Bonus: Did Anyone Defend Asians?
This is an incomplete list of Americans I came across while researching the above article who defended Asians leading up to and during the Asian Exclusian Era (1882–1965). Many were WASPs and many of the WASPs were protestant clergy.
- Frederick Douglass, 1817–1895, leading abolitionist. In 1869, during the Reconstruction era when he was already famous, Douglass gave a little-known speech called “The Composite Nation” in which he argued against restricting Chinese immigration:
Already has the matter taken this shape in California and on the Pacific Coast generally. Already has California assumed a bitterly unfriendly attitude toward the Chinamen. Already has she driven them from her altars of justice. Already has she stamped them as outcasts and handed them over to popular contempt and vulgar jest. Already are they the constant victims of cruel harshness and brutal violence. Already have our Celtic brothers, never slow to execute the behests of popular prejudice against the weak and defenseless, recognized in the heads of these people, fit targets for their shilalahs. Already, too, are their associations formed in avowed hostility to the Chinese.
I have said that the Chinese will come, and have given some reasons why we may expect them in very large numbers in no very distant future. Do you ask, if I favor such immigration, I answer I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would. Would you allow them to hold office? I would.
I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man.
Let the Chinaman come; he will help to augment the national wealth. He will help to develop our boundless resources; he will help to pay off our national debt. He will help to lighten the burden of national taxation. He will give us the benefit of his skill as a manufacturer and tiller of the soil, in which he is unsurpassed.
The speech is interesting for its strong appeal to a vision of America as a multicultural ideal and is the earliest defense of Chinese in America on this list. However, Douglass makes clear that the Chinese that come will have to get in line:
Southern gentleman who led in the late rebellion, have not parted with their convictions at this point, any more than at others. They want to be independent of the negro . . .
Hence these gentleman have turned their attention to the Celestial Empire. They would rather have laborers who will work for nothing; but as they cannot get the negroes on these terms, they want Chinamen who, they hope, will work for next to nothing.
The apprehension that we shall be swamped or swallowed up by Mongolian civilization; that the Caucasian race may not be able to hold their own against that vast incoming population, does not seem entitled to much respect. Though they come as the waves come, we shall be stronger if we receive them as friends and give them a reason for loving our country and our institutions. They will find here a deeply rooted, indigenous, growing civilization, augmented by an ever increasing stream of immigration from Europe; and possession is nine points of the law in this case, as well as in others. They will come in their weakness, we shall meet them in our strength. They will come as individuals, we will meet them in multitudes, and with all the advantages of organization.
- Frank Pixley, 1825–1895, 8th Attorney General of California and publisher of the California paper The Argonaut from 1877. A bristly, opinionated, agnostic WASP who despised organized religion, Pixley would have been considered a white supremacist today. He was an “Anglo-Saxon providentialist” — meaning he considered it a form of divine providence that the Anglo-Saxon race should colonize and administer North America. He supported immigration restrictions on Chinese but probably opposed the purges and violence of the 1880s. He founded The Argonaut in part to voice opposition to Denis Kearney’s predominantly Irish immigrant Workingman’s Party, which took over the California State Legislature. In this quote, he defends the Chinese against Kearney’s party not so much because he liked the Chinese as he felt Irish Catholics were at the same level.
When an organization, composed almost entirely of aliens, who are themselves here by the sufferance of a generous hospitality, band themselves together in defiance of the law to drive out a class, who, however objectionable, have the same legal rights as themselves, it is an act of insolent audacity that ought to move the indignation of every honest man.
