-It's a great pleasure for me to be with you this evening,
as we launch the history department's
annual lecture series.
I'd like to thank Nick Grall,
Glennys Young, and the history department staff
who made the series possible.
It takes a lot of work to put these events together,
and bring them to life.
And they have my sincere gratitude.
Maybe we can just give them a hand.
[ Applause ]
It's wonderful to see another full audience here tonight.
And we're really grateful for your support.
Before I begin my introductory remarks,
I'd like to start with a land acknowledgement.
The University of Washington
acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land.
The land which touches the shared waters
of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish,
Tulalip, and Muckleshoot nations.
Since I arrived at UW in the fall of 2021,
I've been repeatedly asking a question,
a particular question of myself and colleagues
throughout the college.
What makes us, the University of Washington
and the College of Arts and Sciences distinctive?
What attributes can we identify that make us
uniquely well-positioned to excel in the ways
that we already do?
And upon which we can build to the greater benefit of those
we serve both within the university's walls,
and the communities that extend well beyond them.
The University of Washington sits among a small group.
As you know,
a small group of outstanding public research universities
that are its peers.
All renowned for their very high impacts in research,
their excellence in teaching
and their outstanding levels of engagement with
and service to communities near and far.
But we're also different from those peers
in important ways that matter.
We're not, in my view, here to merely replicate
what happens in colleges of arts and sciences
at places like UCLA or Berkeley or Michigan.
We have our own distinctive work to do,
our own distinctive story to tell.
One that matters enormously for our state,
for our nation and for the world.
So when I ask the question, what makes us distinctive?
Inevitably the answer that rises is, our place.
The work we work every day in a world class global city,
perched on the Pacific Rim,
amidst one of the world's most powerful hubs
of technological innovation
within a realm of geological wonders, artistic excellent,
rich and intellectual ferment and incredible natural beauty.
And in the ancestral homelands of 29 Native American tribes.
We also live in a city characterized, as many cities are,
by pronounced income inequality,
a serious housing crisis and opioid epidemic,
and regionally specific impacts of the climate crisis.
These latter issues may be nationally,
and even global grand challenges.
But they're never less inflected in specific ways
by this unique place in which we find ourselves.
We have much to learn from this wonderful,
beautiful, complicated place we call the Pacific Northwest.
For these reasons I've been encouraging the development
of place based instruction in our college.
Some of the faculty here
will have noted a new emphasis on place based courses
in what we formally called our early fall start program,
and which is relaunching this August
with a new name, College Edge.
An example of place based education already exists
in our wonderfully successful Humanities First program
for first year students.
The curriculum in Humanities First sequence
relies heavily on experiential learning
through guided day long field trips to places
like our international district,
where I was fortunate to accompany
a group of Humanities First students on a tour led
by Frank Abe through the cultural landscape
of John Okada's 1957 novel "No-No Boy."
Learning about the history of Japanese internment
while walking through the spaces
where its history could be seen and felt with books in hand,
in spaces like the Panama Hotel, the train station,
and on street corners was an experience those students
and I will never forget.
It's a form of education
that only we can provide because of our location,
one that helps students understand the world
and themselves through this place.
That's just one example.
There are many, many other courses throughout the college
that use our place as a laboratory for learning.
I was especially pleased to see that the lecture series
that begins this evening is yet one more excellent example.
The focus of this year's series, "Seattle and the Salish Sea:
Building and Belonging,"
will include explorations of the distinctive
and deeply important histories of this place we call home.
by examining groups of people
who have made a home and identity within this region,
and from a large range of perspectives,
the speakers in this series will shed new light on places
we thought we knew well,
on issues with which we continue to struggle,
and on the rich historical dimensions of our urban,
rural and cultural landscape.
I hope you'll consider attending the entire series if you can,
which will include lectures by Josh Reed,
who will examine how this Snohomish Nation work
to meet the challenges of living within a colonial system.
Devin Naar will present on settlement by Sephardic Jews
from the Ottoman Empire.
