Dan Outline and First few pages

Dan Ruprecht

History 209S

Outline

Note: this outline is unfinished. Besides the introductory section, it is not properly organized because I am still trying to figure out the most logical way to do so. I have done most of my research so far on #2, “The Sailors’ Manliness”, which is apparent. Currently, it’s grouped by source rather than theme or topic. Thanks in advance for looking over this.

1.      Introduction

a.       “Hook”

                                                              i.      Carmen Theater attack to interest reader and introduce topic broadly

b.      Define the riots in general

                                                              i.      Scale in Los Angeles, then all over the country

                                                            ii.      Actors: American servicemen vs Mexican Americans

c.       Describe a zooter and his suit

d.      Offer explanations of the attacks

                                                              i.      “Juvenile delinquents” / “Zoot Suit War”

                                                            ii.      Nature of the suits

1.      Rationed fabric / expensive watch chains

2.      Unpatriotic

3.      Problems: victims who didn’t wear the suit / obviously assisting war effort

                                                          iii.      Racism

1.      Gene Cabral

2.      Conventional narrative

                                                          iv.      Complicate the explanation

1.      Strange nature of the attacks

a.       Public humiliation

b.      Dominance of the servicemen

e.       Add my interpretation: clashing gender identity

                                                              i.      Hit ‘em with the thesis:  The only way to understand the attacks, and the racism at their core, is to explore the conflicting definitions of manhood in the white serviceman’s mind and the young Mexican American’s.

2.      The Sailors’ Manliness

a.       Naval recruiting posters (“Be a Man and Do It” “Men Make the Navy. The Navy Makes Men”)

b.      Mrozek, Donal D. J., “The Habit of Victory: the American Military and the Cult of Manliness” in J.A. Mangan and James Wallvin, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940.

                                                              i.      “Notwithstanding the actual pluralism of American culture, at virtually any time in its history, the US military have been more likely than civilians to envision a unitary culture and society – or, at least, to set narrower parameters for variations from the culture’s norms.” 226

1.      In other words, the United States military is at the forefront in imagining and imposing cultural norms on those they see around them

                                                            ii.      “need for defence exaggerated behavioural differences between men and women” 220

                                                          iii.      service itself was a rite of passage.” 222

                                                          iv.      intrinsic worth and practical benefits of hierarchy and authority” 222

                                                            v.      Spirit of professionalism,” “passionate dedication to discipline and order.”

c.       Barrett, Frank J., “Organizational Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity: The Case of the U.S. Navy” in Whitehead, Stephen M., & Barret, Frank J., The Masculinities Reader.

                                                              i.      “The military is a gendered institution. Its structures, practices, values, rites, and rituals reflect accepted notions of masculinity and femininity. But it is also a gendering institution. It helps to create gendered identities.” 97

                                                            ii.      “navy can be seen to be designed to create chronic testing that continually marks those who pass these tests terms of traditional masculinity and serves to separate the weak from the strong… validated through the exercise of power over the self and others.” 74

1.      i.e. always need to prove their own masculinity

                                                          iii.      “Masculinity in this culture is very public, but never secure.” 90

                                                          iv.      “embodiment of traditional male sex role behaviors.” 77

                                                            v.      “independent, risk-taking, aggressive, heterosexual, and rational”79

                                                          vi.      “Various studies of military training reveal that the military persuasively bounds off the recruit from civilian life in an effort to socialize ‘boys to be men.’ Recruits learn the value of appearance, cleanliness, exacting detail, and respect for rank and tradition. They come to value conformity and obedience, and learn display rules for exhibiting aggression and courage in the face of risk.” 80. … “From small rituals such as shaving heads and discarding civilian clothes for uniforms, to warrior initiation rites, violent drill instructors, hazing rituals, sex education films on the harms of venereal disease, recruits learn that there is ‘a cult of toughness and masculinity traditionally associated with making soldiers out of civilians.’” 81

1.      i.e. separated themselves off from the world, associate self with masculinity

2.      “…structures and routines that call for continual testing of these qualities. This is a culture that chronically creates trials that separate the ‘weak’ from the rest.” 81

3.       “In basic training, drill instructors sometimes called marine recruits ‘faggots’ to imply that they lack the aggression associated with masculinity.” 82

a.       An insult acceptable from leaders, but not from the zooters!

