The American West

by Robert V Hine

  These pronouncements cut against powerful ideologies and political forces that were themselves reshaping the Pacific world. Industrial capitalism thrived on the free movement of people and goods. Great Britain and the United States negotiated treaties with China to gain access to Chinese markets. In the Treaty of Nanking (1842) and the Burlingame Treaty (1868), the nations established and then enhanced the principle of free movement and migration as a universal human right. Empires could also facilitate the movement of people. The color of one’s skin did not determine one’s membership in the British Empire, for example. Theoretically, once conquered and incorporated into the realm, all people were subjects of the same monarch. In the face of escalating prejudice, oppressed groups turned to the market and the courts to protect their rights. They used concepts of individual freedom, property rights, and citizenship to counter democratic bigotry that equated national belonging with whiteness and manhood.

  In the modern West few groups suffered more fear and loathing than Chinese and Japanese immigrants. In 1878 a federal judge in California ruled that Chinese immigrants could not become naturalized citizens because they were not “white persons” within the meaning of the Naturalization Act of 1790, a decision extended to the Japanese by the Supreme Court in 1922 and not repealed until after World War II. Throughout the West, states and localities passed laws denying Asians the right to vote, forbidding their employment by public agencies, and restricting them to residential ghettos. But with the same dream of land ownership and prosperity motivating them as other immigrant groups, many Asians stayed in the West, created families, and built communities. Their children became citizens by birth.

  “They form little communities among themselves,” wrote a landlord in the Sacramento delta in the 1860s, “do their own cooking, live in little camps together. If you can get them this year you can get them next year and the year after. They become attached to your place and they stay with you.” Similarly, in the 1870s growers in the citrus belt of southern California began employing Chinese men in their groves and packinghouses. They perfected what became known as the “China pack”—each piece of fruit individually wrapped in tissue paper before being carefully packed into a crate. It was like a work of art, one grower remembered, “every wrapper smooth, not a wrinkle, and the tissue triangled to a point at the top so that when the box was opened it was something to display in a grocer’s window.” Citrus growers came to depend on the industry and careful work of these Chinese laborers, and soon every town in the citrus belt had its own Chinatown, usually on the poor side of the tracks.37

  By the 1870s Chinese workers composed half of California’s agricultural workforce. Growers cheered their diligence and reliability, but white workers growled, and violence against Chinese surged during economic depressions. In 1873 white farmworkers in California held rallies demanding the firing of Chinese laborers. In the Sacramento delta, vigilantes invaded Chinese communities, bullied families into leaving, and set fire to their homes. The old pioneer John Bidwell, who employed Chinese on his ranch, had his buildings burned after ignoring a threatening note: “You are given notice to discharge your Mongolian help within ten days or suffer the consequences.” Authorities tracked down and convicted the arsonists and Bidwell rebuilt. The night before his reopening, white malcontents torched the new structures. In Chico, a mob shot five Chinese tenant farmers and burned their bodies with their cabins. In the terrible depression year of 1893, armed mobs attacked Chinese workers in several San Joaquin valley towns. They drove Chinese men from the fields and loaded them onto railroad cars at gunpoint. In the citrus town of Redlands, east of Los Angeles, vigilantes swept into Chinatown in September. Growers denounced the mayhem—looting, arson, beatings—and argued that they couldn’t “afford to pay the wages demanded by the whites.” But Senator John Miller argued that because Chinese workers were inferior human beings, they could “dispense with the comforts of shelter and subsist on the refuse of other men, and grow fat on less than half the food necessary to sustain life in the Anglo-Saxon.” Chinese Americans remembered this period as “the driving out.” By the turn of the century, most had relocated to the Chinatowns of the largest western cities, where they found an uncertain refuge.38

  Anti-Chinese riot in Denver, 1880. Engraving based on a sketch by N. B. Wilkins, in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, November 20, 1880.

