The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights by Sarah M Griffith

Author:Sarah M Griffith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

The Legacies of a Movement

Liberal Protestant resistance to anti-Asian discrimination unfolded over the first half of the twentieth century and climaxed in World War II. To understand and appreciate their wartime opposition to Japanese American internment, it is necessary to look more closely at the decades that preceded the war. Since the turn of the twentieth century, liberal Protestants with ties to Japan challenged white nativists on the Pacific Coast and in Congress and advocated assimilation, Americanization, and intercultural understanding to combat racial discrimination. Through institutional and grassroots mobilization, liberal Protestants lobbied against legislation like the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone, which restricted immigration from the majority of Asia, and the 1924 Immigration Act, which mandated Japanese immigrant exclusion. Contrary to nativists, who argued for preserving the United States for the white race, liberal Protestants envisioned pluralism not as a threat to the country but as a symbol of its progress. Despite the wholesale exclusion of Asian immigrants after 1924, liberal Protestants leveraged their influence with American progressives, government officials, and mainline churches to encourage international cooperation, national sovereignty, and racial equality in the Pacific.

Since the mid–nineteenth century, discrimination against Chinese and Japanese immigrants had been fueled in equal parts by racism and shifting national and international politics. Prior to the 1870s, Chinese were welcomed to the country as a cheaper alternative to white labor, and industrialists lobbied Congress to maintain mutually beneficial trade and immigration treaties with China. As the nation fell into economic depression in the mid-1870s, nativist organizations leveraged their influence in Congress to lobby in favor of Chinese immigrant exclusion. From 1882 through the early 1900s, Congress continued to strengthen legislation against Chinese immigration on both economic and racial grounds. Similar patterns characterized efforts to restrict and exclude Japanese immigrants. By the early 1900s, Japan had evolved into a powerful trade partner and a military superpower in the Pacific. Unwilling to threaten the United States’ economic interest in the Pacific, officials in Congress and the State Department refused to entertain calls from Pacific Coast nativists to legislate against Japanese immigration. Following attempts by the San Francisco school board to segregate Japanese and white children in public schools in 1906, the Roosevelt administration stepped in to negotiate the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement. The agreement acknowledged Japan’s national sovereignty to regulate its own immigration system while appeasing, at least for a while, some of the most ardent nativists on the Pacific Coast. The impotency of anti-Japanese organizations on the Coast shifted during World War I as fears of communist subversives fueled a nationwide push for more stringent immigration legislation. Between 1917 and 1924, Pacific Coast nativists built their political capital among officials in Congress who supported restricting immigration from Eastern and Southeastern Europe and excluding entirely immigrants entering the nation from Japan.

American YMCA secretaries were hardly oblivious to the politics that drove nativism in the United States, and they consistently adapted their strategies to meet new challenges. Amid debates over the future of Japanese immigration in the post–World War I

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