Two Suns on Arizona

For 30 years Dr. Benjamin Baker ("B. B.") Moeur (pronounced More) was family physician to thousands of people in the countryside around Tempe, Ariz. A hefty, wrinkled-faced man, with a gruff manner and a heart of gold, he talked turkey to his patients, drove miles through the darkest weather to combat indigestion or bring babies into Salt River Valley. Even when in 1932, the wheel of political fortune boosted him from the role of family doctor to Governor of Arizona, he never expected to become the centre of an international incident.

Yet last week he was. The Press in Tokyo cried: "Arizona has supplanted Manchuria as Japan's principal trouble zone." A consul of His Britannic Majesty called officially upon the 64-year-old country doctor. From distant Washington, Acting Secretary of State William Phillips, prodded in the rear by Japanese diplomats, frantically telephoned Dr. Moeur. The whole trouble was started by Dr. Moeur's old patients down in Salt River Valley.

The sandy loam of the valley, when irrigated by good water from Roosevelt Dam,* produces superior vegetables. But 1,000 disgruntled farmers had gathered together in the valley for a protest parade. They were incensed at 1,000 chipper little Japanese and some three dozen Hindus who were raising great big heads of lettuce and juicy lemons on their fertile valley soil, eating rice and doing nicely while an honest Aryan could not make a decent living.

A white farmer named Fred Kruse got up and told the others what was what. Hindus and Japanese were moving up from Imperial Valley. In spite of Arizona's land laws which forbid aliens ineligible for U. S. citizenship from owning, leasing or farming land except as laborers, yellow men and brown were already farming 8,000 acres. It was time to put a stop to it! Let every Japanese and Hindu quit the valley by Saturday night or the Aryans would run them out!

Then the kettle was on the fire. From Los Angeles rushed Shintaro Fukushima, Japanese vice consul and half a dozen Japanese businessmen. They asserted that of 125 Japanese families in Salt River Valley, 25 were U. S. citizens by birth, that they legally owned about 150 acres and leased 300 acres more, that all the others were laborers. Wentworth Gurney, British consul, followed and went into a conference with Daljitsingh Sadhari and Ralmat Ali Khan. Protests flashed East and West and overseas.

Governor Moeur and State's Attorney General LaPrade went into action. They let Salt Valley's farmers know that the Law would be enforced without fear or favor, both the alien land law and the law against violence. Warrants and temporary restraining orders were issued against a score of people, some Japanese, others U. S. whites accused of leasing land to Orientals (penalty: two years in jail, $5,000 fine). Complaints poured in and more action was promised. Meantime 800 angry Aryan farmers met and voted against violence if the land laws were enforced.

Then Governor Moeur turned reassuringly to the Empire of the Rising Sun and the Empire on which the Sun Never Sets to declare: "I want to enforce the law not with an iron hand but gently, as I feel there is an equitable way of adjusting this situation without trouble. . . ."

*Named after Roosevelt I and completed in 1911.

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