  “Now that the Chinese have been excluded,” Methodist missionary Merriman Harris wrote from California in 1888, “there is a demand for cheap labor and it is probable that Japanese laborers will be brought over to supply the demand.” The Japanese government did not allow emigration until the end of the century, so it was not until the 1890s that Japanese men began arriving to seek work on the railroads and especially on the commercial farms of the West. In 1900 Harris reported “an unusually large influx of Japanese to the Pacific coast” and noted that they “go into the country districts and readily find work in the fruit orchards and on the ranches.” By 1910 more than thirty thousand Japanese worked on farms in California, the single largest ethnic group toiling in what California journalist Carey McWilliams would later call the “factories in the field.”39

  Japanese workers evoked a familiar response from racist westerners, a group not known for original or consistent thinking. Senator James D. Phelan, former mayor of San Francisco, declared that white men could not compete with the Japanese because “they know no rest and respect no standards,” and he warned his constituents that the Japanese were “rapidly acquiring the most productive lands.” Some commentators saw the Japanese as an even greater threat than the Chinese. They leased and purchased their own land and soon were supplying most of the vegetables and much of the fruit sold in the urban markets of California. Reacting to pressures from exclusionists, in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement with the Japanese government, ending the immigration of Japanese men to the United States. And in 1913 the California legislature prohibited the ownership or long-term lease of land by aliens of Asian descent, legislation imitated by several other western states. But Japanese immigrants (the Issei—the first generation in America) simply shifted the title of their farms to their American-born children (the Nisei), who were legal citizens. By 1920 Japanese farmers, who owned 1 percent of California’s agricultural land, were raising and marketing crops equal to 10 percent of the total value of the state’s production. Instead of trumpeting their success, the California legislature, a body never shy about promoting the agricultural bounty produced by the state’s white farmers, strengthened the anti-Asian leasing law in 1921. Try as they might, the politicians could not obliterate the property and citizenship rights in the American Constitution to prohibit landownership among the Nisei.40

  Campaign poster for Senator James D. Phelan, 1920. National Archives.

  The Gentlemen’s Agreement had permitted the continued immigration of wives of Japanese men already in the Pacific states, and from 1908 to 1924—when the federal Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 ended all Japanese immigration—approximately sixty thousand Japanese women entered the country. Perhaps half were so-called picture brides, women whose families had arranged for their marriage by proxy to immigrant Japanese men in America. “When you think about it, my god,” one Issei remembered, “those girls were only eighteen or nineteen and came across to meet somebody they didn’t even know. They had guts.” Women and men formed families, and those unions irked racist power brokers like Senator Phelan. “The rats are in the granary,” Phelan declared when asked about the immigration of Japanese women. “They have gotten in under the door and they are breeding with alarming rapidity.” In his campaign for reelection to the Senate in 1920, Phelan adopted the slogan “Keep California White.” At the time the Japanese made up less than 3 percent of the state’s population.41

  Most of the Japanese minority lived in isolated rural communities, many in California’s fertile San Joaquin valley. The town of Del Rey, “20 miles south of F
resno, 200 miles from San Francisco or Los Angeles, and 100 years from Japan,” according to one local Nisei, resembled many of these communities. A center of California’s raisin industry, Del Rey began attracting Japanese laborers at the turn of the century, and within a decade Japanese farmers had begun leasing and buying land in the names of their Nisei children. They joined a multiethnic town with Armenians, Mexicans, and Chinese enclaves. “Japtown,” as the Japanese section of Del Rey was locally known, was like a little neighborhood in Tokyo, its wooden buildings packed tightly together, opening onto courtyards with koi ponds and ornamental trees.42

