Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

By Lon Kurashige

From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then has shaped the memory of past discrimination.

In this first book-length analysis of both sides of the debate, Kurashige argues that exclusion-era policies were more than just enactments of racism; they were also catalysts for U.S.-Asian cooperation and the basis for the twenty-first century's tightly integrated Pacific world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781469629445

Lon Kurashige

Lon Kurashige is professor of history at the University of Southern California.

Book preview

Two Faces of Exclusion

Two Faces of Exclusion

THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF ANTI-ASIAN RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES

Lon Kurashige

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

© 2016 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Set in Arnhem and Aller types

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Shimomura Crossing the Delaware by Roger Shimomura. Used by permission of the artist.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kurashige, Lon, 1964– author.

Title: Two faces of exclusion : the untold history of anti-Asian racism in the United States / Lon Kurashige.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016018925| ISBN 9781469629438 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469629445 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Racism—United States—History. | Asian Americans—History. | Asians—United States—History. | United States—Race relations—History. | United States—Emigration and immigration—History. | Asia—Emigration and immigration—History.

Classification: LCC E184.A75 K87 2016 | DDC 305.800973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018925

Portions of chapters 3 and 7 and chapter 5 were previously published in somewhat different form, respectively, in Lon Kurashige, Transpacific Accommodation and the Defense of Asian Immigrants, Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 2 (May 2014): 294–313; and Lon Kurashige, Rethinking Anti- Immigrant Racism Lessons from the Los Angeles Vote on the 1920 Alien Land Law, Southern California Quarterly 95, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 265–83.

For Cole and Reid

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chronology

INTRODUCTION: Racism and the Making of a Pacific Nation

1. BEFORE THE STORM: Race for Commercial Empire, 1846–1876

2. FIRST DOWNPOUR: Chinese Immigrants and Gilded Age Politics, 1876–1882

3. EYE OF THE STORM: The Laboring of Exclusion, 1882–1904

4. RISING TIDE OF FEAR: White and Yellow Perils, 1904–1919

5. FLOOD CONTROL: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Japanese Exclusion, 1919–1924

6. SILVER LINING: New Deals for Asian Americans, 1924–1941

7. WINDS OF WAR: Internment and the Great Transformation, 1941–1952

8. AFTER THE STORM: Debating Asian Americans in the Egalitarian Era

CONCLUSION: Why Remember the Exclusion Debate?

Notes

Bibliographic Essay

Index

Illustrations

Tables

I.1 Asian vulnerabilities and U.S. immigration fears / 12

2.1 Party vote on Chinese labor exclusion, 1879 and 1882 / 47

2.2 Republican votes on Chinese labor exclusion by region, 1879 and 1882 / 48

2.3 U.S. cotton and silk manufacturing by region, 1880 / 51

2.4 Chinese exclusion keywords in select newspapers, 1876–1882 / 54

2.5 Regional difference in House Republican votes in the Forty-Seventh Congress / 60

5.1 Occupational distribution by select Los Angeles precincts, 1920 / 129

C.1 Policy community significance by historical era / 229

Maps

2.1 Chinese labor exclusion voting by congressional district, 1879 / 49

2.2 Chinese labor exclusion voting by congressional district, 1882 / 50

5.1 Support for alien land law in California by county and region, 1920 / 125

5.2 Opposition to alien land law in Los Angeles, 1920 / 127

5.3 Support for Republican presidential candidate in Los Angeles, 1920 / 127

7.1 Support for alien land law in California by county and region, 1946 / 131

A section of illustrations follows page 110

Preface

This book studies racial politics—the crass, overt, in-your-face kind that discriminates against groups of human beings based upon supposedly objective criteria such as nationality, heredity, culture, and skin color. This type of racism, once the norm, is now ostracized to the fringes of most societies, including the United States. As a result, when studying contemporary America scholars tend to focus on more subtle, less visible, or what some call polite forms of racism that perpetuate racial discrimination and inequality stealthily and often without intention. There is much to appreciate about this kind of analysis, but it can be taken too far such that the historical distinction between vulgar and polite racism gets fuzzy and we lack understanding of the sometimes surprising process through which vulgar racism was overcome in law and politics, if not totally eliminated. A case in point is the history of anti-Asian racism in the United States, the subject of this book.

