Anglo-Saxonism at the crossroads: Unites States-Canadian responses to Japanese immigration to North America, 1905--1914.

摘要

This dissertation, "Anglo-Saxonism at the Crossroads: U.S.-Canadian Responses to Japanese Immigration to North America, 1905--1914," explores how statesmen, politicians, and a variety of publicists, writers, journalists, and activists in the United States and Canada used Anglo-Saxonism---an ideology that espoused the superiority of the white, "Anglo-Saxon race" above all others---to debate the significance and effects of Japanese immigration to North America in the decade before World War I. The ensuing controversy brought Anglo-Saxonist ideology to a crossroads and opened a new phase in Anglo-Saxonist thought as it shifted across both space and time. After the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Anglo-Saxonists began to turn away from the Atlantic world and the longstanding debate over African-Americans and the "perils" of Jewish and Slavic immigration and increasingly began to focus their attention on Asia and the Pacific Rim and to the "threat" of Japanese immigration. Moreover, the rise of Japan and the "awakening of Asia" forced Anglo-Saxonists to address issues of trade and diplomacy as well as immigration. What emerged from the Japanese immigration debate was a spectrum of thought within anti-Japanese Anglo-Saxonist ideas, politics, and policy that ranged across political space from exclusionist and militarist to accommodationist and assimilationist. The pervasiveness of Anglo-Saxonist ideology also cut across class, regional, and national boundaries. In combating the perceived threats that undesirable immigration posed, Anglo-Saxonists in North America interacted on both the level of the state---in the official political and diplomatic exchanges between governments---and on levels below the state, in the transnational exchange between various groups of people. By bringing together what until now historians have examined only as two separate national narratives, this dissertation aspires to produce a new and more dynamic interactive history of the Japanese immigration controversy in North America in the ten years before World War I. By globalizing this debate, historians can more easily link immigration issues to state-building and identity formation in multicultural societies in the early twentieth century.