Denouncing the Asian presence in the Golden State was nearly an unwritten requirement for white candidates seeking elective office in Progressive Era California. Republicans, Democrats, Populists, and socialists alike agreed that immigrants from the Far East posed problems to the entire West Coast. The Bay Area having America’s largest cluster of transpacific immigrants, San Francisco became the flashpoint of racial tensions in California, particularly with respect to relations between whites and incoming Japanese aliens. Underscoring the Golden State’s connection to the Asian Pacific Rim, these tensions led to a diplomatic crisis between Japan and the United States. As the immigrants’ Pacific gateway to the United States, Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, served as the clearing house for those who would be admitted into America, or deported.
Most of the 55,000 Japanese immigrants entering the United States from 1900 to 1908 settled in California, with some 1,781 residing in San Francisco in 1900. Most of those living in the outlying areas and in the Southland worked as farm hands. Having been pivotal in the nation’s recent anti-Chinese movement, the city and its press objected to more “Orientals” arriving on its shores in the 1890s. These objections grew more strident in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s stunning 1904-5 military defeat of Russia. The victory of a non-white nation (Japan) over a white one (Russia) magnified the fears of San Franciscans and a growing number of Americans that Japan was fast becoming a serious threat to the Pacific interests of the United States. Those interests included expanding maritime trade with China while protecting America’s recently acquired Pacific stepping stones to that trade in Hawai’i and the Philippines, and defending the West Coast in case of attack.
Fearing the “silent invasion” of Japanese immigrants, in 1905, 67 organizations - mainly labor unions - founded the national Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL), headquartered in San Francisco. Labor groups had been similarly involved in anti-Chinese agitation in the 1870s (see Chapter 6). The AEL’s California branch alone boasted 100,000 members. Its primary goal was to prevent Japanese people from working in agriculture and industry, as well as to stop the influx of such immigrants into the United States. Its methods included distributing propaganda, lobbying for anti-Japanese legislation, holding rallies, and conducting boycotts.
On October 11, 1906, amid the earthquake’s smoldering ruins, rising levels of antiJapanese violence, and sensational graft trials, the San Francisco Board of Education responded to pressure from the AEL and ordered Japanese students to attend an Oriental Public School in Chinatown. The board statement read in part: “children should not be placed in any position where their youthful impressions may be affected by association with pupils of the Mongolian race.” Sacramento Assemblyman Grove Johnson put into more explicit language his concern for the safety of innocent white schoolgirls who might be seated next to older Japanese boys “with their evil oriental thoughts.”
An international crisis quickly developed. The Japanese press denounced the board’s policy as insulting and ungrateful in view of a $250,000 donation from Japan to aid San Francisco’s recovery from the recent earthquake and fire. Japan’s government lodged a protest in Washington, D. C., declaring that the action of the San Francisco board violated a treaty guaranteeing Japanese children equal educational opportunities in the United States. Acutely aware of Japan’s predominant position in Asian Pacific waters and the difficulty of defending America’s territory in the Philippines, President Theodore Roosevelt ridiculed the board’s policy as a “wicked absurdity.”
To resolve the issue, in early 1907 Roosevelt arranged for San Francisco Mayor Eugene Schmitz and the board members to meet with him in the nation’s capital. There a deal was struck that afterward was incorporated into the informal Gentlemen’s Agreement of 19078 between the United States and Japan. According to that agreement, only overage students and those unable to speak English might be sent to separate San Francisco schools. This stipulation would apply to all foreign-born students and not exclusively to those from Japan. In return for this concession, Japan promised not to permit workers, skilled or unskilled, to immigrate to the United States.
In the immediate aftermath of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, San Francisco and other major California ports played highly publicized roles in America’s follow-up show of naval strength to Japan. Convinced that relations with Japan would remain stable and peaceful only if that nation feared the United States, Roosevelt ordered the entire American battleship armada, known as “The Great White Fleet,” on a round-the-world “goodwill cruise” that included a stop at Yokohama, a leading port city near Tokyo. En route to Japan from Hampton Roads, Virginia, the fleet was welcomed by crowds at San Diego, San Pedro, and especially San Francisco where half a million enthralled spectators cheered the warships as they steamed through the Golden Gate.
Despite the Gentlemen’s Agreement and naval show of strength, Japanese immigration to the United States mainly via San Francisco resulted in a further 120,000 new arrivals by 1924. This increase was due largely to so-called “picture brides” shipping to California, swelling the population of alien Japanese in the state. Such brides were so called because having seen only photographs of their prospective husbands of Japanese descent residing in America, the young women participated in marriage ceremonies in Japan. Now wed, the female spouses boarded San Francisco-bound vessels. On arrival, the new wives joined their waiting husbands.
Many of the picture brides labored with their farmer husbands in the fields of the Central Valley. Initially, these families (issei or first generation) farmed as laborers; before long, through their knowledge of growing and their herculean work ethic, some acquired acreage of their own. By 1910 they owned some 17,000 acres and leased more than 80,000. They introduced rice farming in the state and, like Chinese farmers decades earlier, grew potatoes commercially. Soon white growers complained about competition from the state’s immigrant Japanese farmers, particularly those owning their own land and prospering.
Ingrained anti-Asian racism and fear of competition in farming led to the passage, with support from Hiram Johnson and all political parties, of the state’s Alien Land Act of 1913. By its terms “aliens ineligible to citizenship” could not buy California land or lease it for more than three years. Because a federal law of 1790 specified that naturalized citizens must be white, Japanese residents in California were ostensibly prohibited from owning their own farmland or leasing acreage for more than three years. However, the intended targets of the law found legal loopholes. For example, Japanese immigrants bought land in the name of their American-born (nisei, or second generation) children, who were U. S. citizens,
Figure 9.4 Japanese "picture brides.” The original caption appearing in the San Francisco Examiner, March 9, 1919, read in part: "Here are a number of 'picture brides' from the land of cherry blossoms, photographed on the deck of a ship just pulling into San Francisco harbor. They are destined to be the wives of Japanese residents of California.” Courtesy of California State Parks, 2012. Image 231-18-9.
Or they partnered with whites in co-ownership arrangements. To combat the perceived subterfuge, in 1920 the Native Sons of the Golden West and the American Legion, two groups that identified closely with California’s pioneering and the nation’s military traditions respectively, succeeded in securing tighter alien land-owning restrictions.
Land-seeking and other Japanese newcomers to America usually passed through San Francisco’s Angel Island Immigration Station. Situated just inside the Bay, the station served as the United States Pacific gateway, much as Ellis Island in New York City had been functioning as America’s Atlantic gateway with at least one critically important difference - Angel Island was established largely for the purpose of excluding Asians, particularly the Chinese. Built in 1910, largely to enforce the policy of Chinese exclusion, the station processed immigrants from about 80 nations throughout the Pacific Basin and beyond.
Unlike Chinese arrivals, Japanese immigrants detained at Angel Island between 1910 and 1924 were seldom deported. Those sent back to Japan were usually rejected because of diseases diagnosed by examining physicians at Angel Island. Hookworm, an intestinal malady sometimes afflicting Japanese picture brides, led to quarantine and treatment at the station, followed by admission into the United States on receiving medical clearance. Still, detention on Angel Island was unpleasant; quarters were cramped and unclean, privacy was lacking, and the station was described as a prison by some detainees.
World History
