Fanny Bixby Spencer: Living outside of the lines

ABOVE: Suffragettes march in Washington, D.C. circa 1910.  California women gained the right to vote in 1911, nine years before the 19th Amendment granted the vote to all American women.  (Photo, Library of Congress)

~Updated October 2017

   Two weeks before she passed away in 1988, Kamea "Kay" Okamoto Omata wrote to Clarence Nishizu that she wanted to write about Fanny Bixby Spencer, her adopted mother and a member of one of Southern California's most prominent families.  

   "I am writing her story,"Omata told Nishizu, who carefully noted the exchange in his 1982 oral history with Arthur A. Hansen, for California State University Fullerton's Japanese American Oral History Project, "and I think that I would like to call it 'A Hippie Before Her Time.' "  Nishizu recalled an obituary in the Long Beach Press Telegram about Fanny Bixby, describing her as "a woman who, though she could have enjoyed the luxuries of life, chose to devote her energies to the betterment of mankind."

LEFT: Fanny Bixby Spencer, circa 1909-1910. (Photograph, Los Angeles Magazine, March 12 , 2103)

   At her passing in 1930, Fanny Bixby had touched the lives of many Japanese immigrants, including those leasing land from the Bixby family and those in Wintersburg.   In oral histories for the Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project, Bixby is remembered with affection.

   Nevertheless, Fanny Bixby scared people.    

      She was too outspoken, too radical in her beliefs, too much of a coloring-outside-of-the-lines kind of woman.  A wealthy philanthropist, suffragette, socialist, playwright, poet and pacifist, she reportedly was threatened with tar and feathers, blacklisted during World War I, and shunned from the high society she in which she was raised.

The seaside residence of Fanny Bixby's father, Jotham Bixby, in Long Beach.  (Photo, University of Southern California, California Historical Society, circa 1910)  
 
A socialite's life
   Fanny was the daughter of one of California's richest men, Jotham Bixby, and his wife, Margaret Hathaway Bixby.  Jotham Bixby and his cousins acquired the 27,000-acre Rancho Los Cerritos,  17,000 acres in Rancho Palos Verdes and a third interest in Rancho Los Alamitos of 29,000 acres.  As an individual, he purchased 7,000 acres in the Ranchos Santiago de Santa Ana.  

   Jotham Bixby was president of the Bixby Land Company, the Palos Verdes Company, the Jotham Bixby Company, vice president of the Alamitos Land Company, the Alamitos Water Company, president of the Chino Valley Cattle Company of Arizona, president of the National Bank of Long Beach and vice president of the Long Beach Savings Bank & Trust Company.  He was money.

   In the 1932 California and Californians (Vol. IV, The Lewis Publishing Company), it was noted "today in Southern California are hundreds of thousands of home and property owners whose chain of title runs through holdings once owned by Jotham Bixby."

LEFT: Fanny Bixby showed an early tendency to compete, as noted in this 1898 society page blurb about activities at the shore.  (Herald, Aug. 14, 1898)

An ideal childhood
   Born in 1879 in Rancho Los Cerritos (the present-day Bixby Knolls section of Long Beach, California), Fanny Bixby attended the prestigious Marlborough School in Los Angeles, the Pomona Preparatory School and Wellesley College.  

   There is evidence the extended Bixby family made a visit from their Rancho Los Cerritos home to Gospel Swamp (the willows-covered peatland of Wintersburg Village, the future Huntington Beach Township, and Talbert).  

ABOVE: Sheep dipping at the Bixby Ranch, the childhood home of Fanny Bixby, circa 1901.  The man at the center is reportedly Jotham Bixby.  (Photo, University of Southern California Libraries)

   In her 1926 book, Adobe Days, A Book of California Memories, Fanny's cousin Sarah Bixby-Smith, describes a late 1800s Sunday afternoon, "We had all been over to camp-meeting at Gospel Swamp, not that we were much addicted to camp-meeting, but it was the only available service within reach, and of course we had to go to church on Sunday. We sat on wooden benches in the dust under the willows, not an altogether unpleasant change from the usual pew, at least for the children..."

   "But Uncle Jotham had a more exciting aftermath," writes Bixby-Smith.  "He and Papa and I were reading in the parlor after dinner when suddenly he gave a tremendous jump and ran upstairs three steps at a time, where we soon heard a great noise of tramping.  In a minute or two he came down with a dead lizard almost a foot long spread on his New York Tri-weekly Tribune. Evidently it had mounted his bootleg over at camp-meeting and lain dormant for a couple of hours before attempting further explorations. The first jump came when the little feet struck my uncle's knee, harmless, but uncanny."

   Fanny Bixby gave her father, Jotham, a bigger scare by devoting the majority of her inheritance to social efforts.  He put her on an allowance.  

LEFT: Fanny Bixby worked with the juvenile court and was known for helping young newsboys, many of them Russian immigrants.  Willis Rhodes, the young man charged with robbing Bixby in 1907 after she had befriended him, did not "keep out of trouble" and later violated his probation.  (Image, Los Angeles Herald, Dec. 7, 1907)
 
Fanny get your gun
   In January 1908,  Long Beach's first appointed police chief, Thomas W. Williams, "did something which resulted in the Chief being 'swamped' with inquires about what was then considered a “shaky experiment," reported the Long Beach Police Officers Association, Rap Sheet (2008).  

   "Chief Williams appointed Fanny Bixby daughter of Jotham and Margaret Bixby, a 'Special Police Officer' for the City of Long Beach. The young woman who had been born on the Los Cerritos sheep ranch in 1879 had become a Long Beach Police Officer."

ABOVE: Fanny Bixby was the first woman to serve with the Long Beach police department, circa 1909.  Eight years later, the Long Beach police opposed the community hosting a conference for the Christian Pacifists, of which Fanny Bixby was a member.  (What was Fanny Bixby Really Like?, Independent Press Telegram, August 22, 1965)

   The daily newspapers regularly had articles about Fanny Bixby being called to the scene to help with a destitute woman, a suicide attempt, or an orphaned child.

   "The idea of having a woman on the force was a new one.” Williams is reported as explaining, “It occurred to me that such a plan would be feasible and Mrs. Spencer, then Miss Bixby, was willing to serve in that capacity. The idea was soon taken up by metropolitan cities all over the country.”

   The Los Angeles Herald wrote in 1909, "California, which gives an example to the rest of the country and to the world in many respects, is now demonstrating that when necessary a woman can become a policeman, or should we say policewoman?  Miss Fanny Bixby, deputy of a Long Beach constable, has been sworn into office and is wearing her special policeman's star."

RIGHT: Fanny Bixby receives "Policeman's Star" as a deputy constable in 1909, which the Los Angeles Times captioned as a "rich girl's office". (Policeman's Star for Fannie Bixby, Los Angeles Times, January 19, 1909)

   The Herald continued, "Deputy Constable Fannie Bixby is wealthy, but...does not see in the possession of money merely an incentive to lead a useless or society butterfly life.  She believes the possessors of the world's wealth should be the doers of the world's work."

   "It is believed several young men of a set which is called fashionable are shivering in their shoes since Miss Bixby came to Los Angeles for her star..." waxed the Herald.  "With a few fearless missionaries like Miss Bixby actively at work, society would soon be reformed."

ABOVE: The Egan Theater--today the Musart Theater--on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, where Fanny Bixby's play, The Jazz of Patiotism, debuted in 1928.  (Photo, Historic Los Angeles Theaters, circa 1949)

Becoming an activist
    By 1921, the tide had turned and Fanny Bixby was called unpatiotic, a socialist, and a radical. Having spent time in social and suffragette work in the East Coast and in San Francisco, Bixby built the Settlement House in Los Angeles, was aiding Russian newsboys, and financially supported the Walt Whitman School, providing aid and education to immigrants.

   She had written an anti-war play the previous year in 1920, The Jazz of Patriotism, in which the protagonist refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  Not exactly a popular theme for a country recovering from World War I.

   In 1921, Bixby is listed as being on the national board of The League for Industrial Democracy--the successor for the Intercollegiate Socialist Society--which stated its object as being: "education for a new social order based on production for use and not for profit."
 
LEFT: A flyer for the opening of the Walt Whitman School in Los Angeles, "the first proletarian day school in the West," for which Fanny Bixby was a benefactress.  (Image, Southern California Architectural History, Feb. 29, 1920)  

    The Southern California Architectural History blog notes:  "Fanny maintained a lifelong opposition to any aspect of militarism evidenced by her threat to sue over the City of Long Beach granting a permit for a ROTC training camp in a city park for which the Bixby family's Alamitos Land Company had donated the land. She also filed a protest with the State Superintendent of Schools against the practice of saluting the flag on the grounds that 'it was an act of applied war" and on religious grounds' as a form of idol worship." 

    Bixby had gotten the ire of some in Long Beach when she refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in an earlier incident. She and the Reverend Francis Watry were investigated by a Long Beach Chamber of Commerce "committee of three on patriotism to reason with persons guilty of disloyal attitude and try to induce them to change their views or keep still..."  

RIGHT: Fanny Bixby had served as Long Beach's first female police officer by the time she was "criticized" for not standing for the Pledge of Allegiance in 1917. In typical Fanny Bixby fashion, she was blunt about her anti-war position. (Rev. F. Watry is pivot of gale in church at Long Beach, Santa Ana Register, June 15, 1917)

   Long Beach Unitarian Church officers ended up voting on whether or not to retain Reverend Watry.  He was reported by the Santa Ana Register as having been retained by a vote of 17 to 15 "followed by a stormy scene".

   Fanny Bixby never changed her position regarding the Pledge of Allegiance.  She doubled down.  By 1925, she had taken on the state superintendent of public instruction about the requirement that children sing the Star Spangled Banner. The Santa Ana Register described Bixby as "well known social worker" that has "been associated with Upton Sinclair in many of his activities".   To quote author Laurel Ulrich, "well behaved women seldom make history."

ABOVE: Fanny Bixby with her husband, Carl Spencer, on a trip to San Quentin to "visit a socialist friend" in 1923.  They camped along the way.  She is described as being free with her money to help others, but not extravagant with herself, preferring plain clothing and a simple lifestyle. (Miss Fanny, Tolstoy, 31 Goats, and Me, Martin Volkoff, Independent Press Telegram, January 24, 1971)

Touching lives  

    After marrying W. Carl Spencer in 1918--a dock worker she met at a union meeting--Bixby moved to Costa Mesa (then known as Harper).  She took in Japanese, Mexican, Russian immigrant children at her Marina Vista Ranch home, the farm she and Carl Spencer owned in the area of Whittier Avenue.  

ABOVE:  Bixby was a prolific letter writer to the Santa Ana Register, sharing her opinions on County and world issues.  In the above letter, she is chastizing the school board for considering a prohibition on theological discussion in the philosophy department of the Santa Ana Junior College.  (Santa Ana Register, January 23, 1925)

   Bixby is reported as being generous to the community, donating land for the Costa Mesa Apple Growers clubhouse, Costa Mesa Women's Club, and other community projects.  To establish a library, she procured a building, donated her father, Jotham's Bixby's extensive book collection, arranged for utilities and paid for a librarian.

   In his 1982 oral history interview with Arthur A. Hansen (updated in 1988), Clarence Nishizu recalls Tosh Ikeda telling him about Fanny Bixby Spencer.

   Ikeda said, "I vaguely remember that I was only four years old when Mr. and Mrs. Spencer used to walk around the Japanese neighborhood and talk to the people there. Then one day they came into our house and talked to my mother. They wanted to meet and help people, especially the Japanese poor people." 

ABOVE: Fanny Bixby's post World War I play, The Jazz of Patiotism, was still showing in 1928, eight years after she had written it and two years before her death. (Los  Angeles Times, November 12, 1928)

   Ikeda's family was invited to live in one of the Fanny Bixby Spencer houses for free. 

   "One year there was excessive rain," Ikeda told Nishizu, "and the house we lived in was built on a low ground and the house was flooded. As a result of this, my younger brother died from pneumonia. Immediately Mrs. Spencer built another house on a higher ground where we were allowed to move into.” 

   Nishizu recalled, "...the Spencers became active in civic affairs, donating their time and money to help poor children pay for their school lunches. Fanny donated land for a woman's club building and helped finance the cost of maintaining the city library by buying thousands of dollars worth of books and even paying for the librarian's salary."

   "She was an activist who helped extremely poor people," explained Nishizu,  "On one occasion she even paid for the cost of sending a woman to India to meet Mahatma Gandhi."

    Fanny Bixby and Carl Spencer took in over a dozen children of various nationalities, helped numerous local families, and paid for college educations.  When she died in 1930, she reportedly left small token amounts to her relatives, leaving land and the remainder of her $2.5-million-plus fortune to her adopted children, local families, and charities, including land for a park in Newport Beach and a library in Costa Mesa.

ABOVE: The Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission at the time of Fanny Bixby's death in 1930.  A parcel of land she left to Tosh Ikdeda was used for a language school supported by the Mission. (Photo circa 1930, courtesy of Wintersburg Presbyterian Church) © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Wintersburg Village

   Tosh Ikeda was notified Bixby left him three acres off Whittier Avenue in Costa Mesa.  He offered part of it for a Japanese language school organized, supported and attended by elders and congregants of the Wintersburg Japanese Mission.  

   One of the teachers was Shuji Kanno, an elder with the Wintersburg Japanese Mission and father of James Kanno, Fountain Valley's first mayor and the first Nisei mayor in the continental United States (who also attended the school).  Wintersburg Japanese Mission's Reverend Kenji Kikuchi remembers "we taught the children (at the Costa Mesa school) without any payment because their parents couldn't raise money for the tuition fee."  The Japanese language schools in Harper (Costa Mesa) and Talbert (Fountain Valley) were supported as an outreach effort by the Mission.

   After World War II, Ikeda's property--once again, the legacy of Fanny Bixby--was used as temporary housing for Japanese Americans returning from incarceration.  One of the returning Japanese Americans who stayed there was Kimio Tamura, brother of future California Supreme Court Justice Stephen K. Tamura, both congregants of the Wintersburg Japanese Mission.

   Kamea "Kay" Okamoto Omata received an education and property from Fanny Bixby Spencer, as well as a childhood.  She wrote about Bixby in her 1988 letter to Clarence Nishizu, a Wintersburg Japanese Mission congregant.

    "Since I was eight years old I lived with Mr. and Mrs. Carl Spencer," remembered Omata.  "Mrs. Fanny Bixby Spencer was a great philanthropist and helped many ethnic people. She was an internationalist, a conscientious objector of World War I. She was the first policewoman of L.A. County. She helped the White Russian newsboys and even rented a place for the boys on cold nights to come in to get warm. She helped a Black school in Mississippi called the Piney Woods School."

LEFT: The Los Angeles Times reported in 1988 that Bixby had been "almost tarred and feathered" for her stance regarding the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem during World War I and following years. She wore it like a badge for the rest of her life. (The Eccentric One, Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1988)

   "When the Alien Land Law was passed, she thought that it was a bad law because it affected the East Indians, Chinese, Filipinos and Japanese," Omata wrote. "Mr. and Mrs. Spencer did not have any children. They raised and educated thirteen different children of many nationalities. I was the last."

   Bixby sent Omata to church--even though she herself did not attend--and insisted the children learn about their cultural heritage.

   "She left properties to all. Since I had very little connection with the Japanese language, she left in her will that I spend some time in Japan to learn the language and culture of the land of my ancestors," explained Omata.  "I could not truthfully say that she aided only the Japanese people because she helped all nationalities. She was an unusual lady in that she was a wealthy woman but gave all her money for causes that she believed in." 

RIGHT: A poem published in the Santa Ana Register the same year Fanny Bixby is listed as a contributing author and artist for The Messenger, The World's Greatest Negro Monthly, with the poet Langston Hughes.  As much as she stirred up people with her opinions, Bixby was clear in her love of the diversity of humanity and adopted over a dozen children from different regions of the world, permanently changing the course of their lives. Her generosity to those around her was often noted when Bixby was criticized, including the fact she shared flowers she received during her last days alive in a Los Angeles hospital. (My Native Land, a poem by Fanny Bixby Spencer, Santa Ana Register, March 17, 1924)
  

 Three lines of work

    At the end, Fanny Bixby Spencer appears to have made peace with her self-proclaimed banishment from society, while remaining steadfast to her beliefs.  

   The Santa Ana Register reported at the time of her death on March 31, 1930 at age 50, that Bixby had received "both commendation and condemnation" for her social work and political opinions. She requested no flowers at her funeral, "except simple wildflowers and garden blossoms, such as little children may pick for me."

   Two years before her death, Fanny Bixby wrote to her cousin, Sarah Bixby Smith, about how her early activism changed her life, "Since I have been a social outcast, clubs, like churches, are not in my sphere.  I have three lines of work, bringing up my foster children, helping my neighbors (mostly Japanese farmers) and banging my head against the stone wall of militarism and conservatism that hems me in."

© All rights reserved.  No part of the Historic Wintersburg blog may be reproduced or duplicated without prior written permission from the author and publisher, M. Adams Urashima. 

Orange County author and educator Georgia Day Robertson: Moved to write by her time in Poston

LEFT: Georgia Day Robertson, was in her nineties and living in Costa Mesa at the time she was located by California State University, Fullerton's Oral History Program.  She was 100 years old at the time her manuscript was published. (Photo, Poston Internment Camp Biographies)

   Georgia Day Robertson was a woman ahead of her time.  Her childhood was spent in rural Iowa, where the expectation might have been for her to become a farmer's wife.  Instead, she pursued a Bachelor of Science degree--working her way through school--bobbed her hair before it was fashionable, and embarked on a mission to China to teach at a boarding school for girls.  It was there she met her husband, John A.T. Robertson, continuing to work in China until conflicts in Manchuria forced them to leave.

   After her husband's early death, Robertson brought her two young sons, Angus and David, with her to Southern California while she pursued a master's degree in economic history at the University of Southern California (USC).  She eventually moved her family to Southern California as their permanent residence in 1933.

Teaching, selling eggs and short stories

   "When we came to California, we lived in Midway City... it was in August, after Roosevelt had gotten inaugurated, in August of 1933," remembered Robertson.  "People were still talking about the earthquake, you know; it had happened in March. Then the next eight years—from 1933 to 1941—by selling short stories and teaching at a Santa Ana... evening high school and raising chickens and selling eggs, I was able to make enough money to pay the rent and keep food on the table for all of us, and buy a bit of meat for the cat. I bought two gallons of gas a week to drive to market in Santa Ana."

ABOVE: Damage on Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach after March 1933 earthquake. (Photo, Santa Ana Public Library)

   Robertson recalls Midway City had a population of about a thousand people.  "When they opened the oil fields in Huntington Beach... they had to move a lot of houses out.  So they moved them to Midway City, and that's what started Midway City."

Memories of Orange County's Japanese

    Robertson continued raising her boys as a single parent in Midway City and by 1941 was pursuing a doctorate degree at USC.  She remembers the local Japanese American community.

   "They were ranchers (farmers) and they had their little wayside road stands, where we went and bought vegetables," described Robertson.  "...My son Dave's two best friends were Nisei...and we had very close contact with them. There was a Nisei family that lived right in Midway City that had a fish farm, goldfish for aquariums. They were nice people, lovely people."

   By 1942, Robertson was looking for another teaching job at the California Teacher Association's Placement Bureau in Los Angeles.  "Would you be willing to teach Japanese?" she was asked.  Robertson replied, "Why not?" And, she was told about the Poston, Arizona Relocation Center.

ABOVE: Signpost to Poston, Arizona Relocation Center.  The Colorado River Indian Reservation Tribal Council opposed the use of their land for a relocation center, but were overruled by the Army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Most of Orange County's Japanese community were interned at Poston.  (Photo, National Archives)

Life at Poston

   Robertson's first impression of Poston was bleak.  "Bulldozers had scraped off mesquite, everything off the desert, before the barracks were built. When I went there, there was nothing but these black tar paper buildings...When I saw these Issei there sitting with idle hands, just sitting, sitting, sitting and looking down at the ground. Oh, the things I saw! It didn't take long for me to decide that this was a shameful thing, a tragedy, just a tragedy."

   Robertson became head of the mathematics department for all three high schools at Poston (camps I, II, and III).   The internees at Poston included families from Huntington Beach and Wintersburg, as well as most of Orange County's Japanese community.  Her teachers included Nisei (American born citizens), who she ended up counseling.  It was during this time, Robertson heard the personal stories of internees.

   "At least I could listen to them. They would tell their stories," Robertson explains.  "They were having a hard time handling the situation, because they knew their fathers had never done anything wrong, and there was no reason why they had to put them in prison camps. They just couldn't take it, you know."

   Robertson also describes the teaching conditions at Poston's schools.  "... I'll never forget that first morning when I went into the classroom—bare barracks and no seats even, and a little table for the teacher and a little chair and, back up on the wall, her own little blackboard. And that's all there was in the room. No textbooks, no seats. The kids came in carrying their little stools their fathers had made for them out of mesquite." 

A tone of perserverance

   Like many of the teachers who visited or worked at Poston (see Remembering Ma Shep, February 14, 2012 post, http://historicwintersburg.blogspot.com/2012/02/remembering-ma-shep-on-first-floor-of.html), Robertson acknowledged what was happening to her students and set a tone of perseverance that would be remembered.

   "I won't say I know how you feel, because that would be impossible, it wouldn't be true," Robertson told her students on the first day.  "I can't know how you feel. But I have a good idea. You're here and there's nothing you can do about it, and nothing I can do about it, so there's no reason to punish yourselves by not getting an education while you're here. So let's get down to business."

   Poston closed in November 1945.  Robertson's experiences at Poston left a deep impression on her.  The blog Poston Internment Camp Biographies remembers Robertson, "It was the postwar return to her native Iowa and the discovery that many Midwesterners had never heard of or refused to believe in the reality of the Evacuation that impelled her to put pen to paper in the service of civil liberties and social justice."

Moved to write

  With her Poston experiences fresh in her mind, Robertson set about writing a novel, Harvest of Hate.  It would be forty years before the novel was published. 

   Arthur A. Hansen, Emeritus Professor of History and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), conducted Robertson's oral history interview in 1979 when Robertson was 93 years old.  

   In 1972, Hansen had become aware of "a cache of documents in the university library's Special Collections" relating to the evacuation of Japanese Americans during World War II.  Most of the material had been donated by a "former teacher at Poston."  Among the items was "a large, boxed manuscript of an unpublished historical novel by the donor carrying the title 'Harvest of Hate.' "  

   For six years, attempts to find Robertson proved futile.  By chance in 1978, a letter arrived from Robertson's niece inquiring about the manuscript.  

   Robertson's niece, Dorsey Morris, told CSUF professors Robertson was alive and well, living in Costa Mesa.  

   Robertson's novel, Harvest of Hate, was published by CSUF in 1986, commemorating her 100th birthday.  The novel captures the shock, despair, and confusion felt by Southern California's Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor, the loss of property, life in internment, and the turmoil of returning at the end of the war.  

   Robertson's novel relays the debates among Japanese Issei and Nissei about the prospect of internment.

   "I just can't believe our government would force us out of our homes," states one of the book's Nisei characters, confident that U.S. citizenship offered protection.  "...Men who are working on ranches raising food the Army needs so badly, they couldn't be spared, and women and little children and babies and harmless, crippled old men... a lot of us are doing work important to the war effort, and I think the thing for us to do is go right on working..."

   In one of the book's forewords, Orange County resident and principal founder of the Japanese American Council of the Bowers Museum Foundation of Orange County, Hiroshi Kamei recalls, "I first met Mrs. Robertson in 1944 in the second semester of my junior year at Poston...I remember her then as a stately, proud woman with silver-white hair, who made a tremendous impression on me..."  

   Kamei writes he is "forever grateful" to Robertson, who made a personal appeal to her alma mater, Iowa State College, enabling Kamei to pursue a mathematics degree.  

   Robertson continued her contact with the local Japanese American community after the war.

   "In the late 1940s, while I was away at college... my family ran a farm and roadside vegetable stand in Garden Grove..." recalls Kamei.  "Mrs. Robertson, by then having resumed her teaching career in Orange County, frequently stopped at my mother's stand to chat."  Kamei writes in his book foreword in 1986, "I can think of no greater (100th) birthday gift for her than the publication of her novel."

 Georgia Day Robertson died on December 6, 1991 in Orange County at the age of 105 years.  

Historic Wintersburg author's note:  While Harvest of Hate is out of print, copies can be found through rare and used book sellers, and online sources.  The Harvest of Hate, by Georgia Day Robertson. Edited by Arthur A. Hansen. Oral History Program California State University, Fullerton, 1986. ISBN: 0-930046-08-0 KBF

The oral history interview was conducted for the Japanese American Project of the CSUF Oral History Program.  The full oral history interview with Georgia Day Robertson can be viewed at http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft0p30026h;NAAN=13030&chunk.id=d0e307&toc.id=&toc.depth=1&brand=calisphere&query=Japanese%20American%20Oral%20History%20Project&anchor.id=p35#X

All rights reserved.  No part of the Historic Wintersburg blog may be reproduced or duplicated without prior written permission from the author and publisher, M. Adams Urashima.  

Voices from the past: Part Two The oral histories of Orange County's and Wintersburg's Japanese Americans

 

   Arthur August Hansen is Emeritus Professor of History and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF).  He is the immediate past director of the CSUF Center for Oral and Public History (COPH) and the founding director of COPH’s Japanese American Oral History Project.  He currently serves as a historical consultant at the Japanese American National Museum, holding the position of senior historian between 2001 and 2005.

   Historic Wintersburg continues with Part 2 of the interview with Hansen (see Voices from the past Part 1, March 12, 2012 post), who conducted many of the oral histories for the Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project that paint a picture of Wintersburg's past, including those with Yukiko Furuta (Furuta home at Warner Avenue and Nichols Lane), Rev. Kenji Kikuchi (pastor at Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission and Church) and goldfish farmer Henry Kiyomi Akiyama (a congregant at the Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Church). 

 Arthur A. Hansen, Emeritus Professor of History and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF).

The oral history interviews were conducted with Orange County's pioneering Issei and their older Nisei children.  What other considerations went into the interviewing process?

   One main consideration was geography.  An attempt was made to have project interviews with Nikkei drawn from the different geographical regions of Orange County.  

   For example, Yoneko Dobashi Iwatsuru was chosen in part because her birth family, the Dobashis, farmed in the north Orange County community of Yorba Linda (where, incidentally, she was President Richard Nixon's elementary school classmate).  On the other hand, Betty Oba Masukawa was partially selected as an interview because she came from the well-known Oba family of Fullerton, near Yorba Linda.  In the case of four interviewees--Kyotaro and Mine Yabuki Kaneko, George Jiro Abe, and Aiko Tanimachi Kaneko--they were selected because all made their pre-World War II (WWII) home within a residential enclave on the Hellman Ranch near Seal Beach (northwest Orange County, south of Long Beach, Los Angeles County).  

   As for Yoshiki Yoshida, the president of the Orange County chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League at the outbreak of WWII, it was driven to a certain extent by his family being part of the large contingent of prewar Nikkei family who lived and farmed on Irvine Ranch property (central Orange County).  Maki Kanno's* interview provided the project with a representative from Greenville, in unincorporated area west of Santa Ana.

Jim Kanno*, son of interviewee Maki Kanno,* was interviewed by CSU Fullerton in 1971.  He was the first mayor of the City of Fountain Valley and the first Japanese American mayor in the mainland United States.  The Kanno family were congregants of the Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission and Church.

   Three Issei (Henry Kiyomi Akiyama*, Yukiko Furuta* and Reverend Kenji Kikuchi*) and one Nisei (Charles Ishii) claimed the area of northwest Orange County now encompassing the cities of Westminster, Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley--the veritable cradle of the County's Japanese American community prior to WWII.

   The northern Orange County community of Garden Grove supplied two of the Project narrators, Issei Shizu Kamei and Nisei Clarence Iwao Nishizu.* Clarence Nishizu's family also farmed in north Orange County (Anaheim and Buena Park) during the prewar period.

Clarence Iwao Nishizu, one of the oral history interviewees, also a congregant of the Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Church.  Nishizu was instrumental in the creation of the Orange County Agricultural and Nikkei Heritage Museum at the Fullerton Arboretum and the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.

Was there a lack of representation in south Orange County?

   That was not by design so much as lack of time.  The intention was always to interview a Nikkei from Laguna Beach in south Orange County.  Finally, in 1992, I had a graduate student in American Studies connected with the CSUF Oral History Program, Alan Koch, who interviewed a representative from that area, Dr. Don Miyada, recently retired as a chemistry professor at the University of California, Irvine.  That brought the Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project to a total of sixteen interviews.

   Another consideration in the development of the Project was to achieve a reasonable degree of gender balance among those interviewed.  Among the Issei, there are three men and four women; as for the Nisei, there are six men and three women.  The Project objective was fairly well met.

   A final consideration for the Project was that the interviewees all came from pre-WWII farm families.  This was, after all, Orange County's agricultural era for non-Japanese Americans as well as Japanese Americans, but especially so for the latter.

   Over 90 percent of Japanese Americans were involved in farming.  We wanted to showcase those families farming Orange County's four major cash crops (celery, sugar beets, chili peppers and strawberries), plus families associated with another less customary agricultural activity, goldfish farming, that was particularly identified with the County's Nikkei community.

Partial view of Furuta family barn in Wintersburg, off Wintersburg (Warner) Avenue.  Over 90 percent of Orange County's Japanese Americans were involved in farming. (Photo, March 2012)

What was the general reaction of the interviewees when they learned you wanted to talk with them?

   I think it is fair to generalize to an extent in respect to how Issei interviewees reacted to the prospect of being interviewed on tape for the sake of posterity as compared to older Nisei interviewees.  Whereas the Issei tended to experience anxiety about being interviewed, it was due in large measure to the nature of those who would be interviewing them for the Project's bilingual interviews.  On the one hand, there were American college professors and students, who would be indirectly posing the questions in English for them to answer through translators; on the other hand, there were comparatively young graduates of Japanese universities who would be interviewing them in Japanese (translating the English questions posed and rendering in English their responses).

   What made the Issei interviewees anxious in relation to their English-speaking interviewers was their apprehension that the interviewers might find it strange that immigrants who had been in the United States for approximately half a century would still not be proficient in the English language.

   The anxiety that the Issei interviewees felt in relation to their Japanese translators, however, derived from a quite different circumstance.  Put simply, they felt that the "traditional" Japanese they had acquired in the Meiji-era (1868-1912) and Taisho-era (1912-1926) Japan prior to emigrating was "obsolete" and that this situation would hamper communication with their translators, who had been schooled in a "modern" variant of the Japanese language.

Nisei Kazuo "Kaz" Masuda* attended Huntington Beach High School and, along with his family, attended the Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Church.  The Masuda family's experience during WWII was recognized by President Ronald Reagan during his national address regarding the signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.  (Photo, the442nd.org)

   As for the older Nisei interviewees, their source of anxiety was not tied to language, since their monolingual interviews were exclusively in English.  As a consequence, their degree of proficiency in Japanese did not constitute a concern.  What worried these interviewees was that they would be expected by their academic interviewers to provide detailed information about their parents' background in Japan, as well as their migration experiences both from Japan to Hawaii and/or the continental United States, before their eventual settlement in Orange County.

   These older Nisei also nursed some trepidation that their scholarly questioners would assume that they could present a fairly polished and comprehensive account of the Japanese American historical experience.

   The Issei and older Nisei interviewees did share an acute unease about being interviewed for an oral history project that was rooted in their common WWII mass involuntary eviction from their West Coast homes and incarceration in American-style concentration camps located in the U.S. interior West.  

   Viewed as security risks, whether as aliens ineligible for U.S. citizenship, or as American-born U.S. citizens, Nikkei had been relentlessly barraged with questionnaires or interviews throughout the wartime interval, most of which revolved around whether or not they were "loyal" or "disloyal" to the United States.  These veritable interrogations freighted with possibly dire consequences naturally had the effect of making Americans of Japanese ancestry apprehensive toward all species of interviews.  This situation colored their outlook to being interviewed for even so benign an enterprise as the Oral History Project.

Southern California Japanese Americans in the process of evacuation via Pacific Electric Railway, circa 1941.

What allayed their apprehension and ultimately persuaded them to actively participate in the interviewing process?

   Most of the Issei and older Nisei interviewees were honored to be asked to share their life stories in relationship to the creation and development of the Japanese American community of Orange County.  Although typically self-effacing, they sensed the importance of communicating their experiences, not only for younger and/or newer members of the County's Nikkei community, but also for the edification and enjoyment of the County's non-Nikkei population.  

   Their racial-ethnic past--owing in great part to their unjust wartime exile and imprisonment--had largely been buried, even to their own children.

   The time seemed right in the early 1980s, during the rising tide of the movement among Japanese Americans for redress and reparations of their WWII mistreatment, for those interviewed to speak up for democracy, social justice and dignity.  It also was a time, at the peak moment of the so-called "Japanese miracle" in Japan, for Nikkei to give voice, though not ostentatiously so, to their pride in both their Japanese ancestry and heritage and their history and identity as patriotic Americans of Japanese descent.  

   So if the Project interviewees harbored reservations about telling their stories on tape, their incentives to do so fortunately overwhelmed their misgivings to the contrary.

What would you say were the common themes or stories you heard in the Project interviews? 

   Because of the generational differences between the Issei and the older Nisei, the stories and themes communicated reflected this bifurcation.  

   The Issei, quite naturally, focused their attention on their coming of age in Meiji and/or Taisho Japan, and the reasons governing their migration.  They also devoted much of their recollections to their transoceanic migration experience, including their preparation for it, the nature of the ship upon which they sailed, their personal accommodations, how they were received and treated at their respective port of disembarkation (usually Seattle or San Francisco), and their reaction to and interactions with their new American surroundings and population.  

   They also talked at considerable length about their early American employment, which characteristically was as workers in labor gangs for railroads, lumber mills, agricultural concerns, fishing endeavors, or as domestic servants on large rural estates or urban mansions.

   Many Issei told stories about their marriages, their family and institution-building activities, how they coped with or circumvented prejudicial laws and extralegal measures aimed at them as Japanese or Asian immigrants, and when they decided, and why, to forego returning to Japan and make America (most especially Orange County) their permanent home.

 Japanese American chili pepper farmers. (Photo, California State University, Fullerton)

   The older Nisei interviewees took a different tack in their Project interviews.  The difference had a great deal to do with their being American citizens as opposed to Japanese aliens ineligible for U.S. citizenship.  Most of the older Nisei interviewees--because they were among the first born of their generation in the U.S. and Orange County, emphasized stories and themes consistent with being bridges between their Issei parents' generational experiences and the experiences of their younger, co-generational Nisei siblings.  

   They related stories of having to enter American public schools without benefit of English-language facility and the concomitant need to acquire this competency, sometimes in segregated classrooms, and then pass it on not only to their younger siblings, but also to their mainly Japanese-speaking parents.  

   The older Nisei also discussed their obligation to carry a larger burden in respect to family labor, whether in the agricultural fields or in the family home.  They reflected upon their need to defer participation in school-related activities, such as team sports, music and dramatic productions, in order to buttress the family economy.  They commonly expressed their reaction to having to curtail their education after high school or junior college to assume a larger share of responsibility for managing their family farm and helping to subsidize the cost of higher education for their younger siblings.

Poston, Arizona Relocation Camp on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation, about 12 miles south of Parker, Arizona.  Most, if not all, of Orange County's Japanese Americans were evacuated to Poston.  (Photo, KPBS.org)

   Much more than the Issei, the older Nisei took up the theme of their family's eviction from their homes and communities, and subsequent incarceration in detention centers during WWII.  Most expressed their surprise and indignation that, as U.S. citizens, their civil and human rights could be so disregarded by the American government. 

   On the other hand--still being young adults at the time of the war--their camp experiences assumed a great prominence in their life stories.  These included wartime resettlement out of camp into so-called "free zone" areas throughout the country and their postwar return to Orange County.  Those who served in the U.S. military during the war also covered their experiences in considerable detail.

   Since in the postwar era many of the older Nisei carved out successful careers in a variety of different venues and raised children (third generation Sansei)--who often excelled in school and established themselves as business leaders and professionals--these experiences were frequently (and proudly) covered in their interviews.

*Congregants of Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission and Church.

Next in Part 3:  Arthur A. Hansen talks about the Wintersburg interviews.    

Shuji Kanno, a charter member, elder, and clerk of the Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission (Warner Avenue and Nichols Lane).  Father of Jim Kanno, the first mayor of Fountain Valley and the first Japanese American mayor in the mainland U.S.

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