Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

Orientalizing the Pacific Rim:
The Production of Exotic Knowledge By American Missionaries and Sociologists in
the 1920's
“In meeting persons of another race there is . . . a certain amount of adventure involved.” 1
Winifred Raushenbush
In the first week of June, 1924, a middle-aged missionary named J. Merle Davis
paid a visit to the Chinatown of Fresno, California. The Chinatown was small, only a
block or so along Tulare Street, and Davis would have had no trouble locating the
building for which he was looking. If it had been nighttime, he could have been guided
by the brilliant neon sign which announced the Yet Far Low Restaurant, but even in
the daylight by which he walked, the structure of the electric sign on the corner of
Tulare and China Alley was easily visible.
Merle Davis was not a Californian. His father had been an American missionary
to Japan, and Davis had grown up there. After graduating from college in the United
States, he had returned to Japan to serve as the Secretary of the Tokyo YMCA (Young
Men's Christian Association), and only recently had Davis moved to the United States.
At this moment, he was on his way to meet Flora Belle Jan, the seventeen year old
daughter of the man who owned the Yet Far Low chop suey restaurant. Though Jan’s
family was well-off by Chinatown standards, none of this wealth was apparent within
the living quarters attached to the restaurant. It was crowded, dark and dirty, and to
1 Winifred Raushenbush, "Address to Tentative Findings Conference, March 21-26,
1925." Findings Conference Folder, Papers of the Survey of Race Relations, Hoover
Institution Archives, Stanford University.
1

Davis, reeking of Chinatown smells. Within this humble home, Flora Belle Jan slept in a
half loft, one side of which was divided into a place for clucking hens.
Davis was fascinated by the young woman. This was his second visit, and
despite her surroundings, he saw enormous potential in her. Jan was witty, poised and
talkative, with a penchance for being "modern" and "unconventional" in the manner of
a young flapper. Armed with a vivacious intelligence and imagination, she had
ambitions to be a writer, and several of her stories had been published in William
Randolph Hearst’s prestigious San Francisco Examiner. During his visit, Davis chatted
with Jan about her parents’ disapproval of her conduct, and how she was afraid that
they would not support her wish to attend Berkeley and further her career.
Afterwards, he left convinced that with the “right handling and leadership she might
make a great deal of herself and become a real help to her own people.” 2
What was going on here? Why was this missionary from Boston through Japan
so interested in this young Chinese American flapper in Fresno? From this initial
location in the Yet Far Low chop suey restaurant in Fresno, I would like to fan out in a
number of directions and answer certain questions. How did it happen that J. Merle
Davis, and behind him a network of American Protestant missionaries, came to this
2 Descriptions and quotes are from letters, J. Merle Davis to Robert E. Park, June 1 and
June 5, 1924. J. Merle Davis Correspondence Files, Papers of the Survey of Race
Relations, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Biographical information
on J. Merle Davis from his correspondence and from his biography of his father, Soldier
Missionary: A Biography of Rev. Jerome D. Davis, D.D., Lieutenant-Colonel of Volunteers and
for Thirty-Nine Years a Missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions in Japan (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1916). For more on Flora Belle Jan, see
the extensive research on her in Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese
American Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
2

small Chinatown in California? What did he see in her? And what did his interest have
to do with the American institutions of Orientalism in the 1920's?
This essay will trace how American missionaries of the YMCA International
connected the conversion of "Orientals' in Asia with the sociological study of 'Orientals'
in America. 3 Beginning with the Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast of the
3 I use the term "Oriental" not because I condone its use as a name or marker, but
because it reflects a specific historic usage and category. The current usage for people
who can trace their heritage back to Asia or the Pacific Ocean is "Asian Pacific Islanders,"
a label which encompasses Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Samoan, Hawaiian,
Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Indonesian and other such ancestry. The term "Asian
American," which replaced "Oriental" in the 1970's, still works as a more pleasant and
politically useful label for many of the same people who were formerly known as
"Orientals." There has been a voluminous literature on the history of the term
"Oriental," spurred especially by Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).
For a larger discussion of American "Orientalism," particularly in the form of social
scientific definitions, see Henry Yu, Thinking About 'Orientals:' Race, Migration and the
Production of Exotic Knowledge in Modern America (Oxford University Press, manuscript in
progress). Relatedly, I use the term "white" for that constellation of people who benefit
from inclusion into the category of "whiteness" by being defined as different from those
Americans of "color." For the central role of race in American history, see Michael Omi
and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1986).
See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class (London: Verso, 1991); Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of
White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Alexander
Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (London: Verso, 1990); Virginia
Dominguez, White by Definition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986) for
3

United States between 1923 and 1926, and continuing through the formation of the
Institute of Pacific Relations in 1926, a network of American missionaries and social
scientists criss-crossed Asia, America, and Hawaii, producing knowledge about the
relations between people living at each of these locations. In the course of their
explorations of what they labelled the Pacific Rim, they created a body of theories about
the differences between 'Orientals' and 'Occidentals.' 4 Furthermore, the American
missionaries and sociologists would entrench their scholarly discourse within a set of
academic and funding institutions which would disseminate and reproduce their
interesting discussions of the evolution of "whiteness" as a social, legal, and economic
category.
4 The term "Pacific Rim" achieved a currency in the 1980's, due in large part to the rising
awareness of economists and policy experts of the power of Asian economies and the
declining role of American trade with Europe. West coast cities such as Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles were seen to be the economic future of America, connected
to the rising trade centers of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Singapore. The rise in
Asian versus European immigration to the U.S. in the decades since the immigration
reform or 1965 also contributed to an awareness that it would be Asian connections and
culture which would define America's future. The most popular rendition of this shift
from Eurocentrism to Asiacentrism was Frank Gibney's television series and book,The
Pacific Century: America and Asia in a Changing World (New York: Scribner's, 1992).
Though missionaries and sociologists in the 1920's occasionally used the term Pacific
Rim, they also used phrases such as Pacific Basin, with no singular term achieving the
popular usage which Pacific Rim had in the 1980's. See the various essays highly critical
of the recent usage of the term Pacific Rim in Arif Dirlik, editor, What is in a Rim? Critical
Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).
4

definitions of the 'Orient.' 5 This essay examines how American institutions of
'Orientalism' arose in the 1920's, putting in place definitions of the great physical and
cultural "distance" between 'Orientals' and 'Americans' which would have long term
effects on how Asians were understood within American academia for the rest of the
twentieth-century.
Our first question concerns what the missionary J. Merle Davis was doing in
California. He had been sent on a reconnaissance trip to the West Coast by the Institute
of Social and Religious Research, a New York-based organization which channelled
Rockefeller Foundation money into what it deemed worthy social research projects.
Run by a number of Protestant ministers with a deep concern over social welfare and
the state of religiousity in the United States (they were often connected with the label
of ‘social gospel’), the Institute’s stated purpose was to finance scientific research which
would serve the aim of social reform. 6 One of the Institute’s key members was John R.
Mott, a leader in the YMCA movement in the United States, and the founder of the
YMCA International. The YMCA movement had been planned in the last two decades
5 For the relationship between power and knowledge, see Michel Foucault, The Order of
Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), andThe History
of Sexuality , Volumes One and Two (New York: Vintage, 1990); and Edward Said,
Orientalism .
6 The Institute was also at that time funding Robert and Helen Lynd’s research in
Muncie, Indiana which would result in their famous book, Middletown: A Study In
American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929). On the missionaries'
internal histories of John Mott and the YMCA movement, see Galen M. Fisher, John R.
Mott: Architect of Cooperation and Unity (New York: 1952) and Citadel of Democracy: The
Story of the Public Affairs Record of Stiles Hall (Berkeley: The YMCA of University of
California, 1955).
5

of the 19th-century as an attempt to make Christianity a practical element of everyday
modern life, targeting the urban centers of America and the world. The mission of the
YMCA was to promote goodwill and harmony through institutions which organized
social activities that encouraged fair play and cooperation. As an act of 'social gospel,'
the YMCA was an attempt to expand religiousity from a private, individual orientation
into the social acts of everyday life.
In 1922, several YMCA missionaries who had returned from Japan pressed for a
research survey into the widespread anti-Japanese agitation on the West Coast. 7
George Gleason, the secretary of the YMCA in Los Angeles, and Galen Fisher, the
secretary of the Institute in New York, had both worked in an earlier time at the YMCA
in Tokyo, and along with Davis they were of a generation of highly trained and
devoted ministers who had answered John Mott’s call to promote international
understanding and goodwill through foreign missions. To them, the increasingly
strident calls for Japanese exclusion in California and the other Pacific states demanded
attention. Davis, therefore, had been sent to the West Coast to find out what could be
done.
Since the first anti-Chinese riots of the 1870’s, Protestant missionaries had been
one of the few allies of Asian immigrants in the United States. Concurrent with their
7 Papers of the Survey of Race Relations, already cited, Boxes 11-14. Surveys had
become a popular research and social reform device at the time, particularly after the
Pittsburgh Survey, a large scale effort carried out between 1909 and 1914 which
investigated the conditions of industrial workers in that city. Considering topics such as
health, sanitation, housing, wages, industrial accidents, education, crime, juvenile
delinquency, and other social conditions, the Pittsburgh Survey became a model for
reform-minded research. Paul Kellogg Papers, Social Welfare Archives, University of
Minnesota.
6

