The Debate Over Japanese Immigration: The View from France

The story of the Issei — the 100,000 Japanese immigrants who traveled to Hawaii and the United States during the turn of the 20th century — is an epic of survival amid hardship. Through the efforts of labor contractors backed by the Japanese consulate, the majority of the newcomers were recruited to undertake heavy labor on Hawaiian plantations. Others settled on the mainland, predominantly on the nation's Pacific Coast, where they worked as farmers, fishermen, railroad workers, and agricultural laborers. Smaller contingents of students, artists, and professionals also crossed the ocean and scattered through the United States. As the immigrants became established, many brought over “picture bride” wives and started families. Through careful saving of wages and communal self-help, numerous immigrant laborers bought farms and established small businesses, churches, and community institutions. At the same time, they were victimized by widespread racial prejudice and discriminatory legislation. Like other Asian immigrants, they were barred from naturalization by federal law, and therefore from voting, and in many states the Issei were forbidden to marry whites or to practice certain professions. In Hawaii, the white planter class limited educational opportunity and kept Issei in menial labor positions. On the West Coast, white laborers and political leaders, who rigidly excluded Asian workers from unions, organized movements to exclude the Issei from residence on the grounds that they depressed wage scales through their willingness to work for lower pay. Following the “Gentlemen's Agreement” of 1907–8, the entry of Japanese laborers into the country was largely restricted. Shortly thereafter, in response to demands by white farmers enraged by competition from their Issei counterparts, California and neighboring states enacted alien land acts, which forbade all Japanese and other “immigrants ineligible to citizenship” from owning agricultural land. As a result, the Issei were forced to take short-term leases on land or to put their holdings in the names of white colleagues or of their own children, the Nisei (American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry). Exclusionist pressure, founded on nativist opposition to the alleged racial danger posed by the Issei to the American population, flared up again following World War I and climaxed in the Immigration Act of 1924, which outlawed all Japanese immigration to the United States.

Neither Tramp Nor Hobo: Images of Unemployment in the Art of the Ashcan School

This short notice, entitled “When a ‘Hobo’ Works,” which appeared in the New York Times, July 13, 1912, might seem overwrought to contemporary readers in its definitive nature. The need to delineate work and nonwork, however, was quite serious business for Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. During this period, as evidenced in newspaper and journal articles, legislation, and popular culture, there was growing apprehension about the perceived differences and slippage among the ideas of the tramp, the hobo, the vagrant, the unemployed worker, and the worker. Most of this conversation was directed toward defining work and nonwork for men — specifically for white men. Tramping came to be viewed as an affliction of both mind and body, with writers, politicians, and reformers seeking to define the tramp and then theorizing how to put these newly codified bodies to work.Some of the most complex images of joblessness from this period were produced by the Ashcan school of artists, who frequently portrayed jobless men in their paintings and drawings. The Ashcan school, a group of six realist painters who lived and worked in New York City from 1900 to the First World War, established a national reputation as radicals rebelling against what they argued was a conservative artistic community woefully out of touch with modern American life. Ashcan artists depicted what they claimed to be the realities of the city around them — busy streets, shopgirls, ethnic communities, construction workers, and prostitutes, as well as tramps. John Sloan's The Coffee Line, 1905 (Figure 1), is typical of the kinds of images that Ashcan artists produced. The scene is a snowy winter's night in New York with a band of men in line to get a free cup of coffee. Jobless men are the stars here; unwitting leads in Sloan's slice of New York City life. The painting did much to communicate nationally a visual image of the tramp in New York City; it won honorable mention in 1905 at the Carnegie Institute International Exposition and was then exhibited in Chicago; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Dallas; and Seattle.

Lovechild: Stieglitz, O'Keeffe, and the Birth of American Modernism

During the 1910s, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz developed the ambition to create a modern American art and gathered a circle of artists and writers around him who were committed to his spiritual, nature-centered aesthetic. This group of American Moderns is now known as the second Stieglitz circle. A review of the cultural production of this group reveals that concepts of race played a central role in their construction of American modernism. This is especially evident in the discourse about artist Georgia O'Keeffe, who served as the symbol of the aspirations of this circle. Writing under the pseudonym, Search-Light, the writer Waldo Frank made the following observation about the work of O'Keeffe:Arabesques of branch, form-fugues of fruit and leaf, aspirant trees, shouting skyscrapers of the city — she resolves them all into a sort of whiteness: she soothes the delirious colors of the world into a peaceful whiteness.As indicated by the title of Frank's essay, “Georgia O'Keeffe: White Paint and Good Order,” the circle felt that O'Keeffe's arrangement of colors, the literal pigments that she used to make her paintings, achieved a harmonious pattern that represented the ideal world they imagined. The use of whiteness to describe their desired configuration of the world was even more apparent in an assessment of O'Keeffe's paintings by cultural critic Paul Rosenfeld:A white radiance is in all the bright paint felt by this girl… O'Keeffe makes us feel dazzling white in her shrillest scarlet and her heavenliest blue … This art is, a little, a prayer that the indifferent and envious world, always prepared to regard self-respect as an insult to its own frustrate and crushed emotions, may be kept from defiling and wrecking the white glowing place.

