West Coast Cities Research Articles

The Gradient of Ecumenism and Opposition to Religious Intermarriage

As a result of the practice in research on interreligious marriage of classifying subjects by the heterogeneous categories, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, persons who are dissimilar on important variables are placed together while those persons who are similar are separated. Important relationships may thus be confounded. This study explores differences in attitude towards religious intermarriage among respondents randomly selected from the membership lists of ecumenical, moderate, and exclusive churches in a medium-sized west coast city. Results of interviews show that ecumenical church members show the least opposition to intermarriage and members of exclusive churches the strongest opposition. Intermarriage involving an exclusive church is the most strongly opposed regardless of respondents' church affiliation. Age, sex, occupation, or education show no significant influence on the expressed opposition to intermarriage. Individual church activity, contributions, or cultural relativism have a mixed influence on attitude. It is suggested that future research on interreligious marriage give more attention to the ecumenical-exclusive dimension of churches. Interfaith marriage has been one of the most widely researched topics in the sociology of religion. For the most part the studies on interfaith marriage that have been done have focused on the three conventional divisions, Catholic, Protestant, and Jew. However, recent critiques have argued that the practice

Youth Crime in Urban Communities

"Street hustling" is a comprehensive term for various criminal activities by an increasing number of urban youth. Its objective is to make large sums of money quickly without a wanton display of violence. Successful hustling has given. rise to an illicit life style characterized by opulence and personal distrust of those involved. It has also influenced essentially noncriminal and precriminal youth to view a life of crime as a desirable alternative to more con ventional career pursuits. Street hustlers, their crimes, and their general criminal orienta tion are discussed as distinct features of one West Coast city. Black male hustlers are of primary concern in this article although, in fact, criminal hustlers are both male and female and are from vari ous racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Reactions of Samoan burn patients and families to severe burns

Samoan families involved in a disastrous fire in a West Coast city in 1964, and medical and agency personnel who worked with fire victims were interviewed 5 years after the fire to determine individual, family, and community response to the fire and its aftermath. Medical personnel uniformly remarked on the extraordinary stoical response of patients to pain, death of loved ones, lasting disfigurement and related potential stressors. Samoans reported considerable initial distress, but, in contrast with published reports of American burn patients, there were few acute or lasting emotional problems. Specific Samoan cultural, social, and religious patterns which appear to have mitigated or even precluded widespread emotional problems are suggested. It is commonly acknowledged that cultural factors contribute significantly to responses to pain, injury, death and other universal potential stressors of man. This paper explores some of the broader aspects of what Mechanic has called “illness behavior” —the manner in which pain and symptoms are defined, labeled, perceived and reacted to. The fire described here resulted in 17 deaths and some 70 moderate to severe burn injuries. The survivors of this fire experienced a variety of potential stresses triggered by severe burn injuries, long hospitalization and recuperation periods, and resulting permanent physical disfigurement. Yet the Samoan response offers a remarkable contrast to that customarily reported in the literature.

Retention of Cultural Values and Differential Urban Adaptation: Samoans and American Indians in a West Coast City

Retention of Cultural Values and Differential Urban Adaptation: Samoans and American Indians in a West Coast City

Retention of Cultural Values and Differential Urban Adaptation: Samoans and American Indians in a West Coast City

Retention of Cultural Values and Differential Urban Adaptation: Samoans and American Indians in a West Coast City

The Honolulu Metropolitan Area: A Challenge to Traditional Thinking

AFEW months ago that usually unemoLltional paper The Bond Buyer described IL Hawaii as paradise and a paradox, and also an exciting adventure, a state of mind, and a chain of enchantingly lovely islands. It is indeed all of these things, and more, but in this paper it will be interesting to concentrate on those aspects of Hawaii, and particularly Honolulu, which throw some light on our traditional thinking about government of metropolitan areas on mainland. First, to set background, a few words descriptive of Hawaiian Islands as a group and particularly of Honolulu, our country's only metropolitan area in Pacific, would seem in order. The Hawaiian Islands are remote, being separated by over 2,000 miles from our West Coast cities and from nearest islands in Pacific having populations of any consequence-namely, Samoa and Tahiti. They have been called the most isolated of important land areas. The Hawaiian Islands are largest group in Central Pacific, covering 6,412 square miles of land-about equal to area of states of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. The 1950 Census reported a total population for Territory of Hawaii of about a half million.