Far Eastern missions, Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians had set up missions to
‘heathens’ within America itself. Beyond the goals of conversion and saving souls,
these missionaries were also concerned with the social welfare of immigrants. The
missionaries believed that the numerous laws passed by state and federal legislatures
which discriminated against ‘Asiatics’ in America made their work in Asian countries
more difficult; however, despite the fact that it was in their own interests to lessen the
harsh treatment of ‘Orientals’ in America, the missionaries’ condemnations of
American injustice were nonetheless heartfelt. 8
The missionaries had a long history of involvement in the effort to counter anti-
Asian agitation. For example, the most prominent friend of the Japanese in the
country, the Reverend Sidney Gulick, had been born in Japan and by the 1920's had
spent the majority of his life there. As Oriental Secretary for the Federal Council of
Churches of Christ in America, he had published a series of pamphlets and books
attacking restrictive American immigration and land-owning legislation in regard to
Asians, and calling for equal and just treatment of immigrants and aliens regardless of
race, color or religion. 9 The Federal Council, as an umbrella organization of Protestant
evangelical churches, was internationalist in orientation. Besides immigration reform, it
had tried to promote "friendly relations" between the United States and Asian
8 Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1939), 35-36. Also see Wesley Woo, “Protestant Work
Among the Chinese in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850-1920,” Unpublished PhD
dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, 1983.
9 The American Japanese Problem: A Study of The Racial Relations of the East and the West
(New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1914) Gulick also wrote a book emphasizing the danger to
American ideals which mistreatment of the Chinese and Japanese presented, American
Democracy and Asiatic Citizenship (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1918).
7

countries by calling for such acts as the elimination of the opium trade, universal
disarmament, and Philipine independence. Both Sidney Gulick and J. Merle Davis were
solidly esconced within a network of ‘social gospel’ ministers and missionaries which
composed the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, the American Board of Foreign
Missions, the YMCA and YWCA, and the Institute of Social and Religious Research.
By the end of 1923, Davis had decided that the Institute of Social and Religious
Research should pledge $55,000 towards a Survey on Race Relations on the Pacific
Coast. This ambitious effort was aimed at not only discovering the facts about the
"racial situation" in the West, but also at bringing pro- and anti-Asian groups together
in a united research project. 10 Because of the political polarization and hostility over the
desirability of ‘Oriental’ immigration, Davis believed that just getting the two sides to
talk would be a difficult endeavor. But in accordance with the missionaries’ larger aims
of good-will and peaceful reconciliation, he felt that the bringing together of the
opposing sides into a mutual dialogue about ‘objective’ facts would be one of the
greatest accomplishments of the survey. 11
10 Papers of the Survey of Race Relations, Box 11. The Institute was to pay $30,000 of
the cost of the survey, and it was hoped that private fund-raising on the West Coast
would cover the other $25,000. No funds were to be taken from Japanese or Chinese
organizations in the United States though, since the Institute was afraid that such
money would taint the neutral reputation which the survey was seeking.
11 “[W]e can, I believe, make this survey one of the big Christian works of this year on
the whole West Coast. This survey will, we believe, set a precedent for dealing with
the whole terrific race question. It will also, Galen, be a contribution, if not an original
contribution, to the whole question of approaching any serious problem on which
opinions differ.” Letter from George Gleason to Galen Fisher, May 17, 1923, Gleason
Correspondence, Box 11, Papers of the Survey.
8

Davis recognized that the missionaries and the nativists had more than opposing
sympathies in regard to ‘Orientals,’ they also had vastly different backgrounds. In
private letters, the missionaries pinned the source of anti-‘Oriental’ sentiments on
several traits of West Coast ‘whites’: their general lack of education, their origins in the
American South or Catholic Ireland, and their ignorance of ‘Oriental’ culture. It was
no coincidence that the Protestant ministers associated with the survey had themselves
all been college educated, had all originated from the Northeastern United States, and
had all spent significant time in the ‘Orient.’ 12
Curiously, the missionaries believed that their backgrounds in dealing with the
subtleties of ‘Oriental’ culture made them uniquely qualified to overcome the divisions
between differing groups on the West Coast. In recommending his friend Merle Davis
to lead the survey, George Gleason pointed to the time which all of them had spent in
Japan:
The large unanimity of desire to have, as far as possible, labor unions, the
American Legion, chambers of commerce, as well as religious and educational
bodies combine in the survey, makes it very necessary to have an executive
head who possesses the kind of tact which years of experience in Japan seem to
develop in us. I question whether any man on the Coast, or any ordinary man
who has not lived in the Far East, could do the job that needs to be done. 13
12 Papers of the Survey, Box 11, Davis Correspondence, letters between Merle Davis,
George Gleason, Hugo Guy, and Galen Fisher.
13 Letter from Gleason to Fisher, April 20, 1923, Davis Correspondence, Box 11, Papers
of the Survey.
9

The missionaries believed that they knew the Japanese from first-hand
experience, and they remembered how frustrating and difficult it could be to deal with
‘Orientals’ whom they thought might take offense at the slightest mistake. They
blamed the offenses, of course, on the strict demands of social etiquette and politeness
which Japanese society demanded, and not on the difficulties of cross cultural relations,
or even their own penchance for social miscues. In the end, they felt that after dealing
with such an exotic and intricate society as the Japanese, handling the nativists would be
relatively easy.
Who’s Oriental and What’s the Problem
“Is there an Oriental Problem in America? If so, where is it? What are its
manifestations? What do we know of our Chinese, East Indians, Filipinos, and
Japanese? How do they contribute to our wealth and welfare? To what extent
are our impressions in accordance with the facts? These are some of the
questions which The Survey of Race of Relations is trying to answer.” 14
In setting out to research race relations on the West Coast, both missionaries and
nativists agreed that the ‘Oriental problem’ was the central concern. But who was an
‘Oriental’? And what was the ‘problem’?
The answers to these questions, not
surprisingly, depended upon who was being asked. For the Japanese Exclusion
League, the Sons of the Golden West, the American Legion, and other nativist
organizations, ‘Oriental’ was a racial classification bounded not only by presumed
origins in Asia and the Far East (the mythical Orient), but it also reflected a history of
14 “The Survey of Race Relations,” Eliot Grinnel Mears, The Stanford Illustrated Review
(April, 1925). Reprint found in Box 5 of the Papers of the Survey of Race Relations.
10

struggles over the threat to ‘whites’ of cheap labor. Labor organizations and
unionizers had portrayed Chinese ‘coolie’ workers during the late 19th-century as the
greatest threat to ‘free labor’ (‘free’ as opposed to ‘enslaved’), excluding them from
their organizational efforts and using them as the whip to bring ‘white’ labor into
line. 15 By 1923, the Chinese had been so effectively excluded from most occupations
that they were no longer considered a threat. But the nativist rhetoric of a ‘yellow
peril’ and the danger of ‘Orientals’ to America rested largely upon the continuing
memory of how the Chinese ‘problem’ was overcome. When large numbers of
Japanese immigrants came to the West Coast at the turn of the century, , they were
designated easily as the latest "Oriental invasion."
Anti-Japanese organizations pointed to what they saw as unnaturally productive
farming practices as an indication that the growing numbers of Japanese were about to
take over the West. Just like the Chinese before them, the Japanese were portrayed as
unfair competition because of their work habits and their ability to endure hardship and
sacrifice, threatening to crowd out helpless ‘white’ workers and farmers who could not
compete. Worse still, the nativists were frustrated by the strength of the Japanese
15 For discussions of how ‘whiteness’ was constructed with the use of racialized labor
divisions, see Alexander Saxton, The Indispensible Enemy: Labor and The Anti-Chinese
Movement in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971);
Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, Chapter 12 and 13; Roediger, The Wages
of Whiteness; and Ron Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America
(New York: Knopf, 1979). On the images of the Orient which Americans connected to
the Chinese, see Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image
of the Chinese, 1785-1882 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1969) in particular Chapter 8. For a good general discussion of anti-Asian hostility,
Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991).
11

government in protecting Japanese nationals in the United States. Unlike the Chinese
government, which had been relatively powerless to stop the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882, the Japanese government had been able to forestall any federal legislation in the
United States which was discriminatory against Japanese immigrants. The Gentlemen’s
Agreement in 1907 between Japan and the United States had the appearance of a
voluntary act made by the Japanese to limit their emigration to the U.S., and nativist
groups in the West universally called for a strong federal exclusion act; successful anti-
Japanese legislation up until the 1920’s, though, had almost all been on the state level. 16
Not until the new federal immigration laws of 1924, which excluded Asians from entry
into America, did the U.S. government seem to act against the ‘Oriental invasion.’
According to the conspiracy theories of the nativists, the ‘Mikado’ or Japanese
16 The Gentlemen's Agreement was atypical to that point in diplomatic relations
between Western and Asian powers because of the recognition gained by the Japanese
government that they were relatively 'equal' to Western nations, a status won by their
victory over a 'white' nation in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Treatments of anti-
Japanese legislation can be found in Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese
in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988) and
Jacobus tenBroek, et. al., Prejudice, War and the Constitution: Causes and Consequences of
the Evacuation of the Japanese Americans in World War II (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1954). Discussions of anti-Chinese legislation can be found in Charles
J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth-
Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994) and
Sucheng Chan, editor, Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America,
1882-1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991)
12

