Midterm Paper for AAS 1101
The midterm is due at the beginning of the class on March 18th Wednesday in both hard-
copy form and on Canvas. The Midterm is worth 20% of your overall grade, so do start to
think and write early, spread out your work, make outlines, and ensure you’ve got time to
compose multiple drafts to read and revise! NO LATE ESSAYS WILL BE ACCEPTED.
Sources: The essay must engage at least 4 different course materials including the scholarly
articles and the creative ones (documentaries) we have read and watched before the due date. At
least 3 course materials have to be textual materials (scholarly articles and the novel No-No
Boy).
Formatting: (1) Essays must be written in Times New Roman size 12 font, with -inch margins,
and double-spaced. Single-space your header information, and please staple it when turning it in.
(2) Each essay is to be between 4-6 pages. Essays under 4 pages will be docked points by 1/3
of a letter grade. (3) Citations should be intext and include the author’s last name and page
number (ex. Lee, 4). (4) No cover or works-cited page necessary but please have a list of the
course articles and documentaries that you used at the end of your midterm. However, if you are
using sources outside of the course, you will need to cite properly. APA, Chicago and MLA
formats are all accepted as long as you remain consistent.
Misc.
(1) Please remember that working together with others on these essays is a breach of University
policy. It is okay to talk through specific readings with peers, but any collaboration or collusion
regarding essay questions will constitute plagiarism.
(2) I will be able to review or provide feedback on your essays ahead of time if you finish it
early. You can send it to me for review no late than 72 hours before its due date.
Essay Questions Please choose one question from the two prompts below and write an essay.
1. Discussing U.S. immigration, the American historian Thomas Dublin wrote, “I am more
struck by fundamental similarities over time—the similar motivations of immigrants and
the processes of assimilation they experienced.” Once deemed as alien incapable of
assimilating into the so-called melting-pot, Asians were denied U.S. citizenship. Worse
yet, Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were put into concentration camps
during World War II. John Okada’s novel No-No Boy epitomizes the ruptures in Japanese
American communities after the war. Given the experiences of Asians in the U.S. before
the 1950s and various tensions represented in No-No Boy, do you think whether John
Okada would agree with Dublin’s statement? Why or why not?
2. U.S. sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant contend that race as a social
construct means that its formation is the “process by which social, economic and political
forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are
in turn shaped by racial meanings.” In other words, “race” is a human invention and
racial hierarchies have been constructed by various forces and for different purposes.
Write an essay and discuss how U.S. immigration system constructed Asians as a race
and how it affected Asian American life.
James Michener, after publishing Tales of the South Pacific with Mac-
millan in 1947, decided he wanted a different publisher to bring out his
second book. Years later he described his decision to move to Random
House as an expression of social conscience. “I had visited the Random
House offices,” he explained,
and had noted that their receptionist was a charming young Negro girl (she
later appeared in the musical Carmen Jones). Most publishing houses at
that time did not even employ Negroes in their shipping rooms. I imagined
that Random’s choice of a receptionist might cost some patronage, and I
felt that an outfit willing to risk prejudice by such an act of faith would be
a good one to associate with. So I got on the Fifth Avenue bus at Washing-
ton Square, rode up to 50th Street, and handed that Negro girl the manu-
script of The Fires of Spring.
Michener criticized the export of American racism in much of his writing
about Asia and the Pacific during the 1940s and 1950s. In his anecdote
about Random House, he shows that he was also concerned with racial
inequality within the United States and eager to put his social criticism
into practice by working with a publisher that shared his convictions.1
In exploring the role of race in the Cold War, it is useful to think in
terms of racial formations — the historically specific and socially con-
c h a p t e r 6
Asians in America
Flower Drum Song and Hawaii
Hawaii will be the first state with roots not in Europe but in
Asia. This is bound to have a profound effect on America’s
future in the entire Far East. . . . In Asian eyes, the U.S. is
the land of the white man, and all too frequently it is tarred
with the brush of “colonialism.” Hawaii the 50th state could
change all this.
“Enchanting ‘State,’” Newsweek, 1959
223
224 Asians in America
structed racial categories within which people live their lives. Racial for-
mations are a product of both social structures and ideas: they result
from the process of defining how race is organized socially and legally
and what race means. In the century prior to World War II, racial for-
mation in the U.S. largely revolved around the process of racialization,
which separated peoples into distinct and incompatible biological cate-
gories called races. The racialization of African Americans was achieved,
in part, through the system of segregation, which separated black people
from whites legally, physically, socially, and politically. The racialization
of Asian Americans, in contrast, was achieved through a series of laws
regulating immigration and naturalization. Congress passed the first Chi-
nese Exclusion Act in 1882, restricted Japanese immigration in 1907 with
the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement, and created the Asiatic Barred
Zone, which prohibited immigration from South Asia and the Pacific Is-
lands, in 1917. The 1924 National Origins act sealed off virtually all im-
migration from Asia, while the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 closed the
last loophole that had allowed immigration from the Philippines, which
was still a U.S. colony. Restrictions on the naturalization of Asians al-
ready in the U.S. followed a similar trajectory, beginning in 1870 with
the Chinese and culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1923 ruling that the
“free white persons” criterion for naturalization categorically excluded
all Asians. Collectively, these laws established the meaning of Asianness
as foreign, as unassimilable, as “alien.” 2
In the 1930s and 1940s the racial formation of people of color within
the U.S. began to change, as racialization gave way to ethnicization.
With ethnicization, the socially and culturally defined category of eth-
nicity replaced the biological category of race as the preferred way to ex-
plain differences among populations. During World War II, official and
unofficial propagandists celebrated America as a racially, religiously,
and culturally diverse nation, and in the process they transformed the
ethnic immigrant from a marginal figure into the prototypical Ameri-
can. This vision of America, as Nikhil Singh has suggested, served as one
of the ideological foundations upon which the U.S. claim to world lead-
ership rested, both during and after war. As a democratic nation of im-
migrants, this reasoning went, America alone possessed the ideals and
the experiences to lead a multiracial world of independent nations in
which imperialism had lost all legitimacy. Only America contained the
principle of internationalism within its own borders: it alone could claim
to be what Gunnar Myrdal described as “humanity in miniature” and
what Carey McWilliams called “a nation of nations.” 3
Asians in America 225
The pervasive racial discrimination against African Americans and
Asian Americans undermined this claim of world leadership, however,
creating what Myrdal in 1944 called the “American dilemma.” In order
to justify the claim, the social organization of race within the U.S. had
to be brought into alignment with professions of equality for all. Rec-
ognizing this imperative, the federal government instituted a series of le-
gal and legislative reforms that, over the course of the 1940s and early
1950s, partially transformed the economic, political, legal, and social
structures that regulated race in the United States. In a series of reforms
aimed at African Americans, the federal government forbade racial dis-
crimination in defense industries, prohibited the white primary, ordered
the desegregation of the military, invalidated restrictive housing cove-
nants, desegregated interstate travel, and ordered the desegregation of
public schools. During this same period, a separate series of legislative
reforms reopened the door to Asian immigration and allowed Asians
within the U.S. to become naturalized citizens. Congress repealed the
Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1943, passed laws allowing the immigration
and naturalization of Filipinos and Indians in 1946, and in a 1947
amendment to the War Brides Act it allowed Asian Americans serving in
the military to bring home Asian-born wives. In 1952 the McCarran-
Walter Act abolished the principle of Asian exclusion by invalidating the
racial bar to naturalization; it also created annual quotas for immigrants
from the Asia-Pacific area, and added a family reunification provision.
Several pieces of special legislation allowed the entry of Chinese refugees
from communism after 1949 and allowed Asian children to come in as
adoptees. By 1952, and for the first time in U.S. history, all Asians were
allowed to become immigrants, and all Asian immigrants inside the U.S.
were allowed to become naturalized citizens. Together, these reforms
had as their ultimate goal the integration of Asian and African Ameri-
cans into the political and social mainstream of American life.4
These changes in the social regulation of race were both real and lim-
ited: their significance often derived more from the legal precedents they
overturned or established than from any dramatic social changes they
ushered in. School desegregation did not follow automatically from the
1954 Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, nor did
the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act entirely eradicate the principle
of Asian racial difference. Although the act did officially remove the ra-
cial bar to naturalized citizenship, it also perpetuated the racially dis-
criminatory aspects of the 1924 law in a disguised form: Asians would
be allowed into the country under what Neil Gotanda has called “quasi-
226 Asians in America
racial, ancestry based quotas” rather than the strictly national quotas
that applied to Europeans. This meant that the tiny Chinese quota would
apply to all persons of at least 50 percent Chinese background, regard-
less of their national origin. Nevertheless, the 1952 law had a significant
effect on immigration from Asia. Even though the quota for Japan was
set at only 185 immigrants per year and China’s was set at 205, the com-
bined legal changes enabled about 45,000 Japanese and 32,000 Chinese
immigrants to enter the U.S. over the course of the 1950s. These legal re-
forms and increased immigration began to change the meaning of Asian-
ness within the United States: no longer legally aliens, Asians could be-
gin to claim the status of “immigrant” at the very moment that it was
being held up as a privileged category of American national identity.5
These legal reforms allow us to see the double meaning of integration
in the postwar period: the domestic project of integrating Asian and
African Americans within the United States was intimately bound up
with the international project of integrating the decolonizing nations
into the capitalist “free world” order. Many of the proponents of these
reforms recognized this connection, as did middlebrow cultural pro-
ducers. Michener’s anecdote about choosing Random House because it
employed a black receptionist and his reference to Oscar Hammerstein’s
all-black musical, Carmen Jones, allow us to see how the same cultural
producers who narrated the international integration of the United States
and Asia also grappled with the question of the integration of minorities
within the United States. As the social structures organizing Asian people
within the United States changed, the meaning of Asianness did as well.
Hammerstein and Michener, through the musical Flower Drum Song
and the novel Hawaii, participated in the changing racial formation of
Asian Americans by articulating some of the new meanings that Asian-
ness carried.
flower drum song
In 1942 C. Y. Lee, the son of an impoverished gentleman landlord,
left war-torn China to attend graduate school in the United States. Lee
started at Columbia and then transferred to the creative writing pro-
gram at Yale, where he received an MFA in 1947. After graduating, Lee
left New Haven and headed west: he planned to return to China and
write for the film industry there, but news of Mao’s successes in the Chi-
nese civil war interrupted his journey. Getting as far as California, he
settled in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he took a job as a journal-
Asians in America 227
ist with a Chinese-English newspaper. Lee spent his spare hours writing
fiction, and in 1949 — the year Mao’s forces took control of China —
one of his short stories won first prize in a writing contest. That same
year Lee became a naturalized American citizen and started work on his
first novel, a lighthearted story about a wealthy family of refugees from
communist China living in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In 1957 Farrar,
Straus and Cudahy published Flower Drum Song, and to Lee’s surprise
the novel quickly climbed the bestseller lists.6
The popular success of Lee’s novel should be seen within a broader
context of Asian American writing. The growing acceptance of the eth-
nicity paradigm opened up a new cultural space for minority writers.
Although the 1930s saw a flowering of writing by Asian American au-
thors, some of whom, such as Toshio Mori and H. T. Tsiang, were affili-
ated with the Popular Front, World War II proved to be the real water-
shed. Just as the war prompted changes in the legal structures affecting
Asians in the U.S., it likewise dramatically increased their access to a na-
tional literary and cultural apparatus, although it did so unevenly. The
emotional bond that Americans felt with the people of China and the
Philippines as allies in the Pacific war created a greater awareness of and
sympathy toward Chinese and Filipinos living in the U.S., which trans-
lated into a national audience for the stories they had to tell. Established
publishing houses became increasingly interested in bringing out the
work of writers of Chinese and Filipino descent, and non –Asian Amer-
icans were increasingly interested in reading them. Carlos Bulosan’s
America Is in the Heart (1946), for example, an autobiographical novel
about a migrant Filipino worker on the West Coast during the Depres-
sion, won critical and popular acclaim and was selected by Look mag-
azine as one of the fifty most important works of American literature.
Published in the year the United States granted independence to the Phil-
ippines, Bulosan’s book benefited from a concentrated, if brief, interest
in America’s Asian colony. Americans had far less interest in reading the
works of Japanese American writers, who were identified with the war-
time enemy and whose traumatic experiences in the internment camps
challenged the idea of America as a racially tolerant and inclusive soci-
ety. John Okada’s 1957 novel No-No Boy, for instance, which explored
the bitter aftereffects of war and internment on a Japanese American fam-
ily, generated little enthusiasm among white or Asian American readers.7
Among the most popular Asian American literary works of the 1940s
and 1950s were those written by Chinese Americans: Pardee Lowe’s Fa-
ther and Glorious Descendant (1943); Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese
228 Asians in America
Daughter (1950); and C. Y. Lee’s Flower Drum Song. Each of these works
was published by an established East Coast publishing house, garnered
glowing reviews in the national press, and found a large readership across
the country. Pardee Lowe’s novel and Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography,
as the first book-length works published in English by American-born
Chinese writers, were groundbreaking achievements; Wong’s book en-
joyed enormous longevity, and was the most financially successful book
by a Chinese American author until at least 1982. All three works share
certain similarities of theme and character, including a focus on the fam-
ily. Each narrative revolves around generational conflicts between im-
migrant parents, who uphold many “traditional” aspects of Chinese
culture and life, and their American-born children, who struggle to inte-
grate themselves into white American society. Each of these authors also
embraced the role of cross-cultural mediator: they used their writing to
introduce non-Chinese readers to the people and customs of San Fran-
cisco’s Chinatown.8
Lowe’s, Wong’s, and Lee’s narratives each have a touristic quality. Mo-
tivated by an educational and sociological impulse, they guide their read-
ers like privileged tourists through the inner workings of Chinese fami-
lies, businesses, social relations, and customs. Chinatowns, of course, had
been tourist destinations for white Americans since the 1880s and had
appeared as such in musicals, magazine fiction, travel narratives, tourist
guides, and journalistic exposés. These early works usually represented
Chinatown in terms of absolute foreignness, constructing a trip there as
either a visit to an exotic land or as a dip into a world of social pathol-
ogy and vice. The narratives of the 1940s and 1950s, written when ra-
cial restrictions on Asian immigration and citizenship were being eased,
offered a fundamentally different vision of Chinatown. They need to be
seen, in part, as domestic counterparts to the postwar literature of in-
ternational tourism in Asia: like Michener’s The Voice of Asia, they in-
troduce Americans to a people whose integration has become a geopo-
litical imperative. These three narratives ethnicize Chinese Americans
by representing their difference in cultural rather than racial terms. It is
in the display of ethnic culture — conceived in Boasian terms as a whole
way of life — that the touristic nature of these narratives is most visible.
Jade Snow Wong, for instance, brings the reader into a garment factory
and an herbalist’s shop, elucidates New Year’s rituals and marriage cus-
toms, provides recipes for steamed rice and tomato with beef, and ex-
plains Chinese family structure and attitudes toward education. Pardee
Lowe explains the importance of gift exchange and how Chinese lan-
Asians in America 229
guage schools operate, while C. Y. Lee enumerates the distinctions be-
tween Chinatown restaurants aimed at tourists and those that cater to lo-
cal tastes. These displays of Chinese ethnicity are balanced by displays of
Americanization, as characters’ consciousness and behavior are gradu-
ally transformed along American lines. Noteworthy scenes include those
in which characters attend American schools and universities, enter into
a Western hospital, become engrossed in a baseball game, use a commer-
cial bank, and graduate from citizenship school. Chineseness in these
texts thus becomes a matter of culture rather than race, and ceases to be
a rationale for exclusion from an American society that increasingly
defines itself in terms of cultural pluralism.9
The process of ethnicization can also be seen in these books’ reliance
upon the literary conventions of the family-centered, ethnic-immigrant
narrative that had been established by Euro-American authors in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Families, both nuclear and
extended, figured centrally in the experience and literature of white eth-
nic immigrants. In contrast, the Chinatowns of the 1930s and 1940s —
the period that Lowe’s and Wong’s texts cover —were bachelor societies
composed largely of a single and male population. U.S. laws prevented
Asian immigrants from forming families by restricting the immigration
of Asian women, stripping the citizenship of American-born women who
married noncitizens, and criminalizing miscegenation. By presenting
Chinatown families as somehow representative, when in fact they were
a rarity, Lowe, Wong, and Lee construct a similarity between Chinese and
European immigrants around one of the issues that most clearly marked
the racialization of Asians. This cultural work of ethnicization that these
texts performed was a product not only of the authors, but of the en-
tire literary apparatus of editors, publishers, and reviewers who selected
which narratives would be published and shaped how they were pro-
moted and received. The equation of Chinese Americans with white Eu-
ropean immigrants became one of the lessons that these works taught.
As one reviewer of Father and Glorious Descendant noted, “If the story
it unfolds is at all typical, the development of Chinese Americans is much
the same as that of many other immigrants.” 10
The commercial success of Lee’s Flower Drum Song in 1957 attracted
the attention of numerous film and theater producers, including Joseph
Fields, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein. Their enthusiasm
about the novel derived in part from their familiarity with the con-
ventions of white ethnic theater. Producer Joseph Fields, who read Lee’s
novel first and approached Rodgers and Hammerstein about it, was the
230 Asians in America
son of Lew Fields, a former member of a German-dialect vaudeville team
that had been very successful in the turn-of-the-century ethnic theater.
Rodgers and Hammerstein, in turn, had in 1944 produced I Remember
Mama, John Van Druten’s heartwarming play about a Norwegian im-
migrant family growing up in San Francisco, and their 1943 musical
Oklahoma! featured an ethnic character who assimilates into a quintes-
sential American frontier community. Together Rodgers, Hammerstein,
and Fields won out over the competition, and in 1958 their musical ver-
sion of Flower Drum Song opened on Broadway. The show was a re-
spectable success, although not as overwhelming a hit as its predecessors
South Pacific and The King and I. It played on Broadway for a year and
a half, toured nationally for another year and a half, and played in Lon-
don for a year. In 1961 Hollywood producer Ross Hunter released a film
version of the show that was nominated for five Academy Awards.11
Flower Drum Song should be read as both a cultural narrative and a
social practice — as a popular story and as an investment of capital, a
body of hiring practices, and a series of marketing decisions. As it cir-
culated around the country on stages and movie screens, Flower Drum
Song created a focal point around which the integration of Asian Ameri-
cans was enacted, performed, promoted, and publicized. It became a fo-
rum for the articulation of liberal views on race and for the repudiation
of the older racial formation of racialization, and it created a cultural
space in which Asian Americans could be publicly embraced as “real”
Americans.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s version expanded the novel’s work of
ethnicization in a number of ways. In reworking Lee’s story into a li-
bretto, Hammerstein emphasized the ethnic elements in the story while
cutting out Lee’s limited, but significant, exploration of the racial dis-
crimination experienced by Chinatown’s residents. Amid an otherwise
comic framework, Lee had included a number of episodes that revealed
the intersecting exploitations based on race and class that Chinese Amer-
icans experienced. Lee’s novel forced the reader to confront racism in
the labor market, when college-educated Wang Ta could find no job
other than as a dishwasher; it illustrated the proletarianization of edu-
cated workers, when a character with a Ph.D. in political science could
only find work in a grocery store; and it depicted the sexual and emo-
tional frustrations of life in a bachelor society, in which immigration re-
strictions had made marriage and family formation extremely difficult.
Hammerstein omitted these discomforting scenes and instead crafted a
narrative about the relative ease with which Chinese Americans were in-
Asians in America 231
tegrating into America. He pushed the character of the father into the
background and, in keeping with the conventions of the musical genre,
focused the story on the formation of two heterosexual couples: the
elder son, Wang Ta, and Mei Li, a picture bride from China; and night-
club owner Sammy Fong and Linda Low, a singer and stripper in his
club. When Hammerstein wrote the lyrics for “Chop Suey,” which the
characters sing at a party celebrating Madame Liang’s graduation from
citizenship class, he produced a paean to a pluralistic American society.
Hammerstein takes “chop suey” as his metaphor for an ethnically and
culturally diverse America, and gives it form in a musical number that
the Chinatown residents perform in a shifting variety of Western dance
styles, from the square dance to the waltz. As a spectacle of assimilation,
the number celebrates the permeable boundaries of cultural difference
and the pleasingly “mixed-up” quality of contemporary American life.
Rodgers and Hammerstein understood this narrative of ethnicization
as a liberal message about American race relations. Rodgers, when asked
in an interview to explain the show, replied: “What’s the show about?
Well, it’s the story of the confrontation of the Far Eastern and Ameri-
can civilizations, told in terms of the conflicts between first- and second-
generation Chinese Americans in San Francisco. The usual thing you
hear, you know, is East is East, and West is West, and all that nonsense.
We show that East and West can get together with a little adjustment.”
In rejecting Kipling’s dictum, Rodgers repudiates the prewar racial for-
mation of Asians as absolute Other. Like the advertisement for the
Saturday Review travel photo contest, Rodgers rejects the colonial
mindset that insists on the absolute difference between East and West.
Now that Americans have taken over from Europeans the mantle of the
“West,” he implies, such differences can be bridged. Rodgers’s belief
that East and West can “get together with a little adjustment” posi-
tions the show firmly within the postwar politics of cultural pluralism
and liberal universalism and within the global imaginary of U.S.-Asian
integration.12
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s commitment to Asian American ethni-
cization evoked a variety of responses from reviewers. A number of them
recognized and drew attention to the show’s recycling of the conventions
of earlier white ethnic narratives: the New York Times critic, for in-
stance, saw the film as reproducing “the characters and comedy that
used to bloom in any number of plays about German or Swedish or Jew-
ish immigrants coming from the old to the new country . . . in years gone
by,” while the New Yorker’s reviewer noted that “back of the dragonish
232 Asians in America
false front . . . we catch the oddest glimpse of ‘The Jazz Singer’ and
‘Abie’s Irish Rose.’” Other reviewers emphasized the show’s racially lib-
eral message, praising it as a “tuneful lecture on tolerance and good
manners” and singling out the number “Chop Suey” as “a witty ode to
U.S. pluralism.” A number of reviewers, however, condemned the mu-
sical as “patronizing” and took it to task for inauthenticity. The New
Yorker chastised the show as a “stale Broadway confection wrapped up
in spurious Chinese trimmings” and dismissed the film as a “preposter-
ous” and “pseudo-Oriental” “fraud,” in which the “phony Chinese ap-
othegms flow like tiger-bone wine, and the settings are every bit as au-
thentic as Fu Manchu.” Variety rejected the film as “distasteful” and
unlikely to amuse Chinese American audiences: “It is as if we are being
asked to note ‘how darling’ or ‘how precocious’ it is of them to under-
take the execution of American dances, . . . to comprehend the science
of baseball, or to grapple with U.S. idioms.” Even Time, which had pub-
licized the Broadway show assiduously, took a swipe at the movie ver-
sion. Criticizing its use of Asian actors of various ethnicities to play Chi-
nese characters, it protested, “Honestly, fellows, they really don’t all look
alike.” These comments indicate the extent to which, by 1958 and even
more so by 1961, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s mild brand of liberal anti-
racism was coming to be seen as inadequate and outdated.13
Flower Drum Song must be seen, however, not just as a narrative of
integration but as a material and social practice that enabled the in-
tegration of real people. The late 1950s saw a proliferation of Asian-
themed plays and movies: Rashomon, Kataki, Cry for Happy, The Cool
Mikado, and The World of Suzie Wong were all playing on New York
stages when Flower Drum Song opened in 1958, and Hollywood had re-
cently released Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), Tea House of
the August Moon (1956), and Sayonara (1957). But Rodgers and Ham-
merstein did what no other Broadway producers had done before: they
told an Asian American story and they told it using Asian American ac-
tors. Of the original cast of fifty-nine, only two were non-Asian; one
was white and the other black. Flower Drum Song remained until The
Joy Luck Club (1993) the only major Hollywood film — and until David
Henry Hwang’s new version of the show in 2002, the only mainstream
Broadway musical— to feature an almost exclusively Asian American
cast. Because of these casting decisions, the musical was also a source of
pleasure for many Asian Americans. Young people especially enjoyed the
rare opportunity of seeing versions of themselves represented positively
as Americans who could speak without accents and who participated in
contemporary social and cultural life.14
Asians in America 233
In a manner similar to Hammerstein’s all-black Carmen Jones, the
stage and film versions of Flower Drum Song gave work to hundreds of
Asian Americans at a time when these actors had limited professional
opportunities. Over the course of its New York run and national tour,
the producers scoured cities, towns, and Chinatowns across the country
for fresh Asian American talent, checking out small nightclubs, local
theaters, YWCAs, and beauty pageants. As had been the case with Car-
men Jones fifteen years earlier, the producers tapped into a pool of tal-
ent whose access to the Broadway stage had been restricted because of
race. The show provided exposure to amateurs who were appearing on
a commercial stage for the first time, and it boosted more established
performers to stardom. The burst of Asia-themed narratives on Broad-
way and in Hollywood in the late 1940s and 1950s had created a small
pool of experienced performers. The Broadway cast included Pat Suzuki
(the first U.S.-born Japanese American to achieve popular music suc-
cess), Miyoshi Umeki (the first Asian American woman to win an Acad-
emy Award), Jack Soo (later of TV’s Barney Miller), and Keye Luke
(who played the number one son in the long-running Charlie Chan film
series); the film version added Nancy Kwan (who had recently starred in
The World of Suzy Wong) and James Shigeta (the first Japanese Ameri-
can man to attain star status in theater, television, and music and the
first to be groomed by Hollywood since Sessue Hayakawa in the early
1900s). Like Carmen Jones, the musical expanded the cultural space al-
lotted to actors of color in mainstream theater and movies, allowing them
to play a wide range of roles, including those, such as romantic male
lead, usually reserved for whites. The movie version of Flower Drum
Song also called attention to Chinese American painter Dong Kingman,
a well-known watercolorist whose work had appeared on the cover of
the Saturday Review, by using a series of his paintings in its opening
credit sequence. In cover stories in Time and Newsweek, in a photogra-
phy spread in Life, on the stages and screens of countless American cities
and towns, Flower Drum Song made Chinese Americans visible as eth-
nic Americans, and not as an alien “yellow-peril” threat, at the very mo-
ment when immigration from Asia was starting up again after a quarter-
century hiatus (Figure 21).15
The Flower Drum Song programs that theater audiences received fur-
thered the show’s narrative construction of Asian Americans as immi-
grants and as “real” Americans; like the program for Carmen Jones in
1943, they played an important role in the circulation of meaning around
the show. Where the biographical sketches in the program for Carmen
Jones had, in keeping with its Popular Front cultural politics, emphasized
Figure 21. Flower Drum Song made Asian Americans visible as ethnic Ameri-
cans. Miyoshi Umeki and Pat Suzuki appeared on the cover of Time, Decem-
ber 22, 1958. (TimePix)
Asians in America 235
the working-class identity of the show’s performers, the programs for
Flower Drum Song identified the actors in terms of their ethnic mix,
their immigrant origins, and their place of birth. Instead of simply noting
each actor’s previous stage work, the biographies identified the actors as
“native Japanese, . . . Californian, . . . part Chinese and part Hawaiian,
. . . from Shansi Province in North China, . . . native of Seattle, . . . born
in Manila, . . . American of Korean extraction,” and so on. Some pro-
grams even called attention to the citizenship status of the actors’ par-
ents: Pat Suzuki’s parents were identified as “Californians of Japanese
birth and American citizenship,” Keye Luke’s were simply “American
citizens,” and the father of Cely Carrillo from Manila was identified as
“a retired Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Armed Forces, who fought in Bataan.”