New York Motion Picture Production<!--<xref ref-type="other" rid="fn1-10.5594_J12642">*</xref>-->

There Have Been many news articles with reference to the problem of motion picture production in the City of New York, and many of them, I fear, used the language of the West Coast by reason of the extravagance of the adjectives used. Our approach has been a simple and a modest one. It is an approach that I think any people residing in any city, who have an interest generally in the welfare of that city, would take with reference to a business to which it feels it can contribute substantially. We do not envision Siting Hollywood from the West Coast and dropping it into New York City. That would be ridiculous and we realize and know that only too well. We do believe that we have many things here that this industry needs and we feel that the City of New York is entitled to and properly should be given a greater percentage of the production of pictures and that if the facilities, if our scenes, if our backgrounds, if that which we have to contribute are utilized by the industry, it will result not in bitter competition between the West Coast and New York City, or competition between any other center of production and New York City, but it will serve as a stimulant which will bring improvement to the motion picture industry.

Wartime Controls in a Democratic Society

IT IS THE contention of those who oppose democracy as a method of government that a democracy is so cumbersome that it cannot mobilize for quick action to meet the exigencies of war. It is also maintained that a democracy cannot control or discipline its people sufficiently to carry through a program requiring a high degree of mobilization of national resources. The main contention is that authority is not sufficiently centralized and the people not adequately schooled in obedience to provide quick and decisive action on a national scale. Some of our experiences in the present war are useful in assessing whether a democracy is capable of a high degree of mobilization, and if so, what methods it employs. Probably the most pertinent example would be the methods used by the United States to control manpower and to channel it into the most urgent wartime needs. This article is not intended as a comprehensive analysis of our wartime manpower program. It will deal primarily with the system of local committees set up to apportion labor to the most urgent needs. However, some background of the general manpower situation is necessary to view these committees in their proper perspective. We entered the war with a problem of unemployment which had never been solved since the depression years. Therefore, in the early stages of war production, manpower was not a serious shortage problem. Later, as munitions industries mushroomed and the demands for a large number of workers quickly materialized, the workers were recruited largely through offering high wage levels for munitions industries and depending on migration to supplement labor forces within the localities. By 1943 it became apparent that we had reached a stage in the war at which a lack of sufficient manpower of the right skills in the proper places was one of the most serious drawbacks to full production. It became more and more apparent that voluntary methods of recruitment and dependence on competitive factors in allocating the labor force were inadequate to channel labor into war needs and to hold it there. The first program for meeting the situation was the beginning of the employment stabilization program of the War Manpower Commission. There was instituted, first on the West Coast and later throughout the nation, a system of requiring certificates of availability if a worker wanted to leave an essential industry and to go into other work. This program still fell short of solving a serious shortage of workers in the aircraft industries on the West Coast because it was intended only to prevent turnover, and because there were so many ways of evading it. Since the possibility of migration, or interregional recruitment, as it was called by the War Manpower Commission, to the West Coast was no longer practical because of the crowded living conditions and the lack of sources for recruitment, it was decided that the time had come to examine the allocation of labor within labor market areas. Studies were made, therefore, of the major West Coast cities in which labor shortages for aircraft and shipbuilding were most serious. It was discovered that sufficient labor was available in non-essential industries within the area to fill the demands if they could be transferred into the war plants. Two steps were necessary before this transfer could be accomplished. First, by some means it had to be decided which were the industries of high urgency; and second, a method of channeling workers into these industries had to be devised. Early attempts were made to accomplish both these ends through action from the