Emperor was the ultimate fount of the ‘yellow peril’ and served as a symbol for the
effective opposition of the Japanese government to federal laws against the Japanese. 17
The tendency of nativist and labor groups to link racial definitions of ‘Orientals’
with perceived economic conflicts led to the extension of ‘Oriental’ classification to East
Indian and Filipino migrant agricultural workers, even though during the early 1920’s
their absolute numbers were miniscule compared to Chinese and Japanese in the
United States. To the undiscerning eye which could not tell a “Chinaman” from a
“Jap,” the perceived visual difference between ‘traditional Orientals’ and the East
Indians and Filipinos was bridged by their similar economic threat. During the early
days of the Survey of Race Relations, Davis even responded to the suggestions of labor
leaders to consider including Mexicans in the survey’s purview, since they were seen as
one of the larger ‘racial’ labor forces. However, he eventually decided that the
definition of ‘Oriental’ would not stretch that far, and so the practical focus of the
survey was to be the ‘Oriental problem.’ 18
17 One labor leader responded to Davis’ suggestion for an impartial research survey
with the accusation: “I know who you are and where you come from. You are from
Japan and a spy of the Mikado. . . This Survey is loaded with religion and capital. Who’s
going to pay for it anyway? Capital. The capitalists will pay for it and the church will
run it and either way labor will get flimflammed.” Though sounding slightly paranoid,
the accusation had some truth to it: Davis was from Japan and the money did come
from the Rockefeller Foundation. Quote from Winifred Raushenbush, Robert E. Park:
Biography of a Sociologist (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), 108; originally found
in the Papers of the Survey of Race Relations.
18 Papers of the Survey, Box 11, Davis Correspondence. The terms ‘Asiatic’ and
‘Oriental,’ though sometimes interchangeable, could also refer to different
conglomerations of people. For instance, the USC sociologist Emory Bogardus
13

The survey’s focus upon ‘Orientals’ had much to do with its missionary
organizers. Davis, Gleason, and Fisher had begun their project because of their
background in Japan and their concern over anti-Japanese agitation; they had only
expanded the focus of the survey to include the Chinese at a much later date.
Strangely, this expansion was less in response to labor leaders, who no longer had
much ‘problem’ with the Chinese, but to the many other missionaries who worked
among the Chinese in both China and the United States. The definition of who in the
end was an ‘Oriental’ was intimately connected with the missionaries’ interest in the
Orient as the geographical location of their mission. They empathized with ‘Orientals’
in America because they viewed them in the same way that they viewed ‘Orientals’ in
the Orient, as potential converts. Organizations such as the YMCA International and
the American Board of Foreign Missions professed a global vision of not only
Christianization but Americanization, spreading the ‘good word’ about the American
way of life, which they saw as a concurrent goal. The Survey of Race Relations was
only one step towards the remaking of the ‘Oriental’ at home, but it fit into the
broader attempt of remaking the ‘Oriental’ abroad. In his justification for the necessity
of the survey, George Gleason explained the duty of the returned missionaries who
were on the west coast:
referred in 1919 to “Asiatic immigrants” by including Armenians and Syrians from
“Western Asia” together with Chinese and Japanese from “Eastern Asia.” By the
Survey of Race Relations five years later, he was referring more specifically to Chinese
and Japanese as “Oriental immigrants.” The point is that the boundaries of the
definitions changed through time with the contexts and situations of usage. Emory S.
Bogardus, Essentials of Americanization (Los Angeles: University of Southern California
Press, 1919, 2nd edition, 1920), 201.
14

It is up to us in this country to find the right way to handle the Japanese
problems out here. To do this requires first of all more accurate knowledge than
we now possess. After this knowledge is secured, political action and Christian
Americanization efforts must follow. 19
The inclusion of the Chinese within the purview of the survey also had much to
do with the missionaries’ definition of the ‘Oriental problem.’ For them, the ‘problem’
lay not with the threat of Chinese and Japanese labor, but with West Coast ‘whites’
and the terrible treatment which they accorded ‘Orientals’ in America. 20 Davis,
Gleason, Fisher, and Gulick had all known Christianized ‘Orientals’ in Japan, and many
converted ‘Orientals’ had ultimately come to the United States. The ‘conversion’ of
‘Orientals’ linked up to the question of their ability to be assimilated into American life,
and the missionaries truly believed that if the American public could come to see
‘Orientals’ as they did, as potential and successful converts to Christianity and
Americanism, then all would be well. The economic threat of ‘Oriental’ labor was a
non-issue once ‘Orientals’ were recognized as fellow Christians and Americans.
19 Gleason to Davis, October 28, 1922, Papers of the Survey, Box 11.
20 Some of the missionaries were quite pessimistic about the potential success of the
survey in ameliorating this ill-treatment of ‘Orientals.’ Harvey H. Guy of Berkeley,
California, one of the returned missionaries from Japan, referred to the impending
exclusion legislation against Asians using the language of a pathologist: “[T]he case
looks very bad. As a friend of mine said about the Survey, it looks like our
investigations will be too late, the diagnosis has become an autopsy. But. . . we may
learn something even from a corpse, so we must go on with the Survey.” Letter from
Guy to Davis, November 26, 1923. Box 11, Papers of the Survey.
15

In an attempt to dispel the illusion that there was a ‘yellow peril’ in the United
States and that Asians were “unassimilable,” the Reverend Sidney Gulick had included
in his book The American Japanese Problem chapters answering ‘Yes’ to questions such
as “Are Japanese Assimilable?” and “Can Americans Assimilate Japanese?” Examples
of the ‘assimilability’ of the Japanese centered around ‘Americanized’ Japanese
children in Christian homes and schools in America, complete with pictures of them in
American dress and hair-styles. Proudly, one of the picture captions announced that
the “American-Japanese” man in the photograph could “speak no Japanese” and was
a graduate of Yale--obvious proof that he had reached the pinnacle of ‘white, anglosaxon,
Protestant’ achievement in America. 21 Even the reference to ‘American
Japanese’ rather than Japanese American was a calculated attempt at emphasizing the
‘American’ rather than ‘Japanese’ nature of the young man.
Outward signs such as clothing and hair style became the proof of outright
assimilation, since they signified the ‘loss’ of traditional dress and speech. Gulick and
other pro-Japanese writers often used these signs as a rhetorical weapon to combat the
fears of anything less than ‘100% Americanism’ which the nativist organizations were
propagating. 22 Americanization was a focal term in the debate which surrounded the
image of America as a ‘melting pot,’ and as we shall see, the question of ‘assimilation’
became the center of the ‘Oriental problem.’ For the missionaries, a key claim for their
argument against nativist groups such as the American Legion and the Sons of the
Golden West was that ‘Orientals’ were in fact ‘assimilable’ to American life, as proven
21 Gulick, The American Japanese Problem, cited above, 220.
22 The best study of 19th-Century American nativism remains John Higham, Strangers
in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1955)
16

y their adoption of superficial signs of Americanization such as clothing, speech, and
hair-style. American manners and Christian beliefs would surely follow.
The fascination of Merle Davis with Flora Belle Jan, the young daughter of the
chop suey restauranteur, fit into the missionaries’ interest with symbols of effective
assimilation. Jan was American-born, had the mannerisms of a young American
flapper, and proved to all who met her that she was not like the typical ‘Oriental.’ As
Davis gushed, Jan was “the only Oriental in town apparently who has the charm, wit
and nerve to enter good White society. She has been accepted...” 23 In the eyes of
Davis, Flora Belle Jan was the perfect embodiment of successful Americanization, and as
such was the very type of person for which the survey was searching. For these
reasons, she would be used over and over again as an exemplar that successful
assimilation of the ‘Oriental’ was going on in America.
The difference, in the end, between the nativists' definition and the missionaries'
definition of the 'Oriental problem' was that the nativists' believed that the 'Orientals'
were the problem, and the missionaries believed that the nativists were the problem.
In trying to bring everyone concerned together during the Survey of Race Relations,
the missionaries recruited a group of sociologists as experts who could study the
problems in an "scientific" manner. For them, the 'Oriental problem' was limited
neither to the 'Orientals' nor the nativists; according to the sociologists, the missionaries
were part of the problem, too.
A Profession of Faith of a Different Order
23 Papers of the Survey, Box 11, Davis Correspondence, Davis to Robert E. Park, June
1, 1924.
17

