Gentlemen's Agreement (1907)

Segregation of Japanese and Chinese

The United States and Japan signed a treaty in 1894 that opened immigration to the Japanese and guaranteed protection of their persons and property. Immigrants from Japan attracted little attention as a group for the first decade following this treaty. Anti-Asian sentiments were directed primarily at the Chinese. But the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the extension of its restrictions by the Geary Act in 1892 halted the legal immigration of Chinese into the United States. Congress made the exclusion of Chinese permanent in 1902, but Japanese immigration was increasing. By 1906, as many as 1,000 Japanese a month were entering the United States, and hostility toward Asians was redirected toward the Japanese. The Asiatic Exclusion League, organized in San Francisco in 1905, targeted the Japanese, pushing for legislation that would extend the Chinese Exclusion Act to include the Japanese. The league also worked to boycott Japanese workers and Japanese-owned businesses. The California press fanned the fires of discrimination with its Yellow Peril campaign.

On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education adopted a policy that sent Japanese children who had previously attended public schools throughout the city to “Oriental schools,” where Chinese students had historically been segregated. Japanese parents protested. So did the Japanese government, arguing that such action violated the Treaty of 1894. President Theodore Roosevelt, who had received the Nobel Peace Prize earlier that year for brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, was not pleased with the situation in San Francisco. It threatened his foreign policy objectives with Japan, a growing military power.

The U.S. ambassador to Japan hastened to reassure the Japanese government that the United States would not discriminate against Japanese within U.S. borders. Roosevelt himself met with the Japanese ambassador on October 29, 1906, and shared with him passages from the address the president was preparing for Congress. In early December, the president delivered the speech to Congress, denouncing the school segregation in San Francisco and advocating legislation that allowed Japanese immigrants to apply for citizenship. Roosevelt and Secretary Root determined that negotiations with the Japanese to restrict immigration would be necessary to appease Californians, but the federal government also began preparations for a legal challenge that the segregation order violated the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation of 1894.

...