The American Kaleidoscope. Lawrence H. Fuchs

in collectives or labor gangs, and in towns in domestic service. The Japanese differed from the Chinese and Filipinos in that Japanese men were often joined by wives, and eventually 80 percent of the issei (foreign-born generation) had families in the U.S. As their numbers grew, state laws were passed to keep the Japanese in their place. State antimiscegenation laws were generally applied to Asians on the mainland, but in 1905, California passed a statute aimed specifically at preventing intermarriage between Caucasians and Japanese. One witness testified that he knew of a Japanese who lived with a white woman. “In that woman’s arms is a baby. What is that baby? It isn’t Japanese. It isn’t white. I’ll tell you what it is,” he said. “It is the germ of the mightiest problem that ever faced this state.” It would make, he said, the black problem of the South “look simple.”²²

      In order to keep the Japanese and Chinese as sojourners and to discourage settlement, in 1907, Congress provided that any American woman who married a foreigner—keeping in mind that only Asians were ineligible to become Americans—would automatically take the nationality of her husband. Although that law was repealed in 1922, female citizens who married aliens who were ineligible for citizenship were deprived of their own citizenship until 1931, a rule that discouraged women from marrying Asians even in states with no antimiscegenation law. Since the ratio of male to female sojourners was enormous, especially for the Chinese (twenty-six to one in 1890) and Filipinos (ten to one in 1910), such legislation kept many newcomers from marriage at all, and hence from becoming parents of American-born children.²³

      As a growing number of Japanese sojourners became settlers, the cry of restriction arose once more, and in 1907 the imperial government of Japan agreed to impose limitations on Japanese emigration rather than suffer the indignity of a Japanese exclusion statute. It was not enough to restrict immigration; it became increasingly necessary to enforce the system of sojourner pluralism against Japanese already here. After the Japanese farmers achieved considerable success, California, in 1913, passed an Alien Land Law that prohibited aliens who were ineligible for citizenship from owning land, although they were allowed to rent it.²⁴

      Efforts to enforce sojourner pluralism were only mildly successful. Despite limitations, the Japanese by the early 1920s were producing most of the berries, celery, asparagus, and onions raised in California. Despite the strong hostility toward them, they were able to increase their role in agriculture.²⁵ Their numbers were not large (only 80,000 Japanese and 20,000 Chinese immigrated into the U.S. between 1911 and 1920), but because of their success in agriculture and other work, overt white racism became more blatant. “California was given by God to a white people,” said the president of the Native Sons of the Golden West in 1920, “and with God’s strength we want to keep it as he gave it to us.” ²⁶

      The sugar planters and other haole (Caucasian) leaders in Hawaii also were concerned about the success of the Japanese workers, who by 1920 constituted more than 30 percent of the territory’s population. Unlike the California farmers, who were beginning to look to Mexicans to replace the Chinese and Japanese, the employers of Hawaii implored Congress to permit importation of large numbers of Chinese “coolie” laborers, once again under contract and at low cost. After a Japanese plantation strike in 1920, the most powerful men in Hawaii for two years importuned Congress for a permanent system of rotating peonage, but the planters underestimated the growing influence of Hawaii’s small (off-plantation) labor movement with the mainland’s American Federation of Labor and through it with Congress, and the planters were turned down.²⁷

      Walter Dillingham and other leaders in Hawaii argued that it was impossible for the Japanese or their children to become Americans. When the Californian executive secretary of the National Committee on American-Japanese Relations testified before Congress on exclusion of Asian immigration, he insisted that if Asians were permitted to emigrate they would create a race problem like that faced by the whites in the South. When he made that argument to officials in the Japanese government, he said, “they saw the point instantly.”²⁸ Of course the Japanese understood it. Caucasian farmers would not have been permitted in Japan; nor were Chinese and Koreans in Japan allowed to assume any significant roles in the country.

