Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Resilience: Asian Immigration and the American West Coast

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Welcome to the first episode in our new series, Resilience. For the next few weeks, we are going to explore a part of American history that we tend to learn very little about: the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. So let’s dive into the details–the hows and the whys–and learn more about the resilience shown by the 120 thousand Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes, their neighborhoods, their jobs, and their schools, and who endured government-enforced wartime imprisonment right here in America. Joining Sharon today is Dr. Ellen Wu, who researches, teaches, and writes about race and immigration in United States history. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. I'm so glad you're here today because this is the first episode in a new series. For the next few weeks, we're going to explore a part of American history that we tend to learn very little about, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. When we think about World War II, we often picture a war that happened mostly overseas, and we think about our country's involvement as primarily positive. We sent troops to Europe and beyond to help the allied forces, and we created a cohesive wartime effort at home to support our soldiers. But if you've been tuning into this podcast for a while, you know that to

truly understand American history, we need to take a deeper look. While Join the Draft propaganda posters and newspaper ads of Rosie the Riveter united the nation's wartime efforts, much of the public was also united in their support of another effort that was carried out by the government during the war, the incarceration of Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. So let's dive into the details, the hows and the whys, and learn more about the resilience shown by the 120,000 Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes, their neighborhoods, their jobs, and their schools, and who endured government-enforced wartime imprisonment right here in America. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. it's interesting. To begin, I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about vocabulary. Often we hear the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II referred to as internment, but the

words we use matter greatly, and there are some key differences between the words internment and incarceration. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February of 1942, roughly two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an order we'll talk more about in depth as the series progresses, the U.S. government began using the terms relocation centers and internment camps when referring to the detention of Japanese Americans. The reason these terms were used was twofold. First, Roosevelt had been using the words concentration camp as early as 1936 when he wrote a note to the Joint Board for the Army and Navy Departments, and many military and government officials followed his lead. But Americans were becoming more aware of the atrocities of

German concentration camps. Newspapers were regularly reporting on them, even as far back as the 1930s. In March of 1933, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania newspaper, The Prophet, reported a headline that read, Nazis hold 10,000 foes as prisoners, prepare concentration camps in Prussia and Württemberg. Americans associated concentration camps with Nazis, the enemy. And so the U.S. government sought to differentiate their forced detention of Japanese Americans from the reports coming out of Europe. They softened the language they used and moved away from calling them concentration camps when addressing the public. And second, Japanese immigrants were regarded by their neighbors and the government not as fellow citizens,

but as foreigners. This was in part due to restrictive immigration and naturalization policies that bar Japanese immigrants from gaining American citizenship no matter how many years they lived productive lives inside the United States. The term internment refers to the detainment of foreigners or enemy aliens for national security purposes. But most of the people who were incarcerated and had been settled and were residing in America for many years and their children who were born in the United States were, in fact, U.S. citizens. The term internment then does not apply because Japanese Americans were not foreigners. They were Americans. They were Americans who were confined to camps that were maintained by the military. No one was allowed to leave. Barbed wire surrounded them.

Incarceration was forced upon them, and they were stripped of their liberties without due process. For the duration of this series, I will use the terms incarceration and forced removal in order to show respect for the Japanese Americans who suffered very real atrocities that have been historically downplayed with incorrect language. And today, in order to take a closer look at Asian immigration, the 1800s, turn of the century, leading up to World War II, and the discriminatory mindset and policies that became a catalyst for wartime incarceration, I want to speak with an expert.

I'm so pleased to be able to welcome historian Dr. Ellen Wu to the show. Dr. Ellen Wu researches, teaches, and writes about race and immigration in United States history. She's Associate Professor of History at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of the award-winning book, The Color of Success, Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. We can think about this moment in the U.S. The United States is a young country. It's just getting on its feet. You know, it's gotten its independence from Britain. And it's this moment of real promise. Young Americans are imagining this new world ahead of them. And they think of themselves,

that is white Americans, as having a kind of manifest destiny. That is a God-given purpose to go forth and into the frontier and sort of conquer the wilderness and tame it, civilize it, and make it, you know, bountiful and productive. And so there's this whole, I think, feeling of possibility for many white Americans. And that really is a driver in this time of expansion. So there's continental expansion, which is really imperial expansion. White Americans imagined the West as a place of promise and bounty.

