Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History
Intolerance
Even as they struggled to find work, Chinese immigrants were also fighting for their lives. During their first few decades in the United States, they endured an epidemic of violent racist attacks, a campaign of persecution and murder that today seems shocking. From Seattle to Los Angeles, from Wyoming to the small towns of California, immigrants from China were forced out of business, run out of town, beaten, tortured, lynched, and massacred, usually with little hope of help from the law. Racial hatred, an uncertain economy, and weak government in the new territories all contributed to this climate of terror and bloodshed. The perpetrators of these crimes, which included Americans from many segments of society, largely went unpunished. Exact statistics for this period are difficult to come by, but a case can be made that Chinese immigrants suffered worse treatment than any other group that came voluntarily to the U.S.
One traveler from the east coast, in his account of life in California, observed that "To abuse a Chinaman; to rob him; to kick and cuff him; even to kill him, have been things not only done with impunity by mean and wicked men, but even with vain glory.
"Had 'John'--here and in China alike the English and Americans nickname every Chinaman 'John'--a good claim, original or improved, he was ordered to 'move on'--it belonged to someone else. Had he hoarded a pile, he was ordered to disgorge; and, if he resisted, he was killed. Worse crimes even are known against them; they have been wantonly assaulted and shot down or stabbed by bad men, as sportsmen would surprise and shoot their game in the woods. No one was so low, so miserable, that he did not despise the Chinaman, and could not outrage him."?
Legislative Harassment
While Chinese immigrants in the U.S. had to deal with the threat of armed attackers, they also were harassed by punitive laws and regulations, many targeted solely at them. The Foreign Miners License tax law required all non-native born workers to pay the exorbitant rate of twenty dollars per month for the right to mine. The Sidewalk Ordinance of 1870 banned the Chinese method of carrying vegetables and carrying laundry on a pole, while in San Francisco, the Queue Ordinance of 1873 outlawed the wearing of long braids by men, a Chinese custom. Chinese immigrants were prohibited from working for federal, state, and local governments, and from educating their children in public schools. For several decades, a law was in place that prevented Chinese immigrants from testifying in court against Americans of European descent--effectively placing thousands of immigrants outside the protection of the law.
In the economic depression of the 1870s, hostile attitudes toward Chinese immigrants only became worse. Although most immigrants to the U.S. during this period were not Chinese, Chinese immigrants were often singled out as the cause of the nation's high employment rate and low wages. In one 1878 pamphlet, a labor organization warned against the damaging effects of Chinese businesses.
"MEN FROM CHINA come here to do LAUNDRY WORK. The China Empire contains 600,00,000 (six hundred millions) inhabitants.
The supply of these men is inexhaustible.
Every one doing this work takes BREAD from the mouths of OUR WOMEN.
So many have come of late, that to keep at work, they are obliged to cut prices."
Exclusion
The door to the Chinese American dream was slammed shut in 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. This act was the first significant restriction on free immigration in U.S. history, and it excluded Chinese laborers from the country under penalty of imprisonment and deportation. It also made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship. Chinese immigrants in the U.S. now had little chance of ever reuniting with their families, or of starting families in their new home.
For all practical purposes, the Exclusion Act, along with the restrictions that followed it, froze the Chinese community in place in 1882, and prevented it from growing and gaining U.S. citizenship as European immigrant groups did. Later, the 1924 Immigration Act would go even further, excluding all classes of Chinese immigrants and extending restrictions to immigrants from other Asian countries. Until these restrictions were relaxed in the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were forced to live a life apart, and to build a society in which they could survive on their own.
Building Communities
Bank of Canton office in a building that once housed a telephone exchange, San Francisco, California
In the face of a hostile public, and in response to hard times and legal exclusion, Chinese immigrants began to build self-reliant communities that became known, to Chinese and non-Chinese residents alike,as Chinatowns. With the completion of the railroads and the end of the gold rush, Chinese immigrants moved in increasing numbers to urban areas. There, they began to congregate in Chinese-only neighborhoods that functioned as separate, nearly independent, cities within the city.
