Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

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.
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