(From the newly published "Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters
Foreign Peoples At Home and Abroad 1876-1917" by Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Hill & Wang, 2000)
In the 1890s and after, an occasional "white" union did attempt to
embrace—even if reluctantly—the newcomers from Asia. In response to a
strike of Mexican and Japanese sugar-beet workers in Oxnard, California, in
1903, the Los Angeles County Council of Labor resolved:
"We declare our belief that the most effective method of protecting the
American workingman and his standard of living is by the universal
organization of the wage-workers regardless of race or national distinction.
"Resolved; That while we are utterly opposed to the unrestricted
immigration of the various Oriental races, we heartily favor the thorough
organization of those now here, and believe that the fact that men are able
to do our work when we strike is sufficient reason why they should be
organized, regardless of race or color."
But Samuel Gompers voiced the prevailing opinion of American labor when he
agreed to issue an AFL charter to the Council of Labor only on the
condition that "your union will under no circumstances accept membership of
any Chinese or Japanese." For Gompers and others, the Japanese issue melded
entirely with the anti-Chinese agitation of decades earlier, particularly
as the Exclusion Act came due for renewal in the early years of the next
century. "Every incoming coolie means the displacement of an American, and
the lowering of the American standard of living," he argued in 1901. That
same year, Gompers penned a pamphlet bearing the provocative title Some
Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood Against
Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive? The Federationist, the AFL organ,
flatly declared that the Japanese immigrant "can not be unionized. He
cannot be Americanized."
Yellow Peril hysteria mounted in the early years of the century,
particularly as the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War elevated
Japan to new heights of perceived menace in the American political
imagination:
"Once the war with Russia is over," predicted the San Francisco Chronicle,
"the brown stream of Japanese immigration [will become] a raging torrent.
Chronicle headlines in this period included: "How Japanese Immigration
Companies Override Laws," "Brown Men Are Made Citizens Illegally,"
"Japanese a Menace to American Women," "The Yellow Peril—How Japanese Crowd
Out the White Race," "Brown Peril Assumes National Proportions," and "Brown
Artisans Steal Brains of Whites." The journal’s editor feared no less than
the "complete orientalization of the Pacific coast."
Like the impetus for Chinese Exclusion, anti-Japanese sentiment originated
in certain industries but soon spilled across the entire West. "We view
with alarm the pouring of cheap Japanese labor into our western States,"
explained a Wyoming delegate to the United Mine Workers of America in 1904.
"We believe that Americans today, as in 1776, stand for independence and
the noblest manhood; the Japanese laborer, as we find him in our mines and
other industries, stands for neither. The Jap, like the Chinaman, works for
whatever the company is pleased to pay him, and returns a portion of his
earnings regularly to a Japanese agent, who is called a 'boss,' doubtless
to evade technically the law prohibiting contract labor."
The Japanese immigrant "should be excluded from our shores," he concluded.
"Therefore we pray Congress to enact a law excluding the Japanese as well
as the Chinese."
Soon enough, such rough calls for workingmen’s "justice" crystallized in
formal organizations with concrete legislative agendas. Early anti-Japanese
organizations like the Boot and Shoemaker’s White Labor League were joined
soon in the new century by the more ambitious Asiatic Exclusion League and
the suggestively named Anti-Jap Laundry League, which frankly opposed "the
patronizing or employing of Asiatics in any manner." The California
legislature, for its part, began passing anti-Japanese resolutions and
legislation, noting in 1905, for instance, that Japanese immigrants
"contribute nothing to the growth of the State. They add nothing to its
wealth, and they are a blight on the prosperity of it." Further, "the close
of the war between Japan and Russia will surely bring to our shores hordes,
to be counted only in thousands, of the discharged soldiers of the Japanese
Army, who will crowd the State with immoral, intemperate, quarrelsome men,
bound to labor for a pittance, and to subsist on a supply with which a
white man can hardly sustain life." In 1913, the state legislature passed
the Alien Land Law, which forbade land ownership (or even the leasing of
land beyond three years) on the part of any "alien ineligible for
citizenship"—clearly a proscription intended for Japanese immigrants, who
indeed had become active in small farming. As the Elk Grove Citizen put it
that year in a hateful little jingle, "Ill fares the land, / to hastening
ills a prey, / Where Japs accumulate, / day by day."
Or where any Asians accumulate, for that matter. A mob drove a hundred East
Indian farm workers out of Live Oak, California, in 1908; and between 1909
and 1915, white residents perpetrated a number of assaults against Koreans
in the West, though Korean settlement was quite modest. In 1913, a mob of
several hundred unemployed whites ran fifteen Korean fruit pickers out of
Hemet, California, under threat of violence. By the 1910s, there was a good
deal of enthusiasm for a further-reaching Exclusion Act than that which
merely proscribed the Chinese. As Paul Scharrenberg, an AFL officer in
California, put it in 1915, "We are anxious to have enacted an exclusion
law which will effectively and permanently bar these little brown men from
our shores"—by which he meant much more than just "The Chinese Must Go!"
Even Woodrow Wilson, who resisted proposals like the literacy test that
would have restricted European immigration, was sympathetic to the
anti-Asian strains of American labor. "In the matter of Chinese and
Japanese coolie immigration," he said, "I stand for the national policy of
exclusion." Although the president did voice his concern for the
assimilability of a people "who do not blend with the Caucasian race," his
adoption of the term "coolie" here was critical: "Their lower standard of
living as laborers will crowd out the white agriculturalist and is, in
other fields, a serious industrial menace." In 1917, Wilson signed a new
immigration law creating a "Barred Zone" east of the Caucasus Mountains,
the Ural River, and the Ural Mountains. The new law effectively united
Japanese, Korean, and East Indian immigrants with the excluded Chinese as
racial pariahs whose continued immigration was not to be countenanced.