A Chinatown served as a safe haven and second home for Chinese immigrants, a place to shop for familiar food, to worship in a traditional temple, or to catch up on the news from the old country. It also was a good place to do business: The shops and factories in a Chinatown were almost exclusively Chinese-owned, and would hire Chinese workers when many non-Chinese businesses would not. By the turn of the century, Chinatowns had sprung up in cities, from San Diego to El Paso to Connecticut, and formed a network that crossed the continent.?
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Hawaii: Life in a Plantation Society
Hawaii was the first U.S. possession to become a major destination for immigrants from Japan, and it was profoundly transformed by the Japanese presence.
In the 1880s, Hawaii was still decades away from becoming a state, and would not officially become a U.S. territory until 1900. However, much of its economy and the daily life of its residents were controlled by powerful U.S.-based businesses, many of them large fruit and sugar plantations. Unlike in the mainland U.S., in Hawaii business owners actively recruited Japanese immigrants, often sending agents to Japan to sign long-term contracts with young men who'd never before laid eyes on a stalk of sugar cane. The influx of Japanese workers, along with the Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Portuguese, and African American laborers that the plantation owners recruited, permanently changed the face of Hawaii. In 1853, indigenous Hawaiians made up 97% of the islands' population. By 1923, their numbers had dwindled to 16%, and the largest percentage of Hawaii's population was Japanese.
Plantation-era Hawaii was a society unlike any that could be found in the United States, and the Japanese immigrant experience there was unique. The islands were governed as an oligarchy, not a democracy, and the Japanese immigrants struggled to make lives for themselves in a land controlled almost exclusively by large commercial interests. Most Japanese immigrants were put to work chopping and weeding sugar cane on vast plantations, many of which were far larger than any single village in Japan. The workday was long, the labor exhausting, and, both on the job and off, the workers' lives were strictly controlled by the plantation owners. Each planter had a private army of European American overseers to enforce company rules, and they imposed harsh fines, or even whippings, for such offenses as talking, smoking, or pausing to stretch in the fields. Workers shopped at company stores and lived in company housing, much of which was meager and unsanitary. Until 1900, plantation workers were legally bound by 3- to 5-year contracts, and "deserters" could be jailed. For many Japanese immigrants, most of whom had worked their own family farms back home, the relentless toil and impersonal scale of industrial agriculture was unbearable, and thousands fled to the mainland before their contracts were up.
Plantation life was also rigidly stratified by national origin, with Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino laborers paid at different rates for the same work, while all positions of authority were reserved for European Americans. Plantation owners often pitted one nationality against the other in labor disputes, and riots broke out between Japanese and Chinese workers. As Japanese sugar workers became more established in the plantation system, however, they responded to management abuse by taking concerted action, and organized major strikes in 1900, 1906, and 1909, as well as many smaller actions. In 1920, Japanese organizers joined with Filipino, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese laborers, and afterwards formed the Hawaii Laborers' Association, the islands' first multiethnic labor union, and a harbinger of interethnic solidarity to come.
Although Hawaii's plantation system provided a hard life for immigrant workers, at the same time the islands were the site of unprecedented cultural autonomy for Japanese immigrants. In Hawaii, Japanese immigrants were members of a majority ethnic group, and held a substantial, if often subordinate, position in the workforce. Though they had to struggle against European American owners for wages and a decent way of life, Japanese Hawaiians did not have to face the sense of isolation and fear of racial attacks that many Japanese immigrants to the West Coast did. They confidently transplanted their traditions to their new home. Buddhist temples sprung up on every plantation, many of which also had their own resident Buddhist priest. The midsummer holiday of obon, the festival of the souls, was celebrated throughout the plantation system, and, starting in the 1880s, all work stopped on November 3 as Japanese workers cheered the birthday of Japan's emperor.
By the 1930s, Japanese immigrants, their children, and grandchildren had set down deep roots in Hawaii, and inhabited communities that were much older and more firmly established than those of their compatriots on the mainland. Despite the privations of plantation life and the injustices of a stratified social hierarchy, since the 1880s Japanese Hawaiians had lived in a multiethnic society in which they played a majority role. The newspapers, schools, stores, temples, churches, and baseball teams that they founded were the legacy of a community secure of its place in Hawaii, and they became a birthright that was handed down to the generations that followed.