Elena Campbell will look at Seattle's engagement
with peoples from Russia and the USSR.
And finally, Jim Gregory will be detailing
Seattle's history of housing and racial exclusion.
Tonight, I have the privilege of introducing
Professor Emeritus John Findlay,
who will launch this wonderful series.
Professor Findlay began his career
at the University of Washington in 1991
as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History.
An award-winning scholar in social and urban history
in the 20th century United States,
Findlay's particular focus has been on the history
of the North American West and the Pacific Northwest.
He's the author of many articles and books
that focus on Native American history,
regional identity and literature in the Pacific Northwest,
world spheres of Washington state, the nuclear west,
among other things.
His books include -- and there are many of them.
He's had a very prolific career, award winning work,
books that include "People of Chance:
Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas,"
"Magic Lands:
Western Cityscapes in American Culture from After 1940,"
"Atomic Frontier Days, Hanford and the American West,"
which he published with Bruce Hevly,
and "The Mobilized American West, 1940 to 2000."
He's also served as managing editor
of Pacific Northwest Quarterly,
and is Director for the Study of the Pacific Northwest.
And twice -- and this is deeply meaningful to me,
and I really mean this --
he twice served as Chair of the History Department.
And that is service for which I,
and his colleagues are deeply grateful.
The title of Professor Findlay's lecture tonight is
"City and Citizens: Seattleites and Their Rights, 1850 to 2000."
How did Seattle's populations change during that period,
and how were they shaped by the nation's
evolving concepts of citizenship?
By examining the historical demographics of the city,
and looking at what groups of people came to
and settled in Seattle over the decades,
and by exploring how laws and policies regarding citizenship
influenced who came and stayed,
and who was and was not welcome in the city.
His lecture will provide the perfect opening framework
for this series,
showing us how the laws and policies
governed immigration and naturalization, voting rights
and civil rights and the status of Native people among others.
As Seattleites contested
and struggled with these national guidelines,
we'll see how they sometimes created a regionally specific,
indeed a place specific history of citizenship rights.
Thank you for being here
and please help me welcome Professor John Findlay.
[ Applause ]
-Thanks so much for that warm introduction.
And thanks to all of you being here.
I'm really delighted to be asked to do this.
And I hope it's helpful
in setting up not just my own ideas,
but also the ideas of the four people who follow me.
They're just terrific scholars and teachers,
and I'm really honored to be in the group with them.
It took me a while to figure out
what I wanted to talk about tonight
when I was invited to do this talk.
Over the course of my career here,
there are two courses I enjoyed teaching especially.
One was History of the Pacific Northwest
and the other is History of American Citizenship.
What you're going to hear tonight
is a mash up of both courses.
I'm going to do a one-hour lecture that covers roughly two,
five-credit courses.
So you're getting a bargain.
My focus offers a conversation between nation and city.
Especially after 1880, decisions were made
at the federal level about citizenship.
For the most part, Seattle had very little influence
on those decisions.
Those decisions had a lot of influence on Seattle.
Moreover, citizenship issues illuminate aspects
of our urban history we might otherwise overlook.
Thinking about issues related to citizenship
helps us see the history of our own city more clearly.
Moreover, our city offers a viable lens
through which to look at what they're doing in Washington DC.
The other Washington.
Where they make decisions about citizenship.
And then I have one other purpose
besides this conversation between city and nation.
And that is trying to lay the groundwork
for my colleagues who follow me,
try to provide context and background and details
that might flush out some of the issues
they're going to raise in the coming weeks.
In particular, I try to account for
demographic change in Seattle.
What groups came here to reside?
Why and when did they come?
How are they regarded by people already here,
including indigenous peoples?
And what rights could they exercise?
Three things to keep in mind as I go through this material,
I'm defining citizenship mainly as a right to vote.
Now that's a gross over-simplification.
Citizenship is such a layered complicated topic.