                                                        vii.      “… risk taking; discipline; excitement associated with operation of powerful technology; tolerance of degradation; stoic endurance of hardship; tenacity and perseverance in the face of difficult physical trials; rational calculation; absence of emotion; and technological mastery.” 95

d.      Belkin, Aaron. Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire 1891-2001

                                                              i.      “…service members often explain their willingness to risk their lives in terms of a desire to cement their masculine status…” 2

                                                            ii.      “…I show that military masculinity is a site where domestic fears of the other have been exaggerated and then implicated in the smoothing out of imperial responses to exaggerated foreign threats.” 5

                                                          iii.      “… approximately a century ago, when American military masculinity consolidated as a dominant paradigm for male authority, a paradigm that came to model normative citizenship for civilians not just soldiers and that valorized toughness on the one hand and obedience and conformity on the other.” 7

                                                          iv.      “Soldiering would be seen less as one among many normative masculinities than as the paradigmatic embodiment of normativity… the new military man as well as the civilian who emulated him would nonetheless have a greater penchant for obedience, conformity, and docility.” 12

                                                            v.      “In the late nineteenth century, the synthesis of two overlapping trends anticipated the consolidation of modern American military masculinity as a dominant paradigm. On one hand, nineteenth-century ideals of manliness to which only some men could aspire were transformed into a more broadly applicable form of masculinity which was intrinsic to all men and whose emphasis on both self-control and ruggedness mapped closely onto emerging ideas about military professionalism. On the other hand, public glorification of the military as an institution deepened just as the armed forces came to exemplify the state and the nation in more intensified ways. While American society always has been militarized, the militarization of the public sphere became more connected to the military as an organization a century ago. Modern American military masculinity emerged as a dominant paradigm of male authority at the intersection of these two trends.” 13

3.      Mexican American Manhood

a.       Primary sources: PBS American Experience interviews

b.      Gerardo, Galadriel, Misunderstood Masculinities

                                                              i.      Separate pachucos (“punks”) from “zoot suiters” (8)

1.      Pachucos’ gang activity, prostitution—petty crimes, mainly

2.      No distinction in the minds of white servicemen

3.      LATimes June 29 – “Why Call Them Anything?” article

4.      Detailed story of the riots

a.       Prologue:

                                                              i.      WWII changes the city

1.      Half a million immigrants to the city (Gerardo, 14)

2.      Factories still segregated (ibid); drew workers from afar

3.      LA Armory, completed 1940, had “more reservists than anywhere else in the United States” (ibid)

4.      Constant fear of bombings after Pearl Harbor (Gerardo, 15)

a.       Fear of “internal enemies” – Japanese internment

5.      “substantial permanent second-generation Mexican American population existed in LA for the first time” (Gerardo 16)

b.      Sleepy Lagoon (story in full; Gerardo 17)

                                                              i.      Fuels idea that Mexicans are violent/criminal/delinquent

                                                            ii.      22 charged conspirators, largest mass trial in California history (after arrested over 600 in a massive three-day dragnet, beating many for confessions (Gerardo 19)) People v. Zammora et al.

1.      Newspapers sensationalize the trial; civil rights groups complain about unjust treatment

a.       Men not allowed to cut their hair or change their clothes or sit with their lawyers for a couple weeks before finding 17 guilty

2.      Starts newspaper stories of zoot suit gangers/Mexican crime wave

                                                          iii.      “Boy Gang Terrorism Charged to Axis Agents” (PBS American Experience)

                                                          iv.      Threat abroad are the Japs, the “Local threat is our Mexican American youth.” (PBS)

c.       June 3-15^th

                                                              i.      The LA riots, told in full (Gerardo, 19-22 for bullets

5.      Concluding analysis

_________________________________________________________________________________

Dan Ruprecht

History 209S

Zoot Suit Masculinity

            In early June, 1943, as war ravaged Europe and rocked the Pacific, a cohort of about 50 American sailors descended upon the Carmen Theater in Los Angeles, armed with clubs and homemade bludgeons, out for blood. They brushed aside the theater’s staff, flipped the lights on, and spotted their target: a small group of young Mexican American boys. The servicemen dragged the boys out of the theater, tore off their clothing, and began to beat them mercilessly. They attacked any civilians who tried to step in as they made a bonfire of the boys’ clothes and swaggered off, into the night.[1] Thus began the Zoot Suit Riots.

