Sarah M Griffith - The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights: Liberal Protestant Activism, 1900-1950

The Fight for
Asian American
Civil Rights

The Fight for
Asian American
Civil Rights

Liberal Protestant
Activism, 19001950

SARAH M. GRIFFITH

2018 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Griffith, Sarah Marie, author.

Title: The fight for Asian American civil rights: liberal Protestant activism, 19001950 / Sarah M. Griffith.

Description: Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017044806 | ISBN 9780252041686 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252083310 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252050350 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Asian AmericansCivil rightsHistory20th century. | Civil rights movementsUnited StatesHistory20th century. | United StatesRace relations.

Classification: LCC E 184. A 75 G 75 2018 | DDC 323.1195/073dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044806

Cover illustration: Top photo: Young people return from Kyoto, Japan, following the 1929 meeting of the Institute of Pacific Relations, with John D. Rockefeller Jr. on left. Courtesy of the Davis Family. Bottom photo: Manzanar street scene, spring, Manzanar Relocation Center. Photograph by Ansel Adams, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppprs-00285.

This book is dedicated to my father, John S. Griffith, who taught me to love books, knowledge, and the pursuit of those things in life that drive my passion.

Like most first book projects, this one has been a labor of love and I owe a great deal of gratitude to individuals and institutions who have helped me along the way. Paul Spickard has served as both mentor and friend over the years, and I owe him, and his wife, Anna Martinez, special thanks. I benefited from the assistance of research staff and archivists at the Rockefeller Archives Center; the Yale Divinity School Special Collections; the University of British Columbia Special Collections; the University of Oregon Special Collections; the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center; the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Kautz Family Archives at the University of Minnesota. Portions of this book have appeared in the Journal of American History , and I appreciate the support of the editorial team there. The College of Arts and Sciences at Queens University of Charlotte have financed various summer research trips and provided me release from some university obligations in order to complete this manuscript. My colleagues in the Department of History, Barry Robinson, Bob Whalen, and Suzanne Cooper-Guasco, are amazing people and have taught me a great deal about balancing teaching and research agendas. Finally, I owe special gratitude to my editor, Dawn Durante, at the University of Illinois Press, and Nancy Albright, who copyedited the manuscript. Dawn and Nancy are incredibly patient people and skilled editors. I cannot thank them enough for helping to usher this book into publication.

A number of friends have read and provided feedback on chapters, including Julia Brock, Megan Perle Bowmen, Mira Foster, Oliver Rosales, Lily Welty, and David Johnson. The Charlotte Area Historians have shared thoughtful critiques of my work, and I feel lucky to have found this diverse group of scholars in my new home. I have also had the privilege of sharing my work with scholars who share my passion for understanding the impact liberal Protestants have had on American civil rights. David Hollinger, Jon Thares Davidaan, and Robert Schafer each took time out of their busy schedules to compare notes, share research, and offer support for the scholarship contained here. Members of the Davis and Fisher families, Georgiana Davis, Virginia Green, and Anthony Fisher, have been gracious in sharing their recollections and photographic records. Finally, special appreciation goes out to my family, Katie and John S. Griffith, John R. Griffith, Amanda and Geoffrey Lake, Daisy and Ruby Lake, Robert and Roberta Hudson, and my partner in crime, Eric Lee. Each of you have reminded me that camping, fishing, riding bikes, and time spent with one another are as important as any book project or job. Thank you all for keeping me sane.

The Fight for
Asian American
Civil Rights

In a series of editorials published in the Christian Century between August and September 1943, Young Mens Christian Association secretary Galen Fisher summarized some of the social and political forces that had led to the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans. Following Japans attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, nativist organizations, including the California American Legion, the Native Sons of the Golden West, the Eagles, and the Americanism Educational League, had rallied their members to lobby for mass internment of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans. Race-baiting newspapers incited race hatred and encouraged mob violence if those considered enemy aliens were not removed from the Coast. When asked about the decision, West Coast politicians had trimmed their sails to the anti-Japanese wind and dodged questions regarding the constitutionality of President Roosevelts Executive Order 9066.

Fishers indictment of internment reflected the culmination of a resistance movement that evolved among American liberal Protestants over the first Over the interwar period, YMCA secretaries worked alongside a new generation of social scientists, liberal progressives, and Chinese and Japanese North Americans to undermine the social and political capital of nativists on the Pacific Coast and in Congress.

This book reevaluates and repositions liberal Protestants activism within the context of American civil rights history. In examining the shifting religious, intellectual, and political incentives that drove YMCA secretaries to act, this book adds to a growing list of studies that broaden our understanding of the civil rights movement in the United States. Studying the activism of YMCA secretaries offers historians insight into the ways religion interacted with new intellectual trends and shifting national and international politics to shape Americans views on race, equality, and citizenship. Inspired by liberal Christian theology that viewed racial discrimination as a violation of Christian ethics, the YMCA secretaries at the center of the book organized powerful social and legal challenges against white nativists over the first half of the twentieth century. Their activism reached a climax during World War II when YMCA secretaries leveraged their influence among grassroots civil liberties organizations and the War Relocation Authority to wage an ethical and constitutional assault against Japanese American internment. The longevity of YMCA secretaries activism was due in large part to their ability to adapt Christian ethics to shifting national, international, and political landscapes and to organize across racial and institutional lines. Taken together, these efforts and inspirations would continue to shape civil rights initiatives in the postWorld War II era.

* * *

The American liberal Protestants at the center of this study were part of a larger social movement that had its origins in mid-nineteenth-century

The success of the YMCA rested in large part in the spiritual revivalism that swept across many Western nations in the mid-nineteenth century. Rooted in a theology that emphasized spiritual rebirth, piety, moral purity, and public witness over theological scripture and religious piety, religious liberals looked to reason and experience as sources of theological authority. Mainline liberal Protestants affirmed the immanence of God and the general goodness of human nature, and emphasized ethics over doctrine and human action over theological dogma. They embraced humanitarian and educational work and a social evangelism rooted in postmillennial theology, or the belief that Christians had a duty to purify and prepare society for the return of Christ.