Did U.S. Racism Pave Way for Pearl Harbor?
President Calvin Coolidge, in contrast, admired the Japanese throughout his political career. He and his administration did all they could to prevent some of the more unreasonable attacks against them, though to no avail. At a speech to the Roxbury Historical Society on Bunker Hill Day (June 17, 1918), Coolidge - then lieutenant governor of Massachusetts – listed the Japanese “reforms of our own times,” toward modernity, as part of the longstanding “conflict between privilege and freedom.”
In 1918, Hara Takashi became the first commoner to serve as prime minister; Coolidge’s invocation in the same speech of the Japanese experiment in democracy - he later ranked it alongside the American Revolution - is further evidence of his genuine belief that all mankind was capable of being ruled by “reason” rather than by “custom.” As he said of these reforms: “Class and caste and place, all the distinctions based on appearance and accident were giving way before reality. Men turned from distinctions which were temporal to those which were eternal. The sovereignty of kings and the nobility of peers was swallowed up in the sovereignty and nobility of all men. ... The rule of the people had begun. ... It was an example of the great law of human progress and civilization.”
And yet, progress was difficult for the Japanese and seemed to have definite limits, especially when the military, served not the civilian government, but the emperor. In 1921, the reformist Takashi was assassinated and Japan descended into a combination of military despotism and what one scholar called “government by assassination.” (“The '30s began early in Japan,” another historian noted.) A government of consent gave way to a government of compulsion and violence -and the peace went with it.
]In 1932, when 11 naval officers assassinated Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi for agreeing to the terms of a naval-limitations treaty, it signed in blood what had already become plain in fact: The Japanese military was firmly in control. The fear Capt. Frank H. Schofield expressed at Paris in 1919 turned out to be well founded: “Japan has no rival in the Pacific except America. Every ship built or acquired by Japan can have in mind only opposition to American naval strength in the Pacific.”
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate eroded whatever hope there might have been of an accommodation on the issue of the rights of the Japanese nationals in the U.S. The case of Takao Ozawa, who argued his appeal to become an American citizen all the way up to the Supreme Court in 1922, was particularly poignant; his story was well-publicized and sensationalized in Japan. Ozawa had seemingly done everything worthy of praise by the standards of the time - he spoke English at home, worked for an American company, studied at the University of California, and even attended Christian churches.
But when he began applying for citizenship in 1914, successive courts denied his candidacy on the grounds that naturalization was available only to people of white or African descent. The Supreme Court conceded that Ozawa was “well qualified by character and education,” also noting the “culture and enlightenment of the Japanese people,” but still found against him, and them, on the grounds that the “science of ethnology” made clear that the Japanese were not Caucasians. Still, the Court made clear that it was simply following congressional intent and that its decision should not be taken as “a suggestion of individual unworthiness or racial inferiority” - which is exactly how the Japanese press took it.
California senator Hiram Johnson, a leading progressive in his day and a past candidate for the presidency, argued that the ongoing legislative efforts that restricted all immigration on an equal basis were wrongheaded because they failed to understand the distinctiveness of the Japanese. California’s other senator, Democrat James D. Phelan, agreed and pointed to what he called the “incontrovertible fact that the Japanese continue ever Japanese, and that their allegiance is always to Tokyo.” Phelan also said, even more bluntly: “A Jap is a Jap” – adding that unless something was done soon, the Japanese were fully “capable of taking the place of the White man.”
The perceived intelligence and ethnocentrism of the Japanese would prove their undoing when, in 1924, Congress tried its hand at anti-Japanese prejudice. The House Committee, for instance, inserted a provision to bar “aliens ineligible to citizenship” - the Japanese, post-Ozawa, among them - from entering America as immigrants. It even hired its own eugenics expert. Coolidge would be forced by public opinion and by the Congress to sign the Immigration Act of 1924. He tried, behind the scenes, to defeat its anti-Japanese provision, but his efforts failed.
In 1923, Japan’s already precarious government collapsed in the anarchic aftermath of a tremendous earthquake and typhoon that hit Tokyo and Yokohama, killing more than 143,000 people and injuring over 100,000. The earthquake led to an inferno, as open-fire grills toppled over and set the ground ablaze. The government broke down and anarchy ensued, as Japanese turned against Korean laborers, accusing them of poisoning water wells. In the panic, anyone who looked Korean was massacred. In the first act of his presidency, Coolidge dispatched the Navy’s Asiatic fleet to Japan to help in that country’s time of crisis.
Coolidge also, as titular head of the American Red Cross, appealed to the American people to address the catastrophe:
"While its extent has not as yet been officially reported, enough is known to justify the statement that the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, and surrounding towns and villages, have been largely if not completely destroyed by earthquake, fire and flood, with a resultant appalling loss of life and destitution and distress, requiring measures of urgent relief. Such assistance as is within the means of the Executive Department of the government will be rendered; but realizing the great suffering which now needs relief and will need relief in the days to come, I am prompted to appeal to the American people, whose sympathies have always been so comprehensive, to contribute in aiding the unfortunate and in giving relief to the people of Japan."
