Document A: Roosevelt Public Speech (ORIGINAL)
It is unwise to depart from the old American tradition and to discriminate for or
against any man who desired to come here as a citizen, save on the ground of
that man’s fitness for citizenship. . . .We cannot afford to consider whether he is
Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile; whether he is Englishman or Irishman,
Frenchman or German, Japanese, Italian, Scandinavian, Slav, or Magyar. . . .
The entire Chinese coolie class, that is, the class of Chinese laborers, skilled and
unskilled, legitimately come under the head of undesirable immigrants to this
country because of their numbers, the low wages for which they work, and their
low standard of living.
Source: Public speech by Roosevelt, December 1905.
Document B: Roosevelt Letter to Friend (ORIGINAL)
The California Legislature would have had an entire right to protest as
emphatically as possible against the admission of Japanese laborers, for their
frugality, abstemiousness and clannishness make them formidable to our
laboring class, and you may not know that they have begun to offer a serious
problem in Hawaii—all the more serious because they keep an entirely distinct
alien mass. Moreover, I understand that the Japanese themselves do not permit
any foreigners to own land in Japan, and where they draw one kind of sharp line
against us they have no right whatever to object to our drawing another kind of
line against them. . . .I would not have objected at all to the California Legislature
passing a resolution, courteous and proper in its terms, which would really have
achieved the object they were after.
Source: Letter from Roosevelt to a friend on May 6, 1905, in which he criticizes
the California Legislature’s recent move to restrict immigration from Japan.
Japanese Segregation in San Francisco
Document C: Roosevelt to Congress (ORIGINAL)
But here and there a most unworthy feeling has manifested itself toward the
Japanese——the feeling that has been shown in shutting them out from the
common schools in San Francisco, and in mutterings against them in one or two
other places, because of their efficiency as workers. To shut them out from the
public schools is a wicked absurdity….
The mob of a single city may at any time perform acts of lawless violence against
some class of foreigners which would plunge us into war. That city by itself would
be powerless to make defense against the foreign power thus assaulted, and if
independent of this Government it would never venture to perform or permit the
performance of the acts complained of. The entire power and the whole duty to
protect the offending city or the offending community lies in the hands of the
United States Government. It is unthinkable that we should continue a policy
under which a given locality may be allowed to commit a crime against a friendly
nation…”
Source: Roosevelt’s annual message to Congress, December 4, 1906.
Japanese Segregation in San Francisco
Document D: Roosevelt Letter to Secretary Metcalf (ORIGINAL)
The White House
Washington, Nov 27, 1906
My Dear Secretary Metcalf:
….I had a talk with the Japanese Ambassador before I left for Panama; read him
what I was to say in my annual message, which evidently pleased him very
much; and then told him that in my judgment the only way to prevent constant
friction between the United States and Japan was to keep the movement of the
citizens of each country into the other restricted as far as possible to students,
travelers, business men and the like; that inasmuch as no American laboring
men were trying to get into Japan, what was necessary was to prevent all
immigration of Japanese laboring men—that is, of the coolie class—into the
United States….He assented cordially to this view and said that he had always
been against permitting Japanese coolies to go to America or to Hawaii. Of
course, the great difficulty in getting the Japanese to take this view is the irritation
caused by the San Francisco action. I hope that my message will smooth over
their feelings….
Sincerely yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Source: Letter from Roosevelt to Secretary Metcalf, who went to San Francisco
to investigate the Japanese segregation crisis, November 27, 1906.
Japanese Segregation in San Francisco