race

FEAR & LOATHING OF EARLY 20TH C. JAPAN

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

So how bad were relationships between Japan and the U.S. in the early 20th century? Let’s put it this way: Anyone wouldn’t have been surprised if the two countries went to war someday.

International politics isn’t usually on the radar of this journal, but the long-running thread of anti-Japanese fervor can even be found in the Santa Rosa newspapers, and some context helps to interpret where the line was drawn before WWI between geo-political opinions and overt racism.

Unlike many other places in California, Sonoma County had little enmity towards Japanese immigrants. Part of the reason was the respect given Fountain Grove wine maker Kanaye Nagasawa, who came to America via Scotland (where he picked up English with a distinctive burrrrrrr) and was portrayed in the papers as an innovator in the manner of Luther Burbank. Locals apparently also viewed Japanese laborers as kindred spirits, seeking to scratch together enough money for a family homestead. Santa Rosa even had a Japanese employment office because immigrants were sought out as hard-working domestics, farm workers, and general labor.

By contrast, Chinese immigrants were isolated and the target of bigotry in Santa Rosa, usually described in the local newspapers of the day as criminal or foolish “Chinks” or “Celestials” who could barely speak English (which sometimes might have been a feint to play the game of diminished expectations). When they were mentioned in the Press Democrat of that era, it was typically an arrest or something that was an opportunity to write a “humorous” racist vignette (usually with pidgin dialog), often concerning a broken marriage or other personal humiliations of Chinese residents.

Before 1904, most Santa Rosans probably couldn’t find Japan on a map on a bet. But once the Russo-Japanese War began, Japan and its military were in the headlines for much of the year. Many Japanese youths in Sonoma County returned home to fight the Czar, and there was a parade and train station sendoff for the boys.

As the war was underway, a movement began to demote Japanese immigrants to the same dismal legal status as the Chinese. In 1905, San Francisco labor unions created the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, seeking to expand the ban on Chinese “coolie” labor to include other Asian workers. (If you’re wondering where our elected officials stood on these race-tinged issues, Santa Rosa’s own Rep. McKinlay was among the most anti-immigrant hardliners in Congress, leading California House Republicans who helped defeat Teddy Roosevelt’s attempt to make exceptions in the Chinese Exclusion policy for “officials, teachers, students, merchants, or travelers for curiosity or pleasure.”)

( “If Japan Should Attack Us” Sunday feature in the San Francisco Call, Sept. 23, 1906)

Japan’s victory over Russia in the autumn of 1905 only fed American anxieties. Now it wasn’t only hordes of farm laborers to fear, but the possibility that Japan had a robust industrial base that could undercut U.S. exports to Asia, along with a navy capable of challenging the United States militarily.

Fearmongering became a common theme in the early 1906 newspapers. When the British launched a Dreadnought warship, the Feb. 12 NY Tribune used the news in an op/ed to point out that Japan was building two warships of this type, but U.S. ships were years away. An editorial in the Feb. 11 LA Herald warned, “…little Japan, grown ‘cockey’ by its recent victories, is nudging the sleeping giant and whispering to it to ‘go in and win.’ But recently the Japanese government had the nerve to twist the lion’s tail by criticizing the army formations of Great Britain. And reports come that Japan is working day and night on its naval armament…” An adjacent article by “Captain A. W. Best” warns that the “real aim and aspiration of the yellow races…[is] to win first the Pacific slope of North and South America (and Northern Australia) and having established themselves, like weeds there and choked out the white race in those areas to gradually extend the process to the rest of the world…” There was also a Panama Canal angle: Canal-bashers in Congress implied that if it was completed, Japanese warships could use it to attack the U.S. East Coast.

In short order, the situation became a replay of the anti-Chinese hysteria of the 1880s. Champion of the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League was a San Jose Congressman who delivered a Japanese exclusion speech. The San Francisco school board issued an order to segregate “pupils of the Mongolian race” from public schools, charging that classrooms were overcrowded with Asians (in reality, the order only applied to 93 Japanese kids, since Chinese schoolchildren were already forced to go to the “Oriental School”). Following the 1906 Earthquake, Japanese scientists visiting San Francisco were pelted with rocks, perhaps because one of the Exclusion League’s statements claimed the Japanese liked earthquakes: “Do not for a moment think that the Japanese will keep away on account of the earthquakes. They are raised on earthquakes in Japan, and the earthquake will only make the Nepponese [sic] coolies feel more at home in California. ”

The view from Sonoma County can be found by sampling the local papers from January, 1907. Teddy Roosevelt had just ordered the San Francisco Board of Education to keep Japanese students in the public schools, and on the seventh the Santa Rosa Republican printed wire stories about the Governor and an Oregon Senator denouncing the order. The next day, the Republican reprinted an Oakland Enquirer editorial on the “commercial menace of Japan,” warning that the Japanese could horn in on lucrative flour exports if they started grinding wheat grown in Asia. On Jan. 24, the Press Democrat published the editorial cartoon seen at right, powerful in its imagery if rather vague in message (click to enlarge).