  Historian Valerie Matsumoto studied another Japanese community in the San Joaquin valley, the Cortez Colony of Merced County, established by Japanese Christians in 1920. Like many western communities, the settlers’ first priority was founding a church, which, in the words of Matsumoto, “cemented the bonds of friendship and support.” At Del Rey, where Japanese farmers were evenly divided between Christians and Buddhists, the center of community was the nonsectarian kyowakai, a community club. “Everybody that’s Japanese in Del Rey, they had to join kyowakai, an automatic member,” one longtime resident recalled. The kyowakai building, known as Del Rey Hall, hosted the meetings of both Christian and Buddhist congregations, children’s Japanese-language classes, and other community gatherings. Painfully aware of the prejudice against them in the larger world, the Japanese of Del Rey tried to keep to themselves. “We always stood together, whether we liked it or not. . . . That’s why the community remained so important.”43

  With nativist sentiment on the rise after World War I, the Japanese communities in the West found themselves under increased attack. In Oregon’s Yakima valley a politically ambitious attorney led a local movement to evict Japanese farmers from their leaseholds on Indian reservation land, which was under federal control and thus exempt from the state’s anti-Asian leasing law. “THE JAP MUST GO,” he declared in a manifesto that accused Japanese farmers of “slowly but surely” acquiring all the best land in the valley. When the economy went sour in the 1930s, the verbal attacks turned violent. Terrorists bombed homes and farm buildings of two Japanese families. “All our forefathers, yours and ours, came across the oceans,” the Japanese American Citizens League appealed to valley residents, and “we should all have the same equal rights.” Two more dynamite bombs exploded on Japanese farms. “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons,” a farmer from California’s Central Valley told a reporter. “We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man.”44

  Violence against Japanese farmers erupted in Arizona’s Salt River valley. Four thousand families farmed in the district. Only 120 were Japanese, but they received the lion’s share of hatred, especially after Japanese families responded to the state’s Alien Land Law by shifting title to their Nisei children. “Let it be suggested that the newcomers depart quietly while they are still safe and before a war starts,” a local newspaper warned. “Unless something like this is done at once—look out!” In August 1935, fifteen hundred white farmers drove through the streets of Phoenix carrying banners proclaiming, “We Don’t Need Asiatics,” and “Get Out or Be Put Out.” Before the hate campaign sputtered to an end months later, there were sixty-nine violent incidents, including dynamite attacks on Japanese homes and drive-by shootings of Japanese men and boys working in the fields. Fortunately, no one was killed. A group of Japanese farmers suggested negotiations. “We don’t care to hear them talk,” answered a leader of the expulsion movement. “All we want is to see them walk.”45

  Japanese farmworkers, Etiwanda, California, c. 1920. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  By suggesting that offending immigrants “go home,” white supremacists denied the world that global capitalism was creating and the new streams of human movement that tied the American West into a Pacific network of trade and travel. Focused on closing doors to those with the wrong skin color, local racists ignored the larger communities based in such ideas as the freedom of movement and individual rights. Historical creations themselves, these Western ideas of individualism were used by Great Britain, the United States, and others to pry open Chinese and Japanese markets. As Chinese and Japanese laborers traveled to the American West to improve their lives, they deployed these notions in their defense. They sued, and cases wound their way to the highest court. Some cases, like Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), ended badly, with the Court siding with the exclusionists, but others brought victories. In 1898 the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that Chinese Americans born in the United States were naturalized and possessed American citizenship. Going to court, opening businesses, and moving back and forth between countries in search of work, profit, and advancement, these activities defined the West and the Pacific as much as did riots and slurs.

  . . .

  Chinese immigration to the American West all but ceased with the Exclusion Act of 1881, and the Gentlemen’s Agreement severely restricted Japanese immigration in 1908. Neither of these controls slowed immigration; they simply changed the immigrants. In the early nineteenth century, Mexican immigration to the western United States took off like a rocket. Official statistics recorded the entry of 728,171 Mexicans between the turn of the century and 1930, but historians estimate that many more crossed the border, upping the total immigration to about 10 percent of the entire population of Mexico. This northbound mass migration determined the future of the American West as much as any westward movement.

