Sophia Mojonnier

Barclay
US History 102
3 February 2014
An American Definition of American
Immigrants coming into the United States viewed it as a land of opportunities where they
could prosper and grow in an area free from persecution. It was a place where a poor Japanese
man could work hard and earn six times the wages he did in Japan, or a Jewish Russian family
could live free of anti-Semitic violence. However, there is a large and unspoken if you were
white when it came to moving up the economic ladder. American society as a whole was not
ready to accept these immigrants as American and didnt want them to achieve what was
deemed as true success. The closer they came to it, the more they were ostracized and ridiculed
and the less accepted. Japanese and Russian immigrants found it difficult to fully assimilate into
American society due to the American perception of their race and ethnic backgrounds.
Having endured economic hardships, tales of fantastic wages earned in the United States
seemed immensely appealing to Japanese farmers in the 1890s. Thousands applied to be shipped
off to Hawaii to work, in the hopes of saving wages that were an amount equal to the income of
a governor in Japan (Takaki 233). Men and women alike flocked to Hawaii to work on
plantations, drawn in by promises of wages nearly double what they had the possibility of
earning at home. On the plantations they were made to work in the fields and not given much, if
at all any opportunity to move up in the ranks of employment so the authority of the planters
over their workers would be assured. In order to keep that authority, planters stratified tasks
according to race: whites occupied the skilled and supervisory positions, while Asian immigrants
were the unskilled field laborers (Takaki 239). They wanted to keep the Japanese workers, in
regimented labor and away from positions of actual power within the plantation. The Hawaiian
Super Planters; Association went a step further and in 1904, passed a resolution that restricted
skilled positions to American citizens, or those eligible for citizenship (Takaki 239). Asian
immigrants were, of course, excluded from obtaining American citizenship due to the fact that
they were not white and were then completely restricted in their ability to get ahead in
employment. Out of forty-five mill engineers, only one was Japanese and out of three hundred
and thirty-seven overseers, seventeen were Japanese. In addition to the restrictions applied to
them, Portuguese labors were paid $22.50 per month, while Japanese laborers received only
$18.00 for the same work, only earning equal wages through the Japanese strike of 1909 which
lead to the abolishment of the differential wage system and raised wages (Takaki 243). Despite
having phrased their demands in rather American terms during the strike, the workers on
plantations showed no real desire to assimilate into the American culture or to be considered
American, unlike the Japanese who immigrated to California.
Accounting for only two percent of the population in California instead of forty as was
the case on Hawaii, the Japanese immigrants there encountered heavier racial scorn than those
who settled in Hawaii. Those that were previously skilled laborers in Japan, became farmers in
the United States, as they were not admitted into unions due to their nationality. They were
quickly scorned by white society and [became] the target of hostile and violent white workers
(Takaki 252). Though plantation laborers on Hawaii endured harsh physical labor and the
unchanging belief that they could never be equal to a white American, they formed their own
culture with their fellow Portuguese and Hawaiian workers and were accepted within the group
of laborers while those who attempted to be recognized as American were scored and denied;
always placed into a lower bracket in society. The issue of obtaining citizenship was an
especially large road block in their goals of assimilating into American society and becoming
what was deemed truly successful as an American. Still, the fact of differing race was a major
factor in deciding what it was to be American. People like Takao Ozawa who had graduated
from high school in Berkeley California, and had attended the University of California for three
years [and] moved to Honolulu, where he worked for an American company were denied
citizenship (Takaki 258). The time spent working in America for an American company; time
spent Americanizing himself, was rendered redundant, as the court declared he was not qualified
for citizenship based on the fact that he was not Caucasian. Driven here originally by an
American influence upon the Japanese culture, the Japenese people scrambled to get the
opportunity to emigrate to the United States only to find that American society was not prepared
to accept them as anything more than immigrants, and never as American, natural citizen or not.
Motivated by fear and stories of a better life where a weeks pay equaled a months,
Russian Jews fled to America with visions of a safe haven and money to spare. Within the
Palea region stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea in which the Russian Jews were
forced to stay instories of America being a Garden of Eden [and] the golden land where
Jews would no long be enslaved by dead drudgery roared like wildfire (Takaki 264). They
emigrated as settlers, unlike people of most other nationalities and settled in the Lower East Side
of New York City. A Jewish community started to blossom and thrive and it was noted that they
seemed to be living just like they had in Russia: they resided and worked within that small
compass (Takaki 267). Upon arriving, they were desperate to assimilate themselves into
American culture. They believed that their struggles in labor were transforming them from
greenhorns to Americans. When they arrived in America, they were foreigners in their dress,
language and thinking and one Jewish immigrant recalled that they just didnt know how to
cope with it all, I was unhappy because I didnt know anything and I was frightened When
they used to call me names like greenhorn, I felt that I would rather die than hear it again
(Takaki 280) and thus began their desire to become an American and assimilate themselves
into a society that was not prepared to accept them. As they grew more and more successful,
anti-Semitic violence grew increasingly popular.
Increasing presence of Jewish students at universities like Harvard provoked backlash
instead of the acceptance they were striving to achieve. In their attempts to better their chances in
getting white collar careers instead of blue collar factory jobs, American students reacted in
outrage, expressing resentment in statements along the lines of Jews are an unassimilable race,
as dangerous to a college as indigestibal food to man. They are governed by selfishness.
They do not mix. They destroy the unity of the college and they memorize their books! Thus
they keep the average of a scholarship so high that others with a degree of common sense, but
less parrot-knowledge, are prevented from attain a representative grade (Takaki 286). With
anti-Semitism growing rapidly, and the idea of limitation of Jewish admittance by Harvards
president, new admissions criteria that required a photograph of the person applying were
instituted. While official policies stressed the need for well-rounded rather than strictly studious
students and for regional balance from interior regions rather an overrepresentation from New
York City it was common thought that Jews could be identified by their Semitic facial
features and after the establishment of these new policies, Jewish admissions to Harvard
declined, fluctuating between 10 and 16 percent just as President Abbot Lawrence Lowell had
written to the Board of Overseers in March of 1922 (Takaki 287). The success of Jews in
America seemed to fuel hatred and the more they assimilated into American society, the more
the backlash and anti-Semitism rose. Job listings for many gentile companies specified
Christians only [and] many hospitals turned away Jewish doctors for internships, and
prestigious law firms refused to hire Jewish lawyers refusing to employ them because of their
ethnic background, despite the fact that they met qualifications (Takaki 289). When seeking new
homes in the middle-class areas of New York, for example, Harlem, they were met with For
rent signs [that] warned they were not welcome: Keine Juden, und keine Hunde (No Jews, No
Dogs or clauses that restricted selling the property to anyone Jewish (Takaki 289). Despite this,
they kept settling in areas where available housing was found. They were moving up within
society; however their expansion was shaped by anti-Semitic borders. The Russian Jews may
have seen themselves as American, but Americans were not ready to accept them as such.
Ethnic groups such as the Japanese and Russian found it difficult to assimilate into
American society due to the discrimination against their racial and ethnic background. The more
they attempted to Americanize themselves, the more they were rejected by American society as
a whole. Achieving any modicum of success was viewed as threatening, and the non accepting
stance of the American society was made well known by restrictive laws and racist views.
Having come to the United States with hopes and dreams for a better life than at home, they soon
found themselves ostracized and unwelcomed because of the American peoples belief that they
did not meet the criteria to truly be American.