The idea for this investigation began in the archives, like so many works of history do. While reading through documents by a seemingly notorious anti-Asian racist, I discovered that later in life he curiously changed his views about race. After his conversion, he struggled to end the exclusion of Japanese immigrants and later was a rare leader of public opinion to oppose the internment of Japanese Americans to concentration camps during World War II.¹ In researching this man’s transformation, I found many other influential whites who had fought against anti-Asian discrimination. I also turned my gaze inward. After publishing two books and numerous articles on Asian American history and after teaching university courses on the subject for more than a decade, how could I have missed this persistent and robust opposition? It turned out that my ignorance had less to do with me than with an intriguing blind spot in historical knowledge. I started writing Two Faces of Exclusion to explore this collective amnesia and ended up rethinking the larger history of anti-Asian politics.

What has emerged is a story about an intense and shifting political conflict over the discrimination of Asian immigrants and ethnics, whom I refer to inclusively as Asian Americans. Before writing this book, I had assumed that the Japanese American internment, as well as immigration exclusion and other acts of prejudice, derived from an ongoing national consensus of opinion that considered Asians inferior to whites and antithetical to American institutions. But I have learned that these expressions of racism never went uncontested within the policy-making community and that even those who upheld whites as the superior race could oppose discrimination against Asian Americans. For more than three decades, from the middle to late nineteenth century, this opposition prevented Californians bent on excluding the Chinese from ending the nation’s immigration policy welcoming all peoples irrespective of race.

Yet from 1882 to 1924, a perfect storm of historical circumstances converged to enable lawmakers to shut America’s gates to Asian immigrants and further discriminate against those already in the country. While the Chinese had faced harassment in California since first coming in the 1850s, as well as the handicap preventing Asians from becoming U.S. citizens, they retained the same rights of entry as any immigrant until Congress in 1882 placed laborers from China in a special category for restriction. From that time, restriction turned into exclusion for nearly all but elite classes of Chinese, as the number of new arrivals dwindled. The ban spread to latter migrations from Japan, India, and Korea—and by statute any Asian with the exception of Filipinos, who, when they became U.S. colonial subjects, gained free right of entry to the imperial homeland. The Immigration Act of 1924 codified Asian exclusion. In establishing quotas for all nations outside the Americas, Congress prevented only the peoples of Asia from using them.

But historical conditions began to change again after 1924. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the forty-two-year storm of exclusion weakened. While institutional racism persisted, and while Filipinos lost their right of entry and were summarily excluded, rays of sunlight appeared, such as the granting of naturalization rights to Asian immigrant veterans and the rise of support for Asian American workers in the house of labor. After exerting a powerful last gasp with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the storm abated with surprising pace. Chinese exclusion lifted in 1943, and three years later so did the policies against Filipino and Indian immigration. By 1952 all Asians had access to national origins quotas and could become U.S. citizens. Consequently, the regime of institutional racism that was built on the denial of naturalization came crashing down with a suddenness that no one expected. Hawai‘i statehood (1959), which established a lasting and influential Asian American voice on Capitol Hill, and comprehensive immigration reform (1965), which equalized immigration quotas for everyone outside the Americas, produced the final end to the exclusion era. Since then the nation has witnessed its largest and most diverse influx of newcomers from Asia—the foundation of today’s vibrant and growing Asian American population. While remnants of exclusion era racism remain and new storms have appeared, the mother of all storms is over. Given equal rights and opportunities, Asian Americans have attained dramatic social mobility and mainstream acceptance; and by taking advantage of a new era of relatively open (though highly selective and in their own way discriminatory) immigration and refugee policies, they were able to increase the group’s overall population from fewer than 330,000 in 1950 to well over 17 million by 2010.

This, in a nutshell, is the book’s narrative. The pages that follow flesh out its details and contingencies through analysis of the societal fears and Asian immigrant vulnerabilities that lined up to create the perfect storm of exclusion. The findings reveal that lacking one or more of these factors left exclusion, along with attendant forms of institutional racism, politically weakened. While the proponents of exclusionary policies command much attention in this book, so too do their political adversaries. For exclusion was not a rout; it was a debate. There were always two sides to the question. Even during the height of anti-Asian policies, when exclusionists won a series of victories, the organized and well-funded opposition included some of the most powerful leaders in fields of American politics, business, religion, academia, and culture. Exclusionists remained watchful and wary of their respected opponents; they never underestimated them.