During the early planning stages of the Survey of Race Relations, Merle Davis
saw a way to overcome the gulf between the pro- and anti-‘Oriental’ forces: the
survey needed to bring in scientific experts who seemingly had no political stake in the
debate over Asian immigration. The experts would have to come from the outside,
since some of the West Coast academic institutions such as Stanford University had
become associated with pro-‘Oriental’ stands. 24 Davis felt as long as the surveyors
could claim to be conducting ‘scientific’ research and merely ‘gathering facts,’ the
survey would appear politically neutral. 25 In public relations releases to the press, the
rewards for the special role of the universities and research experts in the Survey of
Race Relations were touted repeatedly:
Educators here believe that the race relations survey meeting has been one of
the most important gatherings in many years that the Pacific Coast has seen.
The Survey, it is believed, has thrown more real light on the Asiatic situation, as
it affects the Coast states, than has any other gathering in years. Educated
24 David Starr Jordan at Stanford University was an outspoken defender of Chinese and
Japanese immigrants, and there had been a large controversy at the turn of the
century when E.A. Ross, the prominent social scientist at Stanford, had been fired by
Leland Stanford’s widow because of his open stand against Chinese and Japanese labor.
Leland Stanford, though himself opposed to large-scale settlement of the West Coast
by Asians, had of course made his fortune by using Chinese workers to build his
railroads during the 1860’s.
25 “[W]e are not only promoting the idea of a survey of race relations, but we are also
doing what may eventually prove the bigger thing--promoting the principle of an
unbiased and scientific united approach, by all factions interested, to a controversial
problem.” Gleason to Davis, March 11, 1924, Box 11, Papers of the Survey.
18

persons experience a sense of relief when they learn of any endeavors, entirely
divorced from legislative programs or special formulas, which center about the
greatness of fact. 26
The aura of knowledge and expertise which surrounded the notion of the
university campus was one of the rhetorical myths into which the surveyors wanted to
tap. Like the shrine of a local Shinto deity, or a Catholic pilgrimmage site, the
university campus was a location suffused with powerful meanings: research, facts,
learning, above all, knowledge. For those who believed in enlightenment through
greater knowledge, the "scientific experts" from the hallowed ground of elite
universities could make a rhetorical claim for the greatness of fact in a way in which
the missionaries could not. A correspondent for the Chicago Daily News wrote on
March 23, 1925:
The Survey is looked upon as the beginning of a permanent surveillance of
interracial movements and contacts throughout the Pacific Slope. Scholarship
will inspire and control the work. The G.H.Q. [General Headquarters], in other
words, will be in the universities.
The grandiloquent claims of ‘real enlightenment’ and ‘surveillance’ of ‘racial
movements’ were partly a product of the missionaries’ desire for impartial factfinding,
but they also reflected the current image of social science. Although scientific
sociology as an academic discipline was barely thirty years old, it had already carved
out an impressive niche in almost all of the elite universities of America. Perhaps the
most famous social scientist of those years was the University of Wisconsin’s E.A. Ross,
26 March 26, 1925 edition of the San Francisco Bulletin.
19

the former Stanford University professor and prominent Progressive Party intellectual
who had advocated an instrumental role for social science in the control and progress of
society. 27 Ross and many of his contemporaries pioneered a vision of social science
which shared a tenet with the missions of the Protestant ministers--social reform
planned and implemented by highly educated elites. 28 Indeed, many of the early
27 Ross, who had written Social Control (New York: Macmillan, 1901), extolled the
power of social science in the aid of planned social reform. He was also one of the
sociologists with the most hierarchical conceptions of race. For the rise of sociology as a
discipline, see Mary Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of
American Social Science, 1865-1905 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975); and
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991). In a rather complicated book, one of the myriad things Ross
does is to place the rise of social science in the United States within the context of a
language of ‘American exceptionalism,’ the end achievement being the
transformation by Park’s Chicago school of the idea of America as a ‘melting pot’ into
the ‘objective,’ ‘natural process’ of the ‘assimilation cycle.’
28 The ‘enlightenment project’ of American social reformers at the turn of the century
owed much to the European Enlightenment which spawned the notion of social science,
but its alliance with organized religion differed markedly from the ‘enlightenment’ of
Voltaire and Denis Diderot. The American social scientists scoured the European
traditions for antecedents to their fledgling social science, and found the most
conducive ‘father figures’ in the Scottish Enlightenment (Adam Smith and Adam
Ferguson), who were much less anti-clerical than the French philosophes. For a
canonical discussion of the rise of the ‘science of human society,’ see Peter Gay, The
Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Volume II: The Science of Freedom (New York: Vintage,
1969). It is interesting to contrast Gay’s reading of the European Enlightenment with
20

sociologists had been ministers or missionaries themselves before converting to social
science. The ties of social science and social work inspired by the ‘social gospel’
remained strong. 29
Enlightenment was a means to a better world, and the pursuit of knowledge
about race relations on the West Coast was an end in itself. This goal reflected a belief
in the value of learning, as well as a reflection of the deep faith which both Protestant
Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosphers (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1932) which in comparison is a revealing reflection of the importance
which ‘progressive’ American thinkers placed upon religion and faith in both their
own ‘enlightenment’ and in their view of the the 18th-century version.
29 Chicago sociologist Ellsworth Faris was a former missionary and remained an
ordained minister, and both Ernest Burgess and W.I. Thomas were the sons of
ministers. Robert Park was a member of the church of Edward Scribner Ames, a
pragmatist philosopher at the University of Chicago and a prominent minister of the
‘social gospel.’ Both Albion Small and Charles Henderson, early members of the
Chicago department, saw sociology as a science in service of social problems, and the
Department of Sociology was an important ally of the School of Social Work and
Administration which was housed across the Midway from sociology’s Harper Hall.
During the twentieth-century, Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth both had close
connections to the social workers at the school founded by Edith Abbot and
Sophonisbia Breckenridge, a reflection of their deep interest in immigrant adjustments.
Perhaps the most famous ‘social work’ institution which social scientists at Chicago
became associated with was Jane Addams’ Hull House Settlement. See Robert E. L.
Faris, Chicago Sociology, 1920-1932 (San Francisco: Chandler, 1967) for a description of
the missionary background of Chicago sociology. Robert Faris was the son of
Ellsworth Faris, and a sociology student at Chicago during those years.
21

missionaries and social scientists had in the socially regenerative power of applied
knowledge. We cannot understand the project of the social scientists without putting it
within the context of the religious reformers who shared such similar backgrounds and
goals. As an example, consider Emory Bogardus and William Carlson Smith, both
professors of sociology at the University of Southern California who became involved
with the Survey of Race Relations through their connection with George Gleason and
the YMCA of Los Angeles. Bogardus had grown up on a farm outside of the small
Midwest town of Belvidere, Illinois. Upon attending college in Chicago, he had been
shocked and forever changed by the progressive and cosmopolitan values which he
encountered, explaining that until that time he had accepted without question the literal
interpretation of the Bible. The YMCA movement had affected him powerfully, and for
the rest of his life Bogardus struggled to fulfil the tenets of ‘practical religion’: “I
learned that real tests of religion are what one does with his religious beliefs, what they
do for one, and that daily behavior is a yardstick of what a person’s religion means to
him.” He served as the Director of the School of Social Work at USC as well as the head
of the Department of Sociology, and was instrumental in the Goodwill Industries of Los
Angeles, which collected donated goods and sold them to raise funds for charity
work. 30 William Carlson Smith had been a teacher in Assam, India, with the American
30 All information from Emory Bogardus, A History of Sociology at the University of
Southern California (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1972) and his
autobiography, Much Have I Learned (Los Angeles: University of Southern California
Press, 1962). Quote from page 27. Bogardus’ autobiography was written during his
retirement, along the narrative of a personal journey of constant learning and selfdiscovery.
Curiously, he also published two autobiographical volumes of
Shakespearian sonnets which he had written throughout his life and travels, entitled
The Traveller (1956) and The Explorer (1961).
22

Baptist Foreign Mission Society before attending graduate school in sociology, and
Smith’s dissertation at the University of Chicago was based upon his mission
experiences among the Ao Naga tribe in India. 31 The ‘social gospel’ which advocated
daily efforts to make the world a better place underwrote every moment of Bogardus
and Smith’s work in social science. We cannot understand their devotion to sociology
without taking into account their involvement in programs of personal and social
improvement.
The overlapping backgrounds and shared sense of social mission of the
Protestant ministers and the social scientists allow us to understand why the one man
who did not subscribe to the vision of the Survey of Race Relations as a device for social
reform, Robert E. Park of the University of Chicago, was so insistent in his criticisms of
the missionaries who were his allies. Park, a member of Chicago’s Department of
Sociology and Anthropology, felt that sociology had been too closely allied with
missionaries for too long, and made it a point to try and distance social science from
religious organizations. One of the most prominent social scientists in the country at
the time, Park had been chosen by Merle Davis and the Insitute of Social and Religious
Research to become the Research Director of the Survey of Race Relations. He brought
to the survey not only a badge of scientific expertise, but a very different outlook on
social science than many of his colleagues. To the eventual consternation of many of
the missionaries, Park was also the most influential of the survey researchers.
Park was not a follower of E.A. Ross and other sociologists who saw themselves
as advocates for social reform. To him, the role of sociology was not the improvement
of society, but the description of it and how it worked. Park often professed a deep-felt
distaste for the motives of ‘do-gooders:’
31 William Carlson Smith Papers, UCSB Library, microfilmed from originals in the
Robert Cantwell Papers, University of Oregon Library, Special Collections.
23

