In the era of the First World War and its aftermath, the quest to identify, restrict, and punish internal enemy “others,” combined with eugenic thinking, severely curtailed civil liberties for many people in Oregon and the nation. In Oregon’s Others, Kimberly Jensen analyzes the processes that shaped the growing surveillance state of the era and the compelling personal stories that tell its history.
Oregon’s Others is the newest book in the Emil and Kathleen Sick Series in Western History and Biography on the peoples and issues that have defined and shaped the American West.
To start, can you share a bit about your background and what led you to this study?
As a professor of history and gender studies it is my privilege to work with students, colleagues, and members of our community who are restoring the voices and experiences of diverse people to our collective history. In my previous books, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women and the First World War and Oregon’s Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism, I analyzed the history of women and citizenship rights as woman suffrage and the quest for a more complete female citizenship via service in the First World War came together.
In Oregon’s Others I explore the collisions between civic gains like voting for some people and the losses, often very violent and consequential losses, for others in this period using the lens of civil liberties and surveillance. It’s also very important to me to emphasize the many forms of resistance people used to address these violent and destructive processes. That resistance gives us hope in our own day.
Your book focuses on historical events and processes during and after the First World War. Can you help set the scene? How do we get from an era of so-called progressive reform to the exclusionary and reactionary postwar aftermath?
The era of “progressive” civic, legislative, and workplace reform from the 1890s to the First World War contained deep currents of exclusion, white supremacy, eugenic thinking, and discrimination by race, ethnicity, gender identity and presentation, class, ability, and nationality that limited the scope and effects of those reforms. Wartime and postwar “crises” and severe curtailment of civil liberties in the name of national security provided opportunities for some people to claim a more complete citizenship through loyalty to the state’s aims and programs but also destroyed civil liberties and safety for others.
Can you share a few examples from the book that reflect the ways that the war and eugenic policies expanded surveillance in the early twentieth century?
Wartime and eugenic policies created mutually reinforcing categories of “fit” and “unfit” people, loyal supporters of state projects, and dangerous internal enemy others who did not conform or who did not contribute to the state’s aims. Policymakers promoted surveillance as a vital tool to identify and punish enemy others. They deputized and pressured community members to help conduct that surveillance and report the results to local, state, and federal authorities in the name of loyalty and productive citizenship.
Anna Mary Weston was a second-generation German American railroad car cleaner in Portland who was the first woman in Oregon to be tried under the Sedition Act of May 1918 for speaking against the war effort. Federal agents questioned Weston and her co-workers at her workplace at North Bank Station and then arrested her. Her story illustrates the power of overlapping surveillance projects that create collateral scrutiny.
A federal jury later found Weston not guilty by reason of “mental incapacity” and frequent references to her “mental condition” meant she was also vulnerable in her workplace in this era of eugenic scrutiny. Weston was acquitted of federal sedition charges but authorities did not commit her to the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane in the aftermath of her verdict and additional sanity hearings, even though other family members were committed. The reason is something I try to unravel in the book.
The registration of noncitizen “enemies” during the war included German citizen women residing here and also women born in the United States who lost their US citizenship when they married German citizen men due to US naturalization policy in force at the time. Local and federal leaders also used “alien enemy” registration to police gender presentation and identity. Police or other agents could require anyone to provide proof of identity and registration.
Margarita Ojeda Wilcox fled the Mexican Revolution with her US citizen husband and went to the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane in 1919 to recover from what we might readily identify today as post-traumatic stress. Federal and state policy combined to target Ojeda Wilcox as a Latina born in Mexico and immigration officials and hospital administrators worked to deport her as she was also considered for possible eugenic sterilization. Ojeda Wilcox’s female patient file became a record of surveillance against her. But the same law that required women married to German citizen men to register as noncitizen enemies protected Ojeda Wilcox who became a US citizen upon marriage to her US-born husband. She gained her release without deportation or sterilization.
How does focusing on Oregon amplify our understanding of the nationwide restrictions and challenges to civil liberties going on during this time? In what ways is Oregon’s history unique in this respect?
During this period Oregon gained a “star state” reputation for workplace reform and the “Oregon System” of tools to restructure state and local government such as the referendum to bring more power to voters. The war brought additional “Oregon Firsts” including local and state policies to control sexually transmitted infections and detain women suspected of being infected; licensing laws for businesses and hotels to combat “vice” that targeted gender non-conforming people, sex workers, and Japanese business owners, including Issei women who managed rooming houses; and first-in-the-nation status in various wartime and postwar bond drives to support the government. This created even more pressure to be “first.”