They also imagined it as either wild and empty, when in fact it was the homelands of native and indigenous peoples. So those peoples became to white settlers a bit of an inconvenience, an impediment, sometimes a threat. So those peoples became to white settlers, a bit of a convenience and impediment, sometimes a threat. So this is all happening. It's very violent and contentious, but over time, the United States does push westward and it acquires big, big tracts of land through different wars and treaties and negotiations. And so in this moment of westward expansion, there is the California

gold rush. People from around the world who came to California once miners, you know, found that that there was gold to be, you know, dug for and extracted and hopefully to get rich. And so among all of these people that are coming to California to get lucky and strike it rich are actually Chinese migrants. So about 20,000 or so Chinese come to California beginning in that 1849, 1850 moment. And within a couple of years, they become a presence in California's mining industry. in California's mining industry. And so I think it's worthwhile to remember that so many people at this moment in the West are all newcomers, really, except for the native indigenous peoples. And so I think everything is in flux. That's how I think about this moment in the U.S. West, that there's a lot of things in motion. Everything is kind of possible, but up for grabs. But also

things start to come into conflict. And as Chinese start to come to the West, people of European ancestry, let's say, they start to see these Chinese miners as competitors. And as early as the 1850s, California starts to pass different laws and policies that are really aimed to curtail the opportunities of the Chinese, a special foreign miners tax that only Chinese had to pay, and so forth. It was Leland Stanford's incredible wealth that allowed him to found Stanford University. And his wealth was built largely as a result of him being an owner of the Central Pacific Railroad, which was the western portion of the very first transcontinental railroad across the entire United States. And 90%, the 10 to 15,000 workers who built that railroad came from China.

that railroad came from China. And there's a really interesting historic photo when the tracks being laid, one from the east, one from the west, and they finally meet a promontory point in Utah. And there's this historic photo taken. And, you know, who's missing from that photo are actually the Chinese workers. A very difficult, treacherous journey that they had to make. They were hot and cold. You know, sometimes people would freeze to death over the winter and they wouldn't find their bodies until the snow melted in the spring. But this is a historic moment that, you know, is not really acknowledged in 1869. But what it means after that is there are a lot of Chinese in the West and they're looking for employment. So then they move into the cities. And it's this move into the cities where people are in closer proximity to each other,

where we begin to see the tensions grow, particularly when it came to competition for jobs. California, San Francisco, especially, the cities are growing, people are looking for work, and there's just not enough jobs to go around. The Chinese make up about 10% of the population in California, but they're about one quarter, that is 25% of the able-bodied workers. So people who are looking around, I think they do get this impression that Chinese are taking a lot of the jobs. And often they're willing to work for lower pay than some of the white workers. So there's this whole kind of climate, I think, of insecurity and anxiety and instability.

To understand why the Chinese are like so triggering to white workers at this time is to really understand how white men in particular understood themselves as being independent, free men, free American men. And before the 19th century, independence was really tied to farming. If we go back to the days of Thomas Jefferson, you know, Jefferson imagined the United States as a country of small farmers, right? And that everybody is very idyllic, that everybody would have their own farm and grow their own crops and raise their families, and it'd be wonderful and beautiful. And they wouldn't be dependent on anybody. But the reality is, with the growth of capitalism and industrialism, that type of lifestyle is less possible for a lot

of people. And so as big corporations begin to expand, it's much more realistic for working people to think about taking wage work that is not working for themselves, but working for an employer for money, right, for an income. And so it's in the 19th century that this idea of independence begins to transform. And now it is tied to wage work. And white workers are thinking of themselves as free labor. And this is really key as well. There's another big change, right, in the 19th century in the U.S., and that is, of course, the abolition of slavery. And before the Civil War, free labor had a really clear definition, right? It was like the opposite of enslaved labor, the opposite of slavery. Well, how do you define free labor once that slavery system has been abolished?

And that is a question a lot of people had. And that was a really big source of anxiety, you know, very hard, difficult jobs, they start to think of these Chinese workers as unfree workers, as very slave-like. They call them coolies. Now, technically, I think of it as like LeBron James, right? LeBron James talking about how he's free to take his talents elsewhere.

