Overview
" Until now, the story of America's role in World War II has been presented primarily through the lives of powerful policymakers and generals, or through the heroism of American soldiers of predominantly European ancestry. Award-winning historian Ronald Takaki's multicultural history offers a different perspective. In Double Victory, history is told through the lives of ordinary, ethnically diverse Americans -- a Tuskegee pilot wanting to fly and fight for freedom, a Navajo code talker using his native language to transmit battle messages, a Mexican-American woman riveting B-29 bombers in an airplane factory, a Japanese American feeling betrayed by his own government, and a Jewish-American soldier at Buchenwald pressing human ashes into his palm so that he would never forget what he had seen.Takaki scrutinizes the contradictions of the "good war." The war for the "Four Freedoms" was fought by a Jim Crow army; jobs in the "arsenal of democracy" were not open to all regardless of race; bloody race riots in the cities denied "freedom from fear" to blacks and Mexicans; the fight against Nazism was accompanied by the failure of our government to rescue Jewish refugees; and the leader of the free world signed the executive order for the internment of Japanese Americans.
However, Takaki shows that minorities were not just victims but also actors in history, making choices and taking actions to insist that their nation live up to its founding principle of equality and to defend the world's unfinished, but best hope for, democracy. What emerges from Takaki's study is the affirming story of how minorities fought for a "double victory" against fascism abroad and prejudice at home."Author Bio: "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."
Editorials
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)