Most significant is that both Santa Rosa papers never, as far as I can find, reprinted items from the Bay Area press that suggested that the Japanese were “coolies” or part of a Fifth Column, called for them to be deported or their children removed from school, or otherwise suggested that they were undeserving, lesser people. Yes, individuals were sometimes disrespectfully (in modern eyes) referred to as “Japs” or even “little brown men” in local articles, but if those editors truly intended to publish racial putdowns, they had a lexicon of hateful invective available to them from the San Francisco papers.

Santa Rosa’s big event for that month was a speech by Democratic Party superstar William Jennings Bryan, and more than 3,000 packed into the skating rink on a Saturday afternoon to hear him pontificate about America’s greatness and its destiny to lead the world. In the portion of his speech summarized in a Press Democrat article below, Bryan also pitched the conflicts between Asia and the United States as sort of a crusade for the “active, positive faith of Christianity.” Oh, dear.

The situation only spiraled down. Japanese who had become naturalized citizens but lost their papers in the San Francisco earthquake were denied their former citizenship. 1907 also witnessed two incidents in San Francisco involving White drunks that turned into anti-Japanese riots, and similar riots followed in Berkeley (!) in 1909. The Exclusion League tripled in membership groups, and in 1910 there were an astonishing 27 anti-Japanese laws proposed in the California legislature. William Jennings Bryan, always helpful, told President Woodrow Wilson in 1913 that the problem could be solved if half the Japanese in California were relocated to other states.

Most of those woes didn’t impact Japanese immigrants in Sonoma County, but the California Alien Land Law of 1913 did. They could no longer buy property, or even legally rent land for more than three years, and a 1920 ballot initiative further blocked their ability to have the actual land title held in the name of a trust, business, or their citizen children. The courts later chipped away at the restrictions somewhat, but the entire law was not overturned in California until 1952.

While trade unions and the California Grange sparked the anti-Japanese movement, it was the newspapers of the day that are most to blame for fanning the flames white hot. The pro-union San Francisco Chronicle kept the issue on the front page for much of 1905-1906, even reviving it when interest waned after the quake. It became fodder for a newspaper war with the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner’s long-running “Yellow Peril” series, which most famously offered a 1907 Sunday feature titled, “Japan May Seize the Pacific Coast.” The Hearst syndicate continued playing this alarmist theme for years and hit rock-bottom – which for them, was really saying something – when in 1915 they ran an article supposedly revealing secret plans for a Japanese invasion of California via Mexico. The photos were twenty years old, and the basis of the story was badly-translated fiction from a Japanese magazine.

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN WELCOMED IN SANTA ROSA
Masterly Address Is Heard by Immense Audience
Splendid Reception Tendered the Distinguished Statesman in the City of Roses Saturday

It was an immense audience that gathered in the pavilion on A street to hear the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, the distinguished Nebraska statesman, on Saturday afternoon. They came from far and near to see and hear one of the country’s foremost men. They saw and heard and went away satisfied, carrying with them the inspiration of a high resolve, and uplifted and elevated by the stirring sentiments expressed by the celebrated speaker.

[..]

Mr. Bryan dwelt at considerable length on modern China and her issue from the dormant condition of two thousand years. The negative creed of Confucius is giving place to the active, positive faith of Christianity, he said. Progressive viceroys of different provinces are organizing schools not for the teachers of the musty philosophy of the past, but the newer ideas of a nearer age placed before the earnest student. “I see the day,” said the speaker, “when Christianity will illuminate the lang [sic], dark places of the Orient.”

Referring to Japan the speaker said she was facing one of the most important crises in her history. She had copied western ways and now it remained to see whether she would borrow western religion, or endeavor to build up the nation without religion, and with agnosticism and infidelity.