The next day, more than 200 soldiers joined in the offensive, assaulting the Mexican American population all over Los Angeles as the police force watched. Civilians assisted the soldiers as the attacks spread into East Los Angeles, the heart of the Mexican American barrios. The LAPD claimed they “lacked jurisdictional authority” to act against the military, and in the coming days would aid or protect the servicemen in their attacks.[2] They arrested hundreds of young Mexican Americans, allegedly “for their own protection.”[3] In the following months, the attacks were imitated in major cities across the United States by servicemen in the army, navy, air force and local police forces. In most cases, sailors or soldiers sought Mexican American boys between 16 and 18, stripped them naked, and burnt their clothes in front of their eyes—often urinating on the flames to add to the humiliation—and beat the boys “with a sadistic frenzy.”^[4]

            The name “Zoot Suit Riots” comes from the flamboyant outfits that most victims wore: ballooning high-waisted pants tightly cuffed at the ankle, long jackets with broad, padded shoulders, a conspicuously long watch chain dangling from the pocket, comically fat ties, and wide-rimmed flat hats – a zoot suit. The “zoot suiters” or “zooters” stood in stark contrast to the American sailors wearing their government issued naval uniforms, but of course, understanding the causes of the attacks is much more complicated than identifying who fought whom.

Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron maintained that the riots were caused by the Mexican American “juvenile delinquents.”[5] Many popular media sources concurred, portraying the “Zoot Suit War” as the struggle of heroic American servicemen against a perceived “Mexican crime wave.”[6] Neither interpretation holds water against even the slightest investigation, as many at the time already knew.

There is a case to be made that the zoot suits themselves, those incredibly conspicuous, extravagant suits, set off the servicemen—that the soldiers were outraged by the zooters’ flamboyance. It seemed like an affront to the soldiers that the boys would wear clothing that took up so much rationed fabric or watch chains that cost so much money at a time when the government urged citizens to spend any excess on the war effort. With this logic, many argue that the outfits themselves were unpatriotic or subversive, enough to set off the ire of the soldiers. There are two glaring problems with this train of thought: many Mexican Americans who were attacked did not wear the suit, and most all of the boys had siblings in the military and planned to join themselves once they were of age. The small amount of spending money that they had generally came from working in wartime factories. Gene Cabral was one such boy, 15 and working in a factory as his four older brothers fought abroad. He recognized that the attacks were never about the outfits.

“Looking back now,” he said in 2013, “I’m pretty sure that people were just racist.”[7] Most every history written in the past half century agrees, and the riots are currently understood to be a kind of one-sided racial war. White sailors, to be joined by other servicemen and police as the riots spread hunted young Mexican Americans, and later other minority communities.

Racism was certainly a primary motivator, but the nature of the attacks suggests that there is yet more to consider. Servicemen focused on public humiliation, burning and urinating on the zooter’s clothing while the boys watched, naked and defeated. Allegedly in some cases, the servicemen sexually abused the boys. These kinds of attacks focus on establishing the dominance of the servicemen, first by physically forcing the boys into submission (beatings) and then shaming them (burning their clothes). It is a style of attack which, I propose, was motivated in large part by clashing ideas of what it meant to be a man in America.

Necessary to understanding a racial attack is to consider different components of racial identities, in this case, gender identities. White American servicemen considered themselves to be men for wildly different reasons than their younger Mexican American counterparts, and that dissonance in describing “manliness” was both a part of the servicemen’s racism and something greater. The servicemen felt threatened in their manhood by the competing and unconventional gender identity of the Mexican Americans. Because they were empowered by the state to employ violence upon the other, they did so to reassert their manhood.  The only way to understand the attacks, and the racism at their core, is to explore the conflicting definitions of manhood in the white serviceman’s mind and the young Mexican American’s.

Men Make the Navy. The Navy Makes Men.