While the exclusion debate focused on Asian Americans, it was at the same time connected to a constellation of issues, interests, and ideas in American politics and international relations. The debate touched nearly every major political theme in modern U.S. history. At the center was the division between East and West of which exclusionists, following Rudyard Kipling’s famous line, said, Never the twain shall meet. But also key was the regional divide between East Coast and West Coast, as well as familiar conflicts between North and South, black and white, free and unfree labor, Republicans and Democrats, president and Congress, workers and owners, feminists and gender traditionalists, farmers and monopoly capital, isolationists and internationalists, town and country, Communists and capitalists, and peace advocates and supporters of war preparedness. Exploring the exclusion debate requires heeding the advice of a well-respected historian of American slavery. To understand people’s attitudes about race, he cautioned, you have to understand their attitudes about everything.²

The story traces the exclusion debate as it spilled beyond the boundaries of what we have come to think of as Asian American issues to merge with broad concerns about immigration, race relations, sectional interests, industrial relations, international relations, and national security. In fleshing out this expansive context, the research has relied upon sources that, although commonly used in studies of political history, are often overlooked in the analysis of Asian Americans. These include congressional roll-call voting, electoral voting returns, and other forms of historical data. Wherever possible, I have used basic quantitative analysis to ground the study of political debate.³ In handling discourse, I have put a premium on using the words of the main actors, especially as expressed in public forums like congressional hearings and speeches, legal decisions, and executive decrees. I also have relied upon existing studies, especially on subjects where the literature is particularly strong, while adding my own substantial research to fill gaps of knowledge and shore up areas thinly studied. What results is neither a monograph nor a work of historical synthesis but a hybrid of these two genres that one scholar aptly calls a research survey.⁴ For the specialist, this book offers a fresh interpretation of familiar sources. For the newcomer to Asian American history, it provides a political and intellectual framework that can serve as the foundation for further reading on social, cultural, intellectual, gender, sexual, religious, legal, global, and other dimensions to this experience.⁵

In order to cover more than a century of anti-Asian politics within a study of reasonable length, I have concentrated on groups that excited the greatest concern and whose proposed and real discrimination catalyzed the most powerful opposition. As such, the narrative centers on the earliest and largest groups, Chinese and Japanese Americans, whose homelands remained central to U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region throughout the book’s narrative. The analysis also focuses on Filipino and Indian Americans, but Korean Americans are only briefly mentioned because their migration ended before the U.S. government could get involved in stopping it. Also largely absent in this story are the voices of everyday actors (agricultural and industrial workers, farmers, small business operatives, mothers, and children) who cared deeply about the exclusion debate but whose actions within the United States and Hawai‘i had at best an indirect impact upon the policy-making process.⁶

Like many historians, I have explored the past with one eye on the present. For more than a decade while I was conducting research for this book, there occurred numerous debates in the United States and around the world about the discrimination and restriction of immigrants. While the most dramatic conflicts no longer involve Asian Americans, they testify to the ongoing issues studied here. Sometimes I have been struck by the uncanny similarities between present and past; yet at other times I am equally impressed by the great changes that have occurred that make the past seem like a truly strange place. What, then, is the exclusion debate’s contemporary relevance? This is the toughest and most urgent question addressed in this book. The introduction opens with it, and the conclusion provides answers that may be surprising to those who see anti-Asian racism as simply a blemish on the nation’s historical record. If you read this book carefully and grasp its meaning, then you will be prepared to offer your own answers. My greatest hope is that it encourages us all to work together in resolving current and future storms of exclusionary politics.

Acknowledgments

This book project started before my two sons went to school and has finished as the oldest is getting ready for college. In a sense, working on it has been like raising another child. It was born of great hope and enthusiasm; developed in fulfilling, humbling, and at times uncomfortable ways; and ended up becoming something that was both expected and yet wonderfully surprising. I’m happy and grateful to acknowledge the village of support that I enjoyed in raising this third child.

Let me begin by recognizing support from the Abe Fellowship (2012–13), administered by the Social Science Research Council. Nicole Levit, her staff at the SSRC, Ellis Krauss, Eiji Kawabata, and other affiliated scholars made my year as an Abe Fellow productive and quite enjoyable. Research funding from the University of Southern California constituted the backbone of support for this project. This includes the USC Dornsife Dean’s Office for a generous book subvention; Provost Immigration and Integration Initiative Fellowship; Provost Undergraduate Research Program Award, which at the outset of this project enabled me to hire four undergraduate researchers (Katie Gibelyou, Lauren Nakamura, Victor Lee, and Hannah Buerano); and Advancing Scholarship in the Social Sciences and Humanities award, which gave me an early sabbatical to finish writing this book. Additional funding provided by USC’s Center for Japanese Religions and Cultures and a short-term research fellowship from Hannan University came at an important time. While in Japan conducting research, I affiliated with three schools: University of Tokyo, where it was quite special to be connected with Yujin Yaguchi and his graduate students; Sophia University, where I enjoyed discussions with Kazuto Oshiro, Mariko Iijima, and Yuko Konno, as well as the companionship of Mika Minoura and Naoko Suzuki at the Center for American and Canadian Studies; and Hannan University, where Tomoe Moriya was ever the gracious and intelligent host.