The first thing you have to do with a student who enters sociology is to show
him that he can make a contribution if he doesn’t try to improve anybody....The
trouble with our sociology in America is that it has had so much to do with
churches and preachers. . . . The sociologist cannot condemn some people and
praise others.
Sociology cannot be mixed with welfare and religion. “A moral man
cannot be a sociologist.” Sociology should not help to build up reform
programs, but it should help those who have to build these programs to do it
more intelligently. 32
Park’s stance, though it has been called conservative and fatalistic, was one which
was profoundly anthropological. 33 Sociology was the ‘science of human behavior,’
and the subject of study was the mental: the ‘subjective attitudes’ which people have.
The sociologist should be able to understand a social situation from the point of view of
all its participants; moral approbation or disapproval merely blinded the sociologist to
the ‘inner world’ of other people. The findings of sociology could be used by
reformers to make changes, but social scientists themselves should restrict themselves
to discovering and describing what was going on. Park had been a journalist for many
years before coming to sociology, and his style of empirical sociology had more to do
32 Quoted from Raushenbush, Robert E. Park..., 97.
33 See Fred H. Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago
School (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1977), 79-189 for a discussion of later attacks
on Park’s theories. Also Paul Takagi, “The Myth of Assimilation in American Life,”
Amerasia Journal 2 (Fall 1973):149-159, for an attack on Park from the point of view of
the Asian American movement of the 1970’s.
24

with empathy and description than the social prescriptions which the ministers expected
from him. 34
Robert Park tried very hard to distinguish the sociologists from the missionary
reformers, but during the Survey of Race Relations, the distinction was often hard to
maintain. Without the ministers’ network of connections up and down the West Coast,
the sociologists would never have been able to contact someone like Flora Belle Jan.
Protestant church workers were often some of the few ‘whites’ who had close
personal contact with large numbers of the Chinese and Japanese on the West Coast. 35
34 See Matthews, Quest for..., 112-115, for an introduction to the Survey of Race
Relations, especially on how the survey came out of the missionary project, and a
much more insightful analysis of Robert Park than that contained in Raushenbush’s
biography (cited above). For an intellectual history of race and ethnicity within
Chicago sociology, as well as a good discussion of what he calls the “Anglo-American
Burden,” see Stow Persons, Ethnic Studies at Chicago, 1905-45 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1987). Person discusses the survey and the ‘ethnic cycle’ on pages 68-72.
Another study of race theory at the Chicago school is Fred Wacker, Ethnicity, Pluralism,
and Race: Race Relations Theory in America Before Myrdal (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1983), which, unfortunately, does not mention Asians or Asian Americans as
the studied or the studiers. On the rise of a theoretical sociology which became equated
with a more ‘scientific’ approach, see John Madge, The Origins of Scientific Sociology
(Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1962).
35 George Gleason remarked on how he was forced to use his YMCA and church
contacts to do much of the research for the survey in southern California because: “Dr.
Bogardus’ work is largely confined to the university, and Dr. Smith’s largely to the city
and the immediate vicinity.” Gleason to Davis, Sept 2, 1924 , Box 11, Papers of the
Survey.
25

Although Jan professed herself to be “quite out of sympathy with the Baptist Mission
people” and “emanicipated from all religious influence,” Merle Davis was alerted to
the presence of Jan through his contacts with the Fresno Baptist Mission. 36 Davis
located many other research ‘subjects’ through his church connections.
The reliance of the Survey of Race Relations on the network of Protestant
churches and missions on the West Coast had several important ramifications. For one,
the sociologists, because they felt their project was entwined and conflated with the
missionaries, tried to distance themselves rhetorically from the missionary reformers.
The strident tone of Park’s attempts to distinguish the work of social science from the
work of religion reflected just how much they were connected with each other. 37 Social
science was a profession of faith of a different order from the missionary’s, one which
emphasized a belief in ‘objectivity’ and ‘science’ rather than ‘salvation’ and
‘mission.’
36 Davis to Park, June 5, 1924, Box 11, Papers of the Survey.
37 Park was particularly derisive of Davis and the other ministers’ attempts to insure that
everyone involved in the survey felt included and informed. Davis left a voluminous
amount of correspondence, testament to his constant attempts to network and to keep
people feeling involved. As mentioned before, this need to foster communication,
produce harmony, and minimize misunderstandings and conflict, was an essential part
of the missionaries’ goals for the survey. To Park, they were a waste of time. Davis
wrote about how Park took “another shot at our ‘over organization.’ Since his arrival
here in January he has lost no opportunity to ridicule and deplore what he calls the
absurd amount of machinery which we have set up on this Coast for carrying on the
Survey.” Park felt that only a handful of expert researchers was necessary for his
purposes. Letter Davis to Fisher, March 24, 1924, Davis Correspondence, Box 11,
Papers of the Survey.
26

Park, though, was forced to exaggerate the chasm which lay between the two
disciplines. Within the context of a missionary project in which the sociologists were
inextricably bound, Park’s insistence on the sociologists’ difference from the social
reformers took on much more meaning. The social scientists’ belief in what they were
doing was predicated upon their not having to justify the ultimate ‘good’ of their
research. The justification was self-apparent within the larger aim of social reform
which could be derived from a sense of mission shared with the reformers. The
Protestant ministers and the Chicago sociologists both believed in the ultimate good of
‘enlightenment’ and ‘knowledge;’ they just disagreed on how direct the application of
that knowledge would be. Park’s unease with his allies, though, remained throughout
the survey and many of the missionaries became increasingly disillusioned with Park’s
management of the survey research. 38
A major result of the Survey of Race Relations’ reliance on the Protestant
missions was the lasting definition of who and what ‘Orientals’ were. Because the
missionaries had a preponderence of contacts with the Chinese and Japanese on the
West Coast, and in particular Christianized members of these communities, most of the
life histories collected by the survey and subsequent research results reflected these
connections. Because there was virtually no contact with the smaller numbers of
Filipino and East Indian migrant workers on the Coast, those groups dropped out of
the definition of the ‘Oriental problem.’ 39 Moreover, because the missionaries often
38 Harvey Guy, one of the prominent returned missionaries, was particularly put off by
Park’s disdain for reformers, and more than once Davis was required to convince Guy
to remain committed to the survey. Harvey Hugo Guy Correspondence Folder, Box
11, Papers of the Survey.
39 Immigrants from the Philipines would not arrive in great numbers until after the 1924
immigration laws cutting off Japanese immigration (Chinese immigration had been
27

could speak Chinese and Japanese and the sociologists could not, the researchers had to
rely upon the church network for translation and interpretation. The need for ‘native’
translators and informants was acute. The social scientists quickly turned to ‘Oriental’
students in their classes, and by the end of the survey a spate of student theses and
papers concerning the ‘Oriental problem’ had been written in every major university
on the West Coast. 40
The Survey of Race Relations was the first major intersection between American
missionary efforts among 'Orientals' and American sociology’s research interests with
‘Oriental’ immigrants. The fascination of the Protestant ministers in ‘Orientals’ such as
Flora Belle Jan--American-born, ‘enlightened,’ and modern--was to overlap with the
sociologists’ interest in the Americanization and cultural assimilation of ‘Orientals.' In a
modern world of movement and migration, the missionaries believed that they served
as expert travellers whose knowledge of 'Orientals' abroad provided them with
expertise about 'Orientals' at home. In a related way, the sociologists believed that their
knowledge of 'Orientals' in America told them something about 'Orientals' in Asia. This
effectively cut off for decades already). Because the Philipines were under the control of
the United States, Filipinos could move much more freely between the Philipines,
Hawaii, and the mainland United States than foreign nationals, and they became a
major labor source to replace the supplies of other Asian workers cut off by
exclusionary acts. East Indian migrants tended to stay in dominions of the British
Empire such as Hong Kong, Australia, and Canada.
40 For the impact of Orientalist theories on the self-identities of Chinese and Japanese
American intellectuals, see “The ‘Oriental Problem’ in America: Linking the Identities
of Chinese and Japanese American Intellectuals," in Claiming America: Constructing
Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era, edited by K. Scott Wong
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, forthcoming).
28