            On the 20^th of March, 1779, Marine Captain William Jones took out an advertisement in the Providence Gazette: “The Continental ship Providence, now lying at Boston, is bound on a short cruise, immediately; a few good men are wanted to make up her complement.”[8] Since Jones’ advertisement, the US Marine Corp has been recruiting “a few good men,” even while the meaning behind those words change. Deconstructing what the slogan conveyed in the 1940’s is a useful means to begin to understand marine masculinity during World War II, especially as many of the underlying concepts can be applied to the military in general. The qualities which make up a man were tempered over decades of warfare and made precise at the turn of the twentieth century when emerging ideas of military professionalism mingled with the spreading sentiment that one’s class ought not limit capability for manliness.[9]  What now seems like the traditional view of white American manhood was then only forming—and mostly thanks to the military. Essentially, by the early 1940’s, the United States Military had successfully conditioned its soldiers into believing in and practicing a very specific kind of masculinity, and more importantly, that specific gender identity was established as the American cultural norm.

            First off, the military is “the few.” Simply put, it is an organization that very intentionally separates itself from commoners or civilians. Servicemen are exceptional. In alienating its troops from the rest of the population, the military is able to impress their own ideas onto the recruits and establish them as the norm in the military. Those who choose to join the ranks must learn new codes of conduct to transition from civilian to soldier, or, in a recruiting pamphlet’s words, from “boys to men.”[10] The military thus establishes their practices as essential for manhood; the civilians who come to the military, regardless of age, are boys, lacking some necessary qualification for manhood. Their service then acts doubly as a rite of passage: first soldiers are separated from the population at large, then they are separated from their past selves and raw recruits. In each case, the soldier has become more of a man.

            More importantly however, servicemen are “good men.” As soon as training begins, recruits learn what it means to be a good man:

appearance, cleanliness, exacting detail, and respect for rank and tradition. They come to value conformity and obedience, and learn display rules for exhibiting aggression and courage in the face of risk. […] From small rituals such as shaving heads and discarding civilian clothes for uniforms, to warrior initiation rites, violent drill instructors, hazing rituals, sex education films on the harms of venereal disease, recruits learn that there is ‘a cult of toughness and masculinity traditionally associated with making soldiers out of civilians.[11]

Recruits understood well that these expectations set them apart from those on the outside and secured their status as men, especially in the Navy and the Marines.[12] A recruit was docile, uniform, courageous, and very heterosexual.[13] These aspects were not only stressed as important and beneficial in themselves, but necessary to be a man in the military. Further, they were constantly tested.

            Even after training was completed, a soldier had to expect “chronic testing that continually marks those who pass these tests in terms of traditional masculinity and serves to separate the weak from the strong.”[14] On any day, a soldier may be called to prove his manhood to his peers and superiors in fights or obstacle courses, or by being spontaneously put into command and forced to keep a level head. Masculinity then, was “very public, but never secure.”[15]

 

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[1] This story is recounted in the introduction (p 223 – 225) and conclusion (p 257) of Pagan, E.O. “Los Angeles     Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit Riot, 1943.” Social Science History Spring 2004, no 24.

[2] Gerardo, Galadriel, Misunderstood Masculinities. Dissertation, UCLA, Los Angeles, 2007. 21

[3]  Pagan, 247.

[4] Ibid, p 249 & McWilliams, Carey. North from Mexico: The Spanish-speaking People of the United States. Praeger, 1990.

[5] “Zoot Suit Riots," Britannica Academic, accessed January 26, 2016, http://academic.eb.com/EBchecked/topic/1317905/Zoot-Suit-Riots.

[6] Ibid

[7] Baeder, Ben, “Zoot Suit Riots: Racism underlies week of violence in Los Angeles” San Gabriel Valley Tribune (California, June 1, 2013).

[8] United States Marine Corps, History Division. Accessed www.mcu.usmc.mil/historydivision/pages/frequently_requested/FamousQuotes.aspx

[9] Belkin, Aaron. Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire 1891-2001

[10] Barrett, Frank J., “Organizational Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity: The Case of the U.S. Navy” in Whitehead, Stephen M., & Barret, Frank J., The Masculinities Reader, p88

[11] Barrett, 80-81

[12] A cult of superiority exists, more so with the Marines than other sections of the United States Armed Forces that they are the most capable, most manly, most powerful, etc. It is well documented and has been remarked by most every scholar studying American military culture. See Barrett for more.

[13] Regardless of the contradictions and ample evidence of homosexual assault in the navy, which again is well documented. The point is that the ideal manhood was specifically heterosexual. See Belkin for more.

[14] Barrett, 74

[15] Barrett, 90