Japanese Menace

Here's an excerpt from the California State Board of Health's December, 1920 Monthly Bulletin expressing concern about Japanese farmers:

California's anti-Japanese agitation is well-founded, and none can deny the contention that Japanese landholding in California constitutes a menace to the welfare of the state. We hold the California is for white men and that the tilling of our wonderfully productive agricultural lands belongs to persons of our own race; that the production of food, one of the most essential functions in the maintenance of any civilization, should never be jeopardized by allowing it to pass into the control of aliens.†

Of course I of all people shouldn't be surprised by the unapologetic racism expressed by public officials towards the Japanese. By the time this was written, Congress had already designated an "Asiatic Barred Zone" that prevented most Asians from immigrating to the U.S.; and it was not long before the 1924 Immigration Act that took an even stricter, eugenic-based approach to non-white immigrants; and, of course, Japanese-American internment was still decades in the future.

Nevertheless, it still gives me a jolt to read such blatant racism, by medical professionals no less. The power of culture and racism withstood even the most advanced medical science of the day. 

† California, State Board of Health, "Malaria Greater Menace Than Are the Japanese," Monthly Bulletin 16, no. 6 (December, 1920): 86.