Frederick Bee, 1825–1892, Gold Rush magnate from New York who was the son of English immigrants. In 1876, the Republican National Convention recommended that Congress investigate Chinese immigration. A joint committee was formed, but no attorney was willing to represent the Chinese side. The chairman of the committee then contacted Bee and he agreed to do the job. In 1877, the committee issued a mostly negative report on the Chinese population, but Bee would spend the rest of his life advocating for Chinese in America. In 1878, three thousand Irish members of the Workingman’s Party met in San Francisco to denounce pro-Chinese statements Bee had made in The Washington Post. The same year, a Chinese consulate opened in San Francisco and Chinese envoys hired Bee as consul. In 1882, as Congress was debating what would become the Chinese Exclusion Act, Bee sent a strongly worded letter opposing exclusion:
Humanity, capable of infinite depths of degradation, is capable also if infinite heights of excellence. The Chinese, like all other races, has given us its examples of both. To rescue humanity from this degradation is, we are taught to believe, the great object of God’s moral government on earth. It is not by injustice, exclusion, caste, but by reverence for the individual soul that we can aid in this consummation. It is not by Chinese policies that China is to be civilized. I believe that the immortal truths of the Declaration of Independence came from the same source with the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. We can trust Him who promulgated these laws to keep the country safe that obeys them. The laws of the universe have their own sanction . . . As surely as the path on which our fathers entered a hundred years ago led to safety, to strength, to glory, so surely will the path on which we now propose to enter bring us to shame, to weakness, and to peril.
Bee was given the rank of Mandarin of the Blue Button by the Qing government in April 1882. At the Chinese consulate, Bee helped verify residency status of Chinese after the Exclusion Act was passed, investigated murders of Chinese, and represented Chinese in federal court. In 1886, Bee published a long pamphlet in response to an anti-Chinese report put out by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors called “The Other Side of the Chinese Question:” http://www.frederickbee.com/chinesequestion.html In 1890, Bee again testified to Congress in defense of Chinese before the Geary Act of 1892 extended and expanded the Chinese Exclusion Act.
- Otis Gibson, 1826–1889, Methodist pastor who travelled to China as a missionary from 1855 to 1865. When he returned, he was assigned to San Francisco as superintendent of the church’s “Chinese Domestic Mission” and dedicated the rest of his life to serving the Chinese population in the Bay Area. In 1877 — the same year that Kearney founded the Workingman’s Party — Gibson published a book-length study called The Chinese in America based on his experience. While most of the book is merely descriptive, at least one chapter is devoted to defending the Chinese against the anti-Chinese sentiment in California and the country at the time. Gibson was strongly anti-Catholic:
http://bostonese.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/The_Chinese_in_America.pdf
The doors of our country are open equally… We have room for all. Ours is the “land of the free, and the home of the brave.” The oppressed and down-trodden from all nations may alike find shelter here, and under the benign influences of our free institutions, and of our exalted faith, with the blessing of Almighty God, these different nationalities and varying civilizations shall, in time, blend into one harmonious whole, illustrating to a wondering world the common Fatherhood of God, and the universal brotherhood of man.
- George F. Pentecost, 1842–1920, evangelist and colleague of Dwight L. Moody, the founder of the Moody Bible Institute. In 1912, he was given a full-page spread in The New York Times in which he criticized America as un-Christian, criticized European and American actions in Asia, and defended Chinese immigration to America:
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1912/02/11/100350340.pdf
I personally feel convinced that it would be a good thing for America if the embargo on Chinese immigration were removed. I think that the annual admission of 100,000 into this country would be a good thing for the country. And if the same thing were done in the Philippines those islands would be a veritable Garden of Eden in twenty-five years.
The presence of Chinese workmen in this country would, in my opinion, do a very great deal toward solving our labor problems. There is no comparison between the Chinaman, even of the lowest coolie class, and the man who comes here from Southeastern Europe, from Russia, or from Southern Italy. The Chinese are thoroughly good workers. That is why the laborers here hate them. I think, too, that the emigration to America would help the Chinese. At least he would come into contact with some real Christian people in America. The Chinaman lives in squalor because he is poor. If he had some prosperity his squalor would cease.