Very interesting Mr. Bryan alluded to the religions of other races and the idolatry practiced in certain lands. He then described the visits he and Mrs. Bryan paid to some of the crowned heads of the old world, and of the ceremony attendant thereon. He was pleased beyond measure, he said, to hear President Roosevelt mentioned all over the world as a lover of peace, growing out of his mission in bringing about a cessation of hostilities between Russia and Japan…

– Press Democrat, January 27, 1907

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1906 MEDIA RACISM REPORT CARD

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Raise a weak cheer for the Santa Rosa newspapers in 1906; their reporting on people of color was certainly better than the two previous years, but that only means the dial was turned down slightly from red-zone disgusting levels.

Start with the Great Earthquake: Four Chinese men and a Japanese man died that horrible morning, all at either the Saint Rose or Occidental hotels. Hooray that the papers didn’t refer to them as “Chinks” or “Japs,” but they were identified only by race, whereas Whites usually had their occupation and/or place of death described. (For the record, two of the Chinese men were merchants, two were cooks, and the Japanese man worked as a dishwasher at the St. Rose.) But any effects of the quake in Santa Rosa’s “Chinatown” on Second Street and non-fatal injuries of community members were ignored. Sure, perhaps there was no damage there and no one was harmed, but that’s very hard to believe, considering it was only two blocks from the worst of the fires and devastation. More likely that it was a textbook example of racism by omission.

The most contentious racial incident occurred in March, when a local bricklaying contractor misled African-American workers from Los Angeles into coming here to break a strike. A group of out-of-town masons confronted a Black man in a bar, mistakenly believing that he was part of the group from LA, and a fight broke out. The two newspapers printed quite different accounts of the incident; in the version told by the Republican, the man was attacked by a mob – but in the Press Democrat, he was a troublemaker who “ran amuck.”

Press Democrat editor Ernest L. Finley gets both the highest and lowest marks for racial coverage that year. In December, the newspaper ran a perfectly matter-of-fact report about “Charles Jefferson, a colored man” being assaulted for tipping his hat to a White woman. Yet a few months earlier, the paper had printed a ginned-up story about “a foxy Chinaman. Ah Wang” who supposedly allowed himself to be arrested to gain a free ride from Geyserville to Santa Rosa. That story, complete with pidgin dialect, read like a tale whipped up in a saloon. It was a shameful throwback to the tired, racist crap that the PD routinely published in years past.

FOXY CHINK A GOOD JESTER
Gets Free Ride From Geyserville to Santa Rosa, and After Minute or Two in Jail Pays His Fine

Talk about a foxy Chinaman. Ah Wang holds the record, aided and abetted by a well known Santa Rosa lawyer, Reuben M. Swain, Esq., Referee in bankruptcy, etc.

Ah Wang was tried before the Geyserville justice on Wednesday on a charge of having attempted to induce a young girl there to enter his room. He was acquitted on this charge, as the evidence did not sustain the complaint. Then a second complaint was filed against him, and he was convicted and fined twenty-five dollars or twenty-five days in the county jail.

He was brought to jail here, and no sooner had he been given into the custody of the officer in charge of the county bastille than he set about paying his fine.

In the eyes of the law after his entry and reception in jail and the turning of the key in the lock he had served one day of his sentence and consequently in order to regain his liberty he had only to put up twenty-four dollars. He had some money and borrowed the rest from his attorney, Mr. Swain, who had been to Geyserville to defend him. He then paid his fine.

It seems that the Celestial desired to make the trip to Santa Rosa anyway, and by having the constable bring him to jail he saved the price of the face [sic] from the northern town. By going to jail for a few minutes he served a day of his sentence and thus saved another dollar.

“Me heap sabee law, you bet, I likee advice Judge Swain, you bet,” was his gleeful comment.

– Press Democrat, August 16, 1906
WHITE MAN HITS COLORED MAN
Attack Made at the Corner of Third and Main Streets on Thursday Afternoon

Charles Jefferson, a colored man, who has been employed as stableman in a stable on lower Fourth Street, was the victim of an assault on Thursday afternoon at Third and Main streets at the hands of a white man.

The colored man lifted his hat to a passing lady, whose son keeps his horse at the stable, as she was approaching a buggy at the sidewalk. The perpetrator of the assault stepped up and with the exclamation: “I’ll teach you to take off your hat to women in this country,” struck Jefferson a violent blow in the mouth and felled him to the ground, and then, according to the statement of Contractor Rushing, who says he witnessed the assault, kicked him while down.