And so were the Chinese workers. They were not stuck or bound to any particular employer. But that fine print does not matter so much for white workers. They believe that they did not have the freedom to take a job or quit a job and sort of remove themselves from any kind of employment situation. And I should say that's actually not true, but that was the assumption. It's important to note here that when Dr. Wu is referring to free labor, she doesn't mean labor where people are working for free, where they're working for no money. where people are working for free, where they're working for no money.

What she means is freedom of choice, where someone is at liberty to come and go. In this case, free labor meant that someone was not enslaved or anywhere close to it. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions

and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. There's a lot of economic volatility, especially with the spread of capitalism and industry. And this long running idea in American political culture of independence and freedom and how that matters so much. And it still does, of course, to ordinary working people. I think the third piece here is also tied to culture.

And this is where we can bring in what we can call the yellow peril p-e-r-i-l like danger i think of the yellow peril as a kind of meme of the 19th century you know it was this bundle of ideas that started to coalesce to come together and what they did was they started to attach a certain set of characteristics to the Chinese workers. This is very important that the vast majority of the Chinese who came in the 19th century were men. They were not all men, but mostly men. And so this yellow peril meme had a lot of different components. of different components. I think the key here is the work that it did was to cast or brand Chinese as different in a threatening way. You know, difference doesn't have to be threatening, but difference can matter a lot when it starts to become a logic that justifies how we treat people, right? Or justifies differences of power or

differences of access to resources. And so that is what this yellow peril meme did. It started to come together as a kind of very powerful and persuasive logic in American culture in the late 19th century. So it was like a stereotype in the making. So the stereotype is that the Chinese, who actually were previously kind of respected among Americans, especially well-to-do Americans, but by the late 19th century, that difference starts to become seen as really, really dangerous.

Most of them were not Christians. They came from a pagan culture that was, you know, sinful and depraved. And the Chinese became associated with a lot of crime and vice. So one of the industries the Chinese could actually break into, because they didn't have a lot of choices, was what we might call the vice industry. So they ran gambling dens, places where white people could smoke opium. Some of the women that came from China were sex workers, right? So that was one of the kinds of work they could do was prostitution. And in fact, the Congress banned Chinese women from coming basically because they assumed Asian women ought to be prostitutes in the 1870s. I would just also

mention that a significant dimension of this yellow peril meme was that the Chinese were what I would call gender benders. That is that Chinese men did not act like or appear like white American men. They had different styles of dress. They wore flowy clothes, things that looked like maybe pajamas or robes. Their hairstyle was really not manly. The style of the 19th century, you know, Qing dynasty was that people shaved their foreheads, the men, and often wore a long braid, what they called a q, down their back so their hair did not look like American men. The Chinese carry diseases. This is a big one.

And so, you know, in 1900, the bubonic plague hit both Honolulu and San Francisco Chinatown. They quarantined both. And in fact, they actually burned Honolulu Chinatown to the ground. Honolulu Chinatown to the ground. There's an idea that Chinese, among their many distasteful differences, is that they eat weird foods, that they eat diets of rats and rice. You know, they're not meat and potatoes workers, men, like good American men, but they can get by on very little and even the food they eat is so disgusting. And all of this then sort of, you know, again, comes together and it goes viral, really goes viral. So if you look at popular magazines and newspapers of the time, popular songs and poems, one of the ones that really sticks out for me, it's called like Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner. You know, Uncle Sam's got all these different guests.

There's like the savage Indian, quote unquote, and he doesn't have table manners. So he's essentially like squatting on top of the table. And then there's like what they call the China man dressed in that kind of manner. I describe literally not eating the turkey and mashed potatoes, but eating a giant rat. That meme begins to really translate then into policy and political mobilization. But it was this political mobilization that helped grow the movement to expel or exclude Chinese workers from the American West. So there are state-level policies, for instance, that bar Chinese from voting or testifying in court against

whites or Chinese men from marrying white women, essentially, that was a big no-no, huge no-no, right? The interracial sex and marriage was thought to be extremely threatening because it blurs the lines between groups. In the 1870s, there was actually an Irish immigrant named Dennis Kearney, who is really brilliant, a brilliant tactician. And he realizes he can tap into this anti-Chinese phobia and make it the basis of his political career. So he and his political party, the Workingmen's Party of California, had this famous slogan, the Chinese must go. It's so brilliant, actually, in its hatred, essentially, because it was very convincing that party managed to win seats in the California legislature based on that platform. The yellow peril meme really plays out in terms of violence. So one Chinese English dictionary published by Wells

