1886, and my mother was born on the Hawi Plantation. As a teenager growing up on Oahu, I was not academically inclined but was actually a surfer. During my senior year, I took a religion course taught by Dr. Shunji Nishi, a Japanese American with a Ph.D. I remember going home and asking my mother, who only had an eighth-grade education: "Mom, what's a Ph.D.?" She answered: "I don't know but he must be very smart." Dr. Nishi became a role model for me, and he arranged for me to attend the College of Wooster. There my fellow white students asked me questions like: "How long have you been in this county? Where did you learn to speak English?" They did not see me as a fellow American. I did not look white or European in ancestry. As a scholar, I have been seeking to write a more inclusive and hence more accurate history of Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans as well as certain European immigrant groups like the Irish and Jews. My scholarship seeks not to separate our diverse groups but to show how our experiences were different but they were not disparate. Multicultural history, as I write and present it, leads not to what Schlesinger calls the "disuniting of America" but rather to the re-uniting of America.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Making the "Arsenal of Democracy" More Democratic, July 23, 2000

By 

Steven S. Berizzi - See all my reviews

This review is from: Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Hardcover)

Within the vast literature of World War II, one of the most interesting categories includes books about home-front life in the United States. Although this conflict has been called the "good war," Ronald Takaki, professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and a leading authority on the history of race and culture in the U.S., asserts: "The `Arsenal of Democracy' was not democratic: defense jobs were not open to all regardless of race." Making high-paying jobs in the defense industry available to people of color is, perhaps, the most important theme in this book. According to Takaki, Americans of all races and ethnicities "insisted that America live up to ideals and founding principles" and "stirred a rising wind of diversity's discontent, unfurling a hopeful vision of America as a multicultural democracy." Relying on reminiscences of Americans of color who lived and worked during the war, drawn from a wide variety of printed sources, as well as interviews Takaki conducted, it is quite an achievement!

The racial aspect of the war was summarized by a black draftee who declared: "Just carve on my tombstone, `Here lies a black man killed fighting a yellow man for the protection of a white man.'" Takaki explains that the Army's policy of segregating black soldiers, "symbolized white domination in America." In addition to discrimination in housing and training programs, according to Takaki, "blacks were given "servile work assignments," and "[s]killed blacks found themselves occupationally downgraded." Takaki also writes: "At the beginning of the war, blacks were in especially dire economic straits...The war revived the American economy as an `arsenal of democracy.' But, as it turned out, defense jobs were not democratically distributed; most of them were reserved for whites only. Seventy-five percent of the war industries refused to hire blacks." Although Takaki does not provide the source of that statistic, it is not implausible. Takaki explains: "Confined to the unskilled and the service occupations before the war, African Americans wanted the better and higher paying factory jobs generated by the war." In 1941, civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph organized a march on Washington for July 1. Meeting with President Roosevelt on June 18, Randolph told FDR that 100,000 people would participate. A week later Roosevelt signed an executive order prohibiting "discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or Government." However, Takaki writes that, "as black and white workers followed the defense jobs into the cities, they often clashed violently." For instance: "By 1943, Detroit was a racial tinderbox." On June 20, after a scuffle in a crowded park, "urban warfare" erupted between whites and blacks, and it took 6,000 federal troops to restore order. Five weeks later, according to Takaki, in New York City, where "blacks were still being excluded from many defense industry plants, "Harlem exploded," resulting in six deaths and 500 injuries. During the war, 45,000 Indians, more than 10 percent of the Indian population, served in the U.S. armed forces. Indian workers also were attracted to work in defense industries, but, according to Takaki, they "often received lower wages than that of whites." "Almost 20 percent of all reservation Native Americans in the armed services came from the Navajo Nation in the Southwest." According to Takaki, in 1941, nearly 40 percent on the Navajos' annual per capita income of $128 came from wages, mostly from temporary government employment." "Pushed by poverty, the Navajos were also pulled into the military because they possessed something uniquely valuable to the U.S. military - their tribal language." In May 1942, "the first group of Navajo code talkers was sent to San Diego for training." According to Takaki, the Navajo code talkers "hit every beach from Guadalcanal to Okinawa." Many Mexican Americans worked in agriculture, which was considered a "war industry." The had more difficulty, however, breaking into other fields. A 1942 study of the airplane industry in Southern California reported that "payrolls showed almost no Mexicans employed." Later in the war, Mexican Americans were able to get jobs in steel, armaments, and aircraft, but "they found themselves relegated to the low wage jobs." Their efforts were not always welcomed. On June 3, 1943, "after some fights between young Mexican Americans and servicemen in downtown Los Angeles, hundreds of soldiers and sailors went on a rampage... [chasing] young Mexicans dressed in zoot suits, condemning their victims as draft dodgers." Incidents such as this had great propaganda value to the enemies of the United States. According to Takaki, "the Japanese media gleefully reported the violence as another example of racism in America." According to Takaki, "only 85 Italians were detained as security threats, and a proposed evacuation of `enemy' Italian aliens was ruled out." In contrast: "The 120,000 Japanese on the West Coast were evacuated and imprisoned in concentration camps; 40,000 of them, born in Japan, were classified as `enemy aliens.'" A decade before he became a crusading Chief Justice of the United States, California Attorney General Earl Warren "urged federal authorities to evacuate Japanese from sensitive areas of the West Coast," warning that the Japanese `may well be the Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort.'" The Japanese American evacuees were transported to internment camps in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, California, and Wyoming, mostly in remote desert areas. During the war, nevertheless: "33,000 Japanese Americans...decided to seek equality and justice by serving in the U.S. Armed Forces."