Many pieces of this book grew out of my participation in panels at professional conferences for Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association as well as its Pacific Coast Branch, Association for Asian American Studies, and Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The research also benefitted from my involvement in a series of symposiums run by Yasuko Takezawa (Kyoto University) and in invited talks for Wesleyan University, Simon Fraser University, Portland State University, Purdue University, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, University of Nevada, University of Tokyo, Hannan University, Sophia University, Imin Kenkyukai (Study group for Immigration History), Historical Society of Southern California, and the University of Southern California. Sections of this book were previously published in Pacific Historical Review and Southern California Quarterly. I want to thank David Johnson and Carl Abbott, and Merry Ovnick for my engagement with their journals and for granting permission to reproduce parts of my articles in this book. I’m also grateful to Roger Shimomura for allowing me to reproduce his amazing and provocative art on the book cover.

It is particularly rewarding to recognize the teachers and mentors who continue to speak to me, in person and in spirit, long after my undergraduate and graduate years. The late Robert Kelley (UC Santa Barbara) stands out for his personal support and model of scholarship, which taught me to appreciate far-reaching patterns in American politics, as well as the importance a historical lens can bring to policy analysis. Allan G. Bogue and Tom Archdeacon introduced me to quantitative historical analysis when I was in graduate school, and long after I left Wisconsin, Professor Bogue went out of his way to assist me with roll-call voting analysis. In Los Angeles, Carole Shammas has been my inspiration and go-to source for quantitative history. As a teacher and mentor myself, I enjoyed interactions with hundreds of students who engaged with ideas and pedagogy related to this book; one of these was Vivian Yan, who also provided research assistance. I take particular delight in acknowledging the graduate students (now esteemed colleagues) whose questions, comments, and research interests not only improved this book but also changed the way I see the world. They are Phuong Nguyen, Mark Padoongpatt, Yuko Konno, Go Oyagi, and Yu Tokunaga. Yuko provided the added bonus of skilled translations, archival assistance, and companionship while I was conducting research in Japan.

As partly a work of historical synthesis, this book relies especially on the research of others. I am fortunate to be part of the first generation of scholars to have benefited from the establishment of Asian American history as a legitimate field of study. How wonderful it has been to draw upon the ideas of so many brilliant, innovative, and courageous thinkers—the most relevant of whom are acknowledged not only in the endnotes but also in the bibliographic essay. Past and present colleagues at USC who have contributed to this book include Philippa Levine, Bill Deverell, Jason Glenn, Duncan Williams, Jane Iwamura, Jane Junn, Josh Goldstein, George Sanchez, Saori Katada, Carole Shammas, John E. Wills, Phil Ethington, Steve Ross, and Lois Banner. The librarians and staff members at USC offering much appreciated support for this project were Katharin Peter, Sherry Mosely, Beth Namei, and Sue Tyson. And crucial to my analysis of precinct voting in Los Angeles were Yao-Yi Chiang (USC Spatial Sciences Institute), for his technical assistance; Todd Gaydowski (Los Angeles city archivist), for finding and digitizing a large map upon which the analysis was based; and my research assistants John Tan and Evelyn Sanchez.

An extended community of scholars and friends who commented on parts of the book manuscript at various stages or otherwise supported this research was another invaluable resource. Thank you to Mari Yoshihara, Gordon Chang, Sarah Griffith, Meredith Oda, Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, Yujin Yaguchi, Augusto Espiritu, Rick Baldoz, Madeline Hsu, Maddalena Marinari, Michael Block, Gary Gerstle, Michael Omi, Dana Takagi, Eric Muller, Yasuko Takezawa, Greg Robinson, Nadia Kim, Reverend John Iwohara, Richard Modiano, and Eiichiro Azuma. I can’t thank enough Brian Hayashi and Naoko Shibusawa for taking time away from their own pathbreaking research to critique the entire book manuscript at an advanced stage. It was Brian who helped me see that the perfect storm metaphor could be extended to chapter titles. I also was very fortunate to receive feedback from Paul Spickard and Erika Lee as official referees for the University of North Carolina Press and even profited from an anonymous report that failed to meet the standards for peer review. Chuck Grench, my editor at UNC Press, has been a rock of support for me and my work, and Jad Adkins, Mary Caviness, and others at the Press have been both friendly and professional. And then there was Julie Bush’s masterful copyediting, which saved me from more inconsistencies and mistakes than I care to remember. As convention has it, none of the persons listed in these acknowledgments bears responsibility for errors in this book. That burden is mine alone.