I'm going to get into it a little bit,
but it's so complex and layered,
I just need to simplify it for the most part,
and talk about who could vote. We'll look at African Americans,
we'll look at Native Americans, we'll look at women and
how their rights to participate in society will increase.
We also pay close attention to immigrants,
whether they're welcome or not.
Could they attain voting rights by getting naturalized,
or was that door not open to them?
There are, in fact, first class citizens,
second class citizens and more ranks, more numbers.
There are special labels.
"Aliens ineligible for citizenship
or for naturalization" generally meant Asians,
"American nationals" for Filipinos.
Where do these particular terms come from?
So that's one -- I'm going to simplify citizenship,
but we're going to get into some of the complexities.
But mostly in time I'll just be meaning who had the vote.
Just as a way to simplify things to get through some
of the fine print stuff you're not having to do.
Second, I rely heavily on the US Census of population.
This is, an indispensable source for historians.
It's also maddening way too often.
I can spend hours rambling about it.
But tonight I try to accept -- accept it as it is.
It is what it is.
Like citizenship, too, keep in mind,
the census is a federal project, a national project.
Something that has to accept rather than shape itself.
Third, I mainly provide demographic information
about things going on in the municipal boundaries of Seattle,
within the city limits.
From time to time I'll go outside those limits
just to clarify because there's better data there.
But pay attention to what I mean when I'm talking about Seattle.
And most of the time it means in the city.
Some things that are going recur that I'm not going to have time
to go into too deeply.
First of all,
I'm just stunned at how often American Citizenship is modified
or redefined by wars.
And I guess I'm stunned also about the ubiquity of wars.
As a historian, studying the US for many years,
I shouldn't be surprised by this.
But the prominence of wars
in transforming citizenship, it just surprises me.
Another is that periods of reform and reaction
in immigration policy generally overlap with reform
in race relations more broadly within the United States,
through civil rights and voting rights.
So another component that's enormous
is the prominence of race in talking about
how people are treated differently.
So there's a number of things
that will be tying things together.
But again these are things
I can't always explore in the depth I would like to.
There will be a question and answer period afterwards,
if I can help answer some of your questions.
But I'm sure there's way more here
that could be gone into then I'm going to be able to do tonight.
Our focus begins in the middle of the 19th century.
The city of Seattle was founded by American colonizers in 1851.
And it was incorporated under the laws
of Washington Territory in 1869.
Across those two decades,
the non-Native population of Seattle remained small.
It contained perhaps 150 non-Natives in 1860.
By 1870 the census recorded roughly 1,100 non-Natives.
So there's a 20 year period
where not much happens in terms of what the settlers,
the colonizers wanted to happen in terms of building a town
and developing the economy.
And nothing happened among the whites in Seattle.
Nothing happened to really transform
or even worry about citizenship.
A key exception to this quietude
was the experience of Native Americans.
By 1857,
Natives that had a system of treaties and reservations
imposed on them in the area that became Seattle.
Now, treaties and reservations were themselves
something of a new policy.
Removal policy for Indians
had pretty much disintegrated in the 1840s,
and the government had come up
with a new combination of treaties,
which had been used pretty substantially, and reservations,
which were still rather new in the way
they were constructed and imagined in the 1850s.
As instruments of colonizations,
treaties mainly took away rights from Natives
and pressured them to cultivate to white ways,
perhaps even to become themselves citizens,
although that was a path
that many Native peoples were not eager
to walk down right away.
Treaties were noticeably important though.
They meant that Natives were now living in a new
and different legal world.
And they had to find ways to defend themselves in that world.
They had to find lawyers in part,
to resist or modify the colony regime.
At the same time,
they were also active and important residents of Seattle.
They provided the main source of labor for decades.
They offered spouses and offspring to form families with,
and in so many ways shaped the life of the area.
And fortunately,
Josh Reid's going to devote his talk next week
to the implications of these treaties and the impact
of this colonization on Natives in the area.
But mostly I want to make the point
that for the white settlers who arrived,
not much happened for the first two decades.