Jefferson could make no effort catch his assailant. Contractor Rushing tried to stop him as he ran off. The injured man later swore out a John Doe warrant for his assailant’s arrest in Judge Atchinson’s court, and the warrant was given to Constable Boswell to put into execution. The lady to whom Jefferson said he doffed his cap called at the police station and said the attack on the colored man was entirely unprovoked. She did not see Jefferson’s salute, as it happened, and said it would have been all right anyway, as she had seen the man frequently when she went to the stable with her horse, and had always found his respectful. Jefferson’s face was badly cut.

– Press Democrat, December 21, 1906

A COLORED MAN IS BRUTALLY ASSAULTED

Because a colored man attempted to be polite to Mrs. Birdie Miller on Third street Thursday evening, he was brutally assaulted. He was first knocked down by a vicious blow in the mouth, and then kicked in the face while he was prostate on the ground. The man who made the assault ran away in a cowardly fashion after injuring the man he assaulted. Mrs. Miller is incensed at the treatment given the colored man who had spoken to her, and so expressed herself to Justice A. J. Atchinson and others after assault. The man works in a livery stable where Mrs. Miller’s son keeps his his horse and she drives in there frequently. It has come to a pretty pass when an inoffensive man is brutally assaulted for being polite.

Contractor W. E. Rushing witnessed the assault and he characterizes it as a piece of dastardly work. He attempted to overtake the fleeting man, but was unsuccessful, and later informed the officers where the man was employed and gave a description of him.

Charles Jefferson is the man assaulted and he bears a reputation of being peaceable. He has never been in trouble during the months he has been in Santa Rosa and he deeply regrets the unfortunate occurance. He was given no opportunity to defend himself and the savage kick he received in the face opened a large place on his forehead between the eyes from which blood flowed freely. Jefferson said later he would like to be turned loose with the man who struck him in a field so he could get a chance at him.

A warrant was sworn to by Jefferson for the arrest of his assailant and Constable Boswell made a search for the man without avail Thursday evening. The man was seen by several persons and later talked to others of what he had done and will be pointed out to the officers at the earliest possible moment and taken into custody.

– Santa Rosa Republican, December 21, 1906

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GOODBYE, 19TH CENTURY

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Just a few weeks before the great earthquake tumbled Santa Rosa head-over-heels into the 20th century, there was a late winter’s evening when the town had a chance to forget the confounding modern age and gaze nostalgically backward. It was as if the 19th century dropped in to say goodbye.

The February 1906 event was a performance by the Mahara Brothers’ Minstrel Carnival at the old Athenaeum Hall on Fourth street. Today we think of minstrel shows as an ugly, irredeemable display of bigotry: Whites with burnt cork face makeup telling racist jokes in drawling “coon” accents or belting out “Mammy” songs. And that indeed was the type of minstrel show most people saw, particularly after the turn of the century. But there was another type of minstrelsy that had older roots. Both kinds shared the premise that the audience was supposed to watching slaves having after-dark fun on an antebellum plantation, but the other type of show avoided the demeaning racist shtick, and no surprise why: The performers in these troupes were all African-American.

The 1890 census listed almost 1,500 professional “Negro actors and showmen,” and most had to be working in all-Black minstrel shows, given the limited venues available to African-American performers in that era. They had their own trade paper, “The Freeman,” which tracked touring routes and bill changes, as well as publishing letters about Jim Crow encounters that might serve as precautionary tales to others passing through that area. Among these all-Black companies was the highly regarded Mahara show, which played in Santa Rosa that night.

One of the most famous graduates of the Mahara shows was “St. Louis Blues” composer W. C. Handy, who toured with the company between 1894 and 1903, except for one season. In his autobiography, “Father of the blues,” Handy provided a vivid description of what must have happened on Fourth Street that day:


“Life began at 11:45 A.M. in a minstrel company…we were sure to find a swarm of long-legged boys on hand, begging for a chance to carry the banners advertising the show–the same young rabble, perhaps, that invariably swept down upon the circus with the offer to water the elephants in return for free tickets.