Finally, there is no way I would have completed this project without a stable and supportive family and home environment. That my extended family history in California, Hawai‘i, the Pacific Northwest, and Japan is embedded in the stories told in this book has made this project all the more meaningful to me. In the end, my own family—Anne, Cole, and Reid—deserve the ultimate credit for creating a fulfilling household from which I could work, and for which I have been happy to do so.

Chronology

1842 Treaty of Nanking ends First Opium War 1844 Treaty of Wanghia launches formal U.S.-China relations 1848 California and Oregon (up to Puget Sound) become U.S. territories 1850 California imposes foreign miners’ tax targeting the Chinese 1853 U.S. forces Japan to end isolation from global relations and trade 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce launches formal U.S.-Japan relations 1860–65 U.S. Civil War 1862 Anti-coolie trade law 1865–77 Reconstruction era 1868 Fourteenth Amendment; Burlingame Treaty guarantees Chinese immigration 1870 San Francisco approves anti-Chinese Cubic Air Ordinance 1871 Massacre of Chinese in Los Angeles 1879 Anti-Chinese Fifteen Passenger Act vetoed by President Hayes 1881 Angell Treaty revises liberal Burlingame Treaty 1882 Chinese exclusion law bans laborers for ten-year period 1886 American Federation of Labor (AFL) founded 1892 Geary Act renews Chinese labor exclusion for another ten years 1894 Revision of unequal U.S.-Japan treaty; Immigration Restriction League founded 1898 Hawai‘i and Philippines annexed by the United States 1904 Exclusion Act makes ban on Chinese laborers permanent 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt’s message to Congress favors Japanese immigration 1907 Japan Society of New York founded 1910 Korea becomes a Japanese colony; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace founded 1913 Alien land law enacted in California; Rockefeller Foundation established 1916 Philippines Autonomy Act (Jones Law) 1917 Immigration Act excludes Indian immigrants 1920 California voters strengthen alien land law (Proposition 1 approved); United States refuses to join the League of Nations 1922 Washington Conference arms limitation treaties; Ozawa decision confirms ineligibility for U.S. citizenship to nonwhite Asian immigrants 1923 Survey of Race Relations begins; Thind decision confirms Indian immigrants’ ineligibility for U.S. citizenship 1924 Immigration Act excludes Japanese immigrants and calls for national origins quotas 1925 Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) founded in Hawai‘i 1930 Watsonville anti-Filipino riots 1934 Philippine Independence Act (Tydings-Duffie Act) excludes Filipino immigrants 1935 Nye-Lea Act grants U.S. citizenship to Asian veterans; Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) established 1937 International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union established 1941–45 United States in World War II 1942–45 Evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans 1943 Revision of unequal U.S.-China treaty; Chinese exclusion repealed; all-nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team established 1945 United Nations founded 1946 Luce-Celler Act repeals Indian and Filipino exclusion; Philippine independence 1948 Evacuation Claims Act provides nominal payment for internee losses 1949 Peoples Republic of China founded 1950–53 Korean War 1952 McCarran-Walter Act ends Japanese exclusion 1954 Hawai‘i Democratic Revolution 1955 AFL and CIO merge 1956 Alien land law repealed by California voters 1959 Hawai‘i statehood 1964 Civil Rights Act; United States escalates troops in Vietnam War 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (Hart-Celler Act) ends national origin system 1968 Asian American movement established 1988 Civil Liberties Act pays reparations for Japanese American internment 2012 House of Representatives expresses regret for Chinese exclusion

Two Faces of Exclusion

Introduction

RACISM AND THE MAKING OF A PACIFIC NATION

Visitors to Los Angeles’s historic center, if they look carefully, will find information about the city’s original Chinatown not far from Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church, Avila Adobe, a monument to Latino American war veterans, and the Mexican-themed commercial district of Olvera Street. One sidewalk placard marks the location on Calle de los Negros where on October 24, 1871, a mob of 500 locals shot, hung, and stabbed innocent Chinese residents. This massacre, the marker reads, erupted during a period when anti-Chinese legislation and social discrimination greatly affected Chinese American families and their community life and left them without legal protection.