The U.S. Mainland: Growth and Resistance
In the mainland of the United States, Japanese immigration began much more slowly and took hold much more tentatively than it had in Hawaii. While an initial handful of adventurers left Japan for California in the 1860s, the number of immigrants did not reach the thousands until the 1880s. By 1900 there were still fewer than 25,000 Japanese nationals in the U.S. These early arrivals scattered up and down the Pacific coast, forming small communities within small towns and larger cities, such as San Francisco's Japan Town. Farm labor was a common choice among the first immigrants, but they also could be found in lumber mills and mining camps, and sometimes established general stores, restaurants, and small hotels.
The turn of the century saw the beginning of a great twenty-five-year surge of immigration, in which more than 100,000 Japanese nationals arrived in the U.S., and during which many of the foundational institutions of the Japanese American community were established. These newcomers at first found much of their employment in migratory labor, working the farms, mines, canneries, and railroads of the American West, sometimes becoming active in the labor agitation of the period. Eventually, however, many were able to launch their own businesses, at first serving the needs of their own community with Japanese restaurants, boarding houses, and shops, but soon opening department stores and tailoring chains that catered to the general public. Japanese cooperative societies, such as the Japanese Associations, provided financial support and advice to many such enterprises. Many Japanese farmers, using the labor-intensive growing methods of their homeland, were able to buy their own land and launch successful agricultural businesses, from farms to produce shops. By 1920, Japanese immigrant farmers controlled more than 450,000 acres of land in California, brought to market more than 10 percent of its crop revenue, and had produced at least one American-made millionaire.
Even at the peak of immigration, Japanese immigrants never made up more than a tiny percentage of the U.S. population. However, by the early years of the century, organized campaigns had already arisen to exclude Japanese immigrants from U.S. life. Sensational reports appeared in the English-language press portraying the Japanese as the enemies of the American worker, as a menace to American womanhood, and as corrupting agents in American society-in other words, repeating many of the same slanders as had been used against Chinese immigrants in the decades before. The head of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, denounced all Asians and barred them from membership in the nation's largest union. Legislators and mayors called for a Japanese Exclusion Act. Anti-Japanese legislation quickly followed. In 1908, the Japanese and American governments arrived at what became known as the "Gentlemen's Agreement"; Japan agreed to limit emigration to the U.S., while the U.S. granted admission to the wives, children, and other relatives of immigrants already resident. Five years later, the California legislature passed the Alien Land Law, which barred all aliens ineligible for citizenship, and therefore all Asian immigrants, from owning land in California, even land they had purchased years before.
These new legal barriers led to elaborate circumventions of the law, as Japanese landowners registered their property in the names of European Americans, or in the names of their own U.S.-born children. Meanwhile, Japanese immigration became disproportionately female, as more women left Japan as "picture brides", betrothed to emigrant men in the U.S. who they had never met. Finally, the Immigration Act of 1924 imposed severe restrictions on all immigration from non-European countries, and effectively ended Japanese immigration, supposedly forever. For as long as this Act was in effect, it seemed that the first great generation of Japanese immigrants was also to be the last.
The Nisei
As the hopes of future immigrants were dashed, however, a new generation of Japanese Americans was making itself known. By 1930, half of the Japanese in the United States were Nisei—members of the U.S.-born second generation. Nisei were the children of two worlds: the traditional Japanese world maintained at home by their parents—the Issei—and the multiethnic U.S. culture that they were immersed in at school and at work. The Nisei were born U.S. citizens, and were more likely to speak English than Japanese, more likely to practice Christianity than Buddhism, and more likely to prefer "American" food, sports, music, and social mores than those of Japanese tradition. Many Nisei struggled to reconcile the conflicting demands of their complex cultural heritage. However, they overwhelmingly identified themselves as Japanese Americans, not as Japanese in America.
The Japanese American Citizens League, an organization of Nisei professionals, declared in its creed:
I am proud that I am an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, for my very background makes me appreciate more fully the wonderful advantages of this nation… I pledge myself… to defend her against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
These words were published in 1940. Before the next year was out, the Japanese American community would find its resolve, its resilience, and its faith in the nation put to a severe test.