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HARPERS WEEKLY, June 7, 1913

Comment on California's Attitude By Eastern Investigators
by Edward Hunderford

If you want to view the Japanese situation through the eyes of California drive out to Florin, just beyond the wide-sprawling city of Sacramento. Florin is in the heart of one of the richest agricultural districts upon the continent. It grows strawberries and Tokay grapes, chiefly the former. Recently it has added another crop--little flat-faced, brownskinned children. And it is because of these children that a problem, at the beginning almost exclusively Californian, has become something more than a national one...

Florin is a typical California farming village, with its broad main street, its dusty wooden houses, its inevitable yellow depot. It harbors, in addition to that inevitable railroad station, two general stores, two blacksmith shops, three saloons, a restaurant--so-called--cride little wooden church, and a schoolhouse over which the American flag is floating. Japanese own and conduct a general store, a blacksmith shop, and two of the saloons, in addition to the restaurant. Excluding the church, the school, and the railroad, it might be fairly said that they hold the balance of commercial power at Florin. And that does not represent their balance of numerical strength. There are between 300 and 400 American men and women upon the polling-lists of Florin. There are some 1500 full-grown Japanese men and women dwelling within the town...

It was in 1885 that Japanese emigration into the United States was legalized, although, since 1907, the so-called "gentlemen's agreement" has done away with the necessity of issuing passports. It was long after 1885 before California looked upon the Japanese with anything else than a sort of humorous affection. They met the merry taste of a merry folk. As house servants they were even superior to the Chinese, and so house servants they became. That was in the beginning. It was not until some twelve or fifteen years ago that the Japanese seemed to take real cognizance of agricultural California. and it was the most natural thing in the world that a class of men who succeeded as house servants because of their ability to do hard and grinding work, and to do it well, should succeed as servants in the fields and in the orchards. The problem of engaging "white help" for farm work was following closely in the track of the similar difficulties in domestic services. So the Japanese began to multiply in the fields of California--particularly in the reclaimed districts around about Sacramento, the San Joaquin, Santa Clara, and the Vaca Valleys.

In a little time they had more than merely met the shortage of "white help" in these farming territories, where plenty of human hands are necessary for a successful marketing of the crops. Instead of meeting a shortage they were driving white men out of many of the fields of California--Irish, German, even native born Americans, who because of mental inaptitude, might hardly hope for better than manual labor through the years of their lives. The process was simple. The Japanese could live on lower wages. Then, when the last of the competent white help of those fertile valley bottoms had gone his way, the Jap began, with the slow, patient, persistent, insistence which is so characteristic of him, to demand a better wage. His white employer rubbed his eyes in astonishment. There was a point to which such advances might go and still leave a margin of profit for the owner of the farm. But that point was soon passed and still the inscrutable brown men demanded their increases. If they did not receive them they went away--and the farmer looked elsewhere for laborers. IT was all a part of a well-conceived plan.

Now you can perceive the situation, as the Californian sees it today. The Japanese having forced out the employee, has begun to force out the employer--particularly in the best lands of the river valleys. Staggered by the steady demands for an increase of pay and by the white farm laborer, the white farmer of those rich valleys within a hundred miles finds himself confronted by three choices. He can sell his farm to the Japanese, he can lease it to them, or he can let them operate it on shares. All these paths are intolerable to the native Californians--the sons of the men who came out to the state when it was a wilderness and who have had a hand in making it both strong and great--but none other seems open to them. Generally they are glad to sell and get out, sometimes they lease, but they very rarely are content to work the thing on shares. White man and brown man do not make congenial partners.

