Asiatic Exclusion League
Oxford Companion to Canadian History:
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Asiatic Exclusion League
From the time that Chinese and Japanese began arriving in the province, British Columbians opposed their presence, citing their alleged ‘cheap labour’, low living standards, different customs (reflecting their ‘inassimilability’), and their potential to overwhelm the white population, which, in 1901, was only about 125,000. Responding to repeated protests, in 1886 the federal government imposed a head tax on Chinese immigrants; by 1904 the tax was $500. Because of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Anglo-Japanese commercial treaties, and Canada's colonial status, Canada could do little to curb Japanese immigration. In the first seven months of 1907, over 5,500 Japanese landed in British Columbia, and more were expected.
In August 1907, the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council invited elected officials and anyone who believed in keeping Canada ‘a white man’s country' to help found the Asiatic Exclusion League. To recruit members, the league sponsored a parade and rally at City Hall on Saturday, 7September. Several American visitors, a New Zealander, two local clergymen, and prominent Liberals and Conservatives spoke inside the hall and repeated some of their fiery speeches to the overflow crowd outside. Soon, the crowd turned into a mob that marched the few blocks to Chinatown, where they threw bricks and stones through shop windows. In neighbouring ‘Little Tokyo’, residents repelled the rioters but many windows were broken. News of the Vancouver riot quickly spread around the world. The embarrassed Laurier government sent deputy labour minister W. L. Mackenzie King to investigate damage claims and labour minister Rodolphe Lemieux to Tokyo to negotiate a gentlemen's agreement whereby Japan limited emigration to Canada. Meanwhile, the league established branches in several coastal cities but had trouble maintaining its members' interest; in little more than a year it had disappeared.
In 1921, at a time of rising Asian immigration and economic uncertainty, a new, unrelated Asiatic Exclusion League emerged. It drew interest from labour and business groups and had branches in several BC cities but, after a brief flurry of activity, it too faded into obscurity. Others, notably BC's MPs and the Retail Merchants Association of Canada, took up the cause and lobbied for the passage of the exclusionary Chinese Immigration Act (1923). While both Asiatic Exclusion Leagues had short histories, their activities helped stimulate federal actions to limit immigration from Japan and to halt it from China.
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Asiatic Exclusion League
The Asiatic Exclusion League, often abbreviated AEL, was a racist organization formed in the early twentieth century in the United States and Canada that aimed to prevent immigration of people of East Asian origin.
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United States
The Asiatic Exclusion League was formed as the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League on 14 May 1905 in San Francisco, California, by 67 labor unions. Among those attending the first meeting were labor leaders (and European immigrants) Patrick Henry McCarthy of the Building Trades Council of San Francisco and Andrew Furuseth and Walter McCarthy of the Sailor's Union. The group's stated aims were to spread anti-Asian propaganda and influence legislation restricting Asian immigration. Specifically targeted were Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. The League was almost immediately successful in pressuring the San Francisco Board of Education to segregate Asian school children. By 1908, the Asiatic Exclusion League reported 231 organizations affiliated, 195 of them labor unions. After the league's President, Olaf Tveitmoe, had a stroke in 1917, activity dwindled.
Anti-Jap Laundry League
In 1908 the Laundry Workers' and Laundry Drivers' Unions formed a separate Anti-Jap Laundry League. This league attempted to financially harm Japanese-run laundries using four different tactics: picketing laundries, following customers back to their homes and intimidating them, preventing the laundries from purchasing equipment, and threatening public officials who refused to punish the laundries. They successfully ruined many Japanese laundries in this way.[1] In the laundries run by league members, posters such as the following were hung on the walls:[2]
- Are our boys and girls wrong
- In expecting you who make your living
- Exclusively off the white race
- To stop patronizing Jap laundries.
- And thereby assist your fellow men and women
- In maintaining the white man's standard in a white man's country?
- Anti-Jap Laundry League.
California Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb put great effort into enforcing laws against Asian ownership of property.
Canada
A sister organization with the same name was formed in Vancouver, British Columbia on 12 August 1907 under the auspices of the Trades and Labour Council. Its stated aim was "to keep Oriental immigrants out of British Columbia." [3] On 7 September, riots erupted in Vancouver when League members besieged Chinatown after listening to inflammatory racist speeches at City Hall. Shouting racist slogans, as many as 10,000[citation needed] people marched into Chinatown, vandalizing and causing thousands of dollars worth of damage. The mob then rampaged through Japantown, where they were confronted by residents armed with clubs and bottles with which they fought back. The organization flourished immediately following the riots, but began to dwindle by the following year.[4] The AEL resurfaced in the early 1920s, this time claiming a membership of 40,000 in the province in the period leading up to the passage of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which ended virtually all Chinese immigration to Canada.[5]
Another important, albeit indirect, consequence of AEL activity was that the 1907 Vancouver riots led to the first drug law in Canada. The Minister of Labour (and future Prime Minister), William Lyon Mackenzie King, was sent to investigate the riots as well as victim claims for compensation. One claim was submitted by opium manufacturers, which sparked an investigation into the local drug scene by King. Particularly alarming to the minister was that opium consumption was apparently spreading to young white women. A federal law was soon passed “prohibiting the manufacture, sale and importation of opium for other than medicinal purposes.” [6]
Both Asiatic Exclusion Leagues were the product of an overall atmosphere of white racism against Asians that prevailed in Canada and the United States from the 1800s on, culminating in the imposition of a Head Tax and other immigration policies designed to exclude Asians from Canada, as well as Japanese American internment and Japanese Canadian internment during World War II.
See also
- Chinese Immigration Act
- Takao Ozawa v. United States
- United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind
- Chinese Massacre of 1871
Notes
- ^ Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1900-1918
- ^ Report of the Immigration Commission, 1911. U.S. Congress
- ^ Vancouver News-Advertiser, 7 September 1907.
- ^ Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in British Columbia. 3rd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002, 73.
- ^ Kay J. Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995, 128.
- ^ Catherine Carstairs, “‘Hop Heads’ and ‘Hypes’: Drug Use, Regulation and Resistance in Canada, 1920-1961,” PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2000, 24.
External links
- Asiatic Coolie Invasion on the Virtual Museum of San Francisco.
- History of Metropolitan Vancouver by Chuck Davis
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