Fargo, imagine a travel dictionary where if you were going to Italy and he's like, how to order a cappuccino. But in this dictionary, it's like phrases like, you know, that man tried to shoot me, or I was robbed, you know, or they burned my house down. And so I think that dictionary really is so revealing in just showing us kind of the perils of daily life in the U.S. West. Meanwhile, it's not just all talk and policy either. The Democratic Party, in fact, really is like, hey, this is a really useful issue for us because there are a lot of party divisions, you know, since like the Civil War and the whole slavery issue. I think of anti-Chinese animus, it's kind of like Dolly Parton or melted cheese. It's like something everyone could agree on. So at the national level, then Congress then decides to pass a series of Chinese exclusion

acts beginning in 1882. And they're so significant because it's really the first time that the United States Congress has passed a kind of federal level regulation based on race and class. So it bars the entry of Chinese workers. It's very specific, Chinese workers, which is like at the right at the core of that whole kind of resentment politics. Now, I will mention here, one of the things I think is important to keep in mind is that really before the late 19th century and Chinese exclusion, for the most part, there's not a whole lot of regulations and borders. People basically can come and go whenever they want to. And so this is a real big shift in national policy.

want to. And so this is a real big shift in national policy, this idea that Congress specifically ought to be putting up borders and then regulating them. So the Supreme Court actually does hear a number of very important legal cases, all involving Chinese and exclusion in the 1880s and after. And the Supreme Court decides in 1889 that in fact, yes, Congress has the supreme authority to decide who gets the common goal, to decide on the borders and who we let in and who we keep out. In 1893, then, the Fang Yuting case establishes that precedent for deportation. It's still the precedent today. Xenophobia had always been present in the United States, but here we can see some of the legal basis for excluding certain races from the United States.

And as you're going to see in the upcoming episodes, this xenophobia continues to grow. Once the United States decided that they wanted to shut the door on immigrants from China, this actually posed a labor sourcing issue for the U.S. West. And so in the 1880s, immigrants from Japan started arriving both in Hawaii, which was still an independence kingdom. And a lot of the work they do is very similar to the Chinese, the mining, the railroads, they do domestic work. And then eventually, most of them gravitate towards agriculture in California.

So the big association that people at the time had with Japanese immigrants was that they were farmers. One of these immigrant leaders, a man named Abiko Kutaro, who was a newspaper publisher in San Francisco, he had this light bulb moment. He was thinking, we've seen how Americans have treated the Chinese. It didn't go well. But what if we take a different tactic? You know, the Chinese, a lot of them just wanted to maybe stay a while,

make money and go home to their families. What if we actually very intentionally decide we're going to go all in? We are going to become good Americans. We're going to assimilate. And one of the big ways we're going to go all in. We are going to become good Americans. We're going to assimilate. And one of the big ways we're going to do this is we are going to become that kind of Jeffersonian small farmer. And Qutb Taro actually establishes three agricultural colonies in California where immigrants live together and they grow produce. And actually, they try not to compete with white Americans in any other industries. I think, especially in California,

you know, we can think of it in some ways as a parallel to the tensions of the Chinese and the white workers in the cities. There are tensions between the Japanese and white farmers. And I think much of that, again, if we think about the spread of capitalism and industrialization, this is a moment where agribusiness is really taking off. So it becomes much harder to be like a small family farmer. I think what they do well at is they're OK with maybe not getting the most prized farmlands. Like they kind of eke out their farms on, you know, more maybe marginal places that the other farmers maybe didn't really want to try, but they become very successful at it. In 1917, right at when, you know, U.S. enters World War I, that's the height of Japanese agricultural production in California. And there's, you know,

