The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-SupremacyStoddard, Lothrop
History
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy
Stoddard, Lothrop
Caucasian race; Race relations
For example, the Tokio _Yorodzu_ wrote early in 1916: "Japan has been most
faithful to the requirements of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and yet the
treatment meted out to our countrymen in Canada, Australia, and other
British colonies has been a glaring insult to us."[186] A year later a
writer in _The Japan Magazine_ declared: "The agitation against Japanese
in foreign countries must cease, even if Japan has to take up arms to stop
it. She should not allow her immigration to be treated as a
race-question."[187] And in 1919 the _Yorodzu_ thus paid its respects to
the exclusionist activity of our Pacific coast States: "Whatever may be
their object, their actions are more despicable than those of the Germans
whose barbarities they attacked as worthy of Huns. At least, these
Americans are barbarians who are on a lower plane of civilization than the
Japanese."[188]
The war produced no letting down of immigration barriers along the white
world's exposed frontiers, where men are fully alive to the peril. But the
war did produce temporary waverings of sentiment in the United States,
while in Europe colored labor was imported wholesale in ways which may
have ominous consequences.
Our own acute labor shortage during the war, particularly in agriculture,
led many Americans, especially employers, to cast longing eyes at the
tempting reservoirs of Asia. Typical of this attitude is an article by
Hudson Maxim in the spring of 1918. Mr. Maxim urged the importation of a
million Chinese to solve our farming and domestic-service problems.
"If it is possible," he wrote, "by the employment of Chinese methods of
intensive farming, to increase the production of our lands to such an
extent, how stupendous would be the benefit of wide introduction of such
methods. The exhausted lands of New England could be made to produce like
a tropical garden. The vast areas of the great West that are to-day not
producing 10 per cent of what they ought to produce could be made to
produce the other 90 per cent by the introduction of Chinese labor.... The
average American does not like farming. The sons of the prosperous farmers
do not take kindly to the tilling of the soil with their own hands. They
prefer the excitement and the diversions and stimulus of the life of city
and town, and they leave the farm for the office and factory....
"Chinese, imported as agricultural laborers and household servants, would
solve the agricultural labor problem and the servant problem, and we
should have the best agricultural workers in the world and the best
household servants in the world, in unlimited numbers."[189]
Now I submit that such arguments, however well-intentioned, are nothing
short of race-treason. If there be one truth which history has proved, it
is the solemn truth that those who _work_ the land will ultimately _own_
the land.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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