A 1909 Newspaper Campaign Against Japanese Immigrants

The citizens of San Francisco, and of the state of California as well, awoke not many months ago to the fact that the activity and aggressiveness of the Japanese threatened the whole social and industrial fabric of society. Slowly and steadily the incoming tide of Japanese had pushed back the white race in every occupation they chose to enter. Where once the white man tilled the soil and tended the vine in contented husbandry, an alarmed people found the Japanese had driven them out with a well-defined plan of campaign. The vital point at issue was not the 'separation of the American schoolchild from the Japanese,' but 'the right of an American citizen to earn his bread.' We stand today in Washington exactly where the people of California stood at the beginning of the Japanese invasion. The same employing classes who fatten on coolie labor have been and still are busy displacing the white workman with the Japanese. In Washington today as in California, the Japanese are acquiring the land through lease. They are even now entering the richest section of our own county and acquiring the land which should be owned and worked by our own people. It becomes then not a question of race hatred, but a question of existence on the plane of living that the white man has created.