How do denizens of the twenty-first century make sense of this all-too-true image of Asian helplessness and victimization on the American frontier? Two answers present themselves. First, the hostility is seen as a reflection of more recent racism that has plagued Asian Americans. The murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 by two unemployed white automobile workers in Detroit, Michigan, is a bracing example of the reoccurrence of anti-Asian violence. Ronald Ebens and his nephew Michael Nitz got into a fight with Chin, mistook the Chinese American man for being Japanese, and beat him to death, motivated in part by vengeance against Japanese automakers for competing so successfully against their American rivals. The attackers used racial epithets, calling the victim Chink and Jap, and before the fight began one of them decried, It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work.¹

In the recent past, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and other Asian Americans have been the victims of similar outbursts of racially motivated killing. More common are less violent and more subtle forms of hostility expressed through hate speech, accent discrimination, and glass ceilings in employment. Stereotypes are the most banal, but hardly innocuous, form of anti-Asian prejudice. One type assumes that Asian Americans are uniformly smart and successful model minorities, while another questions their ability to become truly American. Such nonviolent racism was central to the case of Wen Ho Lee, a naturalized Taiwanese American scientist who in 1999 was fired from a research position at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A federal judge charged Lee with selling nuclear weapons secrets to China and placed him in solitary confinement for nine months. It turned out that the scientist was innocent on all counts of espionage and that FBI investigators had leaped to conclusions in part due to his ancestry. The presiding judge, as well as President Bill Clinton, publicly apologized to Lee for his unnecessary ordeal while reprimanding overzealous law enforcement.²

The murder of Vincent Chin and case of Wen Ho Lee testify to the often misrecognized fact that Asian Americans continue to face discrimination, stereotypes, and violence, but the persistence of anti-Asian racism is too easily forgotten in today’s post-racial America. That said, the degree of helplessness and victimization experienced by the Chinese on Calle de los Negros in 1871 seems strangely remote from our world today. If the first response to the Chinatown massacre is to view it as a distant mirror from which to understand the continuation of racism today, the second is to see it as a kind of circus mirror projecting a grossly exaggerated picture with little contemporary relevance. From this second perspective, the vigilante killings appear like a historical artifact from the Wild West, when pioneers crossed the country on horse-powered wagons, engaged in pistol-spinning duels, and took scalps as war trophies. It goes without saying that Southern California’s current Asian American community—consisting of Chinatowns, Little Tokyo, Koreatown, historic Filipinotown, Little India, Little Saigon, Thai Town, Cambodia Town, and massive populations dispersed within the region’s sprawling suburbs—looks nothing like it did on that fateful night in October 1871.

In striking contrast to the nineteenth century, Asian immigrants now enjoy the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen or permanent resident. Social discrimination receives sanction by neither government nor normative understandings of race or community standards. All anti-Asian laws and legal precedents have been expunged from the books or rendered moot. Congress officially apologized for Chinese exclusion and authorized payment of $20,000 as restitution to every living survivor of the Japanese American internment. The impressive ascent in socioeconomic status for Asian Americans has inverted the exclusion era meaning of Chinaman’s chance, which had meant having no chance at all. Today, as writer Eric Liu puts it, Chinaman’s chance means being afforded the great opportunity, enjoyed by millions of new immigrants, to achieve the American dream.³ To borrow a phrase from activists in the 1960s, the yellow peril has become the yellow pearl as Asian Americans have infused the United States with millions of dollars of foreign capital, not to mention priceless contributions to the nation’s human capital, economy, culture, and universities. Asian Americans are even making noticeable inroads into such arenas as entertainment and politics in which they have been woefully underrepresented. Their influence across many fields of endeavor is so powerful that one wonders why and how American society changed so dramatically since the days of the Chinese massacre.

How did a nation that once singled out Asian Americans for discrimination and scorn end up becoming the world’s magnet for today’s migrations from Asia? The burden of this book is to explain the long-term process through which U.S. leaders overcame hostility toward Asian Americans in order to embrace the country’s Pacific destiny, which in the mid-nineteenth century foretold a golden age of U.S.-Asian commerce and civilization. More than 150 years later, the vast majority of American policy makers accept the country’s identity as a Pacific nation that celebrates its interconnections with the vast Asia-Pacific region. To explain this historical transformation, many scholars have studied America’s Pacific history through a wide-angle lens capturing the evolution of economic, geopolitical, and cultural trends over long periods of time.⁴ In contrast, Two Faces of Exclusion sheds light on this story of global integration by narrowing the focus to institutional racism in the United States because discriminatory legislation, treaties, diplomatic agreements, legal rulings, and administrative decisions were critical bellwethers for America’s development as a Pacific nation.⁵ The analysis pays close attention to the movers and shakers of anti-Asian policies, including public officials (presidents, members of Congress, justices, cabinet members, and foreign diplomats) as well as groups and individuals with direct interests in public policies, such as scholars, labor organizers, missionaries, business leaders, peace advocates, and other nonstate actors. While today Asian Americans play leading roles in any discussion of anti-Asian racism, this was not the case in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Asian immigrants were disenfranchised and thus forced to exert what policy influence they could leverage through sympathetic whites and officials from their home countries. The actions and perspectives of Asian Americans, with a few exceptions, became influential during and after World War II when these groups overcame the handicaps that had marginalized them from the political arena.