      The attorney general of California warned the U.S. Senate committee that “If the Negro had had the capacity, the efficiency, the ambition, the energy, and the power to accomplish possessed by the Japanese, all south of the Mason-Dixon would long ago have been entirely black.… the white American will not live upon conditions of equality with the Negro, nor with the Japanese, nor with the Chinese, nor with the Hindu.”²⁹ The warning reflected a considerable degree of intellectual confusion. Blacks were disparaged and thought unfit for full membership in the American polity because of their inferiority. They were seen as lazy and stupid. The Japanese were seen as superhuman; yet in 1924 Congress agreed that all Asians should be barred from immigration.

      Following the agreement between the U.S. and Japan in 1907 to limit Japanese immigration and especially after passage of legislation in 1924 barring Japanese, Chinese, and other aliens ineligible for citizenship from immigrating, employers sought workers from the Philippines, a territory of the United States. As the latest sojourner aliens ineligible for citizenship, Filipinos were pushed to the bottom of the system of stratified sojourner pluralism in the West and in Hawaii. From 1909 through 1931, about 113,000 Filipinos came to Hawaii, of whom 55,000 remained in the islands, 39,000 returned to their homelands, and 18,600 moved on to the West Coast to join the 20,000 Filipinos who had gone directly to the mainland. In Hawaii, they worked mainly in the sugar cane mills and fields and on pineapple plantations. In West Coast states (most numerous in California), they took menial service jobs during the winter in hotels and restaurants or as domestic servants, and in the spring as migrant farm workers.

      As bad as the situation was for Chinese and Japanese aliens in the 1930s, it was worse for Filipinos. On the plantations in Hawaii, Filipinos made less money for the same work. Without the protection of federal collective bargaining laws, Filipino and other workers in Hawaii were extremely vulnerable to retaliation for strikes. During a 1924 strike on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, sixteen Filipinos were killed.³⁰ But Filipino life was generally better in the plantation camps in Hawaii than on the West Coast, where, like the Mexicans in the Southwest, Filipinos provided a cheap, expendable work force of bus boys, dishwashers, toilet cleaners, ranch and cannery workers, and pickers of grapes, lettuce, asparagus, pears, and a dozen other vegetables and fruits that fed America. Growers came to depend on such workers and employed railroad detectives, town and county policemen, and agents to help control them. Often brutalized by whites and each other, they moved with the crop seasons in a world of Chinese gambling houses, Japanese hotels, dance halls, small-time gangsters and petty racketeers, pimps and prostitutes of every hue and several nationalities. They suffered with tuberculosis and slept, ate, fought with, and nursed each other ten in a room in cheap boardinghouses in Honolulu, Seattle, Los Angeles, Stockton, Bakersfield, and a dozen other cities in the West and Southwest.

      As nonwhite males ineligible for citizenship (the 1930 ratio of males to females in California was fourteen to one) and denied federal relief benefits until 1937, Filipinos, more than the Chinese and Japanese or even the Mexicans, were kept in a servile labor class. But they kept coming to the U.S. until 1934, when Congress established a quota of fifty Filipino immigrants per year in the Philippines Independence Act. With the Depression, these sojourner-workers had become expendable. But, as intending sojourners often do, a large number remained, and by the 1950s and early 1960s, they, and especially Mexicans, were the core of the agricultural work force in California and in Hawaii, where they constituted the largest single ethnic group of plantation workers.

       Mexican Sojourners: Turning the Spigot On and Off

      Filipinos were easily replaced by Mexicans in California, and for the other border states, Mexico was the obvious source for a steady supply of inexpensive and exploitable labor. An informal system of Mexican sojourner pluralism emerged in the 1890s after U.S. immigration laws excluded Chinese laborers. For several decades before the beginning of large-scale migrations from Mexico in 1897, exploitation had driven farm laborers deep into poverty. The displacement of small farmers by the expansion of large ranches increased the number seeking work as laborers. Railroad development in northern Mexico, where peons could earn three times as much