FDR - Jean Edward Smith [484]
6. The Japanese protest note of May 9, 1913, pertaining to California’s land statute was summarily rejected by President Wilson, precipitating a brief war scare (see chapter 6). In 1920 California enacted additional legislation denying Japanese the right to lease agricultural land. More than a dozen states followed California’s example. The statutes were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Terrance v. Thompson, 263 U.S. 197 (1923).
Wilson’s action at Versailles is more shameful. When on April 11, 1919, the Japanese delegation sought to amend the preamble to the League of Nations Covenant to include a reference to racial equality, a majority of delegations voted in favor. Wilson, who was presiding, ruled the amendment out of order because of the strong opposition it faced. His dubious holding was not appealed by the Japanese. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919 316–321. Also see David Hunter Miller, 2 Drafting of the Covenant 387–393 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928).
Section 26 of the Immigration Act of 1924, 43 U.S. Statutes at Large 153–169, which excluded “aliens not eligible for citizenship” from admission to the United States, was aimed exclusively at the Japanese, since all other Orientals had been excluded by prior legislation. The provision was enacted over the vigorous objection of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes.
7. Samuel Flagg Bemis, the late dean of American diplomatic historians, wrote that the Root-Takahira agreement “suggests President [Theodore] Roosevelt was preparing to give Japan a free hand in Manchuria as he had done already in Korea. He had already come to feel that the Philippines were the ‘Achilles heel’ of the United States, and that the United States could not fight Japan over Manchuria.” Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States 495–496 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963). Elihu Root was TR’s secretary of state; Kogoro Takahira was Japan’s ambassador in Washington. For the exchange of notes that constitute the agreement, November 30, 1908, see Foreign Relations of the United States, 1908 511–512 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1912). Also see Thomas A. Bailey, “The Root-Takahira Agreement,” 9 Pacific Historical Review 19–35 (1940).
8. Quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy: A History 540 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).
9. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism 214–215 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). I have converted yen to dollars at 3.5 to 1.
10. Raymond Moley, Seven Years After 95 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939).
11. Quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 501.
12. Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor 76–87 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950).
13. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 504.
14. Quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 308 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
15. Fred L. Israel, ed., The War Diary of Breckinridge Long 140 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966).
16. William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940–1941 20–21 (New York: Harper & Row, 1953). The text of the president’s order is in Foreign Relations of the United States 1940, 2 Japan 222 ff. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946).
17. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 506.
18. Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka made it explicit that the pact was aimed at the United States. “It is the United States that is encouraging the Chungking Government,” he told his cabinet colleagues. “Should a solid coalition come to exist between Japan, Germany, and Italy, it will become the most effective expedient to restrain the United States.” Tokyo War Crimes Documents, No. 1259. For the text of the Tripartite Pact, see 3 Documents on American Foreign Relations 304–305 (New York: World Peace Foundation, 1942).
19. WSC to FDR, October 4, 1940, 1 Roosevelt & Churchill: The Complete Correspondence