premise of a traveller's expertise and knowledge had some practical consequences. In
1924, J. Merle Davis began shifting his energies away from the Survey of Race Relations
towards organizing a new project for the YMCA International--a gathering of experts
in North American and Asian countries in order to talk about Pacific relations.
The Institute of Pacific Relations is often remembered by historians for bearing
the brunt of McCarthyism in the 1950's--anti-communists searching for scapegoats
blamed the organization for being one of the prime reasons that the United State "lost"
China. The IPR, however, began its life within the same social networks as the Survey
of Race Relations, and at virtually the same time. The Institute of Pacific Relations,
which would be based in Honolulu, Hawaii (a location which the missionaries very selfconsciously
saw as the crossroads of the Pacific, in particular for their own missionary
movements back and forth across the ocean) represented yet another collaboration
between Protestant missionaries and American social scientists in their efforts to link
the events within the United States to those in Asia. Reiterating the language of
"objective" knowledge and frank discussion free of prejudice, the IPR tapped the same
leading academics who had supported the Survey. Ray Lyman Wilbur, President of
Stanford University, was a major supporter of both the Survey and the IPR, and three
of the head research scientists from the Survey--Robert Park, Elliot Mears, and Roderick
McKenzie--went as American delegates to the first conference in Hawaii. 41
The IPR's first meeting was held in June and July of 1925 on the campus of Oahu
College. The college had been founded by early New England missionaries to Hawaii,
who had given it the Hawaiian name of Punahou, or "new spring," and the first
meeting of the Institute reflected the same ebullient sense of possibility. Much like the
Survey of Race Relations, the missionaries envisioned a flowering of mutual goodwill
41 Statement of Institute of Pacific Relations Held at Honolulu, Hawaii, June 30th to July
15th, 1925, Papers of the Survey, Box 17.
29

and understanding after representatives from Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Korea,
New Zealand, the Phillipines and the United States sat down to talk. Knowledge and
enlightenment would solve the world's conflicts, and the opposition between the Orient
and the Occident could be overcome. If the Survey had defined the meeting of
"Orientals" and "whites" as a worthwhile subject of study, the Institute of Pacific
Relations transformed such meetings into a desirable goal. Creating such meetings of
"strangers" (and turning them into "friends") became an integral part of how the
missionaries believed knowledge was to be produced and used in the modern world.
It was an enterprise fraught with difficulties, an "adventure in friendship" as Robert
Park's assistant Winifred Raushenbush labelled such encounters. 42
The emphasis upon the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean as the central locus for
such encounters was reinforced by descriptions of a new stage in civilization taking
place around the "rim of the Pacific." The Pacific rim became a descriptive label which
connected Asia to the Americas as the new center of world civilization, replacing the
ancient Mediterranean and the recent Atlantic rim. Robert Park descibed the:
impact of divergent peoples and cultures around the whole rim of the Pacific, as
well as in the scattered islands that lie within its wide circumference. The present
ferment in Asia and the racil conflict on the Pacific Coast of America are but
different manifestations of what is, broadly speaking, a single process... 43
By focussing on the Pacific, and in particular Hawaii, as the center, the Pacific rim
concept moved away from descriptions of Asia as Far East of Europe, or the farthest
42 Raushenbush, "Address to Tentative Findings Conference, March 21-26, 1925."
Findings Conference Folder, Papers of the Survey of Race Relations.
43 Robert Park, "Our Racial Frontier on the Pacific," Survey Graphic 56 (May 1926):192.
30

West of the American frontier. In a May, 1926 issue of the Survey Graphic, a reformminded
magazine aimed at social workers and educated elites, the results of both the
Survey of Race Relations and the Institute of Pacific Relations were described at length.
The Pacific Ocean and the Orient was to be America's future:
On the Pacific Coast Americans encounter a new orientation--in both meanings
of the world. Confronted with the Orient at the seam of the hemispheres we
must get our bearings afresh: in the course of time this process amounts to a
reversal of our point of view... We were looking east, toward the Atlantic. Now
we are looking west, toward the Pacific. 44
If the Pacific was the central location for relations between the Orient and the Occident,
then it was up to missionaries and sociologists, expert travellers in the area, to define
the meaning of such encounters. Movement back and forth across the Pacific became
the central metaphor, and Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America became
symbolically interchangable with Chinese and Japanese in Asia. "Orientals" in both
places became understood as the exotic other against which modern America was
defined, and in this process of exoticization the missionaries and sociologists produced
the knowledge of what we might label American Orientalism.
44 Paul Kellogg, "East by West," Survey Graphic 56 (May 1926):133.
31

Movement, Migration and Orientalism
At the Institute of Pacific Relations' first meeting in Hawaii, Roderick McKenzie
presented his initial findings from research conducted during the Survey of Race
Relations. As he continued to study "Orientals" in the United States in the next few
years, he produced a series of papers which indicated that the sociologists were ready
to talk about more than just the place of Asians in America; they were ready to define
the relationship of 'Orientals' and 'Occidentals' worldwide.
Roderick McKenzie was enamoured of the modern world and its capacity for
migration and contact. “Life differs from death in the matter of movement,”
McKenzie wrote, “And the scope of life is defined by the facilities used for overcoming
distance.” 45 Movement and change were the great constants in his study of sociology,
in particular their expression in space: the history of a location had to be tied to its
changing spatial relations with other places. McKenzie might look at the history of a
city, for instance, by considering how the ‘time-distance’ of transportation
technologies connecting it to other cities had changed. Seattle may have been eighty
days away from Hong Kong by clipper in 1849, but only twenty-one days by steamer
in 1880. This might be contrasted with the fact that at the same times, Seattle had been
nearly one-hundred-twenty days by wagon train away from the East Coast in 1849 and
fourteen by train in 1880. McKenzie elaborated his conceptions of the global
interconnections between places and regions in a series of articles dealing with ‘spatial
distance,’ and his great accomplishment was to outline the dynamic relationship
between structural relationships and change brought about by movement and
45 From “Movement and the Ability to Live,” Proceedings of Institute of International
Relations, 1926. Reprinted in Roderick McKenzie, On Human Ecology: Selected Writings,
edited by Amos Hawley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 134.
32

communication. 46 Like Park, McKenzie was enthralled by the ability to move and to
conquer distance which modernity had unleashed upon the world, and he saw it as the
genie which had allowed world dominance by Western societies. “The secret of
environmental control lies in the ability to conquer distance,” he wrote, and it was the
West, particularly the United States, which had conquered distance the best.
The great difference between the East and the West at the present time is in the
matter of movement. In comparison with the West, the East is sluggish,
stagnant, immobile. Although Asia possesses over half the world’s population,
nevertheless, she has less than nine per cent of the world’s motor cars, less than
three per cent of the world’s telephone instruments, and sends about one per
cent per year of the world’s telegraph messages. 47
McKenzie’s musings upon the differences between East and West were common
among the Chicago sociologists, and they often made large scale generalizations about
the Orient and the Occident. Fifteen years earlier, William I. Thomas had held a forum
in the American Journal of Sociology on “The Significance of the Orient for the Occident,”
and his conclusions still structured the way many of the Chicago social scientists saw the
46 “Spatial Distance and Community Organization Pattern,” Social Forces 5 (June
1927):623-638; “The Concept of Dominance and World-Organization,” American Journal
of Sociology 33 (July 1927):28-42; “Spatial Distance,” Sociology and Social Research 13 (July
1929):536-544. All reprinted in Hawley’s edition of McKenzie’s writings, On Human
Ecology, cited above.
47 “Movement and the Ability to Live,” 135.
33

East and West in 1924. 48 Thomas started with a binary opposition between Occident
and Orient, and threw in a strange mix of civilization stage theory and thoughts on the
nature of human progress.
The social scientists had rejected racial hierarchy based upon biological
superiority or inferiority, but they fiddled with theories for understanding the
hierarchical development of civilization. Each stage of civilization was marked by a
dominant mode of social relations: ‘primitive’ societies by face to face, intimate
relations, ‘modern’ societies by more faceless relationships between strangers. The
progress from ‘primitive’ society to other forms of civilization, such as ‘modern’ life
with its cosmopolitan outlook and loose social organization, was a description which
paralleled the Chicago sociologists’ interest in transformations between rural/urban,
and Old World/New World. 49
The opposition between an earlier stable, rural, small village stage of society and
a more recent, urban stage of society was taken by Thomas and coupled with the idea
of modernity based upon movement and migration. The West was modern because it
was in constant flux and conflict; contacts between different peoples had created
cosmopolitan outlooks and the ability to quickly adapt--rising urbanization and urbane
morés was the mark of the West. In Thomas’ view, the East had long been stagnant
and peaceful, with rigid social hierarchies and well-defined social relationships and social
control marking a still largely rural world where village contacts dominated. The East
was undergoing tremendous upheaval though, and just as the Occident had been a
48 “The Siginficance of the Orient for the Occident,” American Journal of Sociology 13
(May 1908): 729.
49 For the history of the idea of stages of civilization in social science, see Ronald L.
Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1976).
34