Others acknowledged the internment of Japanese American actors dur-
ing the 1940s and explained how some actors had changed their names
— from the Japanese Goro Suzuki to the Chinese-sounding Jack Soo, for
instance — as a way of avoiding the anti-Japanese racism.
In some sense, the need to identify these actors as American exposes
the depth of the assumption that Asian Americans are inherently foreign.
Such a national identification of the black actors in Carmen Jones would
have been unthinkable, since the racialization of black Americans did
not involve a denial of their Americanness. One can also read these pro-
grams, however, as extending the mediatory social function of Lowe’s,
Wong’s, and Lee’s Chinatown narratives. They introduced audiences not
just to a fictional narrative about Chinese Americans, but to a large and
ethnically diverse group of Americans with roots in countries through-
out Asia. By naming national origins, the programs identified some ac-
tors as belonging to the emblematic American category of immigrants;
by describing others as “natives” of the states in which they were born,
they asserted an Americanness not identified in racial terms; and by de-
fining some as Americans of a particular national “extraction,” they em-
phasized how American nationality supersedes but does not eliminate
ethnic identity. By including the citizenship status of foreign-born par-
ents, the program called attention to the newly established race-neutral
criteria for U.S. citizenship, and when it identified one father’s service in
the U.S. military, it hinted at the links between the growing presence of
Asian Americans and the history of U.S. expansion in the Pacific. Per-
haps most important, these mini-biographies created a continuity be-
tween the fictional characters on stage and the real actors who per-
formed them, thereby expanding the show’s narrative of inclusion to
encompass the real actors. If audiences could accept a story about Chi-
236 Asians in America
nese becoming Americans, the program suggested, they should also be
able to accept these flesh-and-blood Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Ha-
waiian Americans as real Americans, also.
One could read this process of ethnicization that occurs within and
around Flower Drum Song as a process of “whitening”: by depicting
Chinese Americans in the same terms used to represent European immi-
grants, and by ignoring the history of race-based exclusion, proletarian-
ization, and ghettoization, the musical and the surrounding publicity
imply that there were no racially specific differences in the experiences
of European and Chinese immigrants. One could argue that the show
and the film construct Asians, like Europeans, as racially unmarked
—“white”— as they assimilate into a national American identity that os-
tensibly renders racial identities obsolete. The power of the show to el-
evate a national over a racial identity and to extend its narrative of inte-
gration into the lives of its actors affected even Juanita Hall, the show’s
black actress, who played Madame Liang. A story about Hall in Ebony
recounted how C. Y. Lee had once asked Hall, who had also played
the Tonkinese Bloody Mary in South Pacific, if she had much “Chinese
blood,” because she seemed so Chinese on stage. “There was a time,”
the reporter wrote, “when she quickly corrected such a mistaken impres-
sion by explaining proudly, ‘I am a Negro.’ Now, a little older, wiser,
more tolerant, she smiles, says, ‘I’m an American.’” Hall, in keeping with
the show’s vision of tolerance and integration, rejects the racial label and
defines herself in the ostensibly racially unmarked — and increasingly in-
clusive — terms of nationality instead. Like her character Madame Liang,
who graduates from citizenship class during the show, and like the thou-
sands of black civil rights activists, Asian immigrants, and newly natu-
ralized Asian American citizens, Hall stakes a claim to an Americanness
that is becoming less restricted on racial grounds.16
The film version of Flower Drum Song makes this whiteness reading
an easy one to make. The story focuses on eldest son Wang Ta’s ro-
mantic choice between two women: the American-born and wholly as-
similated Linda Low, played by actress Nancy Kwan (who has a Chinese-
Scottish background), and the recent immigrant Mei Li, played by
actress Miyoshi Umeki (who was born in Japan). The terms of his choice
are laid out in two musical numbers that develop the character of each
woman.
Linda Low’s character-defining number, “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” makes
a visual spectacle out of the equation of assimilation with whiteness. The
number takes shapes as Linda, dressed only in a skimpy wrap-around,
Asians in America 237
sings about the social and sexual pleasures of being a “girl,” such as her
“curvy” silhouette, the “whistle” she attracts from men, and her fu-
ture life with a “brave and free male.” Set in her boudoir before a multi-
paneled mirror, the number is overwhelmingly white: the furniture, the
carpeting, the walls, her costume, the phone are all blazing white. In a
quasi-surreal moment, three separate Lindas appear in the mirror, each
one wearing a different stylish outfit. The number presents Linda Low
as the epitome of the assimilated, Americanized, Asian woman. There is
nothing particularly “Chinese” about this number: her clothes, or lack
thereof, are standard issue for a white star in a Hollywood film, and her
body conforms to mainstream standards of beauty — she’s tall, leggy,
has fine features — and no modesty prevents her from displaying it (Fig-
ure 22). Her song defines her in gendered rather than racial or ethnic
terms. She sings about being a “girl” rather than being “Chinese,” and
she cares about what all “girls” in the 1950s are supposed to care about:
clothes, hairdos, and dates with a boy named “Joe or John or Billy.” The
number does not present her as fundamentally different from any other
Hollywood bombshell—Marilyn Monroe or Doris Day could perform
this number without any real changes. It is hard not to read this scene
as a visual representation of Chinese American whiteness — the over-
whelming paleness of the costume and decor seems to literalize her
assimilation.17
Linda Low’s character and visual presentation stand in marked con-
trast to the film’s other instance of Chinese femininity, the immigrant
Mei Li. Mei Li’s signature number is “A Hundred Million Miracles,”
which she sings in a street-corner park. She has just arrived in San Fran-
cisco with her father, fresh off the boat from Hong Kong, and is trying
to track down the man to whom she has been betrothed as a picture
bride. This number presents Mei Li as typically “Chinese”: her costume
is Hollywood’s version of traditional dress — black satin pants, a smock
with a mandarin collar, a cap, and black slippers. She even wears her
hair in a long queue, the stereotypical emblem of Chineseness in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She sings with a noticeable ac-
cent, her demeanor is modest, she doesn’t expose much of her body, and
she bows often. The song she sings, like the flower drum she performs
with, is a putatively traditional Chinese one, and in introducing it to the
audience, her father invokes the traditional ideal of “filial piety” and the
foreign images of “ghosts” and “loyal officials.” The staging of the num-
ber also emphasizes her separateness from the Chinese Americans who
surround her as an audience and who wear Western clothes and hair-
238 Asians in America
Figure 22. Assimilation as a spectacle of whiteness: Linda Low (Nancy Kwan)
enjoys “being a girl” in the film Flower Drum Song, 1961. (Photofest)
styles. In contrast to Linda Low, Mei Li’s musical number marks her
heavily as Chinese, as ethnic, as foreign (Figure 23).18
Wang Ta, the young male protagonist, starts out in love with Linda
Low but ends up marrying Mei Li. The comparison of these two scenes
raises the question —why choose the one over the other? In a show that
celebrates the process of becoming American, why privilege a character
Asians in America 239
Figure 23. The “foreign” Mei Li (Miyoshi Umeki) sings about Chinese tradi-
tions in the film Flower Drum Song, 1961. (Photofest)
that highlights foreignness over one that emphasizes assimilation? One
possible answer comes from reading these two characters as the two poles
of the stereotypical Asian American woman. Linda Low is the hyper-
eroticized sexual expert, the kind of woman Nancy Kwan had portrayed
the previous year in The World of Suzy Wong. Mei Li, on the other
hand, is the docile, subservient Asian woman, similar to the character
240 Asians in America
Miyoshi Umeki portrayed, and won an Oscar for, in Sayonara four
years earlier. According to the logic of Hollywood, a decent leading man
might fool around with Linda Low, but he has to marry the more do-
mestically inclined Mei Li.
A different, and more historically grounded, reading would be that
what the film values in Mei Li is precisely her Chineseness, her strong
marks of ethnicity. The problem with Linda Low is that she is too as-
similated, she is too “white,” she has lost any significant ties to China.
Her romance with Wang Ta collapses because she does not adhere to
what the show has defined as traditional Chinese values: she offends his
family with her materialism, her explicit sexuality, and her lack of fam-
ily ties, all of which come together in her job as a nightclub stripper.
Although Mei Li adopts numerous Americanisms — she picks up some
slang and learns how to kiss from watching TV— she never loses all her
conventional markers of Chineseness: her halting speech, her quiet mod-
esty, her way of dressing and bowing. She is the heroine because she
holds assimilation in balance with ethnicity. Mei Li offers an example
of what literary critic Frank Chin has described as “dual identity”: her
consciousness contains both Chinese and American elements. Chin, as
well as many other Asian Americanist scholars, condemns dual identity
for perpetuating the idea that Asian Americans are permanent foreign-
ers, racialized aliens forever identified with countries they may never
have seen. The literary work that Pardee Lowe, Jade Snow Wong, and
C. Y. Lee produced during the 1940s and 1950s abounds with dual-
identity characters like Mei Li who bridge the gap between Chineseness
and Americanness. Their privileged position in these popular narratives
suggests, however, that they represent something more complex than
simple alienness.19
I want to suggest that in the 1940s and 1950s it was precisely the dual
identity — the foreignness — of Chinese Americans that gave them value
as Americans. Flower Drum Song hardly advocates the “melting” of
Asian difference into a homogenous sameness of postwar American
whiteness. The idea of dual identity — as opposed to wholesale assimi-
lation —was crucial to the changing racial formation of Asian Ameri-
cans and other ethno-racial minorities during the 1940s and 1950s and
had everything to do with the global imperatives driving the reformula-
tion of American national identity as a pluralistic nation of immigrants.
Dual-identity characters like Mei Li possess cultural and political value
precisely because their non-American parts connect America to the rest
of the world. Although they are not exclusively foreign, their partial for-
Asians in America 241
eignness makes them worth assimilating into American society, because
it legitimates the nation’s claim to be “a nation of nations.” Mei Li’s ob-
vious and persistent Chineseness contributes far more to the argument
for America as “humanity in miniature” than does Linda Low’s spec-
tacular whiteness. In an era of global expansion, these residual ties to
other nations and other peoples carry significant ideological benefits.
The creators of Flower Drum Song were not the only people who
valued Asian Americans’ continued ties to their ancestral homelands:
Washington did as well. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s the U.S.
government regularly employed ethno-racial minorities as agents and le-
gitimators of U.S. expansion. During World War II, for example, the
U.S. Marines recruited hundreds of Navajo Indians as radiomen in the
Pacific theater because their language provided a code that the Japa-
nese were unable to break. During these same years the OSS drew upon
the local knowledge and community ties of Sicilian immigrants living in
Middletown, Connecticut, to plan the invasion of Italy. This enlistment
of “ethnic” Americans of all colors expanded during the Cold War. In
1948, when the U.S. feared that Italy was on the verge of voting the Com-
munist Party into power, U.S. officials encouraged a letter-writing cam-
paign in which Italian Americans urged their relatives back home to
preserve democracy and vote against communism. In these cases, Wash-
ington employed ethnic Americans as agents of expansion: they took ac-
tions that helped the U.S. spread and preserve its influence around the
world.20
The U.S. government also employed ethno-racial minorities as legiti-
mators of expansion during the Cold War, in an effort to deflect the criti-
cism of Asian and African leaders. The State Department and the USIA
employed numerous African Americans as cultural ambassadors, send-
ing them abroad to spread the word that while discrimination still ex-
isted in parts of America, it was on the way out. Washington also en-
listed the services of Asian American cultural producers, including two
of the artists associated with Flower Drum Song. In the early 1950s the
U.S. Army hired C. Y. Lee, who had not yet written Flower Drum Song,
to teach Chinese languages at its California Language School, and be-
tween 1955 and 1957, when he had finished his novel but not yet pub-
lished it, Lee worked as a feature writer for USIA’s Radio Free Asia.
In 1954 the State Department sent Dong Kingman, the artist who had
painted the movie’s opening credit sequence, on a Goodwill Ambassador
tour of Asia as part of its cultural exchange program. Kingman spent
five months lecturing and exhibiting his work in India, Korea, Japan,
242 Asians in America
Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Malay-
sia. When he returned, he submitted his report to the State Department
in the form of a forty-foot-long painted Chinese-style scroll, which Life
magazine reproduced.21
In 1952 Washington sent Jade Snow Wong, author of Fifth Chinese
Daughter, on a forty-five-stop speaking tour through Asia. Wong was
the first Chinese American sent overseas by the State Department, and
she received a hearty welcome, in part because the department had pre-
viously arranged for her book to be translated into a number of Asian
languages, including Chinese, Burmese, and Thai. The State Department
had originally booked Wong for a two-month tour, but American em-
bassies were so eager to have her visit their posts that they extended
her visit to four months. Wong stopped in Japan, the Philippines, Hong
Kong, Malaya, Thailand, Burma, India, and Pakistan, where she spoke
about the United States and the life it offered for Chinese Americans. As
she later explained, Wong understood her “dual heritage” as a political
asset for the nation, one that allowed her to internationalize the role
of cultural mediator that she had constructed in her autobiography.
She embraced the role that Washington offered her because she felt “a
moral obligation to interpret what she knew of the United States to fel-
low Asians.” She also felt her tour “would be good for the image of
the United States” and “inspiring” to Asians who were “searching for
identities” in the midst of decolonization: it might encourage wavering
and nonaligned peoples to decide to look more favorably at the United
States. Wong used her speeches, as did many of the cultural ambassadors
of color, to defend America from the ubiquitous charges of racism. When
asked about prejudice, she acknowledged that she had experienced it,
but emphasized that “racial prejudice had never stopped her from get-
ting where or what she wanted.” She defended America as a racially in-
clusive country and shifted the blame for the effects of discrimination
onto Asian Americans themselves: the “fear of prejudice,” in her view,
ultimately proved more “damaging” than any white bigotry because it
offered an “excuse” for “personal failure.” Wong put the ideals of cul-
tural pluralism and assimilation on display for audiences throughout
Asia and, as a representative of the nation, performed her integration
into American society.22
In Fifth Chinese Daughter, Wong had constructed herself as a discur-
sive tour guide to Chinatown for American readers; in 1956 she turned
this literary fiction into a social practice when she and her husband
guided a group of American tourists on a trip to Hong Kong and Japan.
Asians in America 243
Two years later the flow of American tourists to Asia had increased to
the point that Wong and her husband started a travel agency and began
organizing regular tours to Asia, where they introduced Americans to
Madame Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, Buddhist monks in South Viet-
nam, and indigenous art in Cambodia. As a tour guide and travel agent,
as well as a cultural diplomat and Chinese American, Wong facilitated
the flow of persons and information between the U.S. and Asia that many
Americans believed would help foster closer ties between these parts of
the world. In becoming a travel agent, she transformed her status as an
ethnic mediator within the U.S. into a new role as an international me-
diator between the U.S. and Asia.
Washington valued these “ethnic” Americans as protectors, repre-
sentors, and explicators of the nation precisely because it saw them as
being, in some way, still Navajo, Sicilian, African, and Chinese, as well
as American. It sought to tap into and mobilize their ethnicity and cul-
tural difference in support of internationalism and expansion. This is
not to suggest that all expressions of ethnic identity found favor in the
government’s eyes. To the contrary, only those that could be safely sub-
sumed to a larger national identity and that did not question the funda-
mental principles of foreign policy were encouraged. This is also not to
suggest that all people who participated in these efforts served as simple
propagandizers for U.S. globalization; while some of them certainly did,
others forged alternative understandings of internationalism or found
their awareness of American racism heightened by encountering Third
World criticisms of it firsthand. What we do see in these examples is the
U.S. government drawing upon and encouraging a sense of ethnic iden-
tity as a means of advancing the material and ideological projects of in-
ternational integration.23
statehood for hawaii
Like Oscar Hammerstein, James Michener in the late 1950s turned from
writing narratives about the international integration of America and
Asia to write a narrative about the domestic integration of Asians within
American society. While Hammerstein focused on San Francisco’s Chi-
natown, Michener wrote about the territory of Hawaii. For Michener,
as for many observers, Hawaii more than any other place in the coun-
try affirmed America’s status as a “nation of nations” and as “humanity
in miniature.”
The Hawaiian Islands had played a material role in America’s expan-
244 Asians in America
sion into the Pacific since the early nineteenth century. American sailors
involved in the China trade began stopping at the islands in the late nine-
teenth century, and Nantucket whaling ships followed soon thereafter.
New England missionaries arrived in the 1820s, riding the first wave of
evangelical zeal that carried Americans into China, India, and Southeast
Asia. Together with merchants, they began transforming the social, po-
litical, and economic structure of the islands along American lines. By
the 1880s American sugar planters had led the islands securely into the
U.S. economic orbit, and in 1893, acting with the support of the U.S.
minister to the islands, they overthrew the native government of Queen
Liliuokalani. Washington annexed Hawaii five years later during the
Spanish-American war, incorporating the islands into a territorial em-
pire that encompassed the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. In the
twentieth century the U.S. developed Hawaii as the anchor of its string
of Pacific military bases, and during World War II Hawaii became a ma-
jor jumping-off point for operations in the Pacific.24
Hawaii’s role as a staging area for U.S. expansion into Asia and the
Pacific increased dramatically with the Cold War. The islands became
ever more militarized as the U.S. occupied Japan and waged war in
Korea and Vietnam; with sixteen major military installations on Oahu
alone, it became the central supply node in America’s network of mili-
tary bases spanning the Pacific. Defense dollars poured into the islands
and became a pillar of the post-plantation economy, providing a liveli-
hood for fully one-fourth of the islands’ population; more than any
other state, Hawaii depended financially upon the continuation of the
Cold War. The U.S. government also treated Hawaii as an important lo-
cation from which to wage the struggle for the hearts and minds of Asia.
In 1959 Washington launched the East-West Center in Honolulu, which
the Saturday Review hailed, in yet another reworking of Kipling, as the
place “Where the Twain Will Meet.” (In 1964 it offered the job of di-
rector to Norman Cousins, who turned it down for personal reasons.)
The East-West Center promoted both cultural policies of integration and
military policies of containment. Designed as a counterpart to Moscow’s
Friendship University, it brought Asian, Pacific, and American students
together in one setting; at the same time, it coordinated grants for Indo-
nesian military officers who were undergoing small-arms training before
the 1965 military coup that, with the goal of eradicating communism,
left a half-million Indonesians dead. Hawaii also facilitated the postwar
flow of American civilians into the East, serving as a jumping-off point
for tourists traveling to Asia and the Pacific.25
Asians in America 245
The growing material significance of Hawaii after 1941 was matched
by its increasing visibility in American culture. The islands had been fa-
miliar to the mainland since the 1920s as an elite vacation destination and
source of popular music, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor fixed
the territory in the public mind as an integral part of the nation. Both
the militarization of the islands and the advent of commercial jet service
in 1959 made Hawaii increasingly available to middle- and working-
class mainlanders. Tourism to the islands grew exponentially during the
1950s, making it one of the foundations of the islands’ economy: tourist
spending jumped 350 percent between 1950 to 1959, from $24 million
to $109 million, while the number of tourists increased from 34,000 in
1945 to 243,000 in 1959. Hawaii proliferated throughout popular cul-
ture in travel essays, advertisements, and movies such as From Here to
Eternity (1953) and Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii (1961), and contributed
to the postwar fascination with all things Polynesian that found expres-
sion in Pacific-themed restaurants and hotels. It also provided a material
basis for much of the cultural representation of Asia and the Pacific in
general during the postwar period: William Lederer, Reader’s Digest’s
roving editor in Asia and coauthor of The Ugly American, lived in Ha-
waii and used the islands as a base for much of his writing about Asia;
Dr. Tom Dooley polished his draft of Deliver Us from Evil there; South
Pacific was filmed in the islands; numerous around-the-world travel nar-
ratives, such as Philip Wylie’s The Innocent Ambassadors and Horace
Sutton’s 1959 series in the Saturday Review, used the islands as their
gateway between America and Asia; and a number of Flower Drum
Song’s cast members, including James Shigeta, the film version’s leading
man, came from Hawaii.26
Hawaii’s campaign for statehood, which ran more or less continu-
ously from 1945 to 1959, kept the territory alive in the nation’s politi-
cal culture. It also served as one of the primary sites in which the chang-
ing racial formation of Asian Americans became visible. As a U.S.
territory, Hawaii enjoyed a liminal status. An integral part of the nation
legally, its residents paid federal taxes, were subject to the laws of the
United States, and, if they met national eligibility requirements, were
U.S. citizens. At the same time, however, residents of Hawaii could not
vote in presidential elections, the president appointed their governor,
and their elected representative to Congress had no voting power. Al-
though the statehood debate involved a number of questions, such as
whether the nation could include a noncontiguous state, race was the
big issue: people of Asian and Pacific background outnumbered whites
246 Asians in America
three to one. Plantation owners had begun importing Asian laborers in
the mid-nineteenth century, and by 1959, 54 percent of the population
was Asian. The Japanese formed the largest group at 35 percent, fol-
lowed by Filipinos at 12 percent, Chinese at 6 percent, and Koreans at
1 percent. Full or part native Hawaiians accounted for 18 percent of the
population, while 2 percent was Puerto Rican. Only 25 percent of the
population was white. There was no legal segregation on the islands and
intermarriage was common, with about 10 percent of marriages before
World War I and more than 30 percent in the 1950s taking place be-
tween people of different races. The territory of Hawaii was thus simul-
taneously Asian, in terms of its population, and American, in terms of its
political relationship with the U.S. The debate over Hawaii’s statehood,
which raged in the national press and in the halls of Congress for four-
teen years, was largely a debate over the relationship between these two
categories, Asian and American: Were they mutually exclusive? Could a
people be both Asian and American? Could America in some way be an
Asian nation? The struggle over Hawaiian statehood became a struggle
to define both the meaning and the social organization of Asianness in
America.27
As a pivotal moment of Asian American racial formation, the post-
war statehood movement should be seen in relation to the black civil
rights movement that was taking shape in the American South during
the same years. Both movements raised similar issues about the legal
rights of racial minorities, and both were fueled by the demands of vet-
erans —blacks in the South and Japanese Americans in Hawaii — for full
access to the benefits of citizenship that they had defended with their
lives during the war. At the same time, significant differences distin-
guished them. The civil rights movement was a grassroots mass move-
ment that challenged the legal organization of race as it structured daily
life in the South, and this challenge provoked confrontations, such as the
Montgomery bus boycott, the march on Selma, the freedom rides, and
the conflict over school desegregation in Little Rock, that captured the
nation’s attention. The Hawaiian statehood movement, in contrast, was
neither a mass nor a specifically race-based movement: spearheaded by
the elected officials of Hawaii and waged peacefully in the halls of Con-
gress, it did not seek to restructure the everyday organization of race in
the islands per se, but to secure for all the territory’s residents the full
rights of U.S. citizenship.
Supporters and opponents of statehood often made their arguments
by discursively mapping Hawaii onto a national and global geography.
