@blatham,
The west coast of the United States was the home of the Yellow Peril hysteria in the United States even before the Great War. In fact, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 can be seen as beginning, although certainly the will to exclude the Chinese had to be there for Congress to have acted. In 1880, San Francisco city council passed an act limiting the number of laundries that could be operated by a person in the city. By then, with the Chinese having come for the gold rush and then the building of the transcontinental railroad, all of the laundries in San Francisco were owned by Chinese. This lead to an important decision by the Supremes. They had no power, of course, to rule on the Chinese Exclusion Act unless and until someone sued. But in the case of the San Francisco ordinance, a Chinese gentleman named Yick Wo sued city council, in the case which became famous as
Yick Wo versus Hopkins. This was one of those rare cases where the vote of the Court was unanimous. The basic premise was that it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It only slowly made itself felt in other rulings, though.
Theordor Roosevelt, Jr., the 26th President and arguably the most popular Republican president in our history, was really frustrated by the Yellow Peril bullshit. He had negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize), and then had to deal with another San Francisco ordinance which forbad Japanese and Korean children from attending public schools--although city council was not providing pulic schools for the excluded students. Roosevelt was ready to tear his hair out. Mr. "Walk softly but carry a big stick" quietly asked the city fathers of San Francisco if they liked having military bases located in northern California. He couldn't do anything about that separate but equal bullshit, but the city council hurried to get schools set up for Japanese and Koreans.
The Chinese Exclusion Act had made labor recruiters shrug, and then go out and get Japanese and Korean laborers, mostly for the growing demand of stoop labor in the San Fernando valley (they hadn't discovered Mexicans yet). Of course, the influx of Japanese and Koreans just fueled the Yellow Peril hysteria. The state of Washington was the next hot spot for Yellow Peril hysteria and grandstanding politicians. A good politician is always careful not to waste the opportunity presented by public hysteria. Plump's "Make America Great Again" played into racist hysteria at having a black president. The none too subtle message was that America couldn't be great with a black man in the Oval Office. It's probably just a matter of time before the putrid Yellow Peril corpse is dug up and put on display again.