The pioneers arrived late out of town
and didn't hit the snooze button.
If we move our focus though from local to nation
to the two decades from 1850 to 1870,
those are more momentous at the national level.
In fact, during those two decades, a series of events
dramatically transformed citizenship
and concepts of citizenship in the United States.
I'm going to talk about three of those events in particular,
which are kind of obvious.
But let me go over them just to remind you.
First, between 1861 and 1877, the Civil War and Reconstruction
ended the practice of slavery
and established a new set of rights for African Americans.
The defeat of the South by the North meant that people
who had been property were now redefined as citizens.
They had been property, now they're redefined as citizens.
That's a momentous transformation.
Once the war ended,
the victorious Union passed the 13th and 14th
and 15th amendments to the Constitution,
which respectively confirmed the termination of slavery.
Redefined American Citizenship to include former slaves
and attempted to protect the votes of freed men
or freed women, well freed men at the time.
The rights protected by these three amendments
were not only those of former slaves.
As we shall see, the 14th amendment
proved critical for the fate of immigrant families
by describing what goes by the name birthright citizenship.
Moreover, the same amendment formed the basis
for the Supreme Court overruling anti-miscegenation laws in 1967
and recognizing the right to same sex marriage in 2015.
So these amendments have a huge impact, of course,
during the 19th century.
But their impact only grows in the 20th century.
Furthermore, the emancipation of slaves
encouraged other Americans to demand their rights as well.
Women loomed large in the abolition campaign.
Upon seeing black men win the vote,
they poignantly and repeatedly asked,
"When will women be enfranchised?"
Most states dithered.
But Wyoming territory became the first territory or state
to extend the vote to women in 1869,
the same year Seattle was incorporated.
In so many ways the Civil War and reconstruction
remade American citizenship in just profound ways.
However it would take a long time before the potential
of the 14th and 15th amendments
to create equal citizens before the potential was realized.
Second, from its inception, the United States
has been devoted to expanding its territory,
and it used a variety of methods
to acquire control of Western lands --
purchase, diplomacy, and especially military conquest --
and in doing so, dispossessed other occupants
and asserted national control.
When it did this over and over,
the country had to answer this question --
What was the citizenship status of the people absorbed
or conquered by the US as it moved west?
In 1846 to '48, the United States won the war
it provoked against Mexico.
And in so doing, it acquired an immense amount of territory
in which many citizens of Mexico resided.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,
in bringing that war to an end,
offered to Mexican citizens
the option of becoming American citizens.
This was an important statement about race,
because by law, at the time,
only white persons could become citizens from naturalization,
and many Americans regarded Mexicans as non-white.
On occasion, they were defined as whites too.
What white meant wasn't always static or agreed upon.
The offer of citizenship made by
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was significant.
But it wasn't consistently upheld.
Sometimes the treaty was not followed, not adhered to.
Speaking of treaties not being adhered to,
besides Mexico, the US overpowered Native nations
repeatedly over the course of the 19th century.
The Natives were generally offered a path
to American citizenship provided they assimilated.
Few took that path.
Many people hoped to retain the rights
they had had as members of sovereign nations.
In signing treaties the US attempted to --
they recognized the nations in some ways.
By signing a treaty, it meant they were a nation of some kind.
But at the same time, once those treaties were signed,
pressure was applied to peoples to conform to American --
to white American ways, not to Native ways.
In 1871, two years after Seattle incorporated,
Congress declared the treaty system over with.
And in some ways it heightened the attacked
on Native sovereignty
by reducing the recognition of nations, of Native nations.
A third set of factors
that could help Americans to rethink their means
of citizenship came to the fore wind in the mid-19th century.
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants
began arriving every decade from all around the world.
That some immigrants would come, should not have been surprising.
In many ways, the new United States
had laid out the welcome mat in an effort to attract immigrants,
and in doing so had extended the practices and policies
of people in the colonial period.