So much for the typical farm-land situation. Now consider, for an instant, the situation in the cities. Sacramento, where we started to drive to Florin, will do. Sacramento is a typical, bustling, hustling, American town; with a decent self-respecting and pride in itself that breaks forth in well-planned handsome buildings, well-groomed streets and lawns. For a time the Japanese were content to live in the cheaper and older parts of the town, for Sacramento, like many of its larger brethren, has an unconscionable habit of spreading its wings almost over night and slipping out from its older and more congested streets. The Japanese wanted to spread his wings too. In no one other way did his wings too. In no one other way did he show the difference that exists between the Chinaman and himself more clearly. John Chinaman is not ambitious. He is honest, clean, hard-working, to his own lights highly moral, but when his day's work in the kitchen or the laundry is finished he is content to smoke his pipe and dream. His dreams do not carry, however, far beyond that kitchen or that laundry.

Your Japanese is highly different. He dreams of being a legislator, but in the meantime he is ready to take some intermediate steps--to become a small shopkeeper, a banker, anything that brings him responsibility, increased earnings, and power. His social ambitions keep pace with his commercial. No street, no quarter of any California city, is too good for him, or for his. And his methods of injecting himself into such a quarter is quite as ingenious as his way of getting control of farmlands.

He will go into the part of the city that he likes--in Sacramento or Berkeley or San Jose, even San Francisco--and he will buy a house that he likes. He will pay any price that the owner demands, perhaps up to five times its value. The instant the sale is announced the value of the other property in that block begins to decline. He will probably pick up an adjoining house or two at about its assessed value. After that he and his compatriots can have the remainder of the block at their own price. The Japs have made a shrewd enough bargain to more than cover the outrageous price that they paid to start the wedge.

"Caste!" you begin to say.

Caste, of course, but your Californian is not more particular as to mingling with the brown men than our own beloved south has been about mingling with the black man. Of course the Japanese with better schooling and a far quicker mentality, is hardly to be compared to the negro. That makes the problem the more complicated. For to the whites of the West coast the Japanese are quite as impossible even in the most distant social connections as the negroes are to the whites of the south.

"The reason," you begin to demand.
"The japanese is infinitely superior to the negro." Probably he is. The most bitter of anti-Japanese agitators will admit that he is a likable little fellow, cleanly in his habits, unwavering in his fidelity and his patriotism. If he is uncertain in his business agreements, notably so in comparison with the scrupulous Chinaman, please be broad enough to realize that the Japanese has his own code of business morals, and lives up to them. Americans and Chinese have another, much more easily understood by all of us, and so the Japanese suffers. Frankly, he has no understanding of the meaning of the word "contract." He thinks the white man silly to stand by the written provisions of a piece of paper with meaningless signatures upon it, when he can better himself by breaking those provisions. That is the Japanese way of looking at a contract. He is quite as honest- hearted and as consistent in it as when he unhesitatingly lays down his life for a friend or for his native land.

"You can put it down to racial prejudice and let it go at that," your Californian will tell you. "We say that your America is for white folks and not for yellow men."

He hesitates for a moment, then begins again.

"If you want to see what we are struggling against, take a steamer from San Francisco out to Hawaii. See what the unrestricted inflow of yellow men has done for the business and social morals of those islands. One Ellis Island is enough for the land. And in a little while the Canal will be finished and our own Portuguese problem will be multiplying, other problems of the same sort growing as Trans-Atlantic ships filled with the trash of southern Europe come sailing up to the docks of California."

...[A] farmer from over near Elk Grove was given the floor. He was a tall pantherish sort of a man, a deadly-in- earnest sort of a man, who nervously stroked his chin whiskers as he talked to the legislators.

"My neighbor is a Jap," he said, hastily. He has an eighty-acre place next to mine and he is a smart fellow. He has a white woman living in his house and upon that white woman's knee is a baby.

"Now what is that baby? It isn't white. It isn't Japanese. I'll tell you what it is, it is the beginning of a problem--the biggest race problem that the world has ever known."

And in that instant every objection to the bill was swept from the minds of California's legislators.

[from Anti-Alien Legislation in California. Circa 1913-17. Allied Printing, San Jose, Cal.]