In 1920 Oregon deputized residents to identify “mental defectives” in a singular statewide survey, and one Oregon policymaker advocated the eugenic sterilization of all first-generation Japanese women as a solution to the “Japanese Problem” a year later.
Oregon First “achievements” created a blueprint used by policymakers in other states and at the federal level to identify, surveil, and punish people considered dangerous internal enemies. Studying Oregon helps us see that blueprint, to understand how and why people created it, and suggests the importance of Oregon’s story in informing similar studies in other states, regions, and the nation.
What was your process of gathering the many compelling personal stories you share throughout the book?
Many state and federal archival materials and records of private organizations like the Oregon Social Hygiene Society were created by people intent on surveilling internal enemy others and punishing them. These records include Bureau of Investigation files; World War I “alien enemy” registration forms; files on people who refused to support the wartime Food Pledge campaign to conserve food; case notes on parolees of The Cedars detention home for girls and women suspected of carrying sexually transmitted infections; and Black Portlander Ruth Brown’s habeas corpus court challenge to the double-standard of women’s incarceration there.
The records also include Oregon State Hospital files; the 1920 “Oregon State Survey of Mental Defect, Delinquency, and Dependency”; federal “Industrial Surveys” of Indigenous people living on reservations; and a state “census” of Japanese Oregonians set in the context of a narrative based on fear of first-generation Issei women and their US-born citizen children.
These materials are housed across many different archives and libraries. This phase of the work absolutely depends on the incredible support of archivists and librarians who know these collections.
I believe we need to read and understand these records and the stories they reveal both as the tangible tools of exclusion and othering but also as vital evidence of people’s resilience and resistance in the face of these surveillance projects. To use the sources in this way is to challenge the surveillance projects and the ideas and actions at their foundation as we tell the stories of people at the center.
Then it is important to develop as much additional information as we can about the people whose lives and stories we encounter in these archival sources. Historic newspapers offer incredible details on people who have been left out of the larger historical narrative and the digitization of these newspapers is an invaluable help in this gathering process. This is also true for vital records.
For example, I was able to analyze birth certificates in the state from 1917 to 1918 to demonstrate that seventy percent of Issei women in Portland chose Japanese Oregonian midwives to help them with the birth of their child and to register the important evidence of their children’s births with the state as one way to resist attacks against them. Sometimes these materials are among the very few we have about people who otherwise left little in the historical record about their lives. I encourage all of us to support digitization projects in our communities for access and preservation of these materials.
By using this comparative approach across communities and across institutions we can amplify our understanding of the collective impact of the hunt for internal enemy others and see the destructive power of interconnected systems of discrimination and exclusion at work.
How do the themes in Oregon’s Others relate to present-day issues of civil liberties and surveillance in the state and beyond?
By tracing the growth of the surveillance state and challenges to civil liberties one hundred years ago and by chronicling the persistence and resistance of people in the face of that onslaught, we can hold up a mirror to our own day and think about ways forward to help repair that past and empower all people in our present and future.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
I hope readers will connect with people whose compelling voices and experiences are in the book and see themselves and their communities reflected in the stories the book brings to light. I also hope readers will find strong reasons to engage with the struggles of a century ago as we realize more than ever the constant need to maintain and fight for civil rights and civil liberties protections for all of us. The hunt for internal enemy others in our past can inform our present with the knowledge that unless everyone’s rights and liberties are protected, no one’s will be safe. I hope the study will bring home the destructive dangers of “us” versus “them” thinking and actions.
Kimberly Jensen is professor of history and gender studies at Western Oregon University and author of Oregon’s Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism and Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War.
Upcoming Events
September 14, 2024: Sisters Festival of Books with Paulina Springs Books, 11:00 a.m. PT
Sisters Movie House, Sisters, OR
October 10, 2024: Sick Lecture Series at UW with the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, 4:00 p.m. PT
Petersen Room, Allen Library, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
October 16, 2024: Oregon’s Others Scholarship Symposium, 4:30 p.m. PT
Columbia Room, Werner University Center, Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR
October 19, 2024: PNW History Conference Gender & Sexuality panel, 10:30 a.m. PT
Hilton Portland Downtown, Portland, OR
October 25, 2024: Western History Association Conference panel, 8:15 a.m. CT
Sheraton Kansas City at Crown Center, Kansas City, MO
Emil and Kathleen Sick Series in Western History and Biography
The Sick Series is supported by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Washington.
