THE COURSE OF EXCLUSION, 1882-1924: SAN FRANCISCO NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF THE CHINESE AND JAPANESE IN THE UNITED STATES (IMMIGRATION, CALIFORNIA

This study reviews two major San Francisco newspapers, the Chronicle and the Examiner, as sources of information between the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882, the country's first immigrant restriction legislation, and the exclusion of the Japanese in 1924 to determine why these particular immigrant groups were singled out.;For half a century Chinese and Japanese were targets of a dual campaign: to bar them from entering the United States and to restrict the activities of those who were here. This effort was initiated, developed and sustained on the West Coast, where most of the Chinese and Japanese were located. But from the 1880s to World War I, this country accepted the most dramatic surge of immigration the world had ever seen. Millions of men, women and children left their homes and traveled to the United States to seek better living conditions and a more favorable future. This was not a one-sided effort, either. American railroads, businessmen and owners of farm land sought potential newcomers from overseas, advertised for them, needed them.;During the four decades between 1882 and 1924, the pages of the Chronicle and Examiner tell the story of the opposition to the Chinese and Japanese, a story of racial bias which dominated all other aspects of the relationship. Two major reasons given for the effort to exclude Chinese, labor opposition and political maneuvering, were important in the passage of the initial Chinese Restriction Act, but the evidence is clear in the two papers that over the years these forces became much less significant.;Notwithstanding the insistence of Alexander Saxton, labor was not at the cutting edge of the Chinese and Japanese exclusion campaigns; notwithstanding the scholarship of Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, politics was not an overriding issue in Chinese restriction; the claim by Roger Daniels and others that Japanese exclusion was racially motivated was correct. The two papers' news coverage and their editorial pages show conclusively that racial bias dwarfed other motives for exclusion of both Chinese and Japanese.