New Women in the New Pacific: Japanese–American Romances in the Context of U.S. Empire

In the title of a 1903 American Journal of Sociology essay, Ernest W. Clement announces a new phenomenon: “The New Woman in Japan.” By this title, he quickly explains, he does not mean to satirically compare this Japanese sociological development to the American “parody of man” usually associated with the phrase, because “such a creature as that called the ‘new woman’ in the Occident has not yet appeared to any great extent among the Japanese.” Although sometimes in Japan “the process of the new woman's evolution may be disfigured by some accident” producing “a sickening sort of person,” Clement's interest is not in particular aberrations, but rather in “the abstract, legal new woman” created by recent changes in Japan's civil code. In this abstraction Clement sees improvement on previous Japanese laws that “relegat[ed] woman to an abnormally inferior position.” Clement thus assures readers that, although Japan's modernization hinges upon its women's legal and cultural status, female advancement in Japan will not approach the “abnormal” excesses of the United States. Quoting Alice Mabel Bacon's influential book Japanese Girls and Women to stress this point, Clement explains that Japanese men are adopting many Western habits and opinions, but they still “shrink aghast, in many cases, at the thought that their women may ever become the forward, self-assertive, half-masculine women of the West.” Yet still, many of these Japanese men express “a growing dissatisfaction with the smallness and narrowness of the lives of their wives and daughters — a growing belief that better educated women make better homes.”

The Painting of Jack Levine and the Politics of Criticism

Jack Levine's Feast of Pure Reason (Figure 1) established him at the forefront of the New York art world when he was just twenty-two years old. Levine's meteoric rise in the years before the Second World War is evidenced by his inclusion in key exhibitions during that time as well as by critical acclaim in both the art magazines and the popular press. Art News went so far as to dub him the “dazzling newcomer.” In the years following the war, however, the art establishment's consensus on Levine's work went through a dramatic reversal. Just how complete was this turnaround is plainly visible in a review, also in Art News from 1955, where Levine's painting was described as “unlikable … tired, thin and lacking in wit.”

A Community Art Center for Harlem: The Cultural Politics of “Negro Art” Initiatives in the Early 20th Century

During the interwar decades, African American artists grew in number and visibility, and a wide range of publications featured stories on so-called Negro art. Notices on Negro art exhibitions and educational initiatives appeared in the black press and the mainstream mass media, as well as in special interest publications ranging from Art News to the Club Candle (the newsletter of the New Rochelle Women's Club). Though small in number, collectively these events served as opportunities to measure the overall progress or pulse of the African American artist.

Cavaliers and Crackers, Tara and Tobacco Road: The Myth of a Two-Class White South

In Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, eminent southernist Y(stet)Fred Hobson argues that since the early 19th century, southern discourse has been dominated by a desire to explain the South to a nation critical of its practices. This “rage to explain” was particularly apparent in the era known as the Southern Renaissance — the period roughly between World War I and World War II that saw a flowering of southern letters and intellectual life. During this period, southern poets, novelists, essayists, historians, and sociologists participated in a comprehensive enactment of the southern “rage to explain” the South, both to itself and to the rest of the world. Within this outbreak of explanation, a significant pattern emerges: a pattern of resistance to what I shall call the myth of a two-class white South.Throughout American history, northerners and southerners alike have colluded to create the impression that the antebellum white South consisted of only two classes: aristocratic planters on one extreme and debased poor whites on the other. This impression was initiated in the 18th century, when William Byrd's histories of the dividing line introduced the image of the poor white in the form of the laughable “Lubberlander.” The stereotype of the comic and/or degraded poor white can be traced from Byrd through George Washington Harris's tales of Sut Lovingood (1867) to William Alexander Percy's diatribes against poor whites in Lantern on the Levee (1941) and William Faulkner's unflattering portrayal of the Snopeses (1940–59). Meanwhile, the images of the courteous, kindly planter and of the plantation as pastoral idyll can be traced from John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) through the postbellum plantation fiction of Thomas Nelson Page to Stark Young's Civil War romance, So Red the Rose (1934).

Go Away Little Girl: Gender, Race, and Controversy in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

It's remarkably simple, really.Constructed in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, generally referred to as the “Wall,” consists of two black granite wings, each almost 250 feet long, which meet at an obtuse angle that is submerged into the landscape of the National Mall, a green space between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials and some distance behind White House, in Washington, D.C. The form of the Wall, designed by Maya Ying Lin, is minimalist in nature, not only because it includes the right angles, hard edges, shiny surface, and repeated increments of Minimalism, but because even though it is a war memorial, unlike most, its only ornament and representation is the seemingly endless list of 58,226 names of American service men and women killed in Vietnam.

The Life of Mary Anderson: An Intimate Response to the Turn-of-the-Century World of Transatlantic Migration

On the green slopes of Slieve Martin in County Down where the Mourne Mountains reach Carlingford Lough rests a forty-ton glacial rock called Cloughmore. According to Irish folklore, the giant Fionn M'Comhal hurled the enormous boulder at Benandonner, his Caledonian foe from Scotland, and many believe that ancient Druids chose the site for their rituals. Rain obscures the view from the stone's side some two hundred days of the year, but on a clear day, a stunning vista from Cloughmore emerges: streams trickling down to the shores of the deep Irish Sea and, amidst woods running uphill, the small village of Rostrevor.