World War II had many dimensions. For every book such as James Bradley's marvelous Flags of Our Fathers, which depicts Americans in war at their very best, there needs to be another such as Ronald Takaki's Double Victory telling a different part of the story. While millions Americans fought against Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese imperialism around the world, millions of others were struggling at home to make the United States fully live up to the ideals and founding of American democracy. Appreciating World War II as a multicultural event is essential to a complete understanding of the American experience in the war.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A stirring account of the war at home, May 1, 2004

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Hardcover)

Although most Americans think of World War II as a two-front war--the Pacific theater and the European front--historian Ronald Takaki reminds us that there was a third, more insidious campaign--the struggle at home against "ugly prejudices" and violent oppression of ethnic minorities. While the Roosevelt administration touted the "Four Freedoms" for which Americans were fighting, those freedoms (freedom of speech and religion and freedom from want and fear) were still not fully extended to citizens, residents, and refugees.

In successive chapters, Takaki focuses on the abuses and injustices resulting from the exclusion of minority workers from defense industries, the Jim Crow statutes that segregated African Americans at home and in the army, the unemployment and poverty that greeted returning Native Americans veterans, the hostility towards Mexican Americans for the "zoot suits" worn by their youth, the laws prohibiting longtime Asian laborers from becoming citizens because they were not "white," the forced internment of Japanese Americans, the callousness that turned away Jewish refugees from our ports. He then examines the controversy surrounding the motivations for using the atomic bomb against civilian population centers.

Yet the author also reveals the many advances that the war delivered to ethnic groups. Minority communities contributed tens of thousands of soldiers who fought valiantly on the battlefront and earned the respect and friendship of their white compatriots. The shortage of domestic workers forced reluctant industries to hire non-white workers. A. Philip Randolph and his colleagues launched the civil rights movement by organizing a march on Washington, which was cancelled after Roosevelt signed executive order 8802, abolishing discrimination in government and defense jobs. (The order was largely symbolic, since it was hardly enforced, but in retrospect it was clearly a major first step.) And the sanguine final chapter demonstrates that, although the struggle for civil rights suffered setbacks during the next two decades, there really was no turning back.

Focusing one's attention on the domestic issues of the time, of course, does not minimize the contribution of our armed forces abroad; if anything, such a discussion emphasizes that the fight against prejudice was equally important: both because non-white citizens were serving our country and because our enemies used examples of American intolerance as propaganda against the U.S.--and because it was morally necessary. Although written by an academic, this concise book is both fascinating and approachable; it should be read by all Americans who care about freedom. It's a reminder of why we fought what Studs Terkel called "the Good War": the "double victory" of increasing liberty not only for Europeans and Asians but for every American as well.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Double Victory Appeals to the General Reader and Scholar, July 17, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Hardcover)

As one who holds a Ph.D. in American History, I often pick up books (like this one) to deepen and broaden my understanding of the past. Takaki's recent work does not disappoint in either respect.

Double Victory takes an interesting look, in most cases, at the "forgotten" history of World War II. An eminenent historian of munticulturalism in American life, Takaki assembles the past in a manner that the general reader will find pleasing. The professional, however, will be disappointed that the notes appear at the end of the book and thus finds himself flipping back and forth to discover the source of the author's information. Much of the text is, indeed, "assembled" because it has appeared in print elsewhere. A small percentage of the author's work is based upon new research. This is unfortunate, but Takaki provides an important service by pulling previously published interviews, letters, biographical and autobiographical accounts of wartime experiences, and information contained in journal articles into one slim volume.

Takaki's style is clean, straightforward, informative, and engaging. Double Victory is not a "page turner," but it holds the reader's interest and leaves him with a more complete perspective of a crucial time in American life.