“Immigration” (April 21, 1921)
by Harold J Wahl (1900-1985)
17 x 19 in., ink on heavy paper
Coppola Collection

Wahl was the editorial cartoonist for the Sacramento Bee and was introduced to readers in 1920 in a front-page cartoon. Harold enjoyed drawing in his childhood and fondly remembered doing the artwork for Whatcom High School’s yearbook, Kulshan.  After high school he attended the Chicago Academy of fine Arts.

His first job as an artist was for the McClatchy newspapers in Sacramento California doing cartoons during the Harding era.  His pen sketched issues on the Alien Exclusion Act, Prohibition and Irish troubles.  After five years with the newspapers, Harold was called home to Bellingham to help his father with Wahl’s Department store during the depression. During this time Mr. Wahl moonlighted as a magazine artist, drawing cartoons for Liberty, MacLean’s in Canada and the Rotarian. World War II began and Harold was sent to Amchitka Island in the Aleutian Islands. He moved towards painting during his tour.

His work evolved from early near photographic images to becoming purely abstract. After retiring as a business executive in 1948, he devoted his full time to painting, whose abstract compositions always recalled his past as an illustrator.

The Immigration Act of 1921 imposed a quota system from 1921-1924, and put an end to the ideal of the United States as a refuge for those escaping their home country in hope of a better life. Although intended as temporary legislation, it proved to be the most important turning point in American immigration policy by establishing quotas based on national origin.

Warren Harding signed the law during the first year of his administration. Wilson, who served after him, opposed the legislation and twice vetoed legislation to add literacy tests. Albert Johnson was a Republican representative from the state of Washington. He chaired the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization and strongly supported total restriction.

During most of the nineteenth century, people who wanted to immigrate to the United States were able to do so. By the 1880s, however, this freedom was starting to vanish with the first law that restricted immigration in 1882, when the Chinese were barred from entering the United States. Antipathy to Chinese workers in California triggered Congress to pass this legislation due to job fears and racial bigotry. Many people believed that Chinese workers would accept lower wages than whites, enticing employers to hire them instead of native-born Americans; in addition, there were people who felt the Chinese culture was inferior and that they would never be a credit to the United States. In 1907, under an informal agreement with the government of Japan, the Japanese were added to the undesirables list. Other groups forbidden from entering the United States were those suffering from mental illness, paupers, polygamists, prostitutes, and those with a “loathsome or contagious disease.”

Anti-immigrant groups, such as the American Protective Association (established in 1887) and the Immigration Restriction League (founded in Boston in 1894), cautioned of an “immigrant invasion” that could threaten the American dream. They opposed open immigration, arguing that the immigrants came from poorer and “backward” regions of Europe. They warned that these immigrants would bring ideas of anarchism, communism, radicalism, or socialism with them, and that due to their preference of living in cities, they would contribute to the power of crooked bosses. Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL, supported their opinion, adding that since the new immigrants would accept low wages, it would lead to lower wages for all workers.

President McKinley’s assassination in 1901 led to the banning of anarchists and people who agitated for the violent downfall of the US government. In 1907, the House and Senate set up the United States Immigration Commission, and three years later this commission issued a 42-volume report recommending a cutback in immigration, claiming that immigrants were “racially inferior.” The commission warned that immigrants from eastern and southern Europe lacked intelligence and were likely to turn to crime or end up poor and sick. It suggested a literacy test and although Congress passed literary test legislation in 1912, President Taft used his veto power, pointing out that illiteracy came from a dearth of education and was unrelated to inborn intelligence. Open immigration was part of America’s history and values, and many of America’s most energetic and wealthiest citizens were illiterate when they first arrived on American shores. Had the United States excluded such people, Taft contended, America would never have attained the greatness it did.

When America entered World War I two years later, however, Congress overruled Wilson’s second veto and a reading test was administered to prospective immigrants over the age of 16. In addition, the law excluded those from China, India, and Japan, despite any degree of literacy.

Immigration rose dramatically in 1920, with fears that millions of Europe’s war refugees were about to invade the United States. Racism influenced many opinions, with Warren G. Harding, later president of the United States, calling for legislation to allow only people whose racial background proved that they could embrace American values to immigrate. Attorney Madison Grant, who became an adviser to Albert Johnson’s Immigration Committee, authored the most influential book promoting this racist view, The Passing of the Great Race in America (1916), describing society as a huge snake, with the head consisting of Nordic races, while the “inferior races” made up the tail. This sort of pseudo scientific argument resulted in the establishment of the 1921 quota system to ensure that the tail would not rule over the head.

