Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League , December 1909

As is usual, I'll just deal with the most interesting bits of the proceedings.

Reference is made to a League pamphlet, “Japanese Conquests of the Domestic Occupations, and Some of the Remedies that Might be Applied.” I haven't seen the pamphlet, and this is one of the things that bothers me - how much of history has been lost? Even relatively minor pamphlets can be valuable in helping us understand the how and why of something happening in the past.

A letter from a Senator. This is the part that really gets me: “The heterogeneous population which would follow unrestricted of immigration, together with 10,000,000 of negroes, who are at the bottom of the human scale and vastly inferior to Asiatics-...”

Talk about prejudice. He didn't even capitalize the word “negroes.” But saying they are “at the bottom of the human scale” is really, really harsh (and really, really stupid.)

This type of statistical data is very interesting and useful. It totally supports the idea I've read elsewhere that the League was dominated by members of the labor movement. They basically have 106 unions as members, and that makes that group some 77% of the total membership of the League.

Fruit picking was an occupation that some of the Japanese immigrants did, and this person is referring to an attempt to block them from doing that by hiring only whites.

Another reference to the Anti-Jap Laundry League. This is not just personal hatred, but it's organized wide-scale group hatred.

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