Spring Break
Symposium looks at post-war occupations
Mansur Mirovalev
Daily Staff Writer
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The lectures of the Charles B. Burdick Memorial Military History Symposium were held at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Joint Library and were organized by the San Jose State University history department and the Burdick Military History Project.
The project is named after the late Professor Charles B. Burdick, a World War II veteran and former chair of the SJSU history department.
"Burdick, known as the 'king of the classroom,' was instrumental in founding the military history program at SJSU," said Jonathan Roth, director of the project and associate professor in the SJSU history department.
In the first lecture, Professor Jeffrey Himmel from the SJSU economics department, addressed successes and failures of the Reconstruction in the post-Civil War American South.
Himmel said he has a background in both economics and history. His lecture reviewed the post-war developments in the South and the challenges the Republican Party encountered before and after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Emancipation of nearly four million slaves in the South was compromised by restriction of their civil rights for almost a century and a failure of the land reform that was supposed to provide them with "40 acres and a mule," Himmel said.
After the lecture, answering questions from the audience about the occupation of Iraq, Himmel said that, despite the U.S.-led efforts to introduce secular democracy in post-Saddam Iraq, a secular political regime seems impossible in the country.
In the second part of the symposium, Professor George Moore, who recently retired from SJSU, talked about his personal experience in Japan during his military service in his lecture titled "A 19-Year-Old Lieutenant's View on Japan's Occupation."
Moore was born in Osaka and spent the first 13 years of his life in Japan, as his father and grandfather were Christian missionaries in the country. The Moore family left for the United States in 1940, and in late August 1945, Moore went back to Japan as a U.S. Army interpreter and translator.
"American soldiers and officers in Japan had to disarm the population, teach democracy, stay out of trouble and accumulate enough points to go home," Moore said during a humorous excursion into his military past.
In Moore's opinion, the implementation of democracy in Japan was successful because in the 1920s the Japanese had already been exposed to liberal reforms and understood democratic principles and procedures.
The new Japanese constitution, drafted in only five days under supervision of the U.S. General Douglas McArthur, was adopted in 1946 and has never been amended since, Moore said.
The only similarity between the U.S. occupations of Japan and Iraq is the word "occupation," Moore said.
A major factor in Japan was the official acceptance of the defeat and a lack of resistance on the part of the population and soldiers, Moore said.
"In Japan, the emperor Hirohito declared the end of the war, but I don't remember Saddam Hussein saying 'The war is over,' " Moore said in conclusion.
The Burdick Military History Project will continue lectures and events open for students and the public. The project plans a tour to the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation in Portola Valley on April 24, Roth said.
The Foundation has 211 pieces of military equipment, including tanks and artillery, and is considered the largest private collection of military vehicles in the world, he said.
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