Asians in America 247
Physically, the Hawaiian islands are isolated in the midst of the Pacific
Ocean: they are located 2,000 miles west of the continental U.S. and
4,000 miles east of Japan; Alaska looms 3,000 miles to the north, while
the nearest major Pacific islands are 2,000 miles to the south. Part of the
statehood debate involved determining where Hawaii “belonged” polit-
ically, culturally, and racially. All sides agreed with Joseph R. Farring-
ton, Hawaii’s Congressional delegate in 1949, that Hawaii stood as the
“gateway to the South Pacific and the Far East” and the point “where
east meets west.” They parted company, however, in the meanings that
they assigned to this position of U.S.-Asian convergence.28
Opposition to statehood, as to the civil rights movement, came pri-
marily from Southern Democrats such as Senators James Eastland
of Mississippi, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Herman Tal-
madge of Georgia. Struggling to maintain the legal separation of races
in their own states, they were threatened by the prospect of a multiracial
state that eschewed legal segregation and would likely elect nonwhite
and pro – civil rights senators. Strom Thurmond argued against state-
hood by mapping Hawaii in relation to Asia and denying its ties to the
United States:
There are many shades and mixtures of heritages in the world, but there are
only two extremes. Our society may well be said to be, for the present, at
least, the exemplification of the maximum development of the Western civi-
lization, culture, and heritage. At the opposite extreme exists the Eastern
heritage, different in every essential— not necessarily inferior, but different
as regards the very thought processes within the individuals who comprise
the resultant society. As one of the most competent, and certainly the most
eloquent, interpreters of the East to the West, Rudyard Kipling felt the
bond of love of one for the other; but at the same time he had the insight
to express the impassable difference with the immortal words, “East is
East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
Thurmond emphatically embraces, rather than reworks, Kipling’s em-
blematic phrase. He constructs Asia and America as mutually exclusive
categories which represent the “extreme,” and by implication pure, cat-
egories of East and West. Because Hawaii is Asian, Thurmond suggests,
it cannot possibly also be American. Thurmond uses the phrases of cul-
ture rather than race —he speaks of “civilization” and “heritage,” and
disavows the idea that the East is inherently “inferior”—but he makes a
racialist and segregationist point, namely, that the difference between
Asians and whites is absolute and “impassable.” In arguing that the Chi-
nese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Koreans of Hawaii are fundamentally
248 Asians in America
unassimilable, Thurmond resurrects the racializing logic of the exclu-
sionary immigration laws which deemed Asians to be aliens ineligible
for citizenship. The specter of miscegenation haunts Thurmond’s view, so
that in spite of the “bonds of love,” the racial separation must be main-
tained. With his positive invocation of Kipling, Thurmond also maps
America in relation to Britain: America has Northern European roots
that must be maintained.29
Other opponents of statehood mapped Hawaii in relation to the So-
viet Union. In the late 1940s, labor leader Jack Hall organized Hawaii’s
mostly Asian plantation and dock workers into the radical International
Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union. Hall’s success drew the at-
tention of Washington’s communist hunters to the islands, and in 1953
he and six other union leaders were convicted under the Smith Act of
conspiring to overthrow the government. (The decision was overturned
on appeal in 1958.) Opponents of statehood latched onto these accusa-
tions and, linking the union’s nonwhite membership with its political
radicalism, charged Hawaii with being irredeemably “tinctured with
Communism.” The American Communist Party’s well-known commit-
ment to racial equality made this equation of integration and commu-
nism as easy to make in Hawaii as it was in the rest of the country, where
HUAC investigators, Southern segregationists, and FBI members regu-
larly accused civil rights activists of being party members and fellow-
travelers. Senator Hugh Butler launched this anticommunist argument
in 1949 — the year Mao took power in China —when he announced
that the American Communist Party supported Hawaiian statehood and
was working for a state constitution that would be “dictated by the tools
of Moscow in Hawaii.” Imagining Honolulu as bound to Moscow, But-
ler saw Hawaii’s position as gateway to the East as a point of national
vulnerability: he accused the islands of being “one of the central opera-
tions bases and a strategic clearinghouse” for the worldwide communist
campaign against America. Four years later, as the Korean War wound
down to its unsatisfying conclusion, Senator John Pillion likewise repre-
sented Hawaii as a doorway through which communists could enter the
nation at will. He warned against statehood as a Russian plot and de-
clared that admitting Hawaii into the Union would be to “actually invite
two Soviet agents to take seats in our U.S. Senate.” 30
Statehood advocates, in turn, turned Hawaii’s racially diverse people
— and the relative harmony in which they lived — into a benefit that the
islands would bestow upon the rest of the nation. Where statehood op-
ponents argued in the decreasingly legitimate terms of racialization, sup-
Asians in America 249
porters mobilized the increasingly dominant terms of ethnicization. Al-
ready in the 1920s social scientists began applying the principles of the
ethnicity paradigm to the islands and pointing to their polyglot popula-
tion as proof that multiple races could live together in harmony. By the
1930s Hawaii had earned a reputation as a racial paradise and the
“melting pot of the Pacific.” After World War II the mainstream media
seized upon Hawaii as the place where the American promise of equal-
ity for all was being worked out in practice. In 1945, for example, Life
published an effusive article, entitled “Hawaii, a Melting Pot, a Score of
Races Live Together in Amity,” that rejected the principle of biological
racial difference and praised the islands as “the world’s most successful
experiment in mixed breeding, a sociologist’s dream of interracial cul-
tures.” With so many races and mixtures, the article insisted, prejudice
had become “simply impractical.” The article rejected the racializing no-
tion that intermarriage produced inferior hybrids and applauded that “a
new race”—“tolerant, healthy and American”— is “emerging and sta-
bilizing” in the islands, a claim that it illustrated with numerous photo-
graphs of attractive women accompanied by captions identifying their
ethno-racial backgrounds. While articles such as these acknowledged
the racial conflict that did exist in the islands —Life noted that only a
week before a race riot had broken out between white sailors and people
they attacked as “gooks,” and other magazines mentioned the racially
charged Thalia Massie rape and lynching case of 1931— they tended to
downplay such incidents as deviations from a normal state of racial har-
mony. Life also deemphasized racial difference by constructing gender
difference: by depicting Hawaii in the form of attractive women, it imag-
ined statehood as a kind of sexual union between a feminized Hawaii
and an implicitly masculine mainland.31
James Michener became an outspoken advocate of statehood. In
1953 he published his first essay on Hawaii in Holiday magazine, which
Reader’s Digest condensed, and he went on to write additional pieces for
the New York Times Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Look, and the Honolulu
Star-Bulletin, many of which combined the conventions of travel writ-
ing with pro-statehood arguments. Michener’s arguments did not differ
significantly from those of others who advocated statehood. Rather, he
used his literary skills, celebrity, and status as an expert on Asia and the
Pacific to bring the pro-statehood arguments into greater prominence.
In much of his writing Michener promoted statehood as a strategic
move in the Cold War. International politics had always impinged upon
the race-and-statehood debate: in the 1930s and early 1940s, when an
250 Asians in America
expansionist Japan threatened U.S. interests in the Pacific, many Ameri-
cans saw the Japanese American population of Hawaii as an undesirable
element, a potential fifth column. In the postwar period, however, the
need to secure the allegiance of the decolonizing nations changed the po-
litical currency of Hawaii’s people. Michener saw Hawaii’s Asian-Pacific
population as having an enormous geopolitical value: by granting them
the full rights of citizenship, the U.S. would do much to invalidate the
charges of racism and imperialism that so damaged its reputation abroad.
Michener advocated statehood as a way for Washington to prove the ra-
cially inclusive nature of American democracy. “In Asia, Hawaii has be-
come a symbol of the fair and just manner in which we treat Orientals,”
he wrote in a 1958 Reader’s Digest article. “Quietly, the word has circu-
lated that in Hawaii Chinese do well, that Japanese get elected to office,
that Filipinos get a fair shake. If now we slap Hawaii in the face and say,
‘You cannot have statehood,’ the slap will reverberate.” Statehood would
also ease the memory of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and establish a
clear distinction between the United States and the European colonial
powers, by making Hawaii’s territorial status seem a temporary stage in
the development toward full inclusion in the nation, rather than a per-
manent colonial condition suitable for a nonwhite population.32
In contrast to statehood opponents, Michener mapped Hawaii in
relation to the mainland. He specifically constructed Hawaii as an al-
ternative to Little Rock, as a positive instance of a multiracial society.
In a 1959 article in the New York Times Magazine, Michener noted that
the “bad publicity stemming from Little Rock” had been “a serious bar”
to American efforts to win the support of “uncommitted or wavering na-
tions.” Statehood for Hawaii would offer concrete proof to these nations
that Americans do not “hate Orientals” and could “accept men of vary-
ing colors.” It would facilitate the integration of the decolonizing world
by making “the job of every State Department official in Asia and Africa
. . . a little easier” and “the words of every U.S. Information Service man
. . . a lot more persuasive.” Michener also imagined the Asians of Hawaii
as healers of the South’s bitter racial conflicts. He cast Hawaii’s future
congressmen as rescuers of America from the “grave internal problems
arising from race relations.” Michener constructs the Asian Americans
of Hawaii as reasonable figures who will mediate the highly charged and
long-simmering racial conflicts between blacks and whites. Part of the
value of Hawaii’s statehood, then, becomes its ability to smooth over the
racial divisions within the nation by interjecting Asian Americans as a
third term between the poles of black and white.33
Asians in America 251
Michener also mapped the islands in relation to Asia. To Michener,
Hawaii’s familial and cultural ties to Asia made it worth incorporating
into the union. He saw the people of Hawaii as an exploitable natural
resource who could facilitate U.S. global expansion by serving as native
informants and guides: they were a “splendid resource from which our
government can draw in these difficult days of trying to work with many
foreign governments.” Other statehood advocates shared this view. Busi-
nessweek in 1950 explained that “the islands have brought to the U.S. a
new national resource — a population that is the logical stepping stone
between the U.S. and the Orient” and went on to praise these people as
the “logical intermediaries to carry an understanding of U.S. democracy
to the Orient.” One of the Congressional committees investigating state-
hood came to a similar conclusion: “Many of her people have their ra-
cial background in that Asian area, giving the nation a unique medium
of communication and understanding with Asiatic peoples”; as a result,
Hawaii could become a “natural training ground for leaders to admin-
ister American interests in this area.” In the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, Americans looking for a stepping stone to China valued
Hawaii for its geographical location. In the second half of the twentieth
century, it was Hawaii’s Asian population that held out the promise of
securing access to the markets and resources of Asia.34
If Hawaiian statehood rendered America a little less white and West-
ern in its national identity, that was apparently fine with many statehood
advocates. Businessweek, noting that “America has always had cultural
ties to Europe,” appreciated that the “thousands of citizens of Chinese,
Japanese, Korean, and Filipino ancestry, who understand the customs,
and, in some cases, speak the language of the country of their fathers
and grandfathers,” could now bestow upon the nation those same ties
with Asia. Newsweek in 1959 similarly noted that “Hawaii will be the
first state with roots not in Europe but in Asia” and looked forward to
the “profound effect” that this would have on America’s future in the
Far East: no longer would America be known as a “land of the white
man” and “tarred with the brush of ‘colonialism.’” Time in turn cele-
brated statehood as an act through which America “leaped over its old,
European-rooted consciousness of Caucasian identity.” The incorpora-
tion of Hawaii into the union, in the eyes of these advocates, would ben-
efit America’s role as world leader by making the nation at least partially
Asian.35
While opponents of statehood succeeded in blocking legislation for
many years, their views were not widely held. By 1954, 78 percent of
252 Asians in America
Americans approved of Hawaii’s efforts to join the union, as did the De-
partments of State, Defense, and Justice, the Democratic and Republi-
can parties, and the eleven Congressional committees that had investi-
gated statehood. In 1959 the racial arguments of statehood opponents
finally lost their persuasive power, and Congress approved legislation
making Hawaii the nation’s fiftieth state.36
michener’s hawaii
Michener’s interest in Hawaii culminated in 1959 with the publication
of Hawaii, his first epic historical novel, his first book to approach one
thousand pages in length, and his last major work on the Asia-Pacific re-
gion. Hawaii took shape at the intersection of the discourses of state-
hood, racial integration, and tourism. Excerpted in Reader’s Digest and
Life, chosen as a main selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and re-
published as a Reader’s Digest condensed book, Hawaii quickly became
a bestseller, selling five million copies by 1978. The novel capped Miche-
ner’s decade-long promotion of Asia and the Pacific as tourist desti-
nations and as a primary arena in the Cold War. Written as a manifesto
for statehood and published a few months after that goal was achieved,
Hawaii served as an expanded tourist guidebook to the new state and
became the definitive representation of the island for millions of people
around the world for years to come. In 1962 Hawaii’s Congressman
Daniel K. Inouye praised the novel from the floor of Congress as “the
semiofficial guide to our lovely shores.” “Today,” he said, “when a ship
or airplane deposits visitors on our shores, sometimes as many as half of
them arrive with copies of his book under their arms. And the important
thing about this is that they all have derived from Michener’s writing an
appreciation of the wonderful strains of the human family that have
blended together to build our paradise.” Hawaii was not simply a rep-
resentation of the islands, but part of a cultural-educational apparatus
that deployed the islands as a means through which Americans could
learn the value of racial tolerance. It was both a representation of racial
integration and a device for achieving that integration in practice. With
this novel, Michener took on the task of teaching his readers the politi-
cal and racial lessons of Hawaii.37
In keeping with his didactic view of literature and his guidebook in-
clinations, Michener constructs his novel as a history of Hawaii. After
announcing in a brief prologue that his work of fiction is “true to the
spirit and history of Hawaii,” he builds the novel’s skeleton around the
Asians in America 253
major events that have shaped the islands’ history. The novel begins with
the islands’ birth in a series of volcanic eruptions and goes on to narrate
all the high points of the islands’ social, political, and economic history,
from the migration of the native Hawaiians from Polynesia in the ninth
century, through the annexation by the U.S. in 1898, to the aftereffects
of World War II. He fictionalizes key figures in Hawaii’s history, from
the missionary Hiram Bingham to the insurgent Democratic party leader
John Burns, and he incorporates major episodes from the islands’ social
history, including the spread of leprosy in the 1870s, the plague-induced
burning of Chinatown in 1900, the creation of the Japanese American
442nd Regimental Combat Team during World War II, and the big la-
bor strikes of the 1940s. He explains the climate and the plant and ani-
mal life of the islands, and provides the kind of local information, on
things like the origins of the ukulele and the multiple uses of the coconut
palm, that tourists like to know. Reviewers described the novel as a
“comprehensive social history of our 50th state,” praised its “wealth of
scholarship,” and located it in literary-historical terms as an heir to the
“documentary novel of the Nineteen Thirties.” 38
Around this framework, the novel traces the history of the islands’
four major racial and ethnic groups — native Hawaiian, white Ameri-
can, Chinese, and Japanese —via the formula of the multigenerational,
multifamily saga. The novel consists of six chapters: the first focuses on
the island’s geological history, the next four on each major ethno-racial
group, and the last brings together the main characters from the previ-
ous chapters. The novel covers, with some large gaps, fifty-six genera-
tions of the native Hawaiian Kanakoa family, six generations of the white
Whipple and Hale families, fifty generations of the Chinese Kee family,
and three generations of the Japanese Sakagawa family. Eight pages of ge-
nealogical charts help the reader keep track of the relationships among
dozens of characters.
Through this multifamily formula, Hawaii translates the ethnicity
paradigm into a compelling narrative, as each group lives out sociolo-
gist Robert Park’s four-stage race relations cycle of contact, conflict, ac-
commodation, and assimilation. Michener does not shy away from the
islands’ history of racial conflict and exploitation: he documents the bru-
tal conditions on the ships that transported Chinese laborers, the sys-
tematic exclusion of Japanese children from public schools in order to
keep them on the plantations, and the limited education received by na-
tive Hawaiians in white-sponsored schools that trained them for work
in menial jobs. (The implicit comparison, of course, is with the experi-
254 Asians in America
ences of black Americans on slave ships, in segregated schools, and in
vocational education programs such as those offered by the Tuskegee
Institute.) But the novel universalizes this history by locating it within a
global context. During World War II various characters encounter Brit-
ish imperialism in Fiji, segregation in Mississippi, and Nazism in Eu-
rope, after which they appreciate anew Hawaii’s high degree of racial
harmony. The novel also charts a progression away from this structur-
ally embedded racism and toward the institutionalization of racial egal-
itarianism. Michener ends the novel in November 1954, at the very
moment when the white minority is losing its historic control over the
islands’ political and economic life. Newly naturalized Asian-born resi-
dents have turned out to vote in record numbers, the multiracial Demo-
cratic party has won control of the legislature from the white Repub-
lican elite, and Japanese Americans have been elected to a majority of
seats in the territorial legislature. Michener suggests that Hawaii, while
clearly not a racial paradise, is closer than any other multiracial society
to putting the ideal of racial integration into practice.
The novel also narrativizes the ethnicity paradigm by unfavorably
contrasting characters who think in narrowly racial terms with those
who have embraced the more flexible terms of culture. The novel’s he-
roes are those who can select the best elements of each group’s culture
and combine them to create something new. The home of the Chinese
matriarch Nyuk Tsin embodies this Hawaiian ideal of cultural hybrid-
ity: “In food, language and laughter the establishment was Hawaiian. In
school-book learning, business and religion it was American. But in filial
obedience and reverence for education it was Chinese.” The narrative
structure itself communicates the ideal of liberal universalism by drawing
parallels between each of the different ethno-racial groups, in everything
from their shared experience of a nightmarish ship journey to the is-
lands, to their tendencies toward ancestor worship and quasi-incestuous
marriage. Michener, like Hammerstein, articulates his message that “all
men are brothers” in a manner difficult to miss. Many readers of the novel
understood this message and liked it: the Chicago Sunday Tribune re-
viewer, for instance, praised Hawaii as “one of the most enlightening
books ever written, either fact or fiction, about the integration of diver-
gent peoples into a composite society.” 39
Michener makes sense of this vast narrative and this proliferation of
characters by organizing the book spatially: he uses his generation- and
continent-spanning families as the skeins that knit America together
with the rest of the world. Michener’s families are in motion, traversing
Asians in America 255
the vast expanses between the American mainland, Hawaii, the islands
of the Pacific, and Asia. Immigrants and travelers, their routes map Ha-
waii as the center of a complex web of flows that bind Asia, the Pacific,
and America together.
Michener organizes the novel according to three sets of flows, each of
which has Hawaii at its center. The first set consists of the flows of mi-
gration that span a thousand years and that carry the characters away
from their original homes in Bora Bora, New England, central China, and
Japan. Michener emphasizes this first set of flows in his chapter titles —
“From the Sun-Swept Lagoon” (Polynesians), “From the Farm of Bit-
terness” (Americans), “From the Starving Village” (Chinese), “From the
Inland Sea” (Japanese)— and in the full-color map that forms the book’s
frontispiece (Figure 24). Rendering his project of transnational mapping
literal and visual, this map, titled “The Coming of the Peoples,” charts
the flows of each of his four ethnic groups out from their places of origins
in North America and Asia and into Hawaii. Together with the genea-
logical trees at the back of the book, this illustration maps the family
Figure 24. In his book Hawaii (1959), James Michener maps the immigrant
flows out of Polynesia, New England, China, and Japan and into Hawaii.
(courtesy Random House)
256 Asians in America
structure of the narrative onto the space of the Pacific basin. Michener’s
families are international entities.
As the map makes clear, all of the novel’s groups are immigrants, but
Michener inflects each group’s travel with different meaning. He frames
the Polynesian characters’ travel as an adventure narrative: setting sail
in big canoes, they travel for thousands of miles using only the stars to
navigate and establish a new society on uninhabited islands. The white
New Englanders’ travel is cast as a narrative of national expansion: fired
by missionary zeal, they leave the United States in order to spread Amer-
ican culture, values, and institutions beyond the nation’s borders. The
Chinese and Japanese characters follow the literary path of the classic
ethnic immigrant narrative. Driven from their homes by economic hard-
ship and limited opportunity, they travel to Hawaii in search of ex-
panded opportunities. Once arrived, they begin the slow but steady pro-
cess of integrating themselves into and rising up through Hawaii’s
Americanized society: while the first generation begins as servants and
plantation laborers who maintain their original languages and tradi-
tions, their Hawaiian-born offspring imbibe American culture, attend
public school, become successful businessmen, and eventually enter into
political life.
Casting the Chinese and Japanese stories as familiar ethnic narratives
was key to the novel’s political argument: Michener wanted to show that
the islands’ majority Asian population was composed not of unassimil-
able racial Others but of familiar immigrant types who, like previous
generations of European immigrants, embraced the traditional virtues
of hard work, loyalty to family, and love of education. By making them
familiar immigrants, Michener’s work does culturally what the 1952
McCarran-Walter Act did legally: it shows that Chinese- and Japanese-
born people can be Asian and American at the same time. The family
bonds established by this first set of flows enable Michener to trace the
roots of Hawaii, and by extension America, back to multiple origins in
the Pacific islands, New England, China, and Japan. Michener directs
his educational impulse to these places as well as to Hawaii itself, and
he teaches his readers about religious tensions in Bora Bora, ethnic dif-
ferences among the Chinese, and courtship traditions in rural Japan.
The effect of this is to render New England, traditionally the birthplace
of the nation, as only one among many originary sources of the nation’s
identity. He makes the South Pacific, China, and Japan into equivalent
“old countries” to the more familiar white ethnic homelands of Ireland,
Italy, and Eastern Europe. In doing so, he introduces his mainland read-
Asians in America 257
ers not only to their new fellow citizens, but to their Asian-Pacific cul-
tural roots as well.
The novel’s second set of flows reinforces and sustains these ties to
Asia and the Pacific by sending characters back, either literally or figu-
ratively, to their ancestors’ homelands. Unlike many immigrant narra-
tives, Michener’s does not sever the characters’ ties with their points of
origin: their Americanization does not require the loss of all contact with
their ancestral homes. Rather, after mapping their flow into Hawaii,
Michener posits a partial flow back out of Hawaii as his fully assimilated
characters recognize, maintain, or reestablish the unbreakable bonds of
family and culture that tie them to Asia and the Pacific.
In keeping with Michener’s views of the people of Hawaii as a na-
tional “resource” upon which Washington could draw, his Japanese and
mixed-race characters return to their Asian and Pacific origins as agents
of U.S. expansion. Hoxworth Hale, a part-Hawaiian member of the
white elite, travels to the South Pacific as a military officer during World
War II. Claiming Tahiti as the “islands from which his people had
come,” he describes Bora Bora as “like a sacred home.” When he fathers
a child with a native woman — at her invitation —he asserts that he will
be “forever a part of Bora Bora.” This episode recapitulates a typical im-
perial fantasy of sexual conquest and colonization. Yet Michener com-
plicates this fantasy by making his white man part-Polynesian, which
frames his sexual encounter not as an imperial gesture of control and
domination, but as a migrant’s return to his roots. Hale’s racial hybrid-
ity thus works to obscure the imperial nature of the military expansion
that he enacts. Establishing the bonds to Japan requires a more careful
negotiation. Michener does sever ties based on national loyalty: Kame-
jiro Sakagawa’s devotion to the Emperor leads to penury, unhappiness,
and “schizophrenia” and must eventually be renounced during World
War II in favor of loyalty to the United States. But his sons’ cultural tie
to Japan, specifically their ability to speak Japanese, enables them to re-
turn to their parents’ homeland as part of the U.S. occupation forces and
work as translators for General MacArthur’s land reform expert. The
biological and cultural ties to Asia and the Pacific that these characters
possess make their presence there, and by extension that of the U.S. gov-
ernment, which they represent, that much more natural and thus legiti-
mate. With this return set of flows out of Hawaii and back into Asia and
the Pacific, Michener constructs the immigrant bonds of his characters as
two-way roads, routes through which Americans can flow out into Asia
and the Pacific as easily as Asians and Pacific Islanders can flow into
258 Asians in America
America. These immigrants bestow upon the nation at large the very
thing that political observers feared was lacking in America and under-
mining U.S. foreign policy in Asia: a familiarity with Asia rooted in the
intimate bonds of family and common culture.40
Michener’s third set of flows consists of populations migrating around
the world over the course of millennia. This flow is at once more ab-
stract and more all-encompassing, and more than any other it estab-
lishes America, through Hawaii, as a “nation of nations” located within
a truly global matrix of family ties. The novel culminates in a chapter
that celebrates Hawaii as the incubator of a glorious new type of person,
whom Michener dubs the Golden Man. Although Michener invented
this term for the novel, the narrator ascribes it to a group of sociologists
who in 1946 perfected a concept whose outline had preoccupied them
for years. The sociologists’ Golden Man, as a figure who first appears
earlier in the century but does not fully mature until after the war, is thus
the apotheosis and embodiment of the ethnicity paradigm, the incarna-
tion of changing ideas about race and culture. The Golden Man is pri-
marily an intellectual, rather than a racial, hybrid who combines the
best of both Eastern and Western cultures: “He was a man influenced by
both the west and the east, a man at home in either the business coun-
cils of New York or the philosophical retreats of Kyoto, a man wholly
modern and American yet in tune with the ancient and the Oriental.” 41
Michener focuses on four such Golden Men, one from each of his ethno-
racial groups, and they bring to fruition the themes of cultural relativ-
ism, pluralism, and syncretism that have been developing over the course
of the novel: like the heroic figures in earlier chapters, they are charac-
ters who can understand, embrace, and learn from other cultures.
Michener uses the Golden Men to discredit biological theories of ra-
cial purity and hierarchy. Although each of his four characters thinks of
himself as racially pure, Michener invalidates their narrowly racial think-
ing by tracing their genealogies back centuries and connecting them to
all the races of the world. Hoxworth Hale, his ostensibly white Golden
Man, for instance,
was one-sixteenth Hawaiian, inherited through the Alii Nui Noelani,
who was his great-great-grandmother. He was also part-Arabian, for one
of his European ancestors had married during the Crusades, part-African
through an earlier Roman ancestor, part – Central Asian from an Austrian
woman who had married a Hungarian in 1603, and part-American Indian
through a cute trick that an early Hale’s wife had pulled on him in remote
Massachusetts.
Asians in America 259
Hong Kong Kee, his Chinese Golden Man, has a similar background.
His “ancestors had picked up a good deal of Mongolian blood, and
Manchurian, and Tartar, plus a little Japanese during the wars of the
early 1600’s, plus some Korean via an ancestor who had traveled in that
peninsula in 814, augmented by a good deal of nondescript inheritance
from tribes who had wandered about southern China from the year
4000 b.c. on.” Ultimately, Michener connects all his Golden Men, and
the separate groups they represent, back to a single mythic family, which
he imagines alternately as “two ancient Malayan brothers” or “three
ancient Siberian brothers,” whose descendants form the populations of
Polynesia, New England, China, and Japan — that is, the original homes
of Hawaii’s four major population groups. These Golden Men embody
the ideal of the “brotherhood of man” so popular among middlebrow
intellectuals, from Edward Steichen to Pearl Buck: when Hammerstein,
in an insensitive moment, referred to the children of Welcome House as
“half-castes,” Buck snapped, “We don’t use that ugly term around here:
we’re all half-castes if you trace it back far enough.” 42
The Golden Men are the means through which Michener achieves the
novel’s central ideological project of redeeming the United States from
the accusations of racism and imperialism. Michener presents these
Golden Men as the ultimate benefit that Hawaiian statehood can bestow
upon America. Spanning the globe through their multiple bloodlines,
these new Americans represent a globalism that is natural and inescap-
able, not imperial or coercive. They allow the reader to see America and
the world not only as fundamentally interconnected, but as always hav-
ing been so. They take the ideal of U.S.-Asian integration out of the realm
of contemporary foreign affairs and project it back into the mists of pre-
history and biology. It becomes a result of sex and marriage, of migrations
and flows, rather than politics. The hybrid Golden Men, as emblems of
Hawaii, deflate the accusation of imperialism by showing that America
already and harmoniously contains all the world’s people within itself.
With Nyuk Tsin, the Chinese matriarch, Michener creates the novel’s
quintessential immigrant and most memorable character. In doing so,
he establishes the Asian immigrant woman as an emblematic figure of the
domestic integration of Asian Americans — a cultural counterpart to the
jungle doctor, white mother, and tourist who serve as the era’s figures of
international U.S.-Asian integration. Michener makes hers a classic im-
migrant story: a poor village girl who is kidnapped and sold into pros-
titution, Nyuk Tsin arrives in Hawaii as the second wife of a Chinese
gambler; she works hard, educates her sons, and gradually builds up and
260 Asians in America
oversees a huge financial empire run by her children and grandchildren.
