Picture This

JOANNE: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

ED: Welcome to BackStory, I’m Ed Ayers.

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: If you’re new to the show, we’ll tell you a bit about BackStory. Joanne, Brian, and I are all historians. And every week, we dive into a story in the news, and we look at that topic across American history. So Brian, Joanne, let’s begin today’s show by heading to an island in the San Francisco Bay in 1917. A ship pulls into the dock, and it’s full of immigrants, including young women traveling from Japan. They’ve come thousands of miles to meet their husbands in America.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JUDY YOUNG: They would have the pictures of their husbands in their hands.

ED: This is historian Judy Young.

JUDY YOUNG: They would be peering across the waters and trying to find their husbands, and so you could say that that would be the first glimpse they might have of their husbands.

JOANNE: Wait a minute. What do you mean first glimpse?

ED: Yeah, that’s really the first time they’re laying eyes on the men they were going to be married to. When they finally get a chance to see those men up close, it’s in a drafty immigration station.

JUDY YOUNG: It’s not until the interrogation, when the Board of Special Inquiry brings the two of them together into an interview room that they actually do see each other for the first time.

BRIAN: Not the most romantic of locations. So I’m guessing these are arranged marriages, Ed.

ED: Can’t put anything past you, can we, Brian. That was common practice in Japan at the time. But it became something new in the United States. These women were called picture brides.

JUDY YOUNG: This was the traditional way of getting married that they kind of adapted to the situation for Japanese men in America by doing proxy marriages, where the parents would still look for a good bride, a wife for their son in America, but they don’t need the son to come back to Japan to seal the deal. They could have it done in proxy and just enter the woman’s name in the registry and make that legal. And after the woman is entered into the registry, she is obligated to stay in Japan and live with the in-laws for at least six months.

ED: I wonder what the marriage rate in the United States would be today if people had to live with their in-laws six months before they got married. We would see the numbers plummet, I imagine.

JUDY YOUNG: Yeah, and one of the reasons that the picture brides that were willing to marry someone in America is they can get away from living with the in-laws. That was a reason. And then they would have the bride and groom exchange photos and letters, so they could correspond like pen pals.

JOANNE: Well, that’s really interesting, Ed. I mean on the one hand, you’ve got this new kind of courtship. But it’s also part of an old story of immigrants adapting their traditions to the United States.

ED: That’s right, Joanne. Picture brides are a creative response to immigration restrictions.

JOANNE: And that is definitely something that has been in the headlines a lot lately.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DONALD TRUMP: We’re going have a very, very strict ban and we’re going to have extreme vetting.

MALE SPEAKER: The order puts a 120 day hold on all refugees settling in the US.

MALE SPEAKER: This executive order was mean-spirited, un-American.

MALE SPEAKER: Nearly half of Americans said that they supported tougher immigration restrictions.

JOANNE: Trump’s recent executive order isn’t the first time that the United States has blocked immigrants from specific countries or even entire regions. So today’s show is going to be the first of two episodes on American reactions to immigration.

BRIAN: It goes to a longstanding tension at the heart of our national identity that so many Americans are descendants of immigrants, yet so many of those Americans are suspicious of immigrants.

JOANNE: We’re going to look at some of the immigrant groups that have been targeted, from the French of the 1790s, to Italians, Slavs, and Asian immigrants in the 19th and 20th century. We’re also going to look at some lesser known immigration bans, against people with flat feet, for example, or insufficient facial hair.

ED: But first, let’s return to these Japanese picture brides. They managed to exploit, in surprising ways, a loophole in our immigration laws between 1908 and 1920.

BRIAN: So Ed, I know that we restricted some Asian immigration. But could you refresh my memory on how that actually worked?

ED: Yes, Brian, the white backlash to Asian immigration began almost as soon as Chinese laborers started arriving on the West Coast. This was in the 1850s during the California Gold Rush.

JUDY YOUNG: As long as their labor was needed, they were welcomed. But soon after the Gold Rush petered out, and particularly in 1870s when economic depression set in California and the West Coast. So they were seen as causing unemployment and taking jobs away. And they also were discouraged from settling and integrating into the larger American society.

ED: Asian immigrants faced much more severe restrictions than immigrants from Europe. People from Asia couldn’t become naturalized citizens or even own land in many states. Other laws prohibited marriage between Asian men and white women. And immigration restrictions made it very hard for any Asian woman to come to the United States.

JOANNE: OK, Ed, so I’m guessing this is going to bring us right back to those Japanese picture brides?

ED: You’re very insightful, Joanne. In 1907, the Japanese government negotiated a special deal with President Teddy Roosevelt.

JUDY YOUNG: They were seen as a rising superpower, and they actually had the diplomatic respect of the United States government.

ED: Now the US wanted to end Japanese immigration, but the White House didn’t want to offend the Japanese government. So Roosevelt came up with this non-binding deal known as the Gentleman’s Agreement.

JUDY YOUNG: And it agreed to stop the immigration of Japanese laborers to the United States. But Japanese laborers in the United States can still send for their wives and children. So they took advantage of that loophole to get their women to come to the United States.

ED: Now marrying someone you’ve never even laid eyes on sounds like a pretty big gamble to us today, so I asked historian Judy Young what was the rate of success for these couples.

JUDY YOUNG: I think about 80%. There were stories of women not being happy with their husbands because they had lied about their ages or that lied about their economic status in America. The women had not expected to live in segregated communities and work as hard as they did, as homemakers as well as farm workers, and raising families.

And I mean all of these marriages are not based on love and courting romance the way that American marriages were at this time. They would all say that love comes later, and sometimes not at all. But once you are married and you have children and you’re a family, it’s almost like a obligation to follow through and make it work. Divorce was not an option for this generation.

ED: And how many people?

JUDY YOUNG: Well, a total of 20,000 women were able to come as picture brides and join their husbands in America during this period. Now the government was always worried and concerned that women coming this way as picture brides that they were prostitutes or they will become laborers and help the husbands with their businesses. And there was this propaganda going around in the Sacramento and San Francisco newspapers that the picture bride practice was barbaric and un-American and undemocratic, that there’s this real threat that more people, more Japanese people and a new generation of citizens, would be a threat to white racial purity. So I think for all these reasons they began to find a way to stop this practice.

ED: It’s not because it failed in any way. It was because it was succeeding too well in some ways

JUDY YOUNG: Yes, because as families and communities settling and developing in America was the threat, Congress finally signs a Ladies Agreement in 1920, where Japan agrees to stop letting women immigrate to US as picture brides. So after 1920, men could no longer resort to this practice.

But in 1924, they passed an Immigration Act that barred immigration of aliens ineligible to citizenship. And who are the aliens ineligible to citizenship? The Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, and that’s how they stopped Japanese immigration totally. And that was in 1924.

ED: But Judy, this is an interesting story. But it doesn’t really happen for a very long time. Why does it matter? What’s the legacy of this?

JUDY YOUNG: Well, their legacy is that they form the foundation for the development of Japanese-American families and communities. They made the second generation and future generations of Japanese in America possible.

ED: Judy Young is co-author of “Angel Island, Immigrant Gateway to America.”