positive force in pushing for change in the stagnant and peaceful Orient, Thomas
argued that the stimulation of the new Orient upon the Occident was somehow good
for exciting further change and development (though it was a shame, according to
Thomas, that the West had forced the Orient to become war mongering through its use
of force in ‘opening’ it up). Change had come to the East, and such changes would
come back to further stimulate the West. Progress in civilization was to result from the
mutual transformation of each of the two poles. Thomas clearly believed that conflict
and agitation were spurs to progress and development; consequently, equilibrium and
stagnation were not always conducive to civilized achievement. 50
50 It is interesting how two of the other members of the forum--a missionary and a
professor of Japanese history--refuted Thomas not on his overall point about progress
in world civilization, but upon his overgeneralizations. The missionary teacher
corrected Thomas by saying he was wrong in homogenizing the Chinese, and that
there were a great variety in individuals and in groups among the Chinese in China.
The professor of Japanese history asserted that Thomas was confused, and in particular
generalized the traits of the Orient from his contact with the Chinese and Japanese in
the United States. Both were right about the factual (and methodological) problems
with Thomas’ conjectures, but they may have missed missed the point about Thomas’
elucidation of the ‘problem’ of modernity. One of the other forum members
addressed Thomas by talking about the conflict theories of Ludwig Gumplowicz, a
European social scientist much admired by the Chicago sociologists. She asserted that
conflict led to state formation and great advances in civilization, and all the great art
and literature of world history had been produced in periods of great conflict and
change, so conflict was a good and necessary thing. The Chicago sociologists on the
whole, except for those still sympathetic to the missionaries’ goal of lessening conflict
(Emory Bogardus, for instance), would have agreed.
35

Thomas and the other Chicago sociologists’ emphasis on conflict as a force for
positive change marked their largest difference from the missionaries who were their
allies during the Survey of Race Relations. The missionaries believed in lessening
conflict and bringing harmony to social relations; the sociologists thought such a goal
might actually be undesirable. In many ways, W.I. Thomas, Robert Park, and Roderick
McKenzie’s conception of the Occidental West was a development of Frederick Jackson
Turner’s American West, a place of mobility and freedom, of overcoming and
conquering distance. 51 But unlike those who viewed Turner’s West as a ‘frontier’
moving across the wilderness and producing ‘American’ traits of individuality, selfreliance
and democracy, McKenzie emphasized the frontier as the zone where people
came into contact. It was Turner's conception of the 'frontier' as the meeting place
between savagery and civilization which McKenzie and Thomas echoed in their portray
of the Pacific Rim as the frontier zone of contact between a stagnant Orient and a
modern, mobile Occident.
Assimilation as the Overcoming of Distance
The missionaries involved in the Survey of Race Relations had placed great
symbolism in the wearing of American versus traditional-style clothing. Stylish use of
51 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” a
paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, on July
12, 1893, reprinted in Turner’s The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry
Holt, 1920). Though Turner’s conception of the ‘frontier’ had a large influence upon
Chicago sociology, and Park repeatedly referred to ‘racial frontiers’ in discussing the
American West, the sociologists’ use of the term emphasized the aspect of the frontier
as a zone of contact and transition.
36

American clothes, as opposed to the ‘native’ dress of the immigrant community, was
an outward sign of assimilation purportedly equal to successful Americanization.
Clothing was a semiotic marker which held great meaning, and it could represent not
only the difference between American and non-America, but also the great distance
between the two.
In a somewhat strange event which occurred three years before the survey
began, we can see the great symbolism which clothing held for the missionaries. Miss
Donaldina Cameron, a Presbyterian missionary in San Francisco’s Chinatown, had run
since 1895 a famous Mission Home for ‘rescued Chinese slave girls.’ In well-publicized
raids on brothels in Chinatown, Cameron had enlisted the help of the police to snatch
young Chinese girls from ‘slavery’ and prostitution. Many of the rescued girls
eventually returned to Chinatown, but some remained and converted to Christianity,
serving as helpers in the Home. The fact that the crusade targeted only Chinese girls in
Chinatown brothels, ignoring the ‘white’ prostitutes literally down the road, was an
initial indicator of the missionaries’ specific interests. A scene, typical of Cameron and
the Mission, which occurred in 1920 at a conference of mission workers, is particularly
revealing. As described in a pamphlet published later, while Miss Cameron spoke to
the audience about ‘Chinese slavery’ and the danger of Chinatown tongs: “Enter six
rescued Chinese slave girls dressed in native costume who sing in their own language
‘Out of my bondage, Sorrow and Night, Jesus I come’.” The meaning of the ‘native’
dress was unmistakable: Cameron shrewdly used the symbol of the foreign ‘heathen
Chinese’ as a sign of just how great a divide Christian conversion could traverse, how
even Chinese ‘slave girls,’ the embodiment of the most depraved practices of the
exotic ‘Orient,’ could and should be saved by Christ. 52
52 From “Chinese Slavery. Is it Fact, or Fiction?” an address by Donaldina Cameron,
Superintendant of the Presbyterian Mission Home, 920 Sacramento Street, from
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The missionaries were not the only people who were interested in the ‘Oriental’
as a symbol of the exotic and the foreign. It was no coincidence that Robert Park used
the phrase ‘racial uniform’ to describe the ‘skin color’ of ‘Orientals’ and ‘Negroes’--he
recognized the connection between clothing, costumes, and skin color in a semiotic
system of producing perceived difference, of creating a sense of otherness. 53 Just as
Donaldina Cameron cleverly used the juxtaposition between ‘exotic’ native costumes
(one wonders whether the ‘racial costume’ of ‘Oriental’ skin color and physical
features might have been enough)
and Christian hymns to display the striking
difference between ‘heathen’ and ‘saved,’ and thus the success of her mission, the
sociologists found in the ‘Oriental’ the same extreme example of the great gap which
assimilation could bridge. The sociologists’ fascination with the
‘Oriental problem’
revealed the heavy load of meaning which the ‘Oriental’ could bear. Possessing a
permanent ‘racial uniform’ which was distinct and different from ‘white’ Americans,
Oriental Mission Work On the Pacific Coast of the United States of America, Addresses and
Findings of Conferences in Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA. Oct 13,14,15, 1920,
published by Home Missions Council and Council of Women for Home Missions, 156
Fifth Avenue, New York. Much has been written about Donaldina Cameron,
including the hagiographic biography Chinatown Quest: The Life Adventures of Donadina
Cameron (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1931), Peggy Pascoe’s Relations of
Rescue: The Search for Femaile Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (New
York: Oxford, 1990); for a quick overview, see Laurene Wu McClain, “Donaldina
Cameron: A Reappraisal,” Pacific Historian 27 (1983):25-35.
53 “The Jap is not the right color. The fact that the Japanese bears in his features a
distinctive racial hallmark, that he wears, so to speak, a racial uniform, classifies him.”
From Park’s “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups,” Publications of the American
Sociological Society 8 (1914):66-72.
38

the ‘Oriental’ was nonetheless capable of cultural assimilation through social
interaction.
During the Survey of Race Relations, individual ‘Orientals’ became examples to
be displayed, and symbols in a political and moral contest. Arguments over
assimilability and over Americanization and Christianization were tinged with an
undercurrent of exoticization, using ‘Orientals’ as symbols of both ‘otherness’ and
‘sameness.’ Flora Belle Jan, the young American woman who wore both the costume
of the ‘flapper’ and the ‘Oriental,’ served as a walking and talking symbol of the
possibility, if not the complete success, of cultural assimilation. If she had been ‘white,’
her value as an example would not only have been diminished, but more importantly,
imperceptible. Her visibility as an exotic ‘Oriental’ made her meaningful to the
missionaries as well as the sociologists.
At the conclusion of the survey, Park wrote about an incident which echoed
Donaldina Cameron’s display of her ‘saved’ Chinese slave girls:
I recently had the curious experience of talking with a young Japanese woman
who was not only born in the United States, but was brought up in an American
family, in an American college town, where she had almost no association with
members of her own race. I found myself watching her expectantly for some
slight accent, some gesture or intonation that would betray her racial origin.
When I was not able, by the slightest expression, to detect the Oriental mentality
behind the Oriental mask, I was still not able to escape the impression that I was
listening to an American woman in a Japanese disguise. 54
The ‘racial uniform’ of the young woman, a ‘Japanese disguise’ not unlike the
‘native’ dress of the Chinese ‘slave girls,’ marked her as different and foreign, but
54 Park, “Behind Our Masks,” Survey Graphic 56 (May 1926):136.
39