Her values, while presented as traditionally Chinese, are also comfort-
ingly familiar: she values thrift, education, private property, and the
basic principles of capitalism. Her immigration to Hawaii, rather than
threatening the U.S. by injecting into it alien customs, strengthens the
nation’s social and moral foundations. The progenitor of ninety-five de-
scendants (according to her genealogical tree) who travel the world and
intermarry across many racial and ethnic lines, Nyuk Tsin becomes, in
effect, the mother of a new multiracial and global America.
The novel’s three sets of flows come together in Nyuk Tsin. As an im-
migrant, she participates in the initial flow out of China and into Ha-
waii. She participates in the second flow back to China when she sends
money to her husband’s first wife, who remained behind in the ancestral
village, and when she sends her children’s and grandchildren’s names
back to be registered in the village’s records. In these ways family ties are
maintained across the Pacific, so that even though none of the family has
ever physically returned to China, when the eldest Kee child goes to col-
lege on the mainland, “he was not only head of a burgeoning family left
behind in Honolulu, but also the member of a powerful clan whose
existence had continued in the Low Village for thousands of years.”
Nyuk Tsin embodies the third, more global, flow when she names
her five sons after the continents of Asia, Africa, Europe, America, and
Australia. In this way, she extends her family like a web around the
globe, making it coterminous with all the other peoples of the world. In
the final pages of the novel, her immigrant trajectory comes to its ulti-
mate conclusion as she takes advantage of the naturalization provision
in the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act and, eighty-eight years after immi-
grating, becomes a U.S. citizen. With this episode Michener injects the
novel’s only direct reference to the Cold War in Asia: as Nyuk Tsin takes
her citizenship test, a bevy of newsreel cameras, brought in by the im-
migration officials, film the interview as a “dramatic” event that they
can “use for publicity in Asia.” Having completed the cycle from im-
migrant to citizen, and having facilitated the integration of Asia and
America in many small ways, Nyuk Tsin dies at the age of one hundred
and six.43
• • • • •
Hawaii in the 1950s had an ideological value unmatched by any other
part of the United States. For one reason, it was a multiracial society that
Asians in America 261
contained a negligible number of African Americans. It thus allowed
Michener and other commentators to recast American race relations in
Asian-white terms rather than in the more fraught black-white terms.
Writing about Hawaii enabled Michener to champion the ideal of racial
equality and the practice of racial integration without having to grapple
with the entrenched and often violent racism, rooted in the history of
slavery, that the black civil rights movement was revealing in the Amer-
ican South and bringing to the forefront of national consciousness. By
using Hawaii as “proof” that racism was not permanently entrenched in
the American psyche and society, Michener effectively “solved” the na-
tion’s race problem by excising blacks from America.
Hawaii’s other main ideological advantage was that it allowed Mich-
ener to sidestep the single greatest act of anti-Asian racism: the intern-
ment of Japanese Americans during World War II. As Caroline Chung
Simpson has argued, the fact of internment and its public remembering
during the postwar years threatened, as did other well-known instances
of racial injustice, to destabilize the nation’s claims to being a democratic,
tolerant, and pluralist nation. To remember internment was to risk re-
membering that Americans had until very recently been committed to the
idea of Asians as unassimilable foreign Others. Hawaii offered Michener
the possibility of acknowledging the history of internment while limit-
ing its ideological damage: while California, Washington, and Oregon
forcibly interned 120,000 of their residents of Japanese background,
most of whom were U.S. citizens, Hawaii interned only 1,444. The dif-
ference resulted from widespread opposition to internment among Ha-
waii’s elite, from logistical considerations and, most important, from
self-interest: to lock up or evacuate one third of the islands’ population
and a high proportion of its agricultural and skilled work force would
have devastated the economy and endangered the security of the islands.
Because internment did not dominate the history of Asians in Hawaii,
Michener was able to contain its ideological threat by embedding its re-
membering within a larger narrative of Asian integration.44
Flower Drum Song offered a similar opportunity to publicly raise and
contain the memory of internment by locating it within a larger narra-
tive of Americanization. In its 1958 cover story on the show, Time pre-
sented the life stories of stars Miyoshi Umeki and Pat Suzuki as two
models of how Asians could also be Americans. Umeki, whom the ar-
ticle described as “American by solemn determination,” offered a model
of Asians becoming American though the process of U.S. global expan-
262 Asians in America
sion. Born and raised in Japan, Umeki’s Americanization was set in mo-
tion by the postwar occupation of her country. Encouraged to sing by
American GIs who befriended her family, she began performing with GI
bands in their service clubs; later she learned to copy the style of singers
such as Doris Day whom she heard on the U.S. Army radio and became
a hit on Japanese radio and TV. Her success prompted her to move to
the U.S., where she found work in nightclubs, on TV, and in Hollywood.
She married an American and settled in the U.S. permanently. Time pre-
sented the California-born Pat Suzuki, on the other hand, as “American
by instinct”: temperamentally as well as legally American, she was filled
with wanderlust as a child and “chafed by restrictions, careless of cus-
toms, and in a hurry” as an adult. The article presented her childhood
as a typical one, noting that she sang songs like “I Am an American” at
county fairs. The bombing of Pearl Harbor derailed this uneventful life:
she and her family were “shipped to the Amache relocation camp at La-
mar, Colo.,” and after the war they spent a year working on a Colorado
sugar-beet farm before finally returning home. Time acknowledged but
downplayed the significance of Suzuki’s incarceration, presenting it as
an interruption of an otherwise average American life story. The article
did not mention racism, the violation of civil rights, or the economic ex-
ploitation of people forced to abandon their homes and property. In-
stead it described Suzuki’s life in the camps as “a matter of school as
usual,” and implied that the experience made little impression on her,
claiming that her only memories were of the weather and of the Nisei Boy
Scouts who raised the American flag each morning. The article presented
Suzuki as completely American even as she was ethnically Japanese, and
it never suggested that internment entailed any denial of her American-
ness. The article cast her experiences as a rough spot in an American
childhood, but refused to read it as evidence of a widely held view that
people of Japanese background were fundamentally foreign. In doing so
it contained, as did Michener’s novel, the destabilizing potential that
public rememberings of internment threatened to raise.45
Hawaii and Flower Drum Song make clear that the racial formation
of Americans has never been a simple domestic process. The meanings
and the regulation of ethno-racial difference within the nation have al-
ways taken shape in relation to events and processes occurring beyond
the nation’s borders. The foreign and the domestic spheres, far from be-
ing neatly separated as they have been in most accounts of American po-
litical and cultural history, impinge on each other in unexpected ways.
The racial formation of Asian Americans shifted between the early 1940s,
Asians in America 263
when Japanese Americans were interned, and the 1950s, when Asian
Americans were legally and symbolically integrated into the nation as
immigrants and citizens, and one cannot fully understand that change
outside of a transnational framework that takes into account the politi-
cal and ideological demands of World War II, the Cold War, and the on-
going process of U.S. global expansion.46
23Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)
DOLORES FLAMIANO
This article analyzes published photographs of Japanese Americans interned in World War II by Dorothea Lange
(1895-1965), Ansel Adams (1902-84), and Carl Mydans (1907-2004) in Survey Graphic, U.S. Camera, and Life
respectively. Although their work was constrained by the economic and ideological realities of the war’s photojournalism,
they transcended the medium to provide historians with valuable insights into a controversial chapter in our national his-
tory when the government felt it was necessary to curtail civil liberties. In addition to reconsidering the existing scholarship
on Lange and Adams, this article explores new ground by analyzing the photojournalism of Mydans. This fresh perspective
reveals how photojournalism contributed to the visual construction of race, citizenship, and gender.
DOLORES FLAMIANO is an associate
professor in the School of Media Arts and
Design at James Madison University. She
is completing a book, A Good Picture Is
Hard to Kill: Hansel Mieth and Social Re-
form Photojournalism, 1934-1955, that
examines the life and work of the pioneer-
ing female photojournalist.
After the Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered World War II and anti-Japanese hysteria gripped the home front. Then, on February
19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order
9066 authorizing the War Department to exclude any group of
people from military areas for the duration of the war. This was the
legal basis for the evacuation and internment of 110,000 Japanese
immigrants and Japanese Americans from the west coast. Many
were forced to sell their homes and businesses, often suffering huge
financial losses, and educations, careers, and lives were disrupted,
sometimes irrevocably.1
Mainstream American newspapers and magazines portrayed
the incarceration of Japanese Americans as a military necessity,
adopting the euphemisms “relocation and internment,” which was
consistent with government propaganda, for the forced evacuation
and confinement. In 1993, Walt Stromer recalled that the media
“remained largely silent in 1942 on the issue of the relocation and
internment of Japanese-Americans.”2 This research suggests, how-
ever, that mainstream magazines strongly supported internment,
and dissenting opinions were limited to liberal publications.3 Karin
Becker Ohrn observed in 1977 that “the picture magazines steered
clear of the Japanese-American internment” as much as possible,
and when they did cover it, they took pains not to “plead a cause.”4
Nonetheless, this study found significant magazine coverage of
Manzanar and Tule Lake, two camps in California.5 As for “plead-
ing a cause,” this research indicates that magazine articles support-
ed internment as a required curtailment of civil liberties during
wartime.6
Magazine articles gave two main justifications for the intern-
ment of Japanese Americans: military necessity and the Japanese
assimilation problem. The media seemed to take its cue from Gen.
John Lesesne DeWitt, who was responsible for implementing Ex-
ecutive Order 9066 and who cited these reasons as justifications for
the internment. The Japanese American population was concen-
trated along the west coast, including areas designated as “strategic
military areas” after Pearl Harbor. Several articles asserted that the
evacuation order was an unquestioned military necessity because
officials feared that disloyal Japanese Americans, who leased large
tracts of land, could turn them “into a landing field for [Japanese]
bombers in an hour or two.”7
Race, Citizenship, and Gender in World War II Photojournalism
Japanese American Internment in Popular Magazines
Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)24
As a result of such fears, anti-Japanese sentiment was pervasive
in the mainstream press. A strident proponent of internment was
the newspaper chain owned by William Randolph Hearst.8 Henry
McLemore, a syndicated columnist for the Hearst newspapers,
wrote on January 29, 1942: “I am for immediate removal of every
Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t
mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ‘em up, pack ‘em off
and give ‘em the inside room in the badlands.” This type of opinion
extended to the Washington Post, where respected columnist Walter
Lippmann wrote on February 12, 1942: “The Pacific Coast is in
imminent danger of a combined attack from within and without. .
. . The Pacific Coast is officially a combat
zone . . . and nobody ought to be on a
battlefield who has no good reason for
being there. There is plenty of room else-
where for him to exercise his rights.”9
Despite this propaganda, govern-
ment investigators found no evidence
of Japanese sabotage. In February 1942,
Gen. DeWitt reported to President
Roosevelt that no sabotage by Japanese
Americans had yet been confirmed and
then jumped to the illogical conclusion
that this proved “a disturbing and con-
firming indication that such action will
be taken.”10 In the absence of evidence,
magazines and newspapers sometimes
resorted to innuendo. For instance, a
March 1942 Life article featured a pho-
tograph of a deserted Buddhist temple,
with the following caption: “From this
Jap temple at Salinas [California], FBI
agents took three Buddhist priests who
smile courteously while being arrested.
They possessed maps, a spotlight and
a mimeograph machine.”11 The accusation was implicit yet clear:
these contraband objects were proof that the priests were sending
signals to Japanese ships off the Pacific coast. This article also per-
petuated the common wartime stereotype of Japanese Americans
as inscrutable and duplicitous: bent on America’s destruction yet
politely smiling all the while.
The “Japanese assimilation problem” also was invoked as a jus-
tification for internment. The Japanese, unlike many other immi-
grants, maintained their native customs and tended not to marry
white Americans. Thus, they were presumed to be loyal to Japan
simply because of their race. In May 1942, the Saturday Evening
Post quoted a government sociologist, who claimed that the “Japa-
nese were never Americans in California,” and then followed that
by predicting internment would help them to assimilate: “This
may be their great chance to become Americans.”12 The Nation ob-
served in March 1942: “Federal and local officials feel incapable of
distinguishing between loyal and disloyal persons of Japanese de-
scent.”13 California governor Culbert L. Olson expressed this senti-
ment more directly in February 1942: “You know, when I look out
at a group of Americans of German or Italian descent, I can tell
whether they’re loyal or not. . . . But it is impossible for me to do
this with the inscrutable Orientals, and particularly the Japanese.”14
The underlying racism of these arguments was officially sanctioned
and rarely questioned. These articles failed to mention the racist
laws that were a major barrier to assimilation. For example, all
Asian immigrants to the United States were considered “aliens inel-
igible to citizenship” until 1952. In 1906, the San Francisco Board
of Education ordered Japanese Americans to attend a segregated
“Oriental School” with Chinese and other Asian Americans, and
the Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited Asian immigrants from
purchasing land.15
Internment photography emerged in the 1970s as a topic of scholarly analysis with a strong focus on the Manzanar pho-tographs of Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) and Ansel Adams
(1902-84). However, scholars have neglected magazine photogra-
phy in favor of studying what has appeared in books and museum
exhibitions and is in government ar-
chives. This article starts to fill this gap by
focusing on magazine photojournalism
by Lange, Adams, and Life photographer
Carl Mydans (1907-2004), whose in-
ternment images were shaped by the eco-
nomic and ideological constraints of the
magazines in which they were published.
Nonetheless, they transcended photo-
journalism, and their images and words
provide historians with valuable insights
into a painful chapter in our national his-
tory. Their photographs have contributed
to the construction of a revisionist history
of internment that, according to historian
David Yoo in 1996, “highlights an under-
side of U.S. history, illustrating how race
relations at home stood in stark contrast
to the fight for democracy abroad.”16
Wartime internment stories were rife
with racial slurs and stereotypes, which
most readers apparently accepted or at
least tolerated. “Jap,” for example, was
commonplace in popular magazines such
as Life, although more high-minded publications such as the New
York Times Magazine eschewed the term. Other magazines were
crassly inventive in their derogatory names for Japanese Americans.
In March 1942, American Magazine labeled them “yellow bellies,”
while in 1944, U.S. Camera called them “condescending little
gremlins.”17 In September 1942, American Magazine perpetuated
the enigmatic, unfeeling stereotype: “Japs usually hide their senti-
ments. Sometimes you wonder if they have any.”18 The same article
declared them unable to fit into American life and implied that
they were less than human: “America has never assimilated them.
During business hours they associated with white Americans, but
after dark they lived in huddled colonies. When they moved into a
district, whether in a city or a countryside, Caucasians moved away.
Their neighbors were other Orientals or dark-skinned peoples.”19
Wartime narratives of internment in national magazines fo-
cused on Manzanar and Tule Lake in California while ignoring the
eight camps in more remote areas as far east as Arkansas. Life’s April
1942 article, “Coast Japs Are Interned in Mountain Camp,” paint-
ed a muddled picture; its glowing optimism was punctured once
or twice by stark realism. For example, the internees were described
as “enchanted by scenic surroundings” and yet they called Man-
zanar a “concentration camp.”20 The story emphasized the moun-
tain scenery with several photographs of the “spectacular Sierras”
looming in the background, dwarfing the people and the barracks.
The camp was labeled “a scenic spot of lonely loveliness” where
the “Japs gasped when they saw Mt. Whitney, highest peak in the
“Wartime internment stories
were rife with racial slurs and
stereotypes, which most readers
apparently accepted or at least
tolerated.
‘Jap,’ for example,
was commonplace in popular
magazines such as Life,
although more high-minded
publications such as
the New York Times Magazine
eschewed the term.”
25Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)
U.S., shrugging its white shoulder above lesser ranges just 13 miles
away.”21 The theme of scenic beauty reached an apotheosis in the
work of Adams, whose U.S. Camera article contained eight pho-
tographs, including three landscapes. He saw Manzanar as a rustic
boot camp—tough but ultimately beneficial—with the mountain
range acting as a purifying crucible: “I believe the acrid splendor of
the desert, ringed with towering mountains, has strengthened the
people of Manzanar.”22
Not all observers shared Adams’ sanguine vision, but most
stories showed internment camp life as reasonably adequate and
humane. For instance, Life reported in April 1942 that Manzanar
residents “were settled comfortably last week, prepared to wait out
the war in willing and not unprofitable internment.”23 Other sto-
ries echoed these themes of contentment and gainful employment.
For instance, a New York Times Magazine article in June 1942 fo-
cused on the planned reclamation of Manzanar’s arid wasteland by
Japanese American agricultural workers, though it admitted find-
ing enough work for the evacuees was a “chief problem.”24 Simi-
larly, Collier’s showed a young man in August 1942 with survey-
ing equipment in the fields, and the caption noted “opportunity
is here for anyone who wants to work.”25 In fact, work was hard to
find, and most internees were ruined financially. The government
paid unskilled laborers $12 a month, while doctors and other pro-
fessionals earned $19. Furthermore, the racial disparity in camp
pay scales was staggering. For example, a pediatrician at the Heart
Mountain Hospital was paid $228 per year while Caucasian nurses
working at the same hospital made $1,800 per year.26
Some wartime narratives symbolically linked the internment to another hard time in American history: the nineteenth-century westward expansion. These stories compared the in-
ternees to pioneer settlers and the camps to the old West. With
no apparent irony, magazine articles called the internment camps
“boom towns” and “pioneer colonies” and described the internees
as “pilgrims.”27 In August 1942, Collier’s told the story in rapturous
rhetoric: “A dozen new war-born communities have risen almost
magically in the open spaces of the Far West.”28 In 1944, U.S. Cam-
era juxtaposed Lange’s flag salute photograph with text that com-
pared evacuation and internment to a family camping trip: “Whole
families packed up their belongings, loaded them on trucks, and
joined the caravan inland to internment camps—American style—
where they established themselves.”29 Contrary to this implication
that families moved all their belongings to the camps, they were
allowed to take only what they could carry in their hands.
These examples confirm that internment photographs, as Syl-
via E. Danovitch and Elena Tajima Creef noted in 1980 and 2004
respectively, excluded the harshness or inconvenience of the camps’
daily living conditions.30 Moreover, some articles featured people
(usually women) happily engaged in domestic production. In Au-
gust 1942, Survey Graphic and Collier’s published photographs of
the same two young women posed in their room at Manzanar with
checkered curtains at the windows. Collier’s offered this image as
evidence that life goes on as normal with families and appropriate
gender roles intact: “Nisei girls in one of their Manzanar apart-
Ansel Adams (top) and Carl Mydans had their Japanese intern-
ment photography in World War II shaped by the economic
and idealogical constraints of the magazines in which they were
published. However, they transcended photojournalism, their
images and words provided valuable insights into a painful
chapter in United States history.
Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)26
ments. The women went to great effort to make their homes as at-
tractive as possible.”31 Such images fostered a myth that the camps
were, according to Marita Sturken in 1997, “a kind of summer
camp, with craft classes and group activities.” These “hyperdomes-
tic” images of homemaking and recreation also revealed the gen-
dered discourse of internment stories that “feminize the camps and
emasculate the Japanese men within them.”32 By simultaneously
highlighting the familiar domesticity of internment camp life and
rendering Japanese men powerless, these narratives diminished an
alleged threat to American national security.
Meanwhile, the best-known internment photographs empha-
sized Japanese American loyalty and pa-
triotism.
When the progressive monthly so-
cial reform journal Survey Graphic asked
University of California economist Paul
Taylor to write about the internment,
Lange’s War Relocation Authority (WRA)
photographs were chosen to illustrate the
story. They had collaborated on a 1939
book, An American Exodus: A Record of
Human Erosion, which documented the
dustbowl migration to California. Dur-
ing the depression, many of Lange’s Farm
Security Administration photographs,
including her famous “Migrant Mother,”
had appeared in Survey Graphic. Accord-
ing to Linda Gordon in 2008, Taylor’s
and Lange’s internment story was sched-
uled to appear in April 1942 but was
postponed until September because of
military censorship.33
The September 1942 issue of Survey
Graphic contained a six-page article by
Taylor, “Our Stakes in the Japanese Exodus.” The cover featured a
pre-evacuation photograph by Lange of San Francisco children in
a schoolyard saluting the American flag, and the article included
seven photographs attributed to “Dorothea Lange and Frances
Stewart for War Relocation Authority.”34 Unlike photographic es-
says in Life, which built a story around photographs, this essay
used photographs to illustrate the story. Taylor’s text could stand
alone and did not refer directly to the individuals or activities in
the photographs. The first photograph showed a group of Japa-
nese Americans registering for evacuation in San Francisco, and
three pages of text explained evacuation policies and procedures.
Next, a two-page photographic spread, “The Japanese Exodus—
from Coastal Homes to the Hinterland,” told a simple narrative in
pictures: an evacuation order taped to a vacant store, a child getting
a shot, evacuees arriving by train, farmers working at Tule Lake,
two young women in their “quarters at Manzanar,” and a young
woman playing table tennis.35
Unlike the mass circulation magazines, Survey Graphic es-chewed racial slurs, emotional rants, or clever headlines. Written both for professional social workers and for a gen-
eral audience interested in broader social issues, it was more influ-
ential than its circulation of 25,000 would suggest. According to
Cara Finnegan in 2003, the guiding principles of Survey Graphic
were “progressive, modernist modes of thinking that believed in
the authority of the expert, valued social invention, and possessed
an interest in the communicative potential of visual explanation.”36
In the midst of media-circulated racist hysteria, the journal’s edi-
tors framed the issue thoughtfully: “In essence [Taylor] asks us as
Americans to take a really good look at what we are holding in our
hands—not so much what military necessity required and what it
didn’t; but what’s to be done now to fend against irreparable dam-
age we are likely to do ourselves—damage internally, damage with
our allies and potential allies, damage to our own children and
their chance of survival.”37
The accompanying images and captions by Lange told a story
of government humanity and efficiency and Japanese American
orderliness and good cheer. The first image in the Survey Graphic
article, for instance, showed three well-
dressed, middle-aged, spectacled Japanese
(two men and one woman) standing at a
desk and being helped by a seated man
and woman. The encounter appeared as
routine, calm, and orderly as a visit to
the tax collector. This sense was ampli-
fied by the caption, which was written
by Lange: “A corps of specially trained
teams from civilian agencies aided the
Japanese, aliens and American-born
alike, when they reported at the stations
of the Wartime Civil Control Admin-
istration. These teams helped them in
completing individual preparations and
in making disposition of their homes and
property. They supervised health and as-
sisted in innumerable problems of per-
sonal adjustment.”38 The images and text
focused on the government’s efficiency
and benevolence. Such images “fit per-
fectly with the official presentation of the
internment as humane, orderly, and even
beneficial to the internees,” wrote Judith Fryer Davidov in 1996.39
While her words described Adams’ Manzanar photographs, they
also could apply to Lange’s images of evacuation published in Sur-
vey Graphic.
Lange’s image of children saluting the American flag is a
good example of flag iconography in World War II photojournal-
ism. Sixty-five years after it was shot, the most famous example
of the flag as an icon is still “Raising the flag on Mount Surib-
achi,” a 1945 photograph by Associated Press photographer Joe
Rosenthal.40 Her photograph, like Rosenthal’s image of Marines
on Iwo Jima, displayed Americans rallying around the flag during
wartime. She showed a San Francisco schoolyard where minority
students outnumbered whites and an Asian boy led the flag salute.
This image seemed to reassure viewers that American principles
prevailed despite the harsh realities of internment and the apparent
suspension of civil liberties. Ironically, this image highlighted racial
equality when it was about to receive a crushing blow. The title of
the image, “Americans All,” reflected and amplified the themes of
patriotism and equality.
A better-known flag salute photograph by Lange was published
in U.S. Camera in 1944 under the title “Oath of Allegiance.” U.S.
Camera, which began publication in 1935 under the editorship of
former advertising executive Tom Maloney and was inspired by
European photographic yearbooks, was a book-length compilation
of the year’s outstanding photographs in high-quality reproduc-
tions. It emphasized individual photographs selected by Edward
Steichen, who gained fame in the 1950s as the curator of “The
“Unlike the mass circulation
magazines, Survey Graphic
eschewed racial slurs, emotional
rants, or clever headlines.
Written both
for professional social workers
and for a general audience
interested in broader social
issues, it was more influential
than its circulation
of 25,000 would suggest.”
27Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)
Family of Man” exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art. Under his
direction, U.S. Camera was an im-
mediate success with a circulation
of 35,000 in 1937.41 According to a
former editor, it tried to appeal to a
wide audience with a “mix of corn,
nudes, news and art.” As part of this
mass appeal formula, editors in the
1940s sometimes used photographs
out of context and without explana-
tion, distorting their meaning with
“glib contrasts and quick visual
puns.”42 In 1944 and 1945, U.S.
Camera devoted its pages to war
photography, reflecting both the na-
tional preoccupation with war and
Commander Steichen’s position as
chief of naval combat photography.
The 1944 edition contained scenes
of life on the home front, including
Lange’s “Oath of Allegiance,” which
was the book’s only internment-re-
lated image.
“Oath of Allegiance” featured a
multicultural group of girls with a
Japanese girl in the foreground, all
with their eyes uplifted and hands
over their hearts. The American flag
was located off-camera, above and
behind the photographer. Much of
the emotional power of this image
came from Lange’s proximity to these earnest young people. Their
faces showed that this was no meaningless ritual but a heartfelt
expression of allegiance, and indeed, some of them appeared on the
verge of tears, an understandable reaction for residents of coastal
California in 1942. Amidst the turmoil, the Japanese American
girl in the foreground provided a comforting visual anchor with
her calm stoicism.
Like the Survey Graphic article by Taylor and Lange, the cap-
tion in U.S. Camera fixed the photograph’s meaning to emphasize
American citizenship and the efficiency of the WRA:
The scene is an American schoolyard, at the opening of the day’s
session. A Japanese-American child is leading her fifth grade classmates
in a salute to the American flag. It took place just a few days before she
and more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were evacuated
from the Pacific Coast.
Following Pearl Harbor the tremendous job of rounding up en-
emy aliens and those of Japanese descent from the vulnerable coastal
areas was undertaken by the War Relocation Authority. Whole fami-
lies packed up their belongings, loaded them on trucks, and joined the
caravan inland to internment camps—American style—where they es-
tablished themselves.43
This caption was written not by Lange but by the editors of
U.S. Camera. The first paragraph used “American” three times and
the second paragraph seemed to equate “American style” with be-
nevolent. This, of course, glossed over the gross injustice of intern-
ment. Lange’s own caption to this image, which was not published
but it available in the Online Digital Archive of California, echoed
the language and promises of the American government, minus
the hyperpatriotism: “Flag of allegiance pledge at Raphael Weill
Public School, Geary and Buchanan Streets. Children of families
of Japanese ancestry were evacuated with their parents and will be
housed for the duration in War Relocation Authority centers where
facilities will be provided for them to continue their education.”44
As these examples of Lange’s photography illustrate, the
American flag emerged as a potent symbol in published photo-
graphs of internment. In Survey Graphic, the flag symbolized free-
dom, equality, and diversity, which were all temporarily suspended
by the “Japanese Exodus.” In U.S. Camera, the flag symbolically
reconciled the contradictions between Japanese American incar-
ceration and the rights of citizenship protected under the U.S.
