Tim Tseng's Blog

AACHI co-sponsored an event called “Asian Exclusion and the Church: Ripples from the 1924 Immigration Act” on May 29th, 2024. The event was held at the Japanese American National Museum’s Democracy Center. As we commemorated the Johnson-Reed Act, I found it remarkable how many similarities there are between our current moment and that of one hundred years ago. Anti-immigrant sentiment, a nostalgia for Anglo or White dominance of American culture, and the polarization of the Protestant church permeated the U.S. then and now. New threats appeared on the horizon with a growing Asian power (back then it was Japan, today it is China). A hundred years ago, liberal Protestantism was part of the coalition of progressive forces that blunted the U.S. march towards fascism.

My remarks for the event did not adequately address the Protestant response to the 1924 Immigration Act., so I’ve revised it significantly here. I’d welcome your comments and questions. – Tim Tseng

“America Must Remain American”

“America must remain American,” declared President Calvin Coolidge when he signed into law the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act on May 26, 1924. He resisted the resolutions and telegrams sent to him from Protestant mission boards, local councils and federations of churches that urged him to veto the bill. American Protestants did not object to the law’s main goal of restricting immigration. Nor did they object strenuously to the features of the immigration system created by the law that are still with us today – features such visa requirements, the Border Patrol, and the category of the “illegal alien.” But they angrily denounced a clause that placed Japan overtly into the Asiatic barred zone.

What was the Asiatic barred zone? In 1917, Congress passed an immigration law that included the creation of a region that stretched from India to Southeast Asia where immigration was prohibited. Dubbed the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” it extended the Chinese Exclusion Act to almost all of Asia and lumped all Asians together as “Orientals.” However, immigrants from Japan and the Philippines were exempt. The latter was a U.S. colony so Filipinos were treated as American nationals until the passage of the Tydings–McDuffie Act in 1934. Tydings–McDuffie promised independence for the Philippines, but also reclassified all Filipinos, including those who were living in the United States, as aliens. Filipino immigration was then restricted to a quota of 50.

Immigration from Japan was also permitted because of the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement. In it, the Japanese government “agreed to stop granting passports to laborers who were trying to enter the United States unless such laborers were coming to occupy a formerly-acquired home; to join a parent, spouse, or child; or to assume active control of a previously acquired farming enterprise.” Though the Gentlemen’s Agreement was designed to slow Japanese immigration, it spurred the arrival of “picture brides” and increased the population of Japanese in the U.S.

Protestant leaders conceded that immigration restriction might placate the rising tide of racism, Anglo Saxon supremacy, and xenophobia among their rank and file. To counter the Ku Klux Klan’s slogan “America for Americans,” liberal Protestants had argued for “Christian Americanization.” They believed that the spiritual power of neighborliness and evangelism would transform immigrants into good citizens. They argued that this was especially true of the Japanese Christians in the U.S. Since they had closer ties to Japanese in the U.S. and in Japan, the missionaries positioned themselves as knowledge experts and insisted the Japanese were eager to adapt to American life – especially the young nisei.

The spokespersons of the anti-Japanese movement on the Pacific Coast, however, rejected this premise. Instead, they argued that Japanese immigrants, like the Chinese, were neither White nor Black and therefore ineligible for citizenship. Beginning in 1913, California and several states passed laws (Alien land laws) that used the coded term “aliens ineligible for citizenship” to prohibit Asian immigrants from owning property. When the immigrants sued for the right to naturalize – since many had assimilated and demonstrated loyalty to the United States – the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against them and explicitly barred all Asian immigrants from the right to citizenship [see U.S. vs. Ozawa (1922) and U.S. vs. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923)]. In these two cases, the Supreme Court codified “Oriental” as a racial category that now included everyone from the Asian barred zone, including Japanese.

The clause in the Johnson-Reed Act that added Japan to the Asiatic barred zone closed the door to Japanese immigration entirely. Some, including American Protestants, advocated giving Japan an immigration quota. They argued that Johnson-Reed did not treat Japan as an equal to European countries which were given immigration quotas. Rather, Japan and her subjects were treated like other “inferior” Asian countries in the barred zone.  Thus, this law also came to be known as the “Japanese Exclusion Act.”