Asians, of course, were not the only immigrants to run afoul of American
labor and its allies in government. Armenians in California, for instance,
though exempted from the prohibitions imposed by the Alien Land Law, did
suffer discrimination in housing and in the social organization of cities
like Fresno, whose color bars, by local custom, placed them on the nonwhite
side of the divide; and Armenian farm workers were sometimes terrorized by
violent night-riders in the state’s orchard lands. Likewise, in the 1910s
members of the AFL decried Mexican immigration as a "torrent of peon
poison," and lamented that able-bodied American men were forced to sit idle
without work while "slim-legged [Mexican] peons with tortillas in their
stomachs" performed construction work in their full view. "Cheap labor,"
spat the AFL Advocate in a 1915 piece on Mexican labor in the Southwest,
"—at the cost of every ideal cherished in the heart of every member of the
white race, utterly destroyed and buried beneath the greedy ambitions of a
few grasping money gluttons, who would not hesitate to sink the balance of
society to the lowest levels of animalism, if by so doing they can increase
their own bank account." Like the Asians before them, Mexican workers were
not seen as potential fellows in common cause, but as dangerous tools in
the hands of monopoly capital whose innate racial degradation threatened to
degrade even the noblest of American laborers.
Nor, ultimately, were European laborers themselves immune to such
objections on the part of American natives, even if in some cases they had
comfortably participated in the agitation against Asian or Mexican
immigration. For some natives, in fact, if the anti-Chinese movement had
proved anything at all, it proved that the nation’s gates ought to be
closed against European immigrants. The San Francisco Argonaut depicted the
anti-Chinese rallies of the 1870s as consisting of "the refuse and
sweepings of Europe, the ignorant, brutal, idle off-scourings of
civilization." In a pamphlet titled Must the Chinese Go? (1890), another
writer charged: "The immigrant from across the Atlantic desires and intends
to command the labor market here; not only to rule in our homes, but in
every other department of industry in which he enters; to fix prices of
labor, to strike for more, to do or not to do, without fear of
competition." Like the Chinese in the eyes of a Dennis Kearney, the
anti-Chinese agitators from Europe merely sought unfair control of the
labor market. The perceived crimes of the "new" European immigrants
included not only their tendency to drive down wages by their very
presence, but their tendency to impede the prospects of workers’
organization by their inborn docility. Given the tendency among American
conservatives and the managerial elite to pin American radicalism on
immigrants from Germany, Russia, or Hungary, it is no small irony that in
other quarters immigrant docility reached legendary proportions. As W. Jett
Lauck wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1912, the South or East European
immigrant has "been inclined, as a rule, to acquiesce in the demand on the
part of employers for extra work or longer hours. ... Where older employees
have found unsafe or unsanitary working conditions prevailing, and have
protested, the recent immigrant wage-earners . . . have manifested a
willingness to accept the alleged unsatisfactory working conditions."
American radicals themselves, moreover, were often far from kind or
hospitable to these newly arrived proletarians. "The Dago works for small
pay and lives far more like a savage or wild beast, than the Chinese,"
wrote socialist leader Eugene Debs in 1891. Like the Chinaman and his
infernal rice diet, the Italian immigrant "fattens on garbage" and "is able
to underbid an American workingman. Italy has millions of them to spare and
they are coming." Decades later, in 1911, Milwaukee socialist Victor
Berger, too, denounced "Slovenians, Italians, Greeks, Russians, and
Armenians" as "modern white coolies." Though Debs himself blunted his
anti-immigrant sentiments over time, the Socialist Party as a whole never
did entirely abandon a nativist rhetoric and logic. The party’s national
convention in 1910 adopted a resolution that, though placating Jews in a
clause affirming the maintenance of the United States as "a free asylum"
for persons persecuted in their homelands on political, religious, or
racial grounds, nonetheless endorsed "all legislative measures tending to
prevent the immigration of strikebreakers and contract laborers, and the
mass importation of workers from foreign countries, brought about by the
employing classes for the purpose of weakening the organization of American
labor, and of lowering the standard of life of American workers."
However sympathetic American laborers might have been to the plight of
workers from the Old World, as one AFL spokesman declared, the United
States was now "in the position of any other asylum whose dormitories are
full up. ... We cannot go abroad and hope to lift up the labor of the
world. The selfishness that provides for the home and protection of the
family from want or danger is the only spirit in which this question may be
considered successfully." Thus, though foreign workers in some very real
sense actually constituted "American labor," they were despised, repulsed,
and plotted against politically by congeries of organized groups who
recognized the name as applying only to themselves, not to this invasion of
degraded foreigners.
In this, native labor leaders in the AFL or even the Socialist Party
ironically held something in common with conservative patricians like Elihu
Root. "The subject of the exclusion of laborers is acquiring a new interest
in my mind," wrote Root to his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1907, the
nation’s peak year of immigration. "The whole subject of a peaceful
invasion by which the people of a country may have their country taken away
from them, and the analogy and contrast between the swarming of peaceful
immigration and business enterprise and the popular invasions of former
times, such, for instance, as those overrunning the Roman Empire, are most
interesting." Like Victor Berger, Dennis Kearney, or the riotous members of
the Asiatic Exclusion League, Elihu Root feared for the ultimate possession
of the country. But, like so many among the elite classes who throughout
this period grappled with the perils of "overproduction," Root parted ways
with the likes of these laborites in the terms by which he defined the
problem. If a Kearney or a Berger was most concerned with standards of
living and the dignity of labor, Root came to fear laborers themselves.
Indeed, for Root and others like him throughout this period of boom and
bust, labor’s very disquiet was among the most alarming features of the
immigrants’ "peaceful invasion" of the nation.
Louis Proyect
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