Constitution. In both cases, the juxtaposition of the flag and fresh-
faced young Americans represented patriotism, diversity, youth,
and hope for the future.
Lange’s published photographs and captions conveyed mes-
sages of Japanese patriotism and American benevolence, which
were at odds with her well known opposition to internment. Un-
fortunately, there is little evidence of her response to the treatment
of her photographs in Survey Graphic and U.S. Camera. Ohrn,
however, has noted her ambivalent relationship with magazine
publishing. Lange created four photographic essays for Life but
published only two. According to Ohrn, “throughout her career
she had resisted being characterized as a news photographer” yet
“the photo essays she did for the picture magazines are evidence of
her ability to adapt to some extent to the constraints of magazine
photojournalism.” She concluded that “Lange’s insistence on the
autonomy of her work—her desire to see each assignment through
Dorothea Lange’s photograph of children saluting the American flag is a good example of flag
iconography in World War II photojournalism. The “Oath of Allegiance,” taken in a San
Francisco schoolyard, seemed to reassure viewers that American principles prevailed.
Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)28
to its final layout design and copy—would not have conformed to
the practice of turning photographs over to editors for these crucial
steps of constructing a photo essay.”45
Adams shared Lange’s desire for autonomy, but his relation-ship with magazines was even more problematic. When he was invited by camp director Ralph Merritt to photograph
Manzanar in 1943, he eagerly accepted, seeing it as an opportu-
nity to make a vital contribution to the war effort. He was too
old to serve in combat and was dissatisfied teaching photography
to naval officers. He called his Manzanar work “the most impor-
tant job I have done this year.”46 Previous studies have focused on
his book, Born Free and Equal, which contained 104 photographs.
This study has a much narrower focus: the eight images in “Manza-
nar,” a photographic essay which was published in U.S. Camera in
November 1944. This feature represented a distillation of his book,
showing the formal constraints that he faced in adapting his work
to a magazine format as well as the ideological constraints of U.S.
Camera. The magazine was an offshoot of the U.S. Camera annual
and shared the same patriotic editorial perspective.
Five of Adams’ photographs in U.S. Camera were portraits and
the remaining three were landscapes. The first page of the photo-
graphic essay showcased his prodigious talent as a landscape pho-
tographer with a dramatic half-page photograph of the Inyo moun-
tain range. A smaller photograph showed the entrance to the camp
with a rustic wooden sign (“Manzanar War Relocation Center”) in
the foreground and the imposing mountains in the background.
Historian Gerald Robinson described the sign as “benign and
handsome . . . like one might see upon entering a National Park.”47
The essay’s main caption in U.S. Camera echoed the benevolent
narrative: “The acrid splendor of the desert, ringed with towering
mountains, is part of the life of the people at Manzanar Relocation
Center. In the spring of 1942, some 110,000 persons of Japanese
ancestry were placed in protective custody.”48
The second page included a portrait of a Christian divinity
student standing in front of the Manzanar Christian Church sign,
written in English and Japanese. Although half of the residents were
Buddhist, none were shown in Adams’ photographs. There was also
a close-up of a Women’s Army Corps private in dress uniform and
a wide angle view of a planted field where Manzanar residents used
experimental methods to extract rubber from plants, presumably
to support the war effort. The final page of photographs showed
two young boys, a U.S Navy cadet nurse in dress uniform and a
headshot of a policeman. The overrepresentation of Japanese Amer-
icans in uniform highlighted both their loyalty and their assimila-
tion into the American military and law enforcement institutions.
Adams used what Karin Higa and Tim B. Wride called in 2000
“the purest symbol of patriotic loyalty at the time, the uniform
of the armed forces,” to show that the Japanese people were not
synonymous with the enemy.49 The essay unambiguously depicted
the internees as gainfully employed good citizens. According to the
caption, the WAC private, as well as others like her, were “serv-
ing with pride. They will probably help more than anyone else in
making others feel that Japanese-Americans are good Americans.”50
While the portraits reinforced stereotypes of Japanese docility and
good cheer, the emphasis on people in uniform and the exclusion
of people engaged in Japanese cultural and religious activities pro-
vided powerful counter-narratives to dominant stories of Japanese
difference and disloyalty.
The subtitle of Adams’ article clearly stated his intent to por-
tray “loyal Japanese-Americans.” A letter from him to Nancy Ne-
whall, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, provided insight into
his delicate balancing act as well as the highly charged political
environment of World War II. He wanted his photographs to fight
racist hysteria, and yet he refused to risk having his own patriotism
called into question.
The object of the pictures is to clarify the distinction of the loyal
citizens of Japanese ancestry, and the dis-loyal Japanese citizens and
aliens (I might say Japanese-loyal aliens) that are stationed mostly in in-
ternment camps. There is great opposition out here to all Japanese, citi-
zens or not, loyal or otherwise, chiefly coming from reactionary groups
with racial phobias and commercial interests. . . .
But you can understand how important it is to have everything
completely in hand—to allow no opportunity for anyone to accuse us
of any production detrimental to the war effort. Hence, the distinction
between the loyal and dis-loyal elements must be made crystal-clear,
and the emphasis on the Constitutional rights of loyal minorities placed
thereon to support one of the things for which this war is all about. The
War Relocation Authority is doing a magnificent job, and is firm and
ruthless in their definitions of true loyalty. In effect these pictures imply
a test of true Americanism, and suggest an approach to treatments of
other minority groups.51
Adams’ photographs both reinforced and contradicted the vi-
sual narratives that dominated internment photojournalism. They
also introduced the natural environment as a visual metaphor for
freedom. Because landscape photography was his forte, it is not
surprising that his beloved Sierra Nevadas, which loomed dramati-
cally at Manzanar, figured prominently in his photography of the
internment camp. His text clearly articulated the deeply personal
meaning of this harsh but spectacular natural landscape, which
“strengthened the spirit of the people of Manzanar,” symbolically
reconciling the contradictions between internment and American
values of freedom and equality. For him, these landscapes “symbol-
ize the immensity and opportunity of America—perhaps a vital re-
assurance following the experiences of enforced exodus.”52 Gordon
offered a diametrically opposed perspective on the mountainous
landscape, a common feature of the internment camps: “Manzanar
needed no high barbed-wire fence or guards—as with Alcatraz, ge-
ography formed the prison walls.”53
The numerous close-up portraits of smiling, attractive men,
women, and children bolstered the notion of Japanese American
docility and cheerfulness. Photography historians have questioned
Ansel Adams photograph of the entrance to the Manzanar camp.
29Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)
the meaning of these smiling faces, which seem to belie the dis-
comforts and deprivations of camp life. In 2005, Jasmine Alinder
suggested a solution to the conundrum: “Intensely aware of how
the dominant media and the government were portraying them as
criminals, many Japanese Americans apparently went out of their
way to counter such images and to salvage whatever shred of dig-
nity was permitted to them by dressing in their finest clothes and
putting the best face on a situation that was fundamentally hu-
miliating and degrading.”54 Anne Hammond provided a different
perspective a year later on the smiling faces, suggesting that they
reflected the friendly relationships that Adams had developed with
Japanese Americans during his four vis-
its to Manzanar in 1943 and 1944. Ac-
cording to her, “Adams made friends of
many of the Japanese Americans there. .
. . He was remembered by the internees
as friendly, gregarious, and happy to give
away portraits.”55
Adams was not pleased with the
Manzanar article in U.S. Camera. Pri-
vately, he expressed frustration and dis-
satisfaction with photography magazines,
including U.S. Camera, and with editors,
including Steichen. Despite Steichen’s
reputation as the pre-eminent commer-
cial photographer of the twentieth cen-
tury, he had little respect for him. World
War II and U.S. Camera’s focus on war
photography fueled Adams’ belief that
Steichen lacked intellectual and ethical
depth as he noted in a 1944 letter:
U.S. Camera and the other trade journals are certainly on the
skids. I am about finished with them. The 1945 U.S. Camera arrived.
The same old Steichen showmanship. A series of tragic observations of
a tragic war. Almost nothing beyond Observation; nothing to indicate
what we are fighting for, the purpose of the war. That is what is need-
ed—to reveal the power of the Purpose. A moment’s thought would
bring to light the fact that such pictures could be made of our enemies
as well; human sacrifice is universal.56
It is worth noting that the 1945 annual contained no photo-
graphs shot in the United States, and thus none were by Adams.
His critiques, however, apparently were not motivated by self inter-
est; instead, they reflected his uneasy relationship with commercial
magazine publishing. He deplored the aesthetic, artistic, and moral
sacrifices he was forced to make in adapting his work to a magazine
format, as he expressed in a 1944 letter to his friend and mentor,
the eminent photographer Alfred Stieglitz: “My experience has been
constantly depressing; I feel I am constantly prostituting myself for
the glory of a trade journal.”57 Adams’ internment photographs were
the work of a full-time professional artist, who occasionally dabbled
in magazine photography.
The internment photographs of professional magazine photojournalist Mydans told a different but equally com-pelling story of commitment and compromise during
World War II.
The popular weekly Life magazine was founded in 1936 and
came of age during the war. It remained a mixed bag of features,
cheesecake, and news, but according to Alan Nourie and Barbara
Nourie in 1990, during the war it “matured into the prestigious re-
flector of the cataclysmic events that transformed the United States
and the world.”58 According to James Baughman in 2001, “Life’s
coverage of World War II appears to have won a special place in
the hearts of Americans. . . . [C]irculation rose from 2.86 million
in 1940 to 5.5 million eight years later.”59 The magazine’s popular-
ity and prestige soared partly because of the outstanding work of
twenty photographers dispatched to war zones around the world,
including Mydans, W. Eugene Smith, and Steichen. As Erika Doss
noted in 2001, some of these photographers “aimed for wartime
images with more of a sense of moral outrage about epidemic hu-
man violence,” and all “shared a conviction in the deeper sym-
bolic authority of photography.”60 The
magazine also assumed a higher profile
with publisher Henry Luce’s 1941 edito-
rial manifesto, “The American Century,”
which, Doss pointed out, extolled “na-
tionalism, capitalism, and classlessness,
a sense of confidence, optimism, and
exceptionalism, and the sure belief that
the American way was the way of the
world.”61
The internment photographic essay
by Mydans should be seen in the context
of virulent anti-Japanese ideology that
prevailed elsewhere in Life. Photographic
essays were the most carefully planned
and aesthetically pleasing features in the
magazine. They were surrounded by news
stories, features, and numerous advertise-
ments, some tastefully done but many
mediocre, sensational, and even crude. A
recurring feature in wartime issues of Life
was anti-Japanese propaganda. Scholars have noted that one of the
most blatant examples of Life’s racism ran shortly after Pearl Har-
bor—“How to tell Japs from the Chinese”—purportedly to protect
innocent Chinese victims of righteous American anger against the
Japanese. The article featured a chart detailing visual differences
between Chinese and Japanese facial features, skin tones, and ex-
pressions: “Chinese wear rational calm of tolerant realists. Japs, like
General Tojo, show humorless intensity of ruthless mystics.”62 The
article revealed a naïve belief in the truth-value of images as well as
the visibility of racial categories.
In contrast to this gratuitous feature, Life’s combat photog-
raphy included brutal, even sadistic, examples of anti-Japanese
imagery. A famous 1943 photograph by Ralph Morse showed a
Japanese soldier’s skull atop a tank, where it reportedly had been
placed by U.S. troops, with charred skin and bared teeth.63 Readers
wrote to complain that this image was “malicious, revolting, sav-
age, and vulgar” and “the most terrible picture I have ever seen.”
After one advised, “You better leave that kind of stuff to Hitler and
Tojo,” Life’s editors responded, “War is unpleasant, cruel and inhu-
man. And it is more dangerous to forget this than to be shocked
by reminders.”64 This reply, of course, ignored the writer’s implica-
tion that such a display was un-American, and more suited to the
notoriously brutal enemies. The magazine’s decision to publish this
image in the midst of wartime anti-Japanese propaganda was not
surprising. More shocking, however, was the fact that Steichen se-
lected Morse’s photograph for Memorable Life Photographs, a 1951
book published by Time Inc. and the Museum of Modern Art.65
As World War II dragged on, stories of Japanese atrocities,
including Japanese suicide missions and the beheading of Allied
“Life’s combat photography
included brutal, even sadistic,
examples of anti-Japanese
imagery. A famous 1943
photograph by Ralph Morse
showed a Japanese soldier’s
skull atop a tank, where it
reportedly had been placed
by U.S. troops, with charred
skin and bared teeth.”
Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)30
soldiers, circulated in the American media, feeding anti-Japanese
hysteria. On April 3, 1944, Life published a two-page spread with
gruesome images of mutilated Japanese suicide victims on the is-
land of Attu.66 Like the skull photograph, this story provoked let-
ters to the editor. One reader called it “revolting and unnecessary”
while another wrote, “If the men who are fighting can actually
see it, smell it and hear it, why can’t we stand to just see the pic-
tures?”67
The most bizarre example of anti-Japanese imagery in Life was
selected as the “Picture of the Week” in May 1944: a full-page pho-
tograph showed an attractive twenty-year-old woman with a pen
in her hand, pensively gazing upon a human skull on the table in
front of her. The text revealed the story behind this memento: the
skull was a gift from the “big, handsome Navy lieutenant” who
had “promised her a Jap” when he left for the war two years ear-
lier. The trophy had been autographed by him and thirteen of his
friends and bore the inscription: “This is a good Jap—a dead one
picked up on the New Guinea Beach.” The woman was reportedly
surprised at the gift, which she named Tojo.68 Readers called this
feature “revolting and horrible” and potent material for “anti-allied
propaganda” by the enemy. A thoughtful writer commented, “Let
us reverse the situation and imagine that one of the most promi-
nent magazines of Tokyo published the picture of a young Japanese
girl in such a pose, gazing at the skull of one of our sons who died
for his country—the storm of protest at such savagery would sweep
America and it would most certainly be held up to us as an example
of the hopeless depravity of Japanese youth.”69
Anti-Japanese racist ideology also prevailed in the editorial
offices of Life. Managing editor John Shaw Billings was a self-
proclaimed xenophobe, who hated Indians, Jews, Negroes, and
Carl Mydans’ 1944 photograph of five Japanese at the Tule Lake internment camp was deliberately shot low on a diagonal angle to
give the men a dominant, off-balance, and menacing appearance. The text described them as “fanatically loyal to Japan.”
31Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)
other minorities.70 He was not alone in his prejudices, judging by
an incident that Life photographer Hansel Mieth described in an
interview with John Loengard. Picture editor Wilson Hicks “did
some terrible stuff. When war was declared, he said his assistant,
Peggy Matsui [the wife of Life photographer John Philips], could
not work any longer in the picture department because she was half
Japanese. Hicks knew she was absolutely loyal, to the point where
she would have given her life for everybody there. That he could
fire her a few days after the war started, was awful.”71 Worse still
was the fact that Matsui, devastated by this callous mistreatment,
died soon afterwards.72 These examples provide a glimpse into the
racial ideologies and practices that prevailed at Life, both editori-
ally and institutionally, during World War II. They also provide a
context for the remarkable photographs by Mydans.
He is best known for his World War II photographs, including
a famous image of General Douglas MacArthur wading ashore in
the Philippines in January 1945. Earlier he had covered the Soviet
invasion of Finland and the Japanese invasion of China, and later
he photographed wars in Korea and Vietnam. He received a hero’s
welcome when he returned to the Time Inc. offices in New York
in November 1943 after twenty-two months in a prisoner of war
camp in Manila. Billings normally had little time for photogra-
phers, but in his diary he noted Mydans’ return: “Hicks brought
in Carl and Shelley Mydans who [had] just landed. . . . They have
been in Jap hands since fall of Manila. Carl looks like a midget he’s
lost so much weight. It was good to see them back—like someone
from the dead.”73
In addition to his stellar war reporting credentials, Mydans
was a versatile photographer whose skills extended far beyond
combat pictures. He was among a handful of photographers at the
magazine with formal journalistic training, having graduated from
Boston University in 1930 with a degree in journalism. He began
his career photographing cotton farms in the South and small-
town life in New England for the Farm Security Administration,
and consistent with his early training, he was a thoughtful photog-
rapher with a social conscience. When asked why he photographed
war so much, he replied, “War is not my delight. War was the event
of my years.”74
Mydans’ Tule Lake essay was remarkable because of the unique journalistic angle: a role reversal in which the former American prisoner in a Japanese camp lived for a
week among Japanese prisoners in an American camp. The article
was also significant because of Tule Lake’s status as a segregation
center, where disloyal Japanese were separated from the loyal Japa-
nese in other camps. The disloyal label was applied to those who
gave negative or uncertain responses to a loyalty questionnaire (for
example, refusing to be drafted into the Army) or who requested to
be repatriated to Japan. In addition, the article challenged domi-
nant media depictions of Japanese men. Finally, Mydans exercised
a high degree of autonomy for a Life photojournalist. Not only was
he both the reporter and the photographer of the Tule Lake story,
but the managing editor consulted him during the photograph se-
lection process.
“Tule Lake: At This Segregation Center Are 18,000 Japanese
Considered Disloyal to U.S.” was an in-depth photographic essay.
With eleven pages and twenty-nine photographs, it was longer and
more complex than Lange’s and Adams’. It contained a group por-
trait of five Tule Lake “troublemakers;” two pages of outdoor camp
scenes; two pages with various scenes of family life, community
organizations, and business cooperatives; a portrait of a prisoner;
and two contrasting shots of young women.
All of this provided a noteworthy counter-narrative to domi-
nant images of Japanese docility. The essay appeared in 1944 when
there was scarce coverage of the internment in American magazines,
and public support for internment was waning. Yet anti-Japanese
feeling was still running strong partly because of media coverage
of Japanese war atrocities. Mydans’ story focused on a group of
Japanese Americans who were neither docile nor duplicitous but
openly resistant to the United States. Most of the men profiled in
the story were sent to Tule Lake because they refused to pledge loy-
alty to the U.S. government and/or refused to go to war in the U.S.
military. According to Ronald Takaki in 1989, 4,600 or 22 percent
of the 21,000 Nisei (American-born) males eligible to register for
the draft answered “no,” a qualified answer, or no response. Some
used the loyalty pledge to protest internment.75
Visually, this photographic essay was unique because it fea-
tured close-up portraits of defiant Japanese men, who were the
antithesis of the docile, cooperative, smiling Japanese in other pub-
lished internment photographs. The opening photograph was shot
low on a diagonal angle, giving the five Japanese men a dominant,
off-balance, and menacing appearance. According to the caption,
“These five Japs are among the trouble makers imprisoned in the
stockade within the Tule Lake Segregation Center.” The text de-
scribed them as “fanatically loyal to Japan” and “ringleaders in the
November riots which the U.S. Army . . . finally had to quell.”76
The lieutenant colonel who led the Army, who was shown in a
One of Life’s photographs at Tule Lake in 1944 showed a young
man playing the guitar while sitting on his bunk. This showed
Carl Mydans’ empathizing with a Japanese American.
Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)32
small headshot, appeared quite harmless and even comical in com-
parison to the five Japanese men.
In another dramatic departure from other journalistic accounts
of the internment, Mydans identified with a Japanese American
man and invited Life’s readers to do the same. A full-page portrait
featured a grim young man strumming a guitar while sitting on his
bunk. According to the caption:
What it feels like to be a prisoner is shown in [the] expression of
this young Japanese “pressure boy,” in [the] stockade. He was singing
“Home on the Range” when Mydans entered
[the] stockade barracks. Reports Mydans: “He
sang it like an American. There was no Japa-
nese accent. He looked at me the same way I
guess I looked at a Japanese official when he
came to check on me at Camp Santo Tomas
in Manila. At the back of my mind was the
thought, “Come on, get it over and get out.
Leave me alone.” This boy felt the same way.
He was just killing time.77
Thus, not only did Mydans empa-
thize with a Japanese American, but he
claimed to understand the feelings of a
disloyal Japanese prisoner confined to the
stockade in what he labeled “the worst
of all civilian detention camps in U.S.”78
The young man’s song choice, the nine-
teenth-century “Home on the Range,”
seemed to be a deliberately ironic touch.
The state song of Kansas and the unofficial anthem of the Ameri-
can West, this familiar tune evokes freedom and opportunity, two
things he clearly lacked. Mydans’s description of his singing (“like
an American”) was also ironic; he was, in fact, an American.
Visual details amplified the message of American citizenship.
For instance, the young man had a pompadour hairstyle favored by
zoot suiters, a teenage subculture famous for its subversive activi-
ties (and appearance) in Mexican-American communities in Los
Angeles in the 1940s. The zoot suiters, like the Japanese “pressure
boys” at Tule Lake, gained fame for rioting against the U.S. mili-
tary. Another visual symbol appeared on the wall behind the man:
an assortment of All-American pin-up girls, some of which prob-
ably were torn from Life. Such pin-ups, which were a prominent
part of 1940s print culture, transcended the magazine medium;
they were plastered on the walls of Army barracks and painted in
large-scale reproductions on fighter planes. These images symbol-
ized American femininity and heterosexual masculinity during
wartime. In Robert B. Westbrook’s 1990 analysis, women such as
Betty Grable also served as “icons of the private interests and obli-
gations for which soldiers were fighting, . . . a symbol of the kind of
woman for whom American men—especially American working-
class men—were fighting.”79 Combined with the other visual and
textual information in Mydans’ picture, the pin-ups marked this
young prisoner as a red-blooded American teenage male.
Ultimately, Mydans provided a contradictory account of Tule
Lake prisoners. “Textual slippages,” wrote Wendy Kozol in 1994,
“between identifying the prisoners as Japanese and acknowledging
their citizenship . . . create an ambivalent and confusing portrait.”80
Caroline Chung Simpson echoed this analysis in 2002, noting that
Mydans’ Tule Lake essay served “to disturb further rather than to
settle the reader’s confidence in the process and outcome of the
internment.”81 Mydans’ essay, according to Simpson, marked a key
transition to postwar America.
Life’s article on Tule Lake may be read as a defining moment,
when the confrontation with the specific situation of internment as
a form of Japanese American memory of the war almost unavoidably
turned to a critique of the terms and conditions of American democ-
racy in the postwar period. Mydans’s article is neither a celebration of
Japanese Americans’ struggle to prove their loyalty nor a ringing en-
dorsement of America’s handling of the internment. Instead, the report
mixes his personal reflection on the cruelties of his own incarceration
in a Japanese POW camp with his muted liberal critique of the denial
of citizens’ rights in a manner that seems to
mourn the internment as marking the death
of “an American way.”82
Mydans’ status as a heroic war re-
porter gave him unprecedented influ-
ence at Life. Managing editor Billings,
a curmudgeon who looked down on
photographers, selected and laid out
photographs for the Tule Lake story and
then asked him if he had omitted any
especially good ones. Mydans responded
that he had: “the one of the man playing
the guitar.” Surprisingly, Billings quickly
pulled that picture out of the reject pile
and put it in the layout.83
In a 1977 article about internment
photography, which was one of the first
scholarly studies on the subject, Ohrn
noted that “Lange’s work received less attention than Adams’ dur-
ing the war, and few of her photographs were published.”84 Surpris-
ingly, she did not mention that Manzanar photographs by Lange
and Adams were published in Survey Graphic and U.S. Camera,
two small-circulation yet influential magazines. Instead, she fo-
cused on a comparison of Lange’s unpublished photographs and
Adams’ photographs in the book Born Free and Equal, contending
that Lange “worked from an antagonist position” while Adams “be-
came the apologist, intent on showing the success of internment.”85
Ohrn concluded, “Adams emphasized the grandeur of the place,
while Lange presented its brutality.”86 This analysis influenced the
direction and focus of subsequent studies of internment photog-
raphy.
Researchers continue to compare Adams and Lange. In 2008,
Gordon’s Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of
Japanese American Internment valorized Lange’s “mastery of compo-
sition and of visual condensation of human feelings and relation-
ships” and concluded that her images “unequivocally denounce”
the internment. 87 By comparison, she found that Adams opposed
racism but avoided “identification with the opposition to intern-
ment.” His photographs, meanwhile, sent a mixed message, with
their focus on “the internees’ stoic, polite, even cheerful” attitude
in the face of imprisonment.88
The purpose of this article is not to extend the Lange vs. Adams debate but to expand the history and theory of in-ternment photography into new areas of inquiry. As Kevin
Barnhurst noted in 1994, “histories of photography often recite a
story of technology pushed forward by ‘great men’ who respond-
ed to their social milieu. However, pictures also wield ideological
power, convey myths, and affect their subjects.”89 This article was
motivated by a desire to understand the ideological power of pho-
“Ultimately, Mydans provided
a contradictory account
of Tule Lake prisoners. ‘Textual
slippages,’ wrote Wendy Kozol
in 1994, ‘between identifying
the prisoners as Japanese and
acknowledging their citizenship
. . . create an ambivalent
and confusing portrait.’”
33Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)
tojournalism.
Several scholars of internment photography have focused
on Lange’s opposition to internment, which led her to portray
the Japanese Americans as tragic victims.90 Such images (some of
which were impounded by the government) are cited as evidence
of her sympathy and solidarity with the internees. Her published
photographs, however, told a different story. Survey Graphic im-
ages echoed the dominant discourses of internment, emphasizing
Japanese cheerful docility and American benevolent efficiency.
Meanwhile, her flag salute photographs in U.S. Camera and Sur-
vey Graphic emphasized Japanese American loyalty and patriotism.
These magazines used her flag iconogra-
phy to symbolically reconcile the con-
tradiction between internment and the
myth of America as a beacon of freedom
to the world. Previous studies have ana-
lyzed her internment photography in the
context of her political convictions and
her personal struggles with WRA admin-
istrators. By analyzing instead how her
work was selected, arranged, and cap-
tioned by magazine editors, this study
provides insight into the construction
and amplification of meaning in differ-
ent photographic discourses.