Exclusion Debate

What, then, explains the rise, persistence, and fall of anti-Asian institutional racism? Answering this question requires focusing on a core political conflict between exclusionists, who used the state to discriminate against Asian Americans, and the opposition to this discrimination from groups and individuals whom I call egalitarians. Exclusionists are not hard to imagine as antagonists who perpetrated conceptions and practices of white supremacy during a time when race had much more ominous, hierarchical, and explicit meanings than it does today. It is important to note, however, that exclusionists were not demons. While some evinced a disturbing cold-heartedness and lack of universal empathy, most expressed a commendable compassion for the underdog, even though this did not extend to Asian Americans. Egalitarians are more difficult to envision than exclusionists because the century in which the exclusion debate took place is fixed in our minds as overwhelmingly, if not monolithically, racist. From today’s perspective, it is hard to imagine many policy actors back then who embodied the dictionary definition of egalitarian: "relating to, or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities." So how do we to explain the significant opposition to anti-Asian racism?⁶

This book defines egalitarians as those who opposed exclusionist demands through language rooted in America’s Declaration of Independence, which famously claims that all men are created equal. As a foundational political discourse, egalitarianism was malleable—so much so that even exclusionists justified racial discrimination as necessary for egalitarian purposes, including equal opportunities for working-class whites. But this was a racial discourse rooted in an exclusive vision of a white republic or classless society. In contrast, those I call egalitarians projected an inclusive view of the nation in which Asian Americans were accorded equal treatment. In opposing Chinese exclusion in 1882, Senator George Frisbee Hoar argued, Nothing is more in conflict with the genius of American institutions than legal distinctions between individuals based upon race or upon occupation. The framers of our Constitution … meant that their laws should make no distinction between men except such as were required by personal conduct and character.⁷

President Theodore Roosevelt also used the language of inclusive equality in 1906 when defending Japanese immigrants. The Japanese, he said in that year’s State of the Union address, have won in a single generation the right to stand abreast of the foremost and most enlightened peoples of Europe and America; they have won on their own merits and by their own exertions the right to treatment on a basis of full and frank equality.⁸ During World War II, the photographer Ansel Adams extended this nondiscriminatory language of equality to Japanese Americans confined in concentration camps. His book of photographs Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans affirmed the good citizenship he found among the internees at the Manzanar camp and contained this affirming quote from President Franklin D. Roosevelt: In vindication of the very ideals for which we are fighting this war, it is important to us to maintain the high standard of fair, considerate, and equal treatment for the people of this minority, as of all other minorities.⁹

FDR’s statement reveals complexities and contradictions within the egalitarian position, for the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans stemmed from his own racial suspicions and willingness to discriminate members of this group from among other enemy aliens and U.S. citizens. Theodore Roosevelt, too, could uphold Japanese equality on one hand while undermining it on the other by pledging allegiance to the white race. Even George Hoar, who remained steadfast in his opposition to Chinese exclusion, was not beyond voting for the exclusion of French Canadians and others deemed a labor and civilizational threat to his home state of Massachusetts. As a result, it is important to see egalitarians not simply as righteous antiracists but rather as historical actors driven by interests that often perpetuated the racial status quo as well as the domestic and global capitalist order. Egalitarians were not saints; even the many missionaries who defended Asian Americans possessed their own cultural biases and saw discrimination as a threat not just to their religious principles but also to their material and political interests in spreading the Gospel. In this way, the egalitarian defense of Asian Americans was limited by both a pragmatic sense of what was politically possible in an imperfect society as well as by judgments based in religion, race, class, nation, gender, and other ideological constructs that deemed only certain types of Asian Americans worthy of protection, such as merchants, students, Christians, and others who were not laborers, Communists, or prostitutes.¹⁰

Egalitarians were also diverse and situated in time and place. In addition to missionaries, Radical Republicans included Asian immigrants within their attempt to reconstruct southern race relations after the Civil War. Conservative business leaders focused on a crucial labor supply embraced egalitarianism, as did peace advocates and racial liberals who were the forerunners of civil rights activism that came to include Asian American issues after World War II. But here is the crucial point about egalitarians: regardless of their different, antithetical, and imperfect motives, they, as a coalition of interests invested in the nondiscrimination of Asian Americans, played a crucial role in the history of anti-Asian racism. Their combined efforts impeded, moderated, and eventually overturned exclusionary laws that significantly influenced the lives of millions of people within and outside the United States. Such actions also shaped the nation’s race, labor, and international relations, as well as the development of what has been called the Pacific World. If we are to understand the trajectory of anti-Asian policies, then we must grasp the core conflict between exclusionists and egalitarians.¹¹