American Protestants Protest Japanese Exclusion

Protestant responses to the Johnson-Reed Act was part of their struggle against the intense anti-Japanese movement on the Pacific Coast in the 1910s and 1920s. Since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 Protestant church leaders and missionaries objected strenuously to laws and policies that racially targeted Asians. They worried that these racist laws, and the Johnson-Reed clause, in particular, could jeopardize their mission efforts among Japanese immigrants and in Japan. They also feared that it would play into the hands of anti-colonial nationalists in Asia by revealing the hypocrisy of the claim that Christianity leads to international equality and justice while their own “Christian” nation enacted racist laws. Finally, Protestants were concerned that the 1924 Immigration Act would endanger friendly relations with Japan, an increasingly powerful nation.

Prior to its enactment, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ heavily lobbied President Coolidge to veto the bill and mobilized its constituency to register protests. On May 22, the Congregational Conference in New York urged a veto. The California State Federation of Churches sent Coolidge a telegram imploring him to veto the bill. The Methodist Board of Foreign Missions sent Coolidge a resolution that ‘deplore[d]… the pending legislation” and expressed “hope that a way may be found by the Congress and the Executive of the United States to maintain that international good-will which is so important to both lands in which the churches of America have so vital an interest.” The Commission on International Justice and Goodwill (CIJG), a subsidiary of the Federal Council of Churches released a statement that urged Congress to reconsider their action and find a better solution. The exclusion clause, they declared, was a “hasty and ill-considered action” and “a severe blow to all lovers of just dealing” and all who feel “that friendly relations between America and Japan [are] of vital importance for world peace.” CIJG requested every U.S. senator and representative to regulate Japanese immigration in the “right way.” But “public and congressional nativism triumphed over warnings about the possible diplomatic repercussions.”

Nevertheless, liberal Protestants and their missionaries continued to consistently and vocally defend the rights of Asians to immigrate to the United States. Historians Sarah Griffith and Jennifer Snow claimed that they were not “willing (if bumbling) accomplices to American imperialism, racism and ethnocentrism.” And Nicholas Pruitt notes that

When confronted with rising immigration, they maintained vibrant home mission ministries that sought to bring immigrants into the Christian fold while also introducing them to American ideals. Moreover, Protestant leaders responded to legislative proposals during the 1920s in a manner that reflected theological and missional positions. Along the way, Protestant political concerns and home mission programs designed to ensure the spiritual, cultural, and material well-being of immigrants helped temper nativism among church members. (p. 25).

Fundamentalists, however, conformed to the White mainstream on questions of race and gender. According to Matthew Sutton

The [First World] war and then the Red Scare fostered widespread anti-immigrant sentiments nationwide. Fundamentalists, joining a majority of Americans, called for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws with the goal of reducing the number of ‘undesirables.’ They feared that immigrants were . . . contaminating American society and promoting socialism, communism, and anarchy, making it harder for them to orchestrate revival as the world approached the last days. While they often claimed to oppose the morals and values that pervaded American culture, in reality fundamentalists conformed to the white mainstream on questions of race and gender. In defending exclusionist racial and gender hierarchies, they did not look like religious radicals at all but more like prototypical white Americans. (p. 124)

Despite the unhelpful responses of fundamentalists, liberal Protestant missionaries and church leaders took a few important initiatives to support Asian Americans.

First, they sponsored the Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast in 1921-1924. This survey was conducted under the leadership of Robert Park, a University of Chicago sociologists. The interviews with mostly American-born Japanese and Chinese can be found at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. Sociologists used the data to develop the theory that second generation Asians would integrate and assimilate into American society if they dispersed from their ethnic communities. Liberal Protestants used the data to critique racial discrimination in church and society.

Second, they coordinated a Mission Education Campaign in 1934 to educate and temper nativism among the rank and file church people. The Missions Educational Movement published numerous books and pamphlets such as Albert W. Palmer’s Orientals in American Life, Allen Hunter’s Out of the Far East, and Philip Payne’s Gold Mountain. The widely read Missionary Review of the World dedicated the June 1934 issue to “Orientals in America.”

Third, they gave greater attention to the American-born Asians. Their lobbying had failed to stop Asian exclusion, yet foreign mission efforts in Asia continued under the growing anxiety of war. In the United States, Protestants now focused on American-born Chinese and the nisei. But they also de-emphasized language and ethnic-specific ministries. By the 1940s, they discouraged starting and sustaining ethnic-specific congregations because they believed that Asian American assimilation was inevitable.