- The Industrial Workers of the World, founded in Chicago in 1905, is the only American labor union that explicitly opposed immigration restrictions on East Asians. Known as “Wobblies,” the IWW has fairly consistently represented the radical socialist wing of American unionism and sought to distinguish themselves from the more mainstream American Federation of Labor. Membership in the IWW peaked in 1917 at about 150K. In 1924 the IWW underwent what is known as a “schism” and began shrinking considerably. They also faced pressure from the anti-communist First (1917–1920) and Second Red Scare (1947–1954, i.e. McCarthyism). They believed that the working class of the world should be organized into a single union to overthrow capitalism, and thus Asians should not be excluded. The IWW has always been better at self-promotion than unionism and are notable for their association with several artists, musicians, poets, and writers, especially during the 60s counterculture movement. Noam Chomsky, Tom Morello, Helen Keller, Eugene O’Neill, the founders of the ACLU, and every folk singer from the 60s that you ever heard of is/was a member. The lofty idealism of the IWW is inversely proportional to their relevance as a labor organization, and with membership in the single-digit thousands since 2000 have mostly been limited to labor niches where members of its subculture tend to gravitate, such as Starbucks and bicycle messengers.
- Raymond C. Hoiles, 1878–1970, Libertarian newspaper publisher who attended a Methodist school (cannot find definite religious affiliation). Hoiles was so conservative that he refused to use the term “public school,” instead preferring the term “tax-funded schools,” and advocated for withdrawal from the United Nations. His paper was the only paper on the West Coast to unequivocally oppose Japanese internment.
https://www.ocregister.com/2007/11/27/the-uncompromising-rc-hoiles/
His editorial stance against the forcible relocation and internment of Japanese Americans was noted all across the country. He vigorously opposed their evacuation and fought for lifting the bans placed on them.
As the Japanese American Citizens League once put it, Hoiles “was the only one with the courage of his convictions.”
- Ralph Lawrence Carr, 1887–1950, Scots-Irish (Ulster Protestant) Governor of Colorado from 1939 to 1943. As a fiscal conservative, Carr opposed the New Deal policies of Roosevelt. He also opposed Japanese internment for citizens. Unlike other state governors, when the policy became law he volunteered to take evacuees of Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry so they could be treated respectfully. Carr’s unpopular vocal defense of the Japanese is widely thought to have cost him his political career when he ran for the senate in 1942 and lost. A bust of Carr was erected in Denver in 1976 to commemorate his efforts in defending Japanese Americans. In 1994, the Emperor and Empress of Japan visited Denver to honor Carr. In 2012, the Japanese American Citizens League created an award in his honor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Lawrence_Carr
I am not talking on behalf of Japanese, of Italians, or of Germans as such when I say this. I am talking to … all American people whether their status be white, brown or black and regardless of the birthplaces of their grandfathers when I say that if a majority may deprive a minority of its freedom, contrary to the terms of the Constitution today, then you as a minority may be subjected to the same ill-will of the majority tomorrow.
In one speech to a large and hostile audience, made up primarily of worried Colorado farmers, Carr said of the evacuees:
”They are not going to take over the vegetable business of this state, and they are not going to take over the Arkansas Valley. But the Japanese are protected by the same Constitution that protects us. An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen. … If you harm them, you must first harm me. I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred. I grew to despise it because it threatened [pointing to various audience members] the happiness of you and you and you.”
- Robert A. Taft, 1889–1953, conservative Senator from Ohio and son of the 27th President William Howard Taft, nicknamed “Mr. Republican” but often described politically as a Libertarian. Taft led the conservative coalition in Congress from 1937–1963 that prevented expansion of the New Deal and as a non-interventionist opposed American involvement in WWII until the attack on Pearl Harbor. He opposed the creation of NATO and Bretton Woods and criticized Truman’s handling of the Korean War but supported Israel. Taft sought the Republican Party nomination for President three times and was widely viewed as the front-runner in 1952 until moderate Republicans convinced Eisenhower to enter the race. Taft was the only Congressman to speak out against Japanese internment:
https://books.google.com/books?id=YhHcaweX2tIC&pg=PA241#v=onepage&q&f=false
One searches the wartime record in vain for public protests among non-Japanese. In Congress, only Senator Robert Taft spoke out against the greatest violation of civil liberties since the end of slavery. Groups publicly committed to fighting discrimination, from the Communist Party to the NAACP and the American Jewish Committee, either defended the internment or remained silent. The ACLU promised to represent Gordon K. Hirabayashi, who challenged a West Coast curfew applying only to Japanese-Americans, but soon withdrew from the case.