Photography scholars Karin Higa
and Tim B. Wride also focused on Ad-
ams’ book, Born Free and Equal, con-
cluding that his photographs highlighted
the Americanness of Japanese Americans
and portrayed them as loyal heroes.91 But
the U.S. Camera article differed from the
book in two respects. First, the book was
titled Born Free and Equal while the ar-
ticle was simply “Manzanar.” Thus, the book staked out a clear
ideological position while the article was more neutral. Second,
the smallest section of the book (portraits of Japanese in the mili-
tary) accounted for a large section of the article. Three of the five
portraits in U.S. Camera feature people in uniform, amplifying Ad-
ams’ effort “to integrate the Manzanar experience into the broader
national experience of the war effort” and refute “the link between
people of Japanese heritage and the enemy.”92 These editorial choic-
es further diluted Adams’ already cautious criticism of internment
and highlighted military uniforms as patriotic symbols, which was
consistent with U.S. Camera’s wartime ideology.
By shifting the focus to magazine photojournalism, this study
provides fresh perspectives on internment photography. Contrary
to previous scholarship, this research found that Lange’s published
photographs in wartime magazines bore little witness to her well-
known opposition to internment. Although she made hundreds of
photographs that showed the injustice and suffering of internment,
these images were not published during World War II; instead, edi-
tors selected images that supported the dominant view of intern-
ment as decent and humane. Her iconic flag salute showed young
schoolgirls as non-threatening symbols of Japanese submission and
loyalty, thereby mediating the apparent conflict between citizen-
ship and internment. In U.S. Camera, the photograph’s potential
irony is effectively defused by upbeat text that extols youthful pa-
triotism, American benevolence, and the resilience of the Japanese-
American family.
Both Lange and Adams featured fresh-faced schoolgirls as sym-
bols of innocence, obedience, and patriotism. Many of his portraits
also featured Japanese American men and women in U.S. mili-
tary uniform. These images were both positive and negative. On
the one hand, they showed individual heroism and proud citizen-
ship, but they also defined loyalty in narrow terms as willing and
cheerful submission to internment. Such visual narratives helped
to construct a “model minority” myth in which Japanese Ameri-
cans were ostensibly strengthened and assimilated into American
life through internment. He sent ambiguous messages that both
reinforced dominant narratives of Japanese cheerful docility and
challenged notions of Japanese disloyalty. This research shows that
he was more effective than most scholars
have previously acknowledged in show-
ing the humanity of Japanese Americans
and challenging dominant discourses.
Finally, this article explored new
ground by analyzing Mydans’ Tule Lake
photographs in Life. As Doss observed,
“For all its iconicity and influence, Life
has been surprisingly unstudied, especial-
ly from its context as a popular weekly
picture magazine and visual resource.”93
This article attempted to fill this gap in
journalism history. These images and the
stories behind them provided a glimpse
beyond Manzanar, the camp most often
covered by the media. Mydans’ opening
image of five Tule Lake “troublemak-
ers” potentially transcended and even
subverted Life’s wartime message about
the danger of these men. According to
Luis Alvarez in 2008, these powerful
men “seem to have mobilized their own
bodies to claim a sense of dignity amidst
the dehumanizing and humiliating experience of incarceration.”94
Such images demonstrate how World War II photojournalism both
reinforced and challenged dominant ideologies of gender, race, and
nationality.
What do these images mean and why are they important? According to Davidov, photographs are “artifacts with a continuing life,” contributing to revisionist histories,
including those from the Japanese-American perspective. For ex-
ample, Manzanar images by Adams and other photographers “have
been used by formerly incarcerated people in projects of what
might be called counter-memory: that is, efforts to recollect and
represent the past in a manner that contradicts or is at odds with
official narratives.”95 Such projects can bring closure to the victims
of internment. They also contribute to a more complete and ac-
curate historical record.
A recent example of such a counter-memory project is Life’s
online gallery, “WWII: Internment in the USA,” which opens with
a poignant scene of evacuation by Lange, who is the dominant
photographer with six of fourteen photographs. Ironically, she
worked for the government and not for Life. Even more ironic is
the gallery’s focus on emotional shots that the magazine rejected
during wartime. Also included are photographs published in Life,
including Mydans’ young man with a guitar. The online caption
emphasizes the camp’s humanity: “Young internees at Tule Lake
(shown in March 1944) are allowed hobbies and recreation.” In
a classic slice of Life, it also includes a bit of celebrity trivia to
“By shifting the focus
to magazine photojournalism,
this study provides fresh
perspectives on internment
photography. Contrary
to previous scholarship,
this research found that
Lange’s published photographs
in wartime magazines bore
little witness to her well-known
opposition to internment.”
Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)34
draw in twentieth-first century audiences: “One Tule Lake child
(not shown) will grow up to be ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Heroes’ star George
Takei.”96
These uses of internment photographs confirm Alinder’s ob-
servation: “Uncovering how photographs were made and how they
were read by contemporaries can help us understand photography
not simply as a tool of the powerful but perhaps more productively
as a medium in which different representational strategies vied to
define the experience of incarceration, both in the present and for
posterity.”97
NOTES
1 Gary Mukai, “Teaching about Japanese-American Internment,” ERIC Di-
gest, December 2000, at http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-3/japanese.htm (accessed
on Feb. 18, 2010).
2 Walt Stromer, “Why I Went Along: 1942 and the Invisible Evacuees,” Co-
lumbia Journalism Review, January-February 1993, 15-17.
3 Two magazines that consistently published critical views of the internment
were The Nation and the Christian Century, and an early and consistent critic of
internment was columnist and author Carey McWilliams. A reviewer of his book,
Prejudice—Japanese-Americans: Symbols of Racial Intolerance, wrote: “It may be
difficult for some to realize the close relationship between the wartime Japanese-
American situation, the so-called Negro problem and all other forms of race hatred.
It will not be difficult once one has read McWilliams’s thorough-going expose of
the West Coast situation.” See “California’s ‘Undeclared War,’” Newsweek, Oct. 16,
1944, 96.
4 Karin Becker Ohrn, “What You See Is What You Get: Dorothea Lange and
Ansel Adams at Manzanar,” Journalism History 4 (Spring 1977): 15, 18.
5 Magazines indeed steered clear of the eight other internment camps in Colo-
rado, Arizona, Wyoming, Arkansas, Idaho, and Utah. Local newspapers covered the
camps, but there are few published studies. For a scholarly analysis of the Wyoming
camp, including local press coverage, see Douglas W. Nelson, Heart Mountain: The
History of an American Concentration Camp (Madison: State Historical Society of
Wisconsin, 1976).
6 Japanese Americans were not the only minority group suspected of disloyalty
during the war. For example, the government considered indicting black newspaper
publishers for their criticism of the war effort. See Patrick S. Washburn, A Question
of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press During World
War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
7 See “Eastward Ho,” Time, March 16, 1942, 14; Frank J. Taylor, “The People
Nobody Wants,” Saturday Evening Post, May 9, 1942, 24, 67; and Jim Marshall,
“The Problem People,” Collier’s, Aug. 15, 1942, 52.
8 The flagship Hearst newspaper was the San Francisco Examiner. Other papers
in the chain included the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Los Angeles Examiner, and the
New York Morning Journal.
9 Quoted in Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian
Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989), 388. See also, Gary Y. Okihiro and Julie Sly,
“The Press, Japanese Americans, and the Concentration Camps,” Phylon 44 (First
Quarter 1983): 66-69.
10 David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (Woodstock, N.Y.:
Overlook Press, 2000), 151.
11 “Japanese Carry War to California Coast,” Life, March 9, 1942, 24.
12 C.L. Dedrick, quoted in Taylor, “The People Nobody Wants,” 67.
13 Ernest K. Lindley, “Problems of Japanese Migration,” The Nation, March
30, 1942, 26.
14 John Campbell, ed., The Experience of World War II (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 170.
15 Mukai, “Teaching About Japanese-American Internment.”
16 David Yoo, “Captivating Memories: Museology, Concentration Camps,
and Japanese American History,” American Quarterly 48 (December 1996): 681.
17 See D.H. Eddy, “What Shall We Do with Our 150,000 Japs?” American
Magazine, March 1942, 14-15, 100-02; and “The U.S.A. at War,” U.S. Camera An-
nual, 1944 (New York: U.S. Camera Publishing Corp., 1944), 9.
18 William Robinson, “Outcast Americans,” American Magazine, September
1942, 30.
19 Ibid., 32.
20 “Coast Japs Are Interned in Mountain Camp,” Life, April 6, 1942, 17.
21 “Coast Japs,” Life, April 6, 1942, 15.
22 Ansel Adams, “Manzanar: Photographs of Loyal Japanese Americans at Re-
location Center,” U.S. Camera, November 1944, 16.
23 “Coast Japs Are Interned in Mountain Camp,” 15.
24 Lawrence E. Davies, “Japanese at Work for the U.S.,” New York Times Maga-
zine, June 21, 1942, 14, 37.
25 Jim Marshall, “The Problem People,” Collier’s, Aug. 15, 1942, 50.
26 Mike Mackey, A Brief History of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and
the Japanese American Experience, at http://chem.nwc.cc.wy.us/HMDP/history.htm
(accessed on July 2, 2004).
27 See Marshall, “The Problem People,” 50; Davies, “Japanese at Work for the
U.S.,” 14; and “Coast Japs,” 17.
28 Marshall, “The Problem People,” 50.
29 Dorothea Lange, “Oath of Allegiance” (photograph), U.S. Camera Annual,
1944, 156.
30 See Sylvia E. Danovitch, “The Past Recaptured? The Photographic Record
of the Internment of Japanese-Americans,” Prologue, Summer 1980), 91-103; and
Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizen-
ship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York University Press), 2004.
31 Marshall, “The Problem People,” 51.
32 Marita Sturken, “Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting
the Japanese Internment,” positions 5 (Winter 1997): 695.
33 Linda Gordon, Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japa-
nese American Internment (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 23.
34 The WRA listed the photographer as Francis Stewart, and Karin Becker
Ohrn referred to Frank Stewart. See War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japa-
nese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, 1942-1945, Online Digital Archive of
California, at http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf596nb4h0 (accessed
on Aug. 17, 2009); and Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary
Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 254, 25 n.
35 Paul S. Taylor, “Our Stakes in the Japanese Exodus,” Survey Graphic, Sep-
tember 1942, 372-78, 396.
36 Cara Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 62.
37 Taylor, “Our Stakes in the Japanese Exodus,” 373.
38 Ibid., 372.
39 Judith Fryer Davidov, “‘The Color of My Skin, the Shape of My Eyes’: Pho-
tographs of the Japanese-American Internment by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams,
and Toyo Miyatake,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9 (Fall 1996): 233.
40 For a discussion of this iconic photograph and the role of visual icons in
constructing civic identity, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Perform-
ing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quar-
terly Journal of Speech 88 (November 2002): 363-92. For an analysis of other iconic
photographs, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed:
Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007).
41 John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photog-
raphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 94.
42 Julia Scully, “45 Years Later, Photography Has Come a Long Way in Terms
of Art. But Is It Avoiding Social Reality?” Modern Photography, August 1985, 5.
43 Dorothea Lange (photographer), “Oath of Allegiance,” U.S. Camera An-
nual, 1944, 156.
44 “San Francisco, Calif.—Flag of Allegiance Pledge at Raphael Weill Public
School,” War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation
and Resettlement, 1942-1945, Online Digital Archive of California (accessed on
Aug. 17, 2009).
45 Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 164.
46 Ansel Adams to Nancy Newhall, n.d. (Fall 1943?), Ansel Adams Archive,
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.
47 Gerald Robinson, Elusive Truth: Four Photographers at Manzanar (Nevada
City, Calif.: Carl Mautz, 2002), 27.
48 Ansel Adams, “Manzanar: Photographs of Loyal Japanese-Americans at In-
ternment Camp,” U.S. Camera, November 1944, 16.
49 Karin Higa and Tim B. Wride, “Manzanar Inside and Out: Photo Docu-
mentation of the Japanese Wartime Incarceration,” in Stephanie Barron, Sheri
35Journalism History 36:1 (Spring 2010)
Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds., Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity,
1900-2000 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and University of
California Press, 2000), 36.
50 Adams, “Manzanar,” 17.
51 Adams to Newhall, n.d. (Fall 1943?), 1, 6, Ansel Adams Archive, Center for
Creative Photography, University of Arizona.
52 Adams, “Manzanar, 16.
53 Gordon, Impounded, 32.
54 Jasmine Alinder, “Displaced Smiles: Photography and the Incarceration of
Japanese Americans During World War II,” in Prospects: An Annual of American
Cultural Studies (New York: B. Franklin, 2005), 521.
55 Anne Hammond, “Ansel Adams at Manzanar,” Honolulu Academy of Arts
Exhibit Catalog, 2006, 3, Ansel Adams Archive, Center for Creative Photography,
University of Arizona.
56 Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, Dec. 24, 1944, 1-2, Ansel Adams Ar-
chive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.
57 Ansel Adams to Alfred Stieglitz, Dec. 25, 1944, Ansel Adams Archive, Cen-
ter for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.
58 Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie, American Mass-Market Magazines (West-
port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), 209.
59 James Baughman, “Who Reads Life?” in Erika Doss, ed., Looking at Life
Magazine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 43-44.
60 Doss, Looking at Life Magazine, 13.
61 Ibid., 11.
62 “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” Life, Dec. 22, 1941, 81-82.
63 Ralph Morse, “Dead Jap,” Life, Feb. 1, 1943, 27.
64 “Letters to the Editor,” Life, Feb. 22, 1943, 8.
65 Edward Steichen, Memorable LIFE Photographs (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1951), np. For an interesting perspective on the “fraternity of Ameri-
can war photographers,” including Morse and Mydans, see George H. Roeder, Jr.,
The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 92-95.
66 “Jap Suicides on Attu,” Life, April 3, 1944, 36-37.
67 “Letters to the Editor,” Life, April 24, 1944, 6.
68 “Picture of the Week,” Life, May 22, 1944, 34-35.
69 “Letters to the Editors,” Life, June 12, 1944, 6.
70 For instance, after meeting with M.F. Agha, an art director who Life was
trying to lure away from Condé Nast, Billings wrote, “Agha is a Turk and gives me
the creeps. . . . He’s a different breed from our crowd—& I’m a xenophobe.” See
John Shaw Billings, diary, June 29, 1938, Billings Manuscript Collection, South
Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Elsewhere in the di-
ary, he expressed contempt for other minorities.
71 John Loengard, “Hansel Mieth,” LIFE Photographers: What They Saw (New
York: Bulfinch Press, 1998), 78.
72 After Matsui was fired by Hicks, she refused to transfer to another depart-
ment of the magazine. According to her husband, Life photographer John Philips,
Peggy “resigned, came home and never went out of the house after that.” She died
of septicemia a few months later. See ibid., 78.
73 John Shaw Billings, diary, Dec. 1, 1943, Billings Manuscript Collection,
South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.
74 Christopher Reed, “Carl Mydans,” The Guardian, Aug. 20, 2004.
75 Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 397.
76 Carl Mydans, “Tule Lake: At This Segregation Center Are 18,000 Japanese
Considered Disloyal to U.S.,” Life, March 20, 1944, 25.
77 Ibid., 31.
78 Ibid., 25.
79 Robert B. Westbrook, “‘I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl, That Married
Harry James’: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World
War II,” American Quarterly 42 (December 1990): 596.
80 Wendy Kozol, LIFE’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournal-
ism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 64.
81 Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar
American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 39.
82 Ibid., 23.
83 Maitland Edey, Great Photographic Essays from LIFE (Boston: New York
Graphic Society, 1978), 9-10.
84 Ohrn, “What You See Is What You Get,” 22.
85 Edey, Great Photographic Essays, 19.
86 Ibid., 21.
87 Gordon, Impounded, 6.
88 Ibid., 34.
89 Kevin Barnhurst, Seeing the Newspaper (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994),
xiv.
90 See Ohrn, “What You See Is What You Get;” Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and
the Documentary Tradition; Davidov, “‘The Color of My Skin, the Shape of My
Eyes’”; Robinson, Elusive Truth; Danovitch, “The Past Recaptured?”; Creef, Imag-
ing Japanese America; Higa and Wride, “Manzanar Inside and Out;” Gordon, Im-
pounded; and Alinder, “Displaced Smiles.” See also Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images:
Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2009); and Maisie Conrat and Richard Conrat, Executive Order 9066: The
Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans (Los Angeles: California Historical So-
ciety, 1972)
91 Higa and Wride, “Manzanar Inside and Out,” 333.
92 Ibid., 326.
93 Doss, Looking at Life Magazine, 4.
94 Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During
World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 78.
95 Alinder, “Displaced Smiles,” 533.
96 Davidov, “The Color of My Skin, the Shape of My Eyes,” 240.
97 “WWII: Internment in the USA,” at http://www.life.com/image/50693609/
in-gallery/23021/wwii-internment-in-the-usa (accessed on April 15, 2009).
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The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American
Gatekeeping, 1882-1924
Author(s): Erika Lee
Source: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Spring, 2002), pp. 36-62
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History
Society
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The Chinese Exclusion Example:
Race, Immigration, and American
Gatekeeping, 1882-1924
ERIKA LEE
IN 1876, H. N. CLEMENT, a San Francisco lawyer, stood before a
California State Senate Committee and sounded the alarm: “The Chi
nese are upon us. How can we get rid of them? The Chinese are com
ing. How can we stop them?”1 Clement’s panicked cries and portrayals
of Chinese immigration as an evil, “unarmed invasion” were shared by
several witnesses before the committee which was charged with investi
gating the “social, moral, and political effects” of Chinese immigration.2
Testimony like Clement’s was designed to reach a broad audience, and
the committee hearings themselves were part of a calculated political
attempt to nationalize the question of Chinese immigration.3 Their ef
forts proved successful when the United States Congress passed the
Chinese Exclusion Act on 6 May 1882. This law prohibited the immi
gration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years and barred all
Chinese immigrants from naturalized citizenship. Demonstrating the class
bias in the law, merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats
were exempt from exclusion.4
Historians have often noted that the Chinese Exclusion Act marks a
“watershed” in United States history. Not only was it the country’s first
significant restrictive immigration law; it was also the first to restrict a
group of immigrants based on their race and class, and it thus helped to
shape twentieth-century United States race-based immigration policy.5
This observation has become the standard interpretation of the anti
Chinese movement, but until recently, most accounts of Chinese exclu
sion have focused more on the anti-Chinese movement preceding the
Chinese Exclusion Act rather than on the almost six decades of the
exclusion era itself.6 Moreover, only a few scholars have begun to fully
explore the meanings of this watershed and its consequences for other
immigrant groups and American immigration law in general.7 Numerous
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Lee 37
questions remain: How did the effort to exclude Chinese influence the
restriction and exclusion of other immigrant groups? How did the
racialization of Chinese as excludable aliens contribute and intersect
with the racialization of other Asian, southern and eastern European,
and Mexican immigrants? How did the Chinese Exclusion Act itself set
significant precedents for the admission, deportation, documentation,
and surveillance of both new arrivals and immigrant communities within
the United States?
What becomes clear is that the real significance of Chinese exclusion
as a “watershed” is thus much greater than its importance as one of the
first immigration laws and its significance for legal doctrine. Certainly,
the Page Law (which excluded Asian contract labor and women sus
pected of being prostitutes) and the Chinese Exclusion Act provided the
legal architecture structuring and influencing twentieth-century Ameri
can immigration policy.8 It is my argument, however, that Chinese ex
clusion also introduced a “gatekeeping” ideology, politics, law, and cul
ture that transformed the ways in which Americans viewed and thought
about race, immigration, and the United States’ identity as a nation of
immigration. It legalized and reinforced the need to restrict, exclude,
and deport “undesirable” and excludable immigrants. It established Chi
nese immigrants?categorized by their race, class, and gender relations
as the ultimate category of undesirable immigrants?as the models by
which to measure the desirability (and “whiteness”) of other immigrant
groups. Lastly, the Chinese exclusion laws not only provided an ex
ample of how to contain other threatening, excludable, and undesirable
foreigners, it also set in motion the government procedures and the
bureaucratic machinery required to regulate and control both foreigners
arriving to and foreigners and citizens residing in the United States.
Precursors to the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service,
United States passports, “green cards,” illegal immigration and deporta
tion policies can all be traced back to the Chinese Exclusion Act itself.
In the end, Chinese exclusion transformed not only the Chinese immi
grant and Chinese American community; it forever changed America’s
relationship to immigration in general.
CHINESE EXCLUSION AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN
GATEKEEPING
The metaphor of “gates” and “gatekeepers” to describe the United
States government’s efforts to control immigration became inscribed in
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38 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
national conversations about immigration during the twentieth century.
A wide range of scholars and journalists have recently written about
“guarding the gate,” the “clamor at the gates,” “the gatekeepers,” the
“guarded gate,” “closing the gate,” etc.9 Perhaps the best known and
most recent use of the term is the United States Immigration and Natu
ralization Service’s Operation Gatekeeper, a militarized effort initiated
in 1994 to restrict the illegal entry of Mexican immigrants into the
United States near San Diego, California.10 Although journalists,
policymakers, and academics use the gatekeeping metaphor widely, there
has been little serious inquiry into how the United States has come to
define itself as a gatekeeping nation or what that has actually meant for
both immigrants and the nation in the past and present.
Defining and historicizing America’s gatekeeping tradition clearly
begins with Chinese immigration in the American West during the late
nineteenth century. While Andrew Gyory has persuasively argued that
the adoption of the anti-Chinese movement by national partisan politi
cians led to the actual passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, it
was in California in the 1870s that politicians and anti-Chinese activists
first began to talk about “closing America’s gates” for the first time.11
Explicit in the arguments for Chinese exclusion were several elements
that would become the foundation of American gatekeeping ideology:
racializing Chinese immigrants as permanently alien, threatening, and
inferior on the basis of their race, culture, labor, and aberrant gender
relations; containing the danger they represented by limiting economic
and geographical mobility as well as barring them from naturalized
citizenship through local, state, and federal laws and action; and lastly,
protecting the nation from both further immigrant incursions and dan
gerous immigrants already in the United States by using the power of
the state to legalize the modes and processes of exclusion, restriction,
surveillance, and deportation.12
Through the exclusion movement, both regional and national politi
cians effectively claimed the right to speak for the rest of the country
and to assert American national sovereignty in the name of Chinese
exclusion. They argued that it was nothing less than the duty and the
sovereign right of Californians and Americans to do so for the good of
the country. H. N. Clement, the San Francisco lawyer who testified at
the 1876 hearings, explicitly combined the themes of racial difference,
the closed gate/closed door metaphor, and national sovereignty to ar
ticulate this philosophy. “Have we any right to close our doors against
one nation and open them to another?” he asked. “Has the Caucasian
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Lee 39
race any better right to occupy this country than the Mongolian?” His
answers to the above questions were an emphatic “Yes.” Citing contem
porary treatises on international law, Clement argued that the greatest
fundamental right of every nation was self-preservation, and the Chi
nese immigration question was nothing less than a battle for America’s
survival and future. “A nation has a right to do everything that can
secure it from threatening danger and to keep at a distance whatever is
capable of causing its ruin,” he continued. We have a great right to say
to the half-civilized subject from Asia, “You shall not come at all.”13
The federal case supporting Chinese exclusion only reinforced the con
nection between immigration restriction and the sovereign rights of na
tions. In 1889, the United States Supreme Court described Chinese im
migrants as “vast hordes of people crowding in upon us” and as “a
different race … dangerous to [America’s] peace and security.”14 The
nation’s highest court thus affirmed the right of the federal government
to exclude Chinese, and by doing so, it also established the legal and
constitutional foundation for federal immigration restriction and exclu
sion based on national sovereignty.
Building gates and making and enforcing United States immigration
policy has always involved several overlapping concerns, goals, and
variables.15 Immigrants have been excluded and restricted on the basis
of their race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, moral standing, health,
and political affiliation, among other factors. Some of these justifica
tions for exclusion and restriction were more important during certain
historical periods than others. But they often intersected and overlapped
with each other, working separately and in concert with each other to
regulate not only foreign immigration, but also domestic race, class, and
gender relations within the United States. In turn, gatekeeping became a
primary means of exerting social control over immigrant communities
and protecting the American nation at large. Immigrant laborers who
were considered a threat to American white working men were sum
marily excluded on the basis of class. General restriction laws?espe
cially those targeting immigrants suspected of immoral behavior or “likely
to become public charges”?affected female immigrants disproportion
ately. Immigrant disease and sexuality were monitored, contained, and
excluded through immigration policy as well. Efforts to exclude immi
grant groups on the basis of their alleged health menace to the United
States constituted what Alan Kraut has called “medicalized nativism,”
and the diseases considered most dangerous were explicitly tied to
racialized assumptions about specific immigrant groups.16 Homosexuals
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40 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
were denied entry beginning in 1917 under clauses in general immigra
tion laws related to morality and the barring of “constitutional psycho
pathic inferiors.”17 Race consistently played a crucial role in distin
guishing between “desirable,” “undesirable,” and “excludable” immi
grants. In doing so, gatekeeping helped to establish a framework for
understanding race and racial categories and reflected, reinforced, and
reproduced the existing racial hierarchy in the country.18 Thus, America’s
gates have historically been open only to some, while they have re
mained closed to others.
Understanding the racialized origins of American gatekeeping pro
vides a powerful counter-narrative to the popular “immigrant paradigm,”
which celebrates the United States as a “nation of immigrants” and
views immigration as a fulfillment of the “promise of American democ
racy.” As many critics have pointed out, this popular conception of the
nation ignores the very real power of institutionalized racism in exclud
ing immigrants and other people of color from full and equal participa
tion in the American society, economy, and polity. Explicitly barred
from the country, Asian immigrants do not fit easily into the immigrant
paradigm mold, and instead, offer a different narrative highlighting the
limits of American democracy.19 Instead of considering some of the
traditional questions of immigration history such as assimilation or cul
tural retention, a gatekeeping framework shifts our attention to under
standing the meanings and consequences of immigration restriction, exclu
sion, and deportation for both immigrant and non-immigrant communities.