  Many immigrants came as war refugees attempting to escape the revolution in Mexico that followed the overthrow of the dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1911 and engulfed the country for nearly ten years. Some of the bloodiest fighting took place in Mexico’s northern states, and thousands of civilians looked toward the United States for their safety. During one week in 1916, U.S. immigration agents counted nearly five thousand Mexicans attempting to cross the Rio Grande at El Paso. Unable to cope with such numbers, officials closed the border, but refugees kept coming over, unofficially, downriver, in the city’s eastern section.

  Revolutionary sentiment crossed over with the refugees. In the Rio Grande valley of Texas, farmers from the Midwest and South had been buying up large tracts, irrigating them to grow cotton and vegetables—crops dependent on Mexican labor at harvest. Commercial agriculture squeezed the traditional ranchero world of south Texas. Tejanos resisted, but commercial farmers took over county governments and instituted laws segregating public accommodations and schools. Texas enacted a statewide poll tax in 1902, effectively disenfranchising thousands of poor blacks and Tejanos. Frustrations erupted into violence. In 1915 a group of Tejano rancheros and businessmen met in the small town of San Diego on the Nueces River—not far from the spot where the Mexican War had begun seventy years before—and issued a proclamation calling for armed insurrection by a “liberating army” of the oppressed castes of the Southwest—Hispanics, Asians, African Americans, and Indians. Several hundred (perhaps several thousand) Tejanos pledged themselves to El Plan de San Diego, as the manifesto was known. Tejano raiders attacked farms and railroads, burned bridges, and sabotaged irrigation systems. They killed several dozen Anglos.46

  Texas Rangers pose with the corpses of Mexican raiders near the Rio Grande. Photograph by Robert Runyon, 1915. Library of Congress.

  Texas authorities responded with what historian Walter Prescott Webb described as “an orgy of bloodshed.” Anglo vigilance committees lynched suspected insurrectionists while the Texas Rangers conducted punitive raids against Tejano communities. The revolutionaries attacked the symbols of the white commercial agricultural regime, the Texas authorities counterattacked with the actual power of that regime. And they spread the pain to non-combatants to shore up the class and racial order that consigned Mexicans and African Americans to the lowest ranks. According to longtime resident Emma Tenayuca, the Rangers invaded “villages in
the border country, massacred hundreds of unarmed, peaceful villagers and seized their lands.” Historian Webb estimated that as many as five thousand Tejanos and Mexicans were killed. Soon Mexican supporters were retaliating from across the Rio Grande, terrorizing Anglo communities in Brownsville and other south Texas towns. In 1916 Francisco “Pancho” Villa and his northern Mexican vaquero army threatened an invasion of the city of El Paso, then shifted west to loot and burn the border town of Columbus, New Mexico. President Woodrow Wilson sent an American army on a “Punitive Expedition” across the border, and for the next several months, troops exhausted themselves chasing Villa’s forces through the deserts of Chihuahua. The border war acquired a global menace when American spies intercepted a secret telegram from the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmerman, to his ambassador in Mexico. Zimmerman proposed a deal in which Mexico would declare war on the United States and in exchange Germany would support the return of “lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona.” The border violence gave the Zimmerman telegram bite and helped prompt the United States’ entry into World War I.47

  . . .

  Revolutionary violence pushed refugees across the border, but jobs in orchards and fields across the Southwest pulled them as well. “The cry of the hour is continually for more dependable labor,” reported the El Paso Daily Times in 1912. Encouraging Mexican immigration—and thus increasing the supply of labor and lowering wages—was clearly in the interest of the powerful farmers’ associations of the Southwest, who were engaged in fierce struggle with unions for higher wages and better working conditions. City officials of El Paso and other border towns equally overwhelmed with immigrants appealed to the federal government to stem the tide, but the growers opposed every attempt to restrict the Mexican exodus. By the 1920s Mexican migrants made up about three-quarters of the more than one million farm laborers in the American West.48