In fact, one of the grievances --
In the Declaration of Independence,
one of the grievances
was that he wouldn't let enough immigrants come to the colonies
to make it develop it as much as the colonies themselves wanted.
That was one of the reasons the colonists revolted.
Restrictions on immigration.
Our DNA as a nation is about immigration in many ways.
So the nation was used to an expected immigration
in its first decades.
But what wasn't expected were the sheer numbers
and remarkable diversity of the newcomers.
The surge began the quest in the mid-1820s
and then it grew more and more.
And never stopped growing. In fact, we --
the nation wouldn't fall below the 1850s level,
or these levels until the 1930s.
There's number of immigration coming for a year.
Now, the immense number of immigrants
were an expression in part
of the rise of trans-national capitalism.
There's a concept that I could delve into for hours.
I'm not going to do it for hours.
But imagine a world
where workers and money and goods
circulated with increasing speed
and [indistinct] quantities.
Immigrants were part of this movement,
very much a part of this expanding capitalism,
this mobile capitalism.
And capitalism in this context began to sort of erase --
not erase totally, but obscure perhaps national borders.
Whereas the Civil War and the conquest of Mexico
were programs that white American citizens precipitated,
immigration was something of a force from outside
that Americans had to react to. Over time,
some Americans began to object to the number of immigrants
as well as the baggage they brought with them.
During the 1850s, a nativist political party
called the Know Nothings emerged,
demonstrated the rise of concern about immigration.
The Know Nothings were short lived.
I guess they got smarter. I don't know.
But nativism itself
will continue to influence American politics
down to the present.
How Americans reacted to immigrants depended on
where those immigrants came from and the baggage
that they brought with them.
One author counts out Europeans as roughly 60%
of all immigrants coming to the US between 1820 and 2000.
Over that 180 year period
this author points out Europeans accounted for basically 60%
or three-fifths of all immigrants showing up.
Another using different dates argues --
points out that 36 million of the world's
81 million migrants between 1815 and 1914.
Again most Europeans arrived at the United States.
And the United States was a destination
that was most frequently sought out by these immigration.
It's an enormous set of movements
where Europeans and Americans are especially affected.
At first, most immigrants to the United States
came from Northern and Western Europe,
especially the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany.
Because these people were mostly white and often Protestant,
they were seldom seen as threatening.
After 1890 more people began arriving from Southern
and Eastern Europe.
Particularly the Catholics and Jews.
And as a result, the US became less welcoming.
And when migrants from China and Japan
and the Philippines began arriving on the West Coast,
in some of the same time periods,
the United States began erecting formidable barriers
to these newcomers.
So such responses to the mass of immigrants,
once more contributed to redefining American citizenship.
Who got to come in?
Who got to be naturalized once they were here?
Who couldn't be naturalized?
Who could own land? What were their rights?
All these things were up in the air
as more and more people lined up to enter the country.
Seattle, again,
never led a charge in any of these realms
of redefining citizenship.
Nonetheless, the new realities affected who could
and could not, would and would not, come to reside in Seattle.
And exercise the rights of American citizens, vote,
serve on juries, enlist in the military.
Although relatively few blacks came to the Northwest
during the 19th century, white Americans in the region
paid a lot of attention to those blacks,
and their legal status in particular
was a point of disagreement.
In the early 1840s, the provisional government of Oregon
passed a law that prohibited blacks from residing there.
Not just visiting, or working, but even residing there.
Why? Why did Oregonians do this?
Why did they oppose the presence of blacks?
It wasn't just that they opposed slavery.
They were opposed to free blacks living in their midst,
fearing that they might undermine
white economic opportunity
or that they might make alliances with Native peoples
and cause a revolt,
and a variety of other things.
Although not strictly enforced, this law remained on the books
as Oregon became a territory in 1848 and a state in 1859.
The law wasn't repealed until 1926.
Washington did not follow Oregon's lead
in excluding African Americans.
Also Washington, it had an anti-miscegenation law.
But it abandoned it after 11 years.