The assertion that anti-Asian racism was debated, rather than simply imposed, is at odds with conventional historical understanding. Scholars for the past half century have been preoccupied with the exclusionist side of the story. These studies have revolutionized our understanding of U.S. policies and practices by revealing, with increasing originality and sophistication, the centrality of race in the historical experiences of Asian Americans.¹² But in so doing they have played down, if not overlooked, the significance of the egalitarian opposition to anti-Asian racism. What results is a picture of American racial consensus that emphasizes discrimination, abuse, indifference, and the compromising of democratic ideals.¹³ The pragmatic, historically contingent conception of egalitarians used in this book presents an opportunity to explore beneath the surface of this apparent racial consensus by interrogating the conflicting positions taken by policy makers on Asian American issues.¹⁴

One reason why the relevant scholarship has ignored the robust egalitarian opposition has to do with the field’s preoccupation with racial formation, the making of race as a material and ideological structure of inequality and domination. In this way, the sphere of formal politics has been understood as an arena of race making, and in so doing a wide variety of forces that have influenced anti-Asian policies (including diplomacy, national security, labor relations, and imperial expansion) have not been appreciated on their own terms. Rather, they are seen as determined by racial discourse, if they are discussed at all.¹⁵ A related factor that has obscured the importance of the exclusion debate has stemmed from the separation of diplomatic relations from the analysis of exclusion era politics. Before the 1960s, the study of anti-Asian politics in the United States fell into two main research areas: one focusing on U.S. relations with East Asia and the Pacific, and the other on processes of assimilation, including the formation of racial attitudes by dominant groups as well as the social, cultural, and psychological adaptations made by minorities. The current scholarship on anti-Asian policies derives from the second type of research while largely neglecting the first.¹⁶ A telling sign that the earlier diplomatic studies have been forgotten is that the latest research on Asian Americans has embraced international experiences and contexts as if these were brand-new trends in the study of Asian immigration. To be sure, the recent focus on transnationalism has opened up fresh questions regarding migration and diaspora that were not anticipated by the earlier diplomatic studies. But these earlier studies of diplomatic and trade relations remain indispensable for understanding the history of anti-Asian politics, a process that shaped, and was shaped by, the formation of the larger Pacific World.¹⁷

The shortcomings of the conventional approach demand a new framework that can account for both sides of the exclusion debate as it enveloped all major Asian immigrant groups. It is tempting to see such a framework as revealing a past that although still replete with racism was not as bad as we have thought. But this is not how I see it because such a perception implies that the history of racism exists on a continuum, with some viewing it as really oppressive (say a 9 on a 1–10 scale) and others viewing it less so (a 6 out of 10). The continuum implies judgment of historical approaches usually based on their utility for a contemporary political or ideological project (e.g., advancing a cause or a conditioned ideal of objectivity). The framework used in this book is designed to understand the conflict between exclusionists and egalitarians rather than to judge or rank how bad the past was. Its operating assumption is that persons on either side of the exclusion debate had more in common than they realized. All of these historical actors believed in the righteousness of their cause and cast aspersions on their opponents, and in so doing enacted social, political, and racial divisions that perpetuated rather than ended conflict. The fact that recent scholarship has focused on exclusion without addressing the centrality of the exclusion debate is indicative of the persistence of these divisions, albeit in very different circumstances.

The narrative in this book takes a long-term view of the rise and fall of institutional racism in order to understand the way in which the United States became a Pacific nation. In particular, the exclusion debate is historicized within the confluence of four independent yet conjoined policy issues that each generated a stable community of interest across space and time. The main policy communities centered on immigration and labor, race relations, foreign relations, and national security. Each community has had its own internal debates, constituencies, policy-making processes, and historical trajectories. Egalitarians typically consisted of immigration expansionists, race liberals, internationalists, and civil libertarians. Exclusionists, on the other hand, were often immigration restrictionists, race conservatives, isolationists, and security hawks. Each side of the exclusion debate represented a historically specific alliance of ideologically and materially heterogeneous actors, some of whom made rather strange bedfellows.¹⁸

The alignments were remarkably stable over time, but some groups and individuals within the policy communities changed positions in ways that had a major impact on the exclusion debate. A good example is when the American Federation of Labor, a stalwart exclusionist, switched to the