Consequences of the Johnson-Reed Act

1924 was an election year and if Coolidge had vetoed the Johnson-Reed bill, Congress would have overridden it. Supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, the bill passed the House with 82% support and the Senate with 88%. With its enactment the Ku Klux Klan’s racist, white supremacist, and xenophobic worldview became mainstream. The melting pot and cultural pluralist vision for America had been soundly repudiated until the Cold War years.

David Atkinson argues that the Johnson-Reed “had calamitous consequences for American foreign relations.” The Japanese government immediately protested the immigration act. Ambassadors resigned. There were protests on the streets of Tokyo, boycotts of American goods and even suicides in Japan. “This indignity is seen as a turning point in the growing estrangement of the U.S. and Japan” which in the face of increasing militarism, authoritarianism, and imperial aspirations in Japan culminated in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.”

The 1924 immigration act also “ended large-scale migration to the United States.” Consequently, “the social landscape of the United States changed” between 1924 and 1965. “In a world where new immigrants were few, ethnicity became a matter of eradication and loss, a process of forgetting.” Historian Henry Yu concludes that this forty-year period was “an aberration in American history rather than the model.”

How did Asian Americans and Asian American Christians experience this period? What happens with immigration slows down significantly or stops? We know that Asian Americans lived under the glare of harsh racism for at least the next two decades. The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II was one high water mark of this difficult era. We also know that between 1924 and 1965, American born or raised Chinese, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and Filipinos wrestled with two seemingly contradictory aspirations:  the quest for pathways of inclusion into White Anglo conformist society and church on the one hand and the desire to retain ethnic identity on the other. In a future blog, we’ll explore how Asian American Christians – largely American-born and English-speaking – negotiated this period.

A legacy of the Johnson-Reed Act and the anti-Asian soil from which it sprung can be seen in the continued demand for Asian Americans to assimilate by erasing their histories and identities today. Even in many multicultural settings, the foreign aspects of Asian American identities are not entirely welcome. Is it any surprise that half of Asian Americans say they don’t feel safe in this country, and nearly 80% of Asian Americans don’t fully feel they belong and are accepted, according to the Asian American Foundation’s 2023 STAATUS Index? Is it any surprise that in the 2023 Pew Survey, only 24% of Asian Americans knew much about their own history? Even fewer know the stories of generations of AAPI people of faith.

We don’t remember stories that are not triumphant. Nevertheless, we ought to recover the ones that don’t have happy endings. For despite the sad legacy of the Johnson-Reed Act, this largely forgotten liberal American Protestant heritage of standing with the Japanese and other Asian communities during a dark era in U.S. history should be remembered. These American Protestants – white, Japanese, and others – are part of the lineage of prophetic faith. A kind of courageous faith that is needed today.

Wherever the church fails as a prophet it also fails as an evangelist.
— Rene Padilla

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Sources

• Asian American Foundation’s 2023 STAATUS Index: https://www.taaf.org/projects/staatus-index-2023
• David C. Atkinson, “What History Can Tell Us About the Fallout From Restricting Immigration” Time Magazine, February 17, 2017. Accessed at https://time.com/4659392/history-fallout-restricting-immigration/
• Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).
• Sarah M. Griffith, The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights: Liberal Protestant Activism, 1900-1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018)
• Izumi Hirobe, Japanese Pride, American Prejudice: Modifying the Exclusion Clause of the 1924 Immigration Act. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
• David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
• Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (New York: Doubleday, 2019)
• Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2019)
• Devin E. Naar “The Regional Origins of America’s First Comprehensive Federal Immigration Law,” Time Magazine, July 9, 2024. Accessed at https://time.com/6990567/1924-act-washington-state/
• Nicholas T. Pruitt, Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 24
• Jennifer C. Snow, Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race in America, 1850-1924 (New York: Routledge, 2007) 
• Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)
• Religion Among Asian Americans. 2023 Pew Research Center Report: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/10/11/religion-among-asian-americans/
• Sandra C. Taylor, Advocate of Understanding: Sidney Gulick and the Search for Peace with Japan. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985).
• Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7.
• Wikipedia Articles:
  • Alien Land Laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_land_laws
  • California Alien Land Law of 1913: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1913
  • Cable Act (stripping U.S.-born women of their citizenship if they married men ineligible for naturalization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Act
  • Immigration Act of 1924: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924#cite_note-:3-27
  • Tydings–McDuffie Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tydings%E2%80%93McDuffie_Act