Reconceptualizing the United States as a “gatekeeping nation” thus
provides an especially suitable framework for Asian and Mexican immi
grants, two groups which have not only been among the largest immi
grant populations in the West in the twentieth century, but have also
caused the most debate and inspired new regulation.20 It does not, how
ever, necessarily exclude European or other immigrants nor does it func
tion only in periods of intense nativism. The restrictionist ideology first
established with Asian immigrants came to be extended to other immi
grant groups, including southern and eastern Europeans, as they became
racialized as threats to the nation. In the West, whiteness functioned in a
way that deflected much of the racialized anti-immigrant sentiment away
from southern and eastern European immigrants, and nationally, their
whiteness protected them from the more harsh exclusionary and depor
tation laws that targeted Asians and Mexicans in the pre-World War II
period.21 Nevertheless, once built, the “gates” of immigration law and
the bureaucratic machinery and procedures established to admit, examine,
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Lee 41
deny, deport, and naturalize immigrants have become extended to all
immigrant groups in the twentieth century.
Gatekeeping and the new immigration legislation it entailed also served
as an important?though often ignored?impetus to American state
building at the end of the nineteenth century.22 In the United States, the
great migrations of Asian, Europeans, and Mexicans from the 1880s to
1924 coincided with and helped instigate an expansion of the modern
administrative state. The regulation, inspection, restriction, exclusion,
and deportation of immigrants required the establishment of a state ap
paratus and bureaucracy to enforce the immigration laws and to exercise
the state’s control over its geographical borders as well as its internal
borders of citizenship and national membership. Immigrants, immigra
tion patterns, and immigrant communities were profoundly affected by
the new laws and the ways in which they were enforced. The ideology
and administrative processes of gatekeeping dehumanized and
criminalized immigrants, defining them as “unassimilable aliens,” “un
welcome invasions,” “undesirables,” “diseased,” “illegal.” But even those
groups who were most affected played active roles in challenging, nego
tiating, and shaping the new gatekeeping nation through their interaction
with immigration officials and the state. Related to the growth and cen
tralization of the administrative state, gatekeeping was also inextricably
tied to the expansion of United States imperialism at the end of the
nineteenth century. At the same time that the United States began to
assert its national sovereignty by closing its gates to unwanted foreign
ers, it was also expanding its influence abroad through military and
economic force, and extended some of its immigration laws to its new
territories. For example, following the annexation of Hawaii in 1898
and the end of the Spanish-American war, the Chinese Exclusion laws
were extended to both Hawaii and the Philippines.23
Lastly, the construction and closing of America’s gates to various
“alien invasions” was instrumental in the formation of the nation itself
and in articulating a definition of American national identity and
belonging.24 Americans learned to define American-ness, by excluding,
controlling, and containing foreign-ness. Likewise, through the admis^
sion and exclusion of foreigners, the United States both asserted its
sovereignty and reinforced its identity as a nation. Gatekeeping, a prod
uct and result of Chinese exclusion, had?and continues to have?pro
found influence on immigrant groups, twentieth-century immigration
patterns, immigration control, and American national identity.
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42 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
THE EXAMPLE OF CHINESE EXCLUSION: RACE AND
RACIALIZATION
One of the most significant consequences of Chinese exclusion was
that by establishing a gatekeeping ideology, politics, and administration,
it provided a powerful framework, model, and set of tools to be used to
understand and further racialize other threatening, excludable, and unde
sirable aliens. Soon after the Chinese were excluded, calls to restrict or
exclude other immigrants followed quickly, and the rhetoric and strat
egy of these later campaigns drew important lessons from the anti-Chinese
movement. For example, the class-based arguments and restrictions in
the Chinese Exclusion Act were echoed in later campaigns to bar con
tract laborers of any race. As Gwendolyn Mink has shown, southern and
eastern European immigrants?like Chinese?were denounced as “coo
lies, serfs, and slaves.”25 The Democratic party made the connections
explicit and blended the old anti-Chinese rhetoric into a more general
ized racial nativism in its 1884 campaign handbook. Recalling the great
success of Chinese exclusion, the Democrats pointed to a new danger:
If it became necessary to protect the American workingmen on the Pacific
slope from the disastrous and debasing competition of Coolie labor, the
same argument now applies with equal force and pertinency to the impor
tation of pauper labor from southern Europe.26
Such connections and arguments were significant. In 1885, the Foran
Act prohibited the immigration of all contract laborers.27
The gender-based exclusions of the 1875 Page Act were also dupli
cated in later government attempts to screen out immigrants, especially
women, who were perceived to be immoral or guilty of sexual mis
deeds. The exclusion of Chinese prostitutes led to a more general exclu
sion of all prostitutes in the 1903 Immigration Act.28 Signifying a larger
concern that independent female migration was a moral problem, other
immigration laws restricted the entry of immigrants who were “likely to
become public charges” or who had committed a “crime involving moral
turpitude.”29 As Donna Gabbaccia has pointed out, such general exclu
sion laws were theoretically “gender-neutral.” In practice, however, “any
unaccompanied woman of any age, marital status, or background might
be questioned” as a potential public charge. Clauses in the 1891 Immi
gration Act excluded women on moral grounds. Sexual misdeeds such
as adultery, fornication, and illegitimate pregnancy were all grounds for
exclusion. Lastly, echoes of the “unwelcome invasion” of Chinese and
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Lee 43
Japanese immigration were heard in nativist rhetoric focusing on the
high birthrates of southern and eastern European immigrant families.
Immigrant fecundity, it was claimed, would cause the “race suicide” of
the Anglo-American race.30
Race clearly intersected with such class and gender-based arguments
and continued to play perhaps the largest role in defining and categoriz
ing which immigrant groups to admit or exclude. The arguments and
lessons of Chinese exclusion were resurrected over and over again dur
ing the nativist debates over the “new” immigrants from Asia, Mexico,
and southern and eastern Europe, further refining and consolidating the
racialization of these groups. In many ways, Chinese immigrants?
racialized as the ultimate undesirable alien?became the model by which
to measure the desirability of these new immigrants. David Roediger
and James Barrett have suggested that the racialization of certain immi
grant groups, and especially the racial vocabulary which described Ital
ians as “guinea” and Slavic immigrants as “hunky” were racialized in
relation to African Americans in the realms of labor and citizenship.31
However, I suggest that in terms of immigration restriction, the new
immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Mexico, and other parts
of Asia were more closely racialized along the Chinese immigrant model,
especially in the Pacific Coast states. There, immigration and whiteness
were defined most clearly in opposition to Asian-ness or “yellowness.”32
The persistent use of the metaphor of the closed gate combined with the
rhetoric of “unwelcome invasions” most clearly reveals the difference.
African Americans, originally brought into the nation as slaves could
never really be “sent back” despite their alleged inferiority and threat to
the nation. Segregation and Jim Crow legislation was mostly aimed at
keeping African Americans “in their place.” Chinese, who were racialized
in ways that positioned them as polar opposites to “Americans” also
clearly did not belong in the United States and were themselves often
compared to blacks. But unlike African Americans, they could be kept
at bay through immigration restriction. Thus, immigration laws served
as the gates that had to be closed against the immigrant invasion; an
argument made in relation to southern and eastern European and Mexi
can immigrants, but never applied to African Americans.
As early twentieth-century nativist literature and organization records
illustrate, the language of Chinese restriction and exclusion was quickly
refashioned to apply to succeeding groups of immigrants. These connec
tions?though clear to contemporary intellectuals, politicians, and nativ
ists?have not been made forcefully enough by immigration historians.
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44 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
Reflecting the intellectual segregation within immigration history, many
have separated the study of European immigrants from Asians and
Latinos, citing “different” experiences and problems.33 John Higham,
the leading authority of American nativism claimed that the anti-Asian
movements were “historically tangential” to the main currents of Ameri
can nativism. Edith Abbott, who authored one of the first comprehen
sive studies of immigration, argued that “the study of European immi
gration should not be complicated for the student by confusing it with
the very different problems of Chinese and Japanese immigration.” Carl
Wittke, considered a founder of the field, devoted much attention to
Asians in his important survey of American immigration history, but
argued that their history was “a brief and strange interlude in the general
account of the great migrations to America.”34 As many have pointed
out, continued intellectual segregation within immigration history is a
fruitless endeavor.35 In the case of exclusion, restriction, and immigra
tion law, it is now clear that anti-Asian nativism was not only directly
connected, but was in fact the dominant model for American nativist
ideology and politics in the early twentieth century.
Following the exclusion of Chinese, Americans on the West Coast
became increasingly alarmed with new immigration from Asia, particu
larly from Japan, Korea, and India. Californians portrayed the new im
migration as yet another “Oriental invasion,” and San Francisco news
papers urged readers to “step to the front once more and battle to hold
the Pacific Coast for the white race.”36 Like the Chinese before them,
these new Asian immigrants were also considered to be threats due to
their race and their labor. The Japanese were especially feared, because
of their great success in agriculture and their tendency to settle and start
families in the United States (as compared to the Chinese who were
mostly sojourners). The political and cultural ideology that came to be
used in the anti-Japanese movement immediately connected the new
Japanese threat with the old Chinese one. Headlines in San Francisco
newspapers talked of “Another phase in the Immigration from Asia”
and warned that the “Japanese [were] Taking the Place of the Chinese.”
Moreover, similar charges of being unassimilable and exploitable cheap
labor were made against the Japanese. And because the Japanese were
supposedly even more “tricky and unscrupulous” as well as more “ag
gressive and warlike” than the Chinese, they were considered even “more
objectionable.”37 Political leaders made the connections explicit. Denis
Kearney, the charismatic leader of the Workingmen’s party which spear
headed the anti-Chinese movement in San Francisco during the 1870s,
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Lee 45
found the Chinese and Japanese “problems” to be synonymous to each
other. A Sacramento reporter recorded Kearney in 1892 berating the
“foreign Shylocks [who] are rushing another breed of Asiatic slaves to
fill up the gap made vacant by the Chinese who are shut out by our
laws … Japs … are being brought here now in countless numbers to
demoralize and discourage our domestic labor market.” Kearney mus
ingly ended his speech with “The Japs Must Go!”?a highly original
revision of his “the Chinese Must Go!” rallying cry from the 1870s.38 In
1901, James D. Phelan, mayor of San Francisco spearheaded the Chi
nese Exclusion Convention of 1901 and centered it around the theme
“For Home, Country, and Civilization.” Later, in 1920 he ran for the
United States Senate under the slogan, “Stop the Silent Invasion” (of
Japanese).39
The small population of Asian Indian immigrants also felt the wrath
of nativists, who regarded them as the “most objectionable of all Orien
tals” in the United States.40 In 1905, the San Francisco-based Japanese
Korean Exclusion League renamed itself the Asiatic Exclusion League
in an attempt to meet the new threat. Newspapers complained of “Hindu
Hordes” coming to the United States. Indians were “dirty, diseased,”
“the worst type of immigrant… not fit to become a citizen. .. and
entirely foreign to the people of the United States.” Their employment
by “moneyed capitalists” as expendable cheap labor and India’s large
population “teeming with millions upon millions of emaciated sickly
Hindus existing on starvation wages” also hearkened back to the charges
of a cheap labor invasion made against Chinese and Japanese immi
grants.41
Likewise, the racialized definitions of Mexican immigrants also re
ferred back to Chinese immigration. Long classified as racial inferiors,
Mexican immigrants often served as replacement agricultural laborers
following the exclusion of Asian immigrants.42 Although their immigra
tion was largely protected by agricultural and industrial employers through
the 1920s, Mexican immigrants were long-standing targets of racial
nativism, and many of the arguments directed towards Mexicans echoed
earlier charges lobbied at the Chinese. Because the legal, political, and
cultural understanding of Chinese immigrants as permanent foreigners
had long been established, nativists’ direct connections between Chinese
and Mexicans played a crucial role in racializing Mexicans as foreign.
As Mae Ngai has shown for the post-1924 period, characterizing Mexi
cans as foreign, rather than the natives of what used to be their former
homeland, “distanced them both from Anglo-Americans culturally and
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46 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
from the Southwest as a region” and made it easier to restrict, deport,
and criminalize Mexicans as “illegal.”43
Nativists used the Chinese framework to characterize Mexicans as
foreign on the basis of two main arguments: racial inferiority and racial
unassimilability. George P. Clemens, the head of the Los Angeles County
Agricultural Department explained that Asians and Mexicans were ra
cially inferior to whites because they were physically highly suitable for
the degraded agricultural labor in which they were often employed. The
tasks involved were those “which the Oriental and Mexican due to their
crouching and bending habits are fully adapted, while the white is physi
cally unable to adapt himself to them.”44 While Chinese were consid
ered to be biologically inferior due to their status as heathens and their
alleged inability to assimilate in an Anglo-American mold, Mexicans
were degraded as an ignorant “hybrid race” of Spanish and Indian ori
gin.45 As Mexican immigration increased, fears of a foreign invasion of
cheap, unassimilable laborers similar to the Chinese one rippled through
out the nativist literature. Major Frederick Russell Burnham warned that
“the whole Pacific Coast would have been Asiatic in blood today except
for the Exclusion Acts. Our whole Southwest will be racially Mexican
in three generations unless some similar restriction is placed upon them.”46
(Burnham, of course, conveniently ignored the fact that the Southwest?
as well as most of the American West?had already been “racially
Mexican” long before he himself had migrated west.) V.S. McClatchy,
editor of the Sacramento Bee warned that the “wholesale introduction of
Mexican peons” presented California’s “most serious problem” in the
1920s.47 Increased Mexican migration to Texas was especially contested,
and nativists there explicitly pointed to the example of California and
Chinese immigration to allude to their state’s future. “To Mexicanize
Texas or Orientalize California is a crime,” raged one nativist.48 Chester
H. Rowell argued that the Mexican invasion was even more detrimental
than the Chinese one, because at least the “Chinese coolie”?”the ideal
human mule”?would not “plague us with his progeny. His wife and
children are in China, and he returns there himself when we no longer
need him.” Mexicans, he argued, might not be so compliant or easy to
send back.49
The comparisons between Chinese and Mexicans continued. Other
nativists extended the Chinese racial unassimilability argument to Mexi
cans by claiming that they “can no more blend into our race than can the
Chinaman or the Negro.”50 Anti-Mexican nativists increasingly issued a
call for restriction by explicitly framing the new Mexican immigration
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Lee 47
problem within the old argument for Chinese exclusion. Railing against
the need for cheap Mexican labor, Major Burnham blamed the immigra
tion promoters of the 1920s just as Denis Kearney had blamed the
capitalists and their “Chinese pets” during the 1870s. “It is the old
Chinese stuff, an echo of the [18]70s, word for word!” wrote Burnham.
Moreover, Burnham also viewed that immigration laws?and specifi
cally the same types of exclusionary measures used against the Chi
nese?were the only remedy: “Let us refuse cheap labor. Let us restrict
Mexican immigration and go steadily on to prosperity and wealth just as
we did after the Asiatic Exclusion Acts were passed.”51 In many nativ
ists’ minds, the image of Mexicans merged with that of the biologically
inferior, unassimilable, and threatening Chinese immigrant.
At the same time, some of the race and class based theories and
arguments used against Asians and Mexicans were being applied to
certain European immigrant groups as well, especially in the Northeast
ern United States, where most European immigrants first landed and
settled. As John Higham and Matthew Frye Jacobson have shown, a
sense of “absolute difference” which already divided white Americans
from people of color was extended to certain European nationalities.
Because distinctive physical differences between native white Ameri
cans and European immigrants were not readily apparent, racial nativ
ists “manufactured” racial difference. Boston intellectuals like Nathaniel
Shaler, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Francis Walker all promoted an elabo
rate set of racial ideas that marked southern and eastern Europeans as
different and inferior, a threat to the nation. A new nativist group, the
Immigration Restriction League, (IRL) was formed in Boston in 1894.52
In response to the increase in immigration from southern and eastern
Europe, many nativists began to identify and elaborate upon this new
threat. In many ways, they began to make direct connections between
the “new” European immigrants and the established Asian threat. Both
groups were racially inferior to Anglo-Saxons, and their use as cheap
labor threatened native-born Anglo-American workingmen. Both Ital
ians and French Canadians were explicitly compared to Chinese immi
grants. Italians were even given the dubious honor of being called the
“Chinese of Europe” and French Canadians were labeled the “Chinese
of the Eastern States.” As Donna Gabaccia has argued, Chinese and
Italians “occupied an ambiguous, overlapping and intermediary position
in the binary racial schema.” Neither black nor white, both were seen as
inbetween?”yellow,” “olive,” or “swarthy.” Their use as cheap labor
also linked the two together. Italians were often called “European coo
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48 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
lies” or “padrone coolies.” The large-scale migration of Italians to other
countries also prompted similar versions of invasion rhetoric used against
the Chinese. An Australian restrictionist argued in 1891 that the country
was “in danger of the Chinese of Europe flowing into our shores.”53
French Canadians were compared to Chinese immigrants due to their
alleged inability to assimilate to Anglo-American norms. An 1881 Mas
sachusetts state agency report charged that French Canadians were the
“Chinese of the Eastern States” because “they care nothing for our
institutions.. .. They do not come to make a home among us, to dwell
with us as citizens…. Their purpose is merely to sojourn a few years as
aliens.”54 In 1891, Henry Cabot Lodge opined that the Slovak immi
grants?another threatening group?”are not a good acquisition for us
to make, since they appear to have so many items in common with the
Chinese.”55 Lothrop Stoddard, another leading nativist, went even fur
ther by arguing that Eastern Europeans were not only “like the Chi
nese;” they were in fact part Asian. Eastern Europe, he explained, was
situated “next door” to Asia, and had already been invaded by “Asiatic
hordes” over the past two thousand years. As a result, the Slavic peoples
were mongrels, “all impregnated with Asiatic Mongol and Turki blood.”56
Such explicit race and class-based connections to Chinese immigra
tion were effective in defining and articulating nativists’ problems with
newer immigrants. The old Chinese exclusion rhetoric was one with
which Americans were familiar by the 1910s, and it served as a strong
foundation from which to build new nativist arguments on the national
level. The Immigration Restriction League used this tactic masterfully.
In a 1908 letter to labor unions, the organization affirmed that Chinese
immigration was the ultimate evil, but warned that the Orient was “only
one source of the foreign cheap labor which competes so ruinously with
our own workmen,” The IRL charged that the stream of other immi
grants from Europe and Western Asia was “beginning to flow,” and
without proper measures to check it, it would “swell, as did the coolie
labor, until it overwhelms one laboring community after another.”57
In another letter to politicians, the IRL defined the issues and political
positions even more clearly. The letter asked congressmen and senators
across the country to identify the “classes of persons” who were desired
and not desired in their state. The IRL made this task simple by offering
them pre-set lists of groups they themselves deemed “desirable” and
“undesirable.” The politicians needed only to check the groups in order
of preference. In the “desired” categories, “Americans, native born”
topped the list. “Persons from northern Europe” came second. British,
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Lee 49
Scandanavians [sic], and Germans were also included. In contrast, Asi
atics, Southern and Eastern Europeans, illiterates, and the generic “for
eign born” were all lumped together in the second list of supposed
unwanted and excludable immigrants.58 The IRL could make no clearer
statement: the new threat from Europe and the old threat from Asia were
one.
Due to different regional politics and dynamics of race relations and
definitions of whiteness, divergent opinions about the connections be
tween the old Asian immigration problem and the new European one
existed on the West Coast. On the one hand, the danger posed by the
two groups was explicitly connected and fed off of each other. The
virulent anti-Asian campaigns broadened appeals to preserve “America
for all Americans” and called into question just who was and who was
not a “real American.” The San Francisco-based Asiatic Exclusion League
implied that all aliens were dangerous to the country and passed a
resolution that aliens should be disarmed in order to prevent insurrec
tion. Other nativists in California expressed fears of the degraded immi
gration entering the country from both Asia and Europe.59 Homer Lea,
for example, the author and leading proponent of the “Yellow Peril”
theory of Japanese domination of America, warned that the growing
immigration from Europe augmented the Japanese danger by “sapping
America’s racial strength and unity.”60 The California branch of the
Junior Order United American Mechanics, a long-lived nativist group,
allied themselves with the Asiatic Exclusion League and announced that
southern Europeans were semi-Mongolian.61
On the other hand, demonstrating the importance of regional dynam
ics in the continuing consolidation of the construction of whiteness,
some West Coast nativists made very careful distinctions between clos
ing America’s gates to Asians while leaving them open to Europeans. In
a continuation of the West’s campaign to preserve a “white man’s fron
tier,” Western nativists tended to privilege whiteness at the expense of
people of color. Significantly, many of the leading nativists were Euro
pean immigrants or first generation American themselves.62 Denis
Kearney, leader of the anti-Chinese Workingmen’s Party was an Irish
immigrant. James D. Phelan, leader of the anti-Japanese movement, was
Irish American. In the multi-racial West, the claims to and privileges of
whiteness were important. The best expression of this sentiment oc
curred during the 1901 Chinese Exclusion Convention, an event orga
nized to lobby for the permanent exclusion of Chinese immigrants. While
attendees rallied around the convention theme of protecting the Ameri
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50 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
can “home, country, and civilization,” keynote speakers strongly de
fended an open-door policy towards all European immigrants. In an
impassioned speech, A. Sbarboro, (an Italian immigrant/Italian Ameri
can himself) president of the Manufacturers’ and Producers’ Associa
tion, declared that in California:
We want the Englishman, who brings with him capital, industry and
enterprise; the Irish who build and populate our cities; the Frenchmen,
with his vivacity and love of liberty; the industrious and thrifty Italians,
who cultivate the fruit, olives, and vines?who come with poetry and
music from the classic land of Virgil, the Teutonic race, strong, patient,
and frugal; the Swedes, Slavs, and Belgians; we want all good people
from all parts of Europe. To these, Mr. Chairman, we should never close
our doors, for although when the European immigrant lands at Castle
Garden he may be uncouth and with little money, yet soon by his thrift
and industry he improves his condition; he becomes a worthy citizen and
the children who bless him mingle with the children of those who came
before him, and when the country calls they are always ready and willing
to defend the flag to follow the stars and stripes throughout the world.63
Sbarboro, by explicitly including Italians and Slavs, indeed, all immi
grants from all parts of Europe, with the older stock of immigrants from
France, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium, made clear that the difference
to be made was not among European nationalities, but between Euro
pean and, in this case, Asian immigrants. Membership in the white race
was tantamount. The southern and eastern European might arrive at the
nation’s ports as poor and “uncouth,” but they were assimilable, he
explained. The environment of the United States would “improve his
condition” and make him a “worthy citizen.” Lest doubts still remained
among his audience, Sbarboro refined his assimilation argument to point
to the second generation. He explained that the European immigrant’s
children would mingle with native-born American children and in learn
ing the true ideals of American citizenship, they would become such
patriots, that they would defend their beloved homeland throughout the
world. The belief that second-generation Chinese would do the same
was unimaginable.
These distinctions were important. The debates about immigration
from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Mexico were clearly con
nected to earlier debates concerning Chinese immigration, and an in
creasing number of politicians, policy makers, and Americans across the
country disregarded Sbarbaro’s pleas to keep America’s doors open to
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Lee 51
“all good people from all parts of Europe” and supported restrictions on
immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Nevertheless, Sbarboro’s
attempts to differentiate European immigrants from Asians pointed to
significant distinctions in the ways in which European, Asian, and Mexi
can immigrants were racially constructed and regulated by immigration
law. First, southern and eastern European immigrants came in much
greater numbers than did the Chinese, and their whiteness secured them
the right of naturalized citizenship, while Asians were consistently de
nied naturalization by law and in the courts.64 This claim and privilege
of whiteness gave European immigrants more access to and opportuni
ties of full participation in the larger American polity, economy, and
society. Although they were eventually greatly restricted, they were
never excluded like Asians. For example, as Mae Ngai has shown, the
1924 Immigration Act applied the invented category of “national ori
gins” to Europeans?a classification that presumed a shared whiteness
with white Americans and which separated them from non-Europeans.
The Act thus established the “legal foundations … for European immi
grants [to] becom[e] Americans.” Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino
and Asian Indian immigrants were codified as “aliens ineligible to citi
zenship.”65
Mexican immigration differed from both southern and eastern Euro
pean and Asian immigration on a range of issues. First was Mexico’s
proximity to the United States and the relatively porous United States
Mexico border which facilitated migration to and from the United States.
As historians have shown, Mexican immigrants were treated differently,
even considered “safe” from mainstream nativism due to their status as
long-term residents and their propensity to be “birds of passage,” return
ing home after the agricultural season ended, and thus, not settling in the
United States permanently.66 Mexico’s own contentious history with the
United States and the “legacy of conquest” also colored United States
Mexican relations, racialized Mexicans as inferiors, and structured Mexi
can immigrant and Mexican American life within the United States in
ways that contrasted sharply with other immigrant groups. In the post
1924 period, Mexicans would be categorized as “illegal,” an all-encom
passing racial category which not only negated any claim of belonging
in a conquered homeland, but also extended to both Mexican immi
grants and Mexican Americans.67
These significant differences functioned to shape both immigration
regulation and immigrant life in distinct ways for these groups. Still, the
rhetoric and tools of gatekeeping, first established by Chinese exclusion,
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52 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
were instrumental in defining the issues for all groups and set important
precedents for twentieth-century immigration. Race, gender, and class
based arguments were used to categorize Asian, southern and eastern
European, and Mexican immigrants as inferior, undesirable, and even
dangerous to the United States. Each group held its own unique position
within the hierarchy of race and immigration, but all eventually became
subjected to an immigration ideology and law designed to limit their
entry into the United States.