So in some ways, Washington was more tolerant.
Nonetheless, the black population of the Northwest
remained small,
partly because the territory was so remote
from centers to African American population
especially in the Southern states.
The census recorded one black resident of King County in 1860.
And in 1880 -- I'm sorry, in 1870 and 1880 -- 34 blacks.
Seattle's entire population in this time period
remained pretty small.
The city was remote not only in relation to the South,
but also the Northeast the Midwest and the Southwest.
I would point out that King County already had
about a third of its population foreign born.
So the immigrants are already showing up
in the census numbers, in pretty substantial numbers.
The regions isolation ended in the 1880s,
thanks again, in large part, to the Civil War.
Here it was the economic policies
and Civil War and Reconstruction
rather than constitutional amendments that loom large.
Prior to 1861, Southerners in Congress had opposed
Republican initiatives to stimulate the economy.
For example,
the Republicans had proposed a substantial subsidy
from the federal government
to build a railroad across the continent to the Pacific.
Southerners, as I said, kept opposing these initiatives.
But then when they seceded in 1861,
no longer was there the opposition
to what the Republicans wanted to do.
And now the Republicans began to implement a strategy
of stimulating the economy by giving away federal lands
in the American West.
In quick order, Congress passed the Homestead Act.
And in this case,
recipients had to either be US citizens
or declare their intent to become citizens.
And also the Morrill Act, which created land-grant universities.
This act gave states parcels of federal land to the West
and allow them to sell the land or lease them
and take the proceeds
and help build colleges to encourage farmers and engineers
to get higher education.
In 1862 and '64,
Congress arranged to transfer immense holdings
of Russian government land to private companies
in return for those companies building railroads
across the continent.
The first one went to San Francisco in 1869.
The second one Puget Sound, arriving 1883.
Immigrant labor, especially made from China,
played a huge role in building these transcontinental lines
and maintaining them.
And now the Northwest was much closer
to the rest of the country.
A cross country journey
that might have taken four to six months over land
now took four to six days.
The Republicans didn't stop once the Civil War ended.
In 1867 they purchased Alaska from Russia.
By 1900, Seattle had begun making Alaska
into its hinterland.
By that, I mean Seattle had begun to make sure
that for every ounce of gold or lumber or fish
that came and went to Alaska,
Seattleites controlled the profits.
They controlled the proceeds
and they were making money by colonizing Alaska,
just as Californians had made money
by colonizing Puget Sound in previous decades.
Additional Republican legislation facilitated access
to fish, game, timber, minerals.
Again, especially on federal lands in the West.
Taking to gather these initiatives during
and after the Civil War,
made the West and Seattle a more vibrant
and more integrated part of the American and the global economy.
These initiatives helped to generate a demand for workers
that were seldom satisfied.
Meaning that most of the time more immigrants were welcome.
Simply because there weren't enough workers develop the West.
And Republican initiatives had made the region
and its resources much more accessible.
Note, that none of these developments,
none of this giving away of land would have occurred
without another longstanding confrontation.
And that is the whites' confrontation
against indigenous peoples.
It's fundamental to keep this in mind.
The government had lands to give away
only because it had taken it from Native Americans.
Just dispossession made everything else feasible
for these Republican initiatives
in the Civil War and Reconstruction era.
Federal government policies and actions,
among other things, loomed large in the growth of Seattle.
In part because of the development of railroads,
a town that had been only 1,100 in 1870
and 3,500 in 1880 suddenly had 42,000 in 1890,
and more than 80,000 in 1900.
By 1900, Seattle ranked as the 48th largest city
in the United States. You see that information.
And by 1910, it was the 21st largest city
in the United States.
Of course, Seattle was also a city of newcomers.
Only 14.5% of the population
had been born in Washington Territory as of 1900.
Almost 60% had been elsewhere in the US,
especially in the states in the Midwest --
Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin for example.
And one of the reasons
those Midwestern states loomed so large
in providing people [indistinct]
is that the railroad come from Minