Patrick's responses to each thesis

“Toward a More Perfect World” Summary

            In Knowles’ examination of one of the most iconic movie stars in American history, he defines Clint Eastwood’s artistic arc as similar to the arc of his character Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino, one of his most recent roles. Deeply affected by violence, Kowalski in the Korean War and Eastwood in his many films that glorified violence, the two gradually found new identities as community members or artists that have helped Americans come to terms with our history of violence, both in cinema and in reality.

            Knowles continually compares Eastwood’s experiences, films, and persona to those of John Wayne, who represents a less cynical representation of American violence as necessary and moral, if occasionally extra-judicial. While their characters in westerns share similarities (each has a moral code and tries to help individuals find justice), Knowles claims that Eastwood’s characters’ comfort and indifference to violence represented a cynicism to American history prompted by the Vietnam War and continued injustice. Knowles argues that through films like Letters from Iwo Jima and Gran Torino, Eastwood finds a middle ground, growing cynical and distasteful of violence itself, rather than American history.

            Overall, throughout Eastwood’s career he forced Americans to confront the violence in their history, and he represented in film how much of American society felt about that history. Knowles shows that whereas Wayne glossed over the violence and Dirty Harry glorified it, characters like Kowalski acknowledged it and resolved to, if not stop it, then come to terms with how violence shaped American history and cinema.

Santo Domingo Affair Thesis Summary

            Bianca Dang’s “The Fate of the ‘Negro Republic’” examines how Reconstruction and post-war tension in the United States and particularly the South affected and was affected by American expansion and federal attempts to determine how to address racial conflict and white supremacy. By examining Reconstruction foreign and domestic policy together, Dang shows that ideas about equality in the United States extended to and affected how the nation approached relations with the Dominican Republic. Using the views of well-known African American political figures of the time such as Frederick Douglass and Henry McNeal Turner, Dang argues that those in favor of Dominican annexation used multiple arguments and justifications but ignored the potential negative effects of annexation on the Dominicans themselves.

            Reasons for annexation included President Grant’s desire for another naval base, Douglass’s hope that the United States could help the Dominican Republic, and Turner’s postulation that black southerners might need a safe location should the South turn even more violent than it already was. These justifications proved unsatisfactory to half of the US Senate, and the resolution to annex the Dominican Republic failed. Dang notes that it was only after this failure that Grant organized a commission to determine whether or not Dominicans wanted to be annexed, which she argues points to a patronizing assumption of American superiority. Throughout her thesis, Dang shows how context, in regards to Reconstruction, affected and prompted these distinct views on Dominican annexation, viewing Douglass’s optimism as a result of his inexperience with the postwar South and Turner’s pragmatism as a direct result of living there.

Tacoma Chinese Expulsion Thesis Summary

            Unterreiner’s analysis of racial violence towards Chinese laborers in Tacoma succeeds in contextualizing racism and discrimination in the post-war environment as well as the economic changes of the late 19^th century. Unterreiner argues that white working class men responded to their loss of jobs by targeting the Chinese workers who were being exploited by employers. Acknowledging the employers’ exploitation, calling it “slavery,” and assuming the moral high ground, Tacoma whites and its newspaper demanded action against the Chinese. Unterreiner uses his thesis to demonstrate how this argument, viewed as racist and hypocritical now, fit within the context of how many Americans conceived of racial equality and rights.

            Reminiscent of antebellum anti-slavery movements in California, which focused more on the labor that would be “stolen” from free white workers by slave-owning southerners, the arguments of the Tacoma Daily Ledger and Tacomans decried slavery and blamed both the Chinese and their employers for destabilizing society. Unterreiner points to an enduring belief, enshrined by political figures like Justice John Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson, that Americans consist of two races, white and black, with Asian individuals not belonging in American society to explain why many white Tacomans blamed what they called “Chinese slavery” on the Chinese. Unterreiner shows how this belief has changed the Asian and Asian-American experiences and still affects them today.