In 1921, the House passed Johnson’s bill demanding a two-year moratorium on all immigration. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 drastically limited immigration into the United States. In 1922, only 309,556 people legally came to America, compared with 805,228 the prior year. Quotas for Africa, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and New Zealand generally filled rapidly, with the eastern and southern Europeans filling almost 99 percent of their quota. Emigration from Canada, Mexico, and other nations of the Western Hemisphere was not restricted, as Congress wanted to ensure a sufficient supply of cheap agricultural labor for farmers in California and Texas. China and Japan were the only countries possessing a quota of zero.

Under the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, ships filled with prospective immigrants were turned away and sent back to their place of origin. These procedures, however, were only the start, and the self-appointed guardians of American racial purity in Congress were already plotting even tighter controls.

Taken from: “Immigration Act of 1921 Imposes Quota System, 1921-1924.” Historic U.S. Events. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Gale U.S. History In Context. Web. 5 Feb. 2013.

The Act was not significantly revised until the national origins provision was removed in 1965 by LBJ, although members of the LBGT community could still excluded due to  “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” until 1990.

“The Chinese Empire” (September 7, 1899)
by Charles Lewis (Bart) Bartholomew (1869-1949)
16 x 25 in., ink on heavy paper

Charles Lewis (Bart) Bartholomew was a longtime editorial cartoonist for the Minneapolis Journal. He began working as a reporter for the Minneapolis Journal before becoming one of the first daily editorial cartoonists in the world. From 1890 to 1915, he produced an editorial cartoon almost every day, usually published on the front page. A collection of 52 drawings, all from about 1900-1910, is held by Gustavus Adolphus College. This one predates those.

“John Chinaman” was a stock caricature of a Chinese laborer seen in cartoons of the 19th century. John Chinaman represented, in western society, a typical persona of China, depicted with a long queue and wearing a coolie hat. American political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who often depicted John Chinaman, created a variant, John Confucius, to represent Chinese political figures.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term first emerged with British sailors who, uninterested in learning how to pronounce the names of the Chinese stewards, firemen, and sailors who worked as part of their crews, came up with the generic nickname of “John.”

With its weaknesses exposed during the Opium Wars in the 1850s, China began to lose power over its peripheral regions. France seized Southeast Asia, creating its colony of French Indochina. Japan stripped away Taiwan and took effective control of Korea (formerly a Chinese tributary).

The roots of the Boxer Rebellion can be found in the 1895 Euro-centric settlement after Japan’s defeat of China in the Sino-Japan War. This settlement allowed Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and Russia all to claim exclusive trading rights with specific areas of China. These areas were referred to as “spheres of influence.” Some countries went so far as to claim to actually own the land within its sphere of influence. This already volatile mix was complicated when the United States acquired the Philippines in the 1898 settlement of the Spanish-American War.

The United States had been left out of the Sino-Japan settlement, but now that it had a part of Asia, it wanted a share of China, too. China’s Empress Tsu-Hsi did not want to grant any more spheres of influence to western nations, and rejected the attempts of the United States to gain these trading rights. John Hay, the United States Secretary of State, did not think that people would be in favor of a U.S. war with China, so soon after the Spanish-American War, so he attempted another means to gain influence in China. Hay contacted the governments with Chinese spheres of influence, and tried to persuade them all to share trading rights equally, including the United States.

On September 6, 1899, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay sent notes to the major powers (France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, and Russia), asking them to declare formally that they would uphold Chinese territorial and administrative integrity and would not interfere with the free use of the treaty ports within their spheres of influence in China, as the United States felt threatened by other powers’ much larger spheres of influence in China and worried that it might lose access to the Chinese market should the country be officially partitioned. Although treaties made after 1900 refer to this “Open Door Policy,” competition among the various powers for special concessions within China for railroad rights, mining rights, loans, foreign trade ports, and so forth, continued unabated.

It was in this disorganized squabbling of foreign ownership over Chinese trade that the Boxer Rebellion began. And the Boxer Rebellion was the beginning of the end for Imperial China. In November 1899, under the rule of Empress Dowager Cixi, the secret society the Harmonious Fist (translated as “boxers”) began slaughtering foreigners. The Boxers won the Empress Dowager’s support when eight European countries sent troops. But China lost the conflict, and the West imposed sanctions that permanently weakened Qing rule.

Over the next ten years, numerous revolutionary uprisings occurred throughout China, resulting in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 under the leadership of Sun Yat-Sen.