everything else about her said ‘American.’ If such assimilated ‘Orientals,’ so obviously
different from ‘normal’ Americans, could fool one into thinking they were actually
Americans in ‘Oriental disguise,’ then obviously the amount of cultural assimilation
which an "Oriental" could undergo was enormous. The distance traversed was as
immense as the ocean which physically separated America from Japan.
One of the most important results of the opposition between the Orient and the
Occident was the way in which it was metaphorically mapped onto the enormous
physical distance between Asia and America. When the missionaries and sociologists
chose to use the example of ‘Orientals’ as a way of proving the validity of their theories
about Americanizaton and cultural assimilation, they were relying upon the
presumption of a great cultural difference between "Orientals" and Americans. By
putting assimilation along a spectrum from ‘non-American’ to ‘American,’ and by
positing "Orientals" as the ultimate exotic non-American other, the sociologists linked
the opposition between ‘Oriental’ culture and ‘American’ culture with differences in
location and place. Oriental culture was associated with the Asia, and American culture
with the United States, and thus the cultural differences between the two were mapped
into physical space.
The Pacific Rim as an arc from Asia to America encompassed the journey from
one extreme to the other, representing the spatialization of cultural differences.
‘Americanization’ became more than a cultural process; it became one of travel,
containing within it the movements of migration, from a ‘stagnant Orient’ to a
‘modern America’ based upon mobility. In spatializing cultural difference with their
theories, the sociologists had made the distance traversed literal. The Orient was a
world away, but ‘Orientals’ could still be made into Americans.
The ‘Oriental’ stood at the far end of this opposition, the farthest point away
from ‘normal’ America, and a symbol of everything America was not. This was the
ultimate meaning which ‘Orientals’ held for not only sociologists and missionaries, but
40

seemingly for all of America, that of the exotic foreigner. ‘Orientals’ were by definition
not ‘Occidental.’ In the same way that W.I. Thomas and Roderick McKenzie had used
the idea of the sluggish, peaceful Orient as the foil for their description of an Occident
full of movement and change (as the unmoving object against which they could orient
the direction which Western civilization was travelling), Robert Park was using the
‘Oriental’ in America as the yardstick against which to measure the spread of American
culture and ideals. For Park and his colleagues, the Survey of Race Relations was not an
opportunity to test the validity of their ideas about cultural assimilation--the sociologists
were assuredly not going to abandon their theories no matter what they found. The
survey was an opportunity to prove the validity of their theories.
The sociologists were fascinated with ‘Orientals’ because of their visible
difference, the ‘racial uniform’ and ‘exotic mask’ they wore which permanently
marked them as different from ‘other Americans.’ More than any 'white' American
ever could, ‘Orientals’ proved the validity of cultural assimilation as a sociological
process. Robert Park’s interest in the young American woman in a ‘Japanese disguise,’
just like his interest in Flora Belle Jan, had much to do with her being the embodiment
of successful assimilation at its most extreme point--a perfectly ‘normal’ American
wearing an exotic Halloween mask.
The sociologists used the bodies of ‘Orientals’ as their most prominent proof of
the success of cultural interaction. Assimilation was a complex and complicated process
involving loosened social control, the changing relationship of individuals to groups,
transformations from rural to urban social relations, the transition to a modern,
cosmopolitan outlook, but in the end, the products of cultural assimilation were wholly
American, irregardless of skin color. Culturally assimilated "Orientals" were the proof.
Park concluded at the end of the Survey of Race Relations, just as he had concluded
41

efore the start of it: “The race relations cycle--contact, competition, accommodation
and eventual assimilation--is apparently progressive and irreversible.” 55
Significantly, Robert Park was not merely talking about ‘Orientals’ in America
becoming assimilated to American culture; he was also making a point that America
was beginning to seep into the Orient itself. “American films, with their realistic and
thrilling pictures of American life, have transmitted to the Orient some of the
restlessness and romanticism of the Occident.” 56 Park was not an American
exceptionalist. He truly believed that the world as a whole was becoming a ‘melting
pot,’ and that the future of the world lay in some Americanized modernity of
movement, of change and exchange between peoples and cultures. “If America was
once in any exclusive sense the melting pot of races, it is so no longer. The melting pot
is the world.” He went on to note that:
The really new factors in international and race relations are the devices like the
cinema and the radio; these, with the rapidly increasing literacy, are steadily
bringing all the peoples of the earth measurably within the limits of a common
culture and a common historical life. 57
Like W.I. Thomas, Robert Park felt that contacts between different peoples were
increasing all over the world, creating a global civilization never seen before. America
had long been the most prominent place where extensive ‘racial’ and ‘cultural’
contacts occurred, but in a modernity where no culture or society could remain
untouched by others, all the world had become America.
55 Park, “Our Racial Frontier on the Pacific,” 192.
56 Park, “Our Racial Frontier,” 195.
57 Park, “Our Racial Frontier,” 196.
42

The institutionalization of Orientalism into the research universities of America
occurred within a social network of missionaries and social scientists who combined
their definitions of Asians in Asia with an understanding of Asians in the Americas.
American Orientalism arose long before the 1920's, narrated in lurid pulp fiction and the
"yellow peril" tracts of anti-Asian nativists; however, the knowledge of "Orientals"
produced by missionaries and social scientists in the 1920's had powerful long term
effects because of its discursive life in academia. It is in social institutions, particularly
academic institutions of higher learning, that knowledge is reproduced the most
effectively and efficiently. Social science was not merely the network of sociologists and
missionaries who produced knowledge about exotic 'Orientals'--social science as an
academic discipline also reproduced these ideas and disseminated them in journals,
conferences, and classrooms. 58 The act of scholarship involved disciplining students to
understand the world in the proper way (in the manner of an Orientalist), and the
58 Though the Survey and the IPR were the first major institutional embodiments of the
collaboration between missionaries and sociologists, there had been a long history of a
fascination with the Orient among both, and thus a large body of American Orientalist
discourse. What distinguished the work of the Survey and the IPR from earlier studies,
for instance Progressive California academic and activist Mary Roberts Coolidge's
seminal study Chinese Immigration (New York: Henry Holt, 1909), was the systematic
institutional framework which generated research. Tied to the University of Chicago,
the Orientalist discourse coming out of the survey and its legacy was considerably more
coherent and had a much more powerful effect upon academic theories about Asians in
America and abroad. For a description of the IPR's beginning, see J. Merle Davis, The
Institute of Pacific Relations (Worchester, Mass. and New York: Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, Division of Intercourse and Education 1926).
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legitimization conferred by elite institutions of higher learning transformed the
travellers' knowledge of missionaries and sociologists into scientific theory. 59
The theories produced by the missionaries and social scientists defined
"Orientals" at home and abroad, in that same moment defining the location of home,
and its distance from the foreign. America could contain "Orientals" who were
ostensibly the same as those in Asia or Hawaii; theoretically, their existence remained
connected to places outside of the space of America. Chinatowns and Little Tokyo's in
America were "little pieces of the Orient," and "Oriental" bodies, no matter how
culturally similar to "white" Americans, were still tied to the "Orient" by the dreams and
missions of "white" Americans.
American social theories emphasized "Orientals" for their usefulness as a symbol
of exotic difference, asserting constantly that what made them interesting was that
which was not American about them. The long-term legacy has been a discourse about
Asian Americans which continues to involve definitions of America which cannot find a
sensible place for Asian Americans without exoticizing them. This exoticization has
relied upon a conception of a Pacific Rim which stretches from Asia across to America,
arching in a spectrum from the exotic "Orient" to the familiar "Occident," the mysterious
East to the home place West. Missionaries and sociologists criss-crossed the vast space
of the Pacific, embodying its great distances in the knowledge they produced about the
great differences between "Orientals" and "Americans." In codifying and then
59 See Henry Yu, Thinking About Orientals: A History of Race, Migration, and Modernity in
Twentieth Century America (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton, 1995) and “Constructing the
‘Oriental Problem’ In American Thought, 1920-1960,” in Multicultural Education,
Transformative Knowledge and Action: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by
James A. Banks (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996) for discussions of how
knowledge about 'Orientals' was reproduced institutionally.
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institutionalizing knowledge about "Orientals" in Asia and the Americas, missionaries
and social scientists during the 1920's contributed in no small measure to the
maintenance and dissemination of American Orientalism. 60
It is no coincidence that recent extolations of the "Pacific Rim" concept, most
notably by Frank Gibney, have echoed the Orientalism of the early missionaries and
social scientists. In his bookThe Pacific Century, Gibney echoes almost word for word
the ebullience which missionaries showed for the future results of contact between East
and West. 61 Japan, China, and the "Little Tigers" of Asia serve Gibney in the same way
the Orient served American intellectuals in the 1920's--as the exotic other against which
to measure America, and the challenge which would redeem America. It is an
unfortunate coincidence that American social thinkers have learned so little after having
travelled so far.
60 For more on how theories of the "Oriental Problem" in America were transformed
into the "Model Minority," myth, as well as the relationship of 'cultural race' and
physical space, see Yu, Thinking About Orientals; on social scientific fascination with
interracial sex and marriage, see “Mixing Bodies and Cultures: The Meaning of
America's Fascination With Sex Between ‘Orientals’ and Whites,” in Sex And Love
Across the Color Line, edited by Martha Hodes (New York University Press,
forthcoming).
61 Gibney, The Pacific Century.
45