Draft Comments

Hi, everybody! Here are my comments on reading your drafts. I'll bring my full comments to Andrea in class tomorrow.

Tom--I think you've laid an extremely strong foundation! You do a great job clearly explaining both the political situation in the nation and between Santa Clara and Orange counties. I know you haven't got the whole paper laid out yet, so much of what I'm going to say is probably already what you're planning to do, so I apologize if this is redundant. Your thorough background is great and well-written. It does, however, border on summary in some places, and because it takes on a summary kind of tone, that tends to obscure what parts of this are your own interpretations and arguments. You start to get more into what seems to be your own arguments at the end of the draft, when you discuss the language of the Yes and No on Proposition 14 campaigns, and so I think that's a great sign for the rest of your paper. And it seems a lot like the questions that crop up for me in the first 13 pages will be addressed in the rest of your paper--for instance, what exactly the difference in language in the campaigns indicates in terms of the types of conservatism/liberalism that were becoming prevalent in each county, or how much race played into California politics as a polarizing issue, and how this shift is different from the national shift in the Republican party.

Chris--This has really come a long way, especially in terms of your sources! You've definitely been able to overcome your original difficulty in getting your hands on sources. I have a few questions about how you are planning to tie the threads in your paper together. You talk about how the ways and situation of the Chinese immigrants to California in many ways alienated them from white people, which in turn produced prejudice. But in what ways do the attitudes of white people (towards minorities in general and towards the lower/servant class) play into this as well? You talk about the white tendency to "conflate race with class" when it came to the Chinese. Was this how white people (obviously not all...) viewed other minorities? It seems that race determines class, but for some reason not for white people, who can be both the lower working class (who dislike the Chinese because they are taking their jobs and wages) and the upper class (who look down on the Chinese but employ them as servants). Finally, sometimes your evidence does not quite seem to be helping your point--I'm thinking specifically of the incident with the fire and Jane Stanford's brother, which undermines the point you make beforehand about the Stanfords being unusually open-minded about the Chinese.

Sylvie--I really like the dimensions you've added here. The context of Catholicism in American helps so much. I particularly like the distinction you make between the "social conservatism" among Irish Catholic workers and immigrants and the "political conservatism" among people like Buckley. You also write extremely clearly and vividly. I am not sure yet--we'll probably find out tomorrow in class!--whether you're planning to add something introductory at the beginning, but some kind of introduction might help--maybe a little glimpse of "who is William F Buckley, and what is New American Conservatism," at the beginning might help orient your reader as to what is to come as they're reading your excellent background information. You also do a great job of showing the apparent contradictions or oddities in Buckley: his election campaign, for instance, or his support of contraception for people who don't have a problem with it, immediately followed by his denial that people in India, for instance, need more information on contraception. In response to your final questions, I do think some greater connection between Catholicism and conservatism could be beneficial: how, for instance, did conservatism operate without Catholicism (you show how Catholicism operated without conservatism, at least in Buckley's eyes)?