PART VI.

Anti-Japanese Agitation and Alien
Land Law of 1913

The more salient facts relative to Japanese immigration and its

status in California have been surveyed. In the following pages |

the anti-Japanese agitation will be reviewed, and also the alien

land of 1913, a culminating point of that agitation, will be dis- |

cussed.

The name of Dr. O’Donnell may be recalled as the first man |

who raised a cry, “Japs must go,” as early as 1887, when there
were no more than 400 Japanese in the entire State. These few
Japanese could not be made even a municipal political issue. He
failed.

The year 1899 saw two events that counted much against
Japanese: First, a bubonic plague broke out in San Francisco.
Orientals were much blamed for it, for what particular reasons
we do not know to this day. Second, there was held a mass meet-
ing under an extravagant name of “Japanese Exclusion” under
the auspices of the Building Trades Council and San Francisco
Labor Council. Mr. Thomas F. Turner, who doubtless voices
the sentiment of these agitators, says, “the Chinese are contract

labor coolies, a servile class subjected to the jurisdiction of the |}

Six Companies, with life and death power. They are cheap

laborers ; deprive the whites of their employment, and also keep |

out the white immigrants from the State; they are loathsome in
their habits and filthy in their dwellings ; and vile in their morals.”
“They (Japanese) are more servile than the Chinese, but less
obedient and far less desirable. They have most of the vices of
the Chinese with none of their virtues. They underbid in every-

thing, and as a class tricky, unreliable and dishonest.”* This |}

was written in 1901.

1 “Chinese and Japanese Labor in the Mountain and Pacifie States,
in Reports of Industrial Commission, Vol. 15, p. 387.

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