By the early twentieth century, the call to “close the gates” was not
only sounded in relation to Chinese immigration, but to immigration in
general. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, poet and former editor of the Atlantic
Monthly reacted to the new immigrants from southern and eastern Eu
rope arriving in Boston in 1892 by publishing “The Unguarded Gates,”
a poem demonizing the new arrivals as a “wild motley throng … accents
of menace alien to our air.”68 Just as H. N. Clement had suggested
“closing the doors” against Chinese immigration in 1876, Madison Grant,
the well-known nativist and leader of the Immigration Restriction League
called for “closing the flood gates” against the “new immigration” from
southern and eastern Europe in 1914.69 At the same time, Frank Julian
Warne, another nativist leader, warned that unregulated immigration
from Europe was akin to “throwing open wide our gates to all the races
of the world.”70
The solution, all agreed, lay in immigration policy, and a succession
of federal laws were passed to increase the control and regulation of
threatening and inferior immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1917 re
quired a literacy test for all adult immigrants, tightened restrictions on
suspected radicals, and as a concession to politicians on the West Coast,
denied entry to aliens living within a newly-erected geographical area
called the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” With this zone in place, the United
States effectively excluded all immigrants from India, Burma, Siam, the
Malay States, Arabia, Afghanistan, part of Russia, and most of the
Polynesian Islands.71 The 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts drastically
restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe and perfected
the exclusion of all Asians, except for Filipinos.72 Although Filipino and
Mexican immigration remained exempt from the 1924 Act, Filipinos
were excluded in 1934.73 Both Filipinos and Mexicans faced massive
deportation and repatriation programs during the Great Depression. By
the 1930s, the cycle that had begun with Chinese exclusion was made
complete.74
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Lee 53
THE EXAMPLE OF CHINESE EXCLUSION: IMMIGRATION
REGULATION
The concepts of race and immigration that developed out of Chinese
exclusion provided the ideological structure to which other immigrant
groups were compared and racialized. The passage of the Chinese Ex
clusion Act also ushered in drastic changes in immigration regulation
itself and set the foundation for twentieth-century policies designed not
only for the inspection and processing of newly-arriving immigrants,
but also for the control of potentially dangerous immigrants already in
the country. Written into the act itself were five major changes in immi
gration regulation. All would become standard means of inspecting,
processing, admitting, tracking, punishing, and deporting immigrants in
the United States. First, the Exclusion Act laid the foundation for the
establishment of the country’s first federal immigrant inspectors. While
the Bureau of Immigration was not established until 1894 and did not
gain jurisdiction over the Chinese exclusion laws until 1903, the inspec
tors for Chinese immigrants (under the auspices of the United States
Customs Service) were the first to be authorized to act as immigration
officials on behalf of the federal government.75 Prior to the passage of
the 1875 Page Law and the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, there was
neither a trained force of government officials and interpreters nor the
bureaucratic machinery with which to enforce the new law. As George
Anthony Peffer has illustrated, enforcement of the Page Law first estab
lished the role of the United States collector of customs as examiner of
Chinese female passengers and their documents, thereby establishing an
important?though often overlooked?prototype for immigration legis
lation and inspection.76 Sections four and eight of the Chinese Exclusion
Act extended the duties of these officials to include the examination of
all arriving Chinese. Inspectors were also required to examine and clear
Chinese laborers departing the United States as well.77
Second, the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion laws set in motion
the federal government’s first attempts to identify and record the move
ments, occupations, and financial relationships of immigrants, returning
residents, and native-born citizens. Because of the complexity of the
laws and immigration officials’ suspicions that Chinese were attempting
to enter the country under fraudulent pretenses, the government’s en
forcement practices involved an elaborate tracking system of registra
tion documents, certificates of identity, and voluminous interviews of
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54 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
individuals and their families.78 Section four of the Exclusion Act estab
lished “certificates of registration” for departing laborers. Such certifi
cates were to contain the name, age, occupation, last place of residence,
personal description, and facts of identification of the Chinese laborer.
This information was also recorded in specific registry-books to be kept
in the customs-house. The certificate entitled the holder to “return and
re-enter the United States upon producing and the delivering the [docu
ment] to the collector of customs.” The laborer’s return certificate is the
first reentry document issued to an immigrant group by the federal
government, and it served as an equivalent passport facilitating re-entry
into the country. Chinese remained the only immigrant group required
to hold such re-entry permits (or passports) until 1924, when the new
Immigration Act of that year issued?but did not require?reentry per
mits for other aliens.79
As other scholars have pointed out, the documentary requirements
established for Chinese women emigrating under the Page Law and
exempt class Chinese (merchants, teachers, diplomats, students, travel
ers) applying for admission under the exclusion laws also set in motion
an “early version ofthat system of ‘remote control’ involving passports
and visas” in which United States consular officials in China and Hong
Kong verified the admissibility of immigrants prior to their departure
for the United States. While the original Exclusion Act of 1882 placed
this responsibility in the hands of Chinese government officials alone,
an 1884 amendment gave United States diplomatic officers the task of
verifying the facts so that the so-called “section six certificates” re
quired of exempt class Chinese could be considered “prima facie evi
dence of right of re-entry.”80
Eventually, in an effort to crack down on illegal entry and residence,
the Chinese Exclusion laws were amended to require all Chinese resi
dents already in the country to possess “certificates of residence” and
“certificates of identity” that served as proof of their legal entry and
lawful right to remain in the country. These precursors to documents
now commonly known as “green cards,” were first outlined in the 1892
Geary Act and 1893 McCreary Amendment, which required Chinese
laborers to register with the federal government. The resulting certifi
cates of residence contained the name, age, local residence and occupa
tion of the applicant (or “Chinaman” as the act noted), as well as a
photograph. Any Chinese laborer found within the jurisdiction of the
United States without a certificate of residence was to be “deemed and
adjudged to be unlawfully in the United States,” and vulnerable to arrest
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Lee 55
and deportation.81 The Bureau of Immigration used its administrative
authority to demand a similar “certificate of identity” for all exempt
class Chinese merchants, teachers, travelers, students, and others begin
ning in 1909. While the Bureau believed that such certificates would
serve as “indubitable proof of legal entry” and thus, protection for legal
immigrants and residents, it also subjected all non-laborer Chinese?
who were supposed to be exempt from the exclusion laws?to the same
system of registration and surveillance governing Chinese laborers. Ap
parently, the plan was an extension of an existing system of registration
used for Chinese Americans entering the mainland from Hawaii.82 Other
immigrants were not required to hold similar documents proving their
lawful residence until 1928 when “immigrant identification cards” were
first issued to new immigrants arriving for permanent residence. These
were eventually replaced by the “alien registration receipt cards” (i.e.,
“green cards”) after 1940.83
The issuance and institutionalization of such documentary require
ments verifying Chinese immigrants’ rights to enter, re-enter, and re
main in the country codified a highly organized system of control and
surveillance over the Chinese in America. Much of the rationalization
behind such documentary requirements stemmed from the prejudiced
belief that it was, as California Congressman Thomas Geary explained,
“impossible to identify [one] Chinaman [from another.]”84 Although it
was an unprecedented form of immigration regulation and surveillance
at the time, this method of processing and tracking immigrants eventu
ally became central to America’s control of immigrants and immigration
in the twentieth century.
In addition to establishing a system of registering and tracking immi
grants, the Chinese Exclusion Act set another precedent by defining
illegal immigration as a criminal offense. It declared that any person
who secured certificates of identity fraudulently or through imperson
ation was to be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, fined $1000, and
imprisoned for up to five years. Any persons who knowingly aided and
abetted the landing of “any Chinese person not lawfully entitled to enter
the United States” could also be charged with a misdemeanor, fined, and
imprisoned for up to one year.85
Defining and punishing illegal immigration directly led to the estab
lishment of the country’s first modern deportation laws as well, and one
of the final sections of the Act declared that “any Chinese person found
unlawfully within the United States shall be caused to be removed there
from to the country from whence he came.”86 These initial forays into
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56 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
federal regulation of immigration would be even further codified and
institutionalized seven years later in the Immigration Act of 1891.87
CONCLUSION
The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 fundamentally
transformed both immigration to the United States and the country’s
relationship to immigration. It was the first of many restriction and
exclusion laws, but its significance goes far beyond the legal realm.
Chinese exclusion helped re-define the very ways in which Americans
saw and defined race in relation to other immigrant groups and trans
formed America’s relationship to immigration in general. The end result
was a nation that embraced the notion of guarding America’s gates
against “undesirable” foreigners in order to protect Americans.
Gatekeeping became a national reality and was extended to other immi
grant groups throughout the early twentieth century. Both the rhetoric
and the tools used in the battle over Chinese exclusion were repeated in
later debates over immigration. In many ways, Chinese immigrants be
came the models by which others were measured. Nativists repeatedly
pointed to ways in which the new Asians, Mexicans, and Europeans
were “just like” the Chinese. They also argued that similar restrictions
should be established. By 1924, the cycle begun with Chinese exclusion
was complete, and gatekeeping had changed from being the exception to
the rule. Immigration inspectors and inspections, passport and other
documentary requirements, the surveillance and criminalization of im
migration and the deportation of immigrants found to be in the country
illegally all became standard operating procedures in the United States.
Nativists no longer needed to ask “how can we stop immigrants?” They
had found the answer in Chinese exclusion.
NOTES
Numerous people have read earlier versions of this article, and I have benefited
greatly from their comments: David Roediger, George Anthony Peffer, Paul Spickard,
Catherine Ceniza Choy, Jigna Desai, Pat McNamara, Liping Wang, Claire Fox, and
Claudia Sadowski-Smith, and the anonymous reader from the Journal. Michael
LeMay provided early guidance.
1. California State Senate, Special Committee on Chinese Immigration, Chinese
Immigration: It’s Social, Moral, and Political Effect (Sacramento, 1878), p. 275.
2. San Francisco Alta California, 6 April 1876, as cited in Andrew Gyory,
Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1998), p. 78.
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Lee 57
3. Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate, p. 78; Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and
New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875
1920 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), p. 73.
4. Act of May 6, 1882 (22 Stat. 58).
5. Roger Daniels, “No Lamps Were Lit for Them: Angel Island and the Histori
ography of Asian American Immigration,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 17,
1 (Fall 1997): 4; Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate, pp. 1, 258-9.
6. Recent exceptions are Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immi
grants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995);
Sucheng Chan, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America,
1882-1943 (Philadelphia, 1994); Sucheng Chan and K. Scott Wong, eds. Claiming
America: Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era (Phila
delphia, 1998); Mae Ngai, “Legacies of Exclusion: Illegal Chinese Immigration
During the Cold War Years,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 18, 1 (Fall
1998): 3-35.
7. Lucy Salyer has demonstrated how Chinese exclusion shaped the doctrine
and administration of modem immigration law. Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers,
pp. xvi-xvii.
8. On the Page Law, see George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their
Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion (Urbana, 111., 1999).
9. For example, see Michael C. LeMay, Gatekeepers: Comparative Immigra
tion Policy (New York, 1989); Michael C. LeMay, From Open Door to Dutch
Door: An Analysis of U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1820 (New York, 1987);
Nathan Glazer, Clamor at the Gates: The New American Immigration (San Fran
cisco, 1985); Norman L. and Naomi Flink Zucker. The Guarded Gate: The Reality
of American Refugee Policy (New York, 1987); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate.
10. Richard Rayner, “Illegal? Yes. Threat? No,” New York Times Magazine, 1
January 1996; Daniel B. Wood, “Controlling Illegal Immigration?But at a Price,”
Christian Science Monitor, 4 October 1999; “Fifth Year of Operation Gatekeeper
Stirs Debate” Siskind’s Immigration Bulletin, (October 1999), available from http://
wwxv.visalaw.com/99oct/21oct99.html.
11. Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate, pp. 1-2.
12. On the anti-Chinese movement, see in general, Mary R. Coolidge, Chinese
Immigration (New York, 1909); Neil Gotanda, “Exclusion and Inclusion: Immigra
tion and American Orientalism,” in Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Glo
balization, ed. Evelyn Hu-DeHart (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 129-132; Gyory, Clos
ing the Gate, Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Phila
delphia, 1999), pp. 51-64; Karen J. Leong, “A Distant and Antagonistic Race:”
Constructions of Chinese Manhood in the Exclusionist Debates, 1869-1878,” in
Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West, ed. Laura
McCall, Matthew Basso, Dee Garceau (New York, 2000), pp. 131-148; Charles
McClain, Jr., In Search of Equality: Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in
Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); Mink, Old Labor and New
Immigrants’, Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here; Salyer, Laws Harsh as
Tigers’, Alexander Saxton, Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Move
ment in California (Berkeley, Calif., 1971); K. Scott Wong, “Immigration and
Race: The Politics and Rhetoric of Exclusion,” in Many Americas: Critical Per
spectives on Race, Racism, and Ethnicity, ed. Gregory Campbell (Dubuque, IA,
1998), pp. 231-244.
13. California State Senate, Special Committee on Chinese Immigration, Chi
nese Immigration, pp. 276-7, emphasis original.
14. Chan Chae Ping v. United States (130 US 581, 1889). In 1893, the Court
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58 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
also ruled that Congress had the right to exclude and deport unwanted aliens in
1893 in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (149 US 698,1893).
15. Erika Lee, “Immigrants and Immigration Law: A State of the Field Assess
ment,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 18, 4 (Summer, 1999): 85-114; Elliott
Barkan and Michael LeMay, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues
(Westport, Conn., 1999), p. xxii.
16. Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace”
(Baltimore, 1994), p. 3.
17. Immigration Act of 1917 (39 Stat. 874). My thanks to Margot Canaday for
this citation.
18. Immigration policy directly shaped American “racial formation,” what
Michael Omi and Howard Winant have explained as the “socio-historical process
by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.”
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States From the
1960s to the 1990s (1986; New York, 1994), p. 55. For a study on immigration
policy and racial formation in the post-1924 period, see Mae Ngai. “The Architec
ture of Race in American Immigration Law,” Journal of American History, 86,1
(June 1999): 67-92; and Mae Ngai. “Illegal Aliens and Alien Citizens: United
States Immigration Policy and Racial Formation, 1924-1945” (Ph.D. diss., Colum
bia University, 1998). On critical race theory and the law, see Sally Engle Merry,
Colonizing Hawaii: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, N.J., 2000), p. 17;
Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey, The Common Place of Law: Stories from
Everyday Life (Chicago, 1998).
19. Donna Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Im
migrant Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History, 86, 3
(1999): 1115-1134; George J. Sanchez, “Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Im
migration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 18, 4 (Summer, 1999):
66-84; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham,
N.C., 1996), p. ix.
20. Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration
Policy, 1850-1990 (Stanford, Calif., 1993). See also Jose David Saldivar, Border
Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), pp. 96-7;
Ali Behdad, “INS and Outs: Producing Delinquency at the Border,” Aztlan, 23, 1
(Spring, 1998): 103-113; Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U S.-Mexico
Border, 1978-1992 (Austin, Tex., 1996).
21. Mae Ngai, “The Architecture of Race,” pp. 67-92.
22. I use Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s definition of the state as being
composed of institutions, the policies they carry out, the conditions and rules which
support and justify them, and the social relations in which they are imbedded.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 83. See
also, John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the
State (New York, 2000), p. 1; David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical
Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, Calif., 1999), p. 31; Alan Kraut, Silent
Travelers, pp. 48-9; Anistide Zolberg, “The Great Wall Against China: Responses
to the First Immigration Crisis, 1885-1925” in Migration History: Old Paradigms
and New Perspectives, ed. Jan and Leo Lucassen (Bern, 1999), pp. 291-316; and
Aristide Zolberg, “Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration Policy,” in The Hand
book to International Migration: The American Experience, ed. C. Hirschman et al.
(New York, 1999), pp. 71-93.
23. Act of July 7, 1898: Annexation of Hawaiian Islands (31 Stat. 141) and Act
of April 30, 1900: Regarding the Territory of Hawaii (31 Stat. 161); Act of April
29, 1902: Chinese Immigration Prohibited (32 Stat. 176). On imperialism and im
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Lee 59
migration in general, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United
States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York,
2000), pp. 26-38.
24. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, p. ix; David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond:
Transnational Perspective on United States History,” Journal of American History,
86, 3 (1999): 966.
25. Congressional Record, 48th Cong., 2d sess. (February 13, 1885), p. 1634; as
cited in Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, p. 109.
26. Democratic National Committee, The Political Reformation of 1884: A Demo
cratic Campaign Handbook (1884); as cited in Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and
New Immigrants, p. 107.
27. Act of February 26, 1885 (also known as the Alien Contract Labor Law and
the Foran Act) (23 Stat. 332).
28. Act of March 3, 1903 (32 Stat. 1222).
29. The 1882 Regulation of Immigration Act (Act of August 3, 1882; 22 Stat.
214) also excluded lunatics, convicts, and idiots. The 1891 Immigration Act added
polygamists and “persons suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious dis
ease.” (Act of March 3, 1891; 26 Stat. 1084).
30. Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant
Life in the US, 1820-1990 (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), p. 37.
31. James Barrett and David Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality
and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 16,
3 (1997): 8-9.
32. Recent studies on racial formation in the West illustrate the importance of
moving beyond the white and black binary. See Neil Foley, The White Scourge:
Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, Calif.,
1997); Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Su
premacy in California (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); Chris Friday, “In DueTime: Narra
tives of Race and Place in the Western United States,” in Race, Ethnicity, and
Nationality in the United States: Toward the Twenty-First Century, ed., Paul Wong
(Boulder, Colo., 1999), pp. 102-152.
33. As David Roediger and James Barrett have pointed out, part of the problem
in immigration history has been a lack of attention to race (as opposed to ethnicity)
within the field. “Typical” immigration history, they write, has largely been “the
story of newcomers becoming American, of their holding out against becoming
American or, at best, of their changing America in the process of discovering new
identities.” Worse, they argue, is the misguided conflation of race with ethnicity.
Stark differences between the racialized status of African Americans, Latinos, Ameri
can Indians, and Asian Americans and European immigrants, they explain, meant
that “the latter eventually became ethnic.” James Barrett and David Roediger,
“Inbetween Peoples,” pp. 4-6.
34 John Higham, Preface to the Second Edition and Afterword, Strangers in the
Land (New York, 1978). Higham implied that he was wrong in this interpretation,
but offered no substantive corrective. See also Edith Abbot, Historical Aspects of
the Immigration Problem; Select Documents (Chicago, 1926), p. ix; Carl Wittke,
We Who Built America; The Saga of the Immigrant (New York, 1939), p. 458.
Many of these oversights were first pointed out by Roger Daniels in “Westerners
from the East: Oriental Immigrants Reappraised,” Pacific Historical Review, 35
(1966) and “No Lamps Were Lit for Them,” pp. 3-18.
35. Donna Gabaccia. “Is Everywhere Nowhere?” pp. 1115-1135; George
Sanchez, “Race, Nation, and Culture,” pp. 66-84.
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60 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
36. “Shut the Gates to the Hindu Invasion,” San Francisco Examiner, 16 June
1910; “The Watchdog States,” San Francisco Post, 24 May 1910.
37. San Francisco Bulletin, 4 May 1891, as cited in Roger Daniels, Asian
America, p. 111. “Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League,” July, 1911 (Allied
Printing, San Francisco, 1911).
38. Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in
California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley, Calif., 1962), p. 20.
39. Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans?an Interpretive History (Boston, 1991),
p. 44.
40. “Advance Guard of Hindu Horde Has Arrived,” San Francisco Examiner, 1
August 1910, as cited in Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, p. 127.
41. San Francisco Daily News, 20 September 1910.
42. George Sanchez writes that “Mexicans rapidly replaced the Japanese as a
major component of the agricultural labor force.” George Sanchez, Becoming Mexi
can American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945
(New York, 1993), p. 19.
43. Mae Ngai, “The Architecture of Race,” p. 91.
44. Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression:
Repatriation Pressures, 1929-1939 (Tuscon, Ariz., 1974), p. 10.
45. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in
Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), p. 54.
46. Frederick Russell Burnham, “The Howl for Cheap Mexican Labor,” in The
Alien in Our Midst or Selling Our Birthright for a Mess of Pottage, ed. Madison
Grant and Charles Stewart Davison (New York, 1930), p. 48. See also Neil Foley,
White Scourge, p. 51.
47. V. S. McClatchy, “Oriental Immigration”; Neil Foley, White Scourge, pp.
195, 197.
48. Foley, The White Scourge, p. 55.
49. Chester H. Rowell, “Why Make Mexico an Exception?” Survey, 1 May
1931; and idem, “Chinese and Japanese Immigrants,” Annals of the American Acad
emy, 34 (September, 1909): 4; as cited in Foley, The White Scourge, p. 53.
50. Frederick Russell Burnham, “The Howl for Cheap Mexican Labor,” p. 45.
51. Ibid., p. 48
52. John Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp. 132-3.
53. Donna Gabaccia, “The Yellow Peril’ and the ‘Chinese of Europe,'” pp.
177-9.
54. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Twelfth Annual Report of the
Bureau of Statistics of Labor (Boston, 1881), pp. 469-70. My thanks to Florence
Mae Waldron for this citation.
55. Lodge was quoting the U.S. Consul in Budapest. Henry Cabot Lodge, “The
Restriction of Immigration,” North American Review, 152 (1891): 30-32, 35; Mat
thew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, pp. 76-7.
56. Lothrop Stoddard, “The Permanent Menace from Europe,” in The Alien in
Our Midst, ed. Grant and Davison, pp. 227-8.
57. J.H. Patten, Asst. Secretary, Immigration Restriction League, Letter to Unions,
15 October 1908, Scrapbooks, Immigration Restriction League Collection, 1894
1912, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.
58. J.H. Patten, Asst. Secretary, Immigration Restriction League to Congress
men and Senators, n.d., ibid.
59. Asiatic Exclusion League, Proceedings, Feb. 1908, pp. 19, 71, and Decem
ber, 1908, pp. 17, 19; John Higham, Strangers in the Land, p. 166.
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Lee 61
60. Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (New York, 1909), pp. 124-8; John
Higham, Strangers in the Land, p. 172.
61. Congressional Record, 61 Cong., 1 Sess., 9174; Asiatic Exclusion League,
Proceedings, (February, 1908), pp. 55, 57; John Higham, Strangers in the Land, p.
174.
62. As David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Matthew Frye Jacobson have shown,
Irish and southern and eastern European immigrants commonly constructed and
asserted their “whiteness” by allying themselves (and sometimes leading) racist
campaigns against African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian and Mexican
immigrants. See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of
the American Working Class (New York, 1991); Matthew Frye Jacobson, White
ness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cam
bridge, Mass., 1998); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York,
1995).
63. San Francisco Call, 22 November 1901.
64. Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New
York 1996).
65. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race,” p. 70.
66. Lawrence Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1891-1931
(Tucson, Ariz., 1980), p. 22; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, p.
20; Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression, pp.
30-32.
67. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race,” p. 91.
68. Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New En
gland Tradition (Chicago, 1956), pp. 82-88; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian
Virtues, p. 181.
69. Madison Grant, The Alien in Our Midst, p. 23.
70. Frank Julian Warne, The Immigrant Invasion (New York, 1913), p. 295.
71. Immigration Act of 1917, (39 Stat. 874).
72. The Quota Act of 1921 (42 Stat. 5, section 2); Immigration Act of 1924, (43
Stat. 153). See generally, John Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp. 308-24.
73. Robert A. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 1924-1952, (New York,
1957), p. 60; H. Brett Melendy, “The Filipinos in the United States,” in Norris
Hundley, ed., The Asian-American: The Historical Experience, ed. Norris Hundley
(Santa Barbara, Calif. 1976), pp. 115-6, 119-25.
74. One recent estimate places the number of Mexicans, including American
bom children who were returned to Mexico at one million. See Francisco E.
Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in
the 1930s (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1995), p. 122.
75. The Bureau of Immigration was established under the Act of August 18,
1894 (28 Stat. 390). In 1900, Congress transferred the administration of the exclu
sion laws to the commissioner-general of immigration, but the everyday enforce
ment of the law still remained with the immigration officials in the Customs Ser
vice. In 1903, all Chinese immigration matters were placed under the control of the
Bureau of Immigration and its parent department, the newly created Department of
Commerce and Labor. “An act to establish the Department of Commerce and
Labor,” (32 Stat. L., 825).
76. The Page Law was also enforced by U.S. Consuls in Hong Kong. Act of
March 3, 1875 (18 Stat. 477) George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their
Women Here, pp. 58-9; Wen-hsien Chen, “Chinese Immigration Under Both Ex
clusion and Immigration Laws,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1940), p. 91.
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62 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002
77. Act of May 6, 1882, (22 Stat. 58).
78. See, for example, the Chinese Arrival Files, Port of San Francisco, RG 85,
Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives, Pacific
Region, San Bruno, CA.
79. Act of May 26, 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 (43 Stat. 153); e-mail
communication with Marian Smith, Historian, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service, 24 October 2000.
80. Section 4, Act of May 6, 1882, (22 Stat. 58); Act of July 5, 1884 (23 Stat.
115); Mary R. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, pp. 183-5; George Anthony Peffer,
If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here’, John Torpey, The Invention of the Pass
port, pp. 97-9.
81. Section 7, Act of May 5, 1892, “Geary Act,” (27 Stat. 25) and Section 2,
Act of November 3, 1893, “McCreary Amendment,” (28 Stat. 7).
82. United States, Department of Commerce, Annual Report of the Commis
sioner-General of Immigration for Fiscal Year 1903 (1903), 156 dina Annual Report
of the Commissioner-General of Immigration for Fiscal Year 1909 (1909), 131.
83. The use of “immigrant identification cards” was first begun under U.S.
Consular regulations on July 1, 1928. The “alien registration receipt cards,” com
monly known as “green cards” were the product of the Alien Registration Act of
1940 and the corresponding INS Alien Registration Program. Act of June 28, 1940
(54 Stat. 670); e-mail communication with Marian Smith, Historian, U.S. Immigra
tion and Naturalization Service, 26 October 2000; Marian Smith, “Why Isn’t the
Green Card Green?” http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/aboutins/history/articles/
Green.htm.
84. Mary R. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, pp. 209-33; John Torpey, The
Invention of the Passport, p. 100.
85. Sections 7 and 11, Act of May 6, 1882, (22 Stat. 58). This second clause
added to existing terms of punishment first established by the Page Law for any
persons caught “importing” either Asian contract laborers or prostitutes. Act of
March 3, 1875 (18 Stat. 477).
86. Section 12, Act of May 6, 1882, (22 Stat. 58).
87. This law established the Office of Superintendent of Immigration, outlined
the specific duties of “inspection officers,” established a medical examination of all
incoming immigrants, and laid out rules for border inspection along the Canadian
and Mexican borders. The criminal charges and deportation regulations concerning
illegal immigrants affirmed those first laid out in the Chinese Exclusion Act. Act of
March 3, 1891. In 1894, the Bureau of Immigration was established by the Act of
August 18, 1894 (28 Stat. 390).
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- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
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Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Spring, 2002), pp. 3-134
Front Matter
Contested Citizenship: National Identity and the Mexican Immigration Debates of the 1920s [pp. 3-35]
The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924 [pp. 36-62]
Review Essay
Review: American Religious Multitudes [pp. 63-66]
Review: Of People, Place, and Process: The Impact of Globalization on Asian American Communities [pp. 67-70]
Review: The White Racist Movement: Its Revelation [pp. 71-73]
Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 74-75]
Review: untitled [pp. 75-77]
Review: untitled [pp. 77-78]
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Review: untitled [pp. 126-127]
Review: untitled [pp. 127-129]
Notes on Contributors [pp. 130-134]
Back Matter