a lot of food needs to be produced because now the U.S. is sending troops to war. But just to give you an idea of how successful Japanese are, you know, in some particular crops, they grow as much as 90% of California's output. So this is like, I think, celery or tomatoes, onions, Celery or tomatoes, onions, asparagus, and so many other types of produce are being produced by Japanese farmers. So this becomes a huge source of tension with white farmers. So because the Japanese were thought to be so threatening to white farmers in California, the first thing California tried to do, actually, was to squeeze them out of farming through a law. In 1913, California passes what was called the Alien Land Law. So something important to remember is that at this time, that is the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States and Japan

are like rival imperial powers. They're kind of like second string empires. You know, they're not quite at the level of like Britain, but they're ambitious. And both of them have their eye on basically conquering, taking over and controlling the Pacific region. So the US and Japan have this huge rivalry. And what that means is that policymakers don't single out the Japanese by name so explicitly in these laws, but they're meant to target the Japanese. So the alien land law bars anyone, any what they call alien, that is a non-U.S. citizen, but aliens ineligible to citizenship. That is, you know, newcomers, immigrants who are not allowed to become citizens. In 1790, Congress passed some laws called the Alien and Sedition Acts. And those acts limited naturalization, the ability to become a U.S. citizen, to what they called free white persons. And it was updated after the Civil War

to include people of African ancestry. But it still excluded people who had Asian ancestry and Native Americans. In 1913, California lawmakers wanted to legally establish that Japanese immigrants, Japanese Americans were not white. They weren't of African nativity or descent, and so therefore they were ineligible to become citizens. So the Japanese community in the United States decided that they needed to challenge that law because this would put them in a position where their livelihoods were potentially threatened.

And in 1922, they sent a test case to the Supreme Court. And this test case is an important predecessor to some of the immigration acts. There's this young man. A young man by the name of Takau Uzawa. Who was very pale, slender, had a mustache, and he was a Christian. He had this sort of American stereotype of being a family man and hardworking. The best kind of assimilated immigrant you could possibly imagine. And so if they were going to win, it would be with him. When this case went to the supreme court

the attorneys decided that they're going to argue the japanese are actually free white persons but the supreme court does this kind of reasoning using the science and i put that in scare quotes the science of the time and they decide that that Japanese are not Caucasian, quote unquote, and therefore they are not white, and therefore they are not eligible to become citizens. And they lose the case. You know, these categories, they're really, it's like this social knowledge that has to keep getting reproduced and renegotiated and worked out. But in 1917 and 1924, Congress also passes a couple of laws that aim to restrict immigrants, not only from Asia, but other parts of the world, especially Europe.

Because this is a moment when millions and millions of people are coming from across the Atlantic, from Europe to the U.S. And again, the borders are pretty much open, but there's a lot of xenophobia and anti-immigrant feeling, especially because so many of these folks were Jewish and Catholic. Right. So it's also there's a religious element. So 1917, it's a lot of, you know, just a lot of anti-foreign hysteria. 1917, there's a lot of, you know, just a lot of anti-foreign hysteria. Congress passes a pretty wide-reaching immigration act that targets the Europeans with a literacy test. There are a lot of eugenic categories, like people who are disabled, whether that's mentally or physically. And then it targets what they called people from the Asiatic barred zone. So they basically pulled out a world map and they drew a very large circle around everywhere from the Middle East

into the South Pacific. And they said, if you're from these places, you really can't come. In 1924 then, as far as Asians are concerned, Congress then closes all those remaining loopholes so that nobody from Asia, including Japan, which is the really big target, no one can come.

And this is actually very, very humiliating for the Japanese empire. And it's actually one of the reasons that helped fuel that tension that led up to the outbreak of World War II between the U.S. and Japan. Before we closed, I asked Dr. Wu why she became a professor of United States history. There's a place for me in American history, a place that I did not know existed. Hopefully, others who are not Asian American will also understand that this is their history too, that this is an expansive way to think about our nation's history that I hope is inclusive, even as we explore the maybe the more unsavory or unpleasant dimensions of it. Thank you so much for being here today. And I hope you'll join me next time when we will

talk more about how Japanese Americans lived on the West Coast in the 1930s and 40s, how they flourished and who resented them for their success. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review or sharing a link to it on your social media. All of those things help podcasters out so much. Here's where it gets interesting is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder and is hosted by me, Sharon McMahon.

See you again soon.