1895.07.01 Thunder God and Demons
in “Comical Record of Japanese History” (Kokkei Yamato Hishiki)
Meiji 28
Artist: Yoshiiku
Signature: Sharakusai Yoshiiku (Utagawa Yoshiiku, 1833-1904)
artist`s seal: Sharaku

A small note: it is clear to me today, after working on placing the WW2 drawings, that what we generally think of as World War 2 was really two independent wars that merged into an even larger one. The war in the Pacific appears to have been inevitable, with Japan as the rising power in the East. The effects of industrialization, which Japan embraced, combined with the likely human failings at the end of the Qing Dynasty in China, which brought down the Empire, changed the balance and emboldened Japan. So as I think about what “pre-war” means for WW2, it is not only the rise of Mussolini’s fascism in Italy and its admiration and embrace by Hitler, it is also the rapidly changing landscape in Japan and China.

Thunder God and Demons, from the series Comical Record of Japanese History (Kokkei Yamato shiki), upper register “Newly Designed Night Parade of a Hundred Demons” (Shin’an hyakki yagyo); lower register “Shinto Rituals and Lantern Parade Celebrating Total Victory” (Zensho shukusai shinji andon)

The growth of Japan as a global power in the late 1800s, particularly with its dominance over China and then Russia, and with global leaders subdividing China, leads directly to the instability of the region and lays the groundwork for conflict in the Pacific as WW2 breaks out.

The First Sino-Japanese War (July 25, 1894 – April 17, 1895), and marked the emergence of Japan as a major world power and demonstrated the weakness of the Chinese empire. The war grew out of the conflict between the two countries for supremacy in Korea.

The war demonstrated the failure of the Qing dynasty’s attempts to modernize its military and fend off threats to its sovereignty, especially when compared with Japan’s successful Meiji Restoration. For the first time, regional dominance in East Asia shifted from China to Japan; the prestige of the Qing dynasty, along with the classical tradition in China, suffered a major blow. The humiliating loss of Korea as a tributary state sparked an unprecedented public outcry. Within China, the defeat was a catalyst for a series of political upheavals led by Sun Yat-sen and Kang Youwei, culminating in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution.

Increasing tensions between Japan and Russia were results of Russia’s unwillingness to compromise and the prospect of Korea falling under Russia’s domination and thus coming into conflict with and undermining Japan’s interests. Eventually, Japan was forced to take action. That would be the deciding factor and catalyst leading to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05.

This print, published in July 1895, is part of a propaganda celebration of the Japanese victory over China.

The Kokkei Yamato Hi shiki is a set of nine woodblock prints comprising two connected groups of cartoons and caricatures, in two registers one above the other. The term Yamato Hi in the main title, which appears with a black rectangular cartouche on the upper margin of each sheet, is an ancient name for Japan that defies direct translation.

All the cartoon images that form the upper half of the joined set, subtitled Shin’an hyakki yako (Newly Designed Night Parade of One Hundred Ghosts) are of the so-called hundred ghosts from Japanese folk tales. The images that make up the lower half of the set, subtitled Zensho shukusai shinji andon (Shintō Rituals and Lantern Parade Celebrating Complete Victory), are caricatures of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, in which the defeated Chinese are mocked and satirized.

The nine prints read as a scroll when placed next to each other. The top inset of this print, the eighth print in the scroll, depicts various yokai, three ghostly women, three monsters and a red fish, with an inscription reading “Bay”.  The bottom inset depicts Chinese in various caricatures, including pleading “rat ships,”  a Japanese soldier as the Thunder God, a Japanese soldier dressed in kimono, and a Japanese naval officer being entreated by the Chinese “rat ships.” (See the print “Rats in a Bag” by Kiyochika for another use of this caricature).

The Ukiyo’e Caricatures 1842-1905 website of the Department of East Asian Studies – Japanese Studies, University of Vienna provides the following transcriptions of the kanji associated with each caricature in the bottom half of the print:

1． Tonbi horyo horyo
2． Genbu aitaka Sakuramaru
3． Riku wa kachi go-banzai
4． Pekin kaminari doji-oyaji
5． Hōtō ni mo fude no ayamari
6． Umi katte ji katamaru
7． Teijo jōbu ni mamorezu
8． Heijō chan nenbutsu
9． Atama kakushite shiri kakusazu

The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons is a theme that has captivated the imagination of Japanese artists for centuries. Since the Heian period (794-1185 AD), and perhaps even earlier, Japanese painters have rendered scenes of demonic creatures romping and cavorting at night. Japanese story tellers say that one night each summer all sorts of terrifying beings make their way to the mountains to enjoy themselves with games and amusements.

The publication by Toriyama Sekien of a book on Hyakki Yakō in 1776 signaled a new interest in the fantastic theme of Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, which was to last throughout the Edo and Meiji periods. Late in the nineteenth century, the printmaker Utagawa Yoshiiku (1833-1904) produced several imaginative illustrations based on the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. One of these was his Kokkei Wanisshi-ki (Comical Record of Japanese History), which employs the theme of 100 demons to comment on contemporary Japanese military actions in China.