“The parade itself was headed by the managers in their four-horse carriages. Doffing silk hats and smiling their jeweled smiles, they acknowledged with easy dignity the small flutter of polite applause their high-stepping horses provoked. After them came the carriage in which the stars rode. The “walking gents” followed, that exciting company which included comedians, singers and acrobats. They in turn were followed by the drum major–not an ordinary drum major beating time for a band, mind you, but a performer out of the books, an artist with the baton. His twirling stick suggested a bicycle wheel revolving in the sun. Occasionally he would give it a toss and then recover the glistening affair with the same flawless skill…

“…[A]t 7:30 we played a program of classical music in front of the opera house. In all probability, we would pull the ‘Musician’s Strike’ out of our bag of tricks. During this well-rehearsed feature each musician would, when his turn came, pretend to quarrel with someone else and quit the band in a huff. When, to the dismay of the innocent yokels, the band had dwindled to almost nothing, a policeman who had been ‘fixed’ and planted at a convenient spot would come up and ask questions. This would lead to a flght between some of the remaining musicians, and the officer would promptly arrest them.

“The crowd could be depended on to express its disappointment in strong language. ‘Just like ni*gers,’ they’d groan. ‘They break up everything with a fight. Damn it all, they’d break up Heaven.’ During these recriminations we would spring the old hokum. The band, having reassembled around the corner, would cut loose with one of the most sizzling tunes of the day, perhaps Creole Belles, Georgia Camp Meeting, or A Hot Time In the Old Town Tonight, and presently the ticket seller would go to work. Our hokum hooked them.”

Handy also wrote that company’s standards were so high that members thought of the troupe as a “finishing school.” By 1906 Handy was no longer with the show, but we know from reviews of their performances in San Francisco earlier that month that the big star of this tour was Bessie LaBelle, who would later become known as a West Coast blues singer with Jelly Roll Morton. That she was the featured performer was another difference between the white minstrel shows, which rarely had any women at all; as many as half the Mahara performers were female, including a renowned trombone player.

It probably goes without saying that the exception to the all-black identity of the Mahara company were the Mahara brothers themselves, who handled the money and managed everything. Founder of the touring group was William Mahara, who had been a manager for other minstrel companies going back to 1875 before starting his own in 1892. When W.C. Handy described “managers in their four-horse carriages” leading the parade, he primarily meant William, with his diamond-buttoned shirt sitting next to his giant St. Bernard, Sport.

According to W. C. Handy, William and his brother Frank, who managed their other touring company, treated performers with complete respect. Performers traveled the country in a private Pullman car with their own cook, waiter, and porter. Their train cars also had a hidden compartment to stash food, weapons, and act as an emergency hideaway, which Handy had cause to use when a Tennessee sheriff and posse sought to arrest him in 1903 for striking a white man. A third Mahara brother, Jack, worked as the advance man and miraculously survived being shot between the eyes during an 1894 train robbery. He was left with a hole about an inch deep and two inches wide in his forehead, which he covered with a silver plate. Talk about your conversation starters.

By 1906 the independent minstrel shows were facing hard times as vaudeville geared up to become an entertainment industry. That the ad in the Santa Rosa papers promised an “olio of pleasing vaudeville novelties” (the “olio” was the middle part of the minstrel show) was a concession that tastes had changed; a purposely old-fashioned show had dwindling appeal.

This was near the end of the Mahara Brothers’ Minstrels; William died in 1909, and that same year ads can be found for the “Jack Mahara All White Minstrel Company.” Blurbs that proceeded the show promised, “the minstrel show like any other enterprise in this progressive age has evolved; there are many changes from the old days in minstrelry. The Jack Mahara Minstrels have evolved…members that are young and full of comedy…a clean, refined and moral show.” A few months later, Jack abandoned his clean, refined all-white troupe in Nevada owing them back pay. And that was the end of the Mahara minstrel empire.

Plantation Life Will Be Well Presented

It was in the evening when the day’s work in the cotton field was done and “Massa” had gone to bed, in the darkest days of slavery, that the darky toilers wer wont to gather around their humble huts and there hold high carnival under the pale light of the moon. Though all, or nearly all, of this has passed into history and tradition, there is still a strong semblance of those never to be forgotten days left in “plantation life.” A vivid spectacle introduced in Mahara Bros. Big Minstrel Carnival this season, which makes its appearance at the Athanaeum on February 26th. To make the pictures more realistic they introduce ten of the handsomest creole ladies from the Boyou Teche, La., pastimes of the rice and tobacco fields, giving an entertaining exhibition of the tobacco stripping and manipulation. Grand choruses of supereminence song with the rich, true plaintive voices of the southern negro. The ladies of the company are also seen in the second edition of the program, known as “Minstrelsy of Today,” showing the evolution of the blacks since emancipation. This amusement, Dusky Beaux & Belles, is spectacular, up-to-date, singing and dancing, dressed in costumes of the club, reception, and the ball room.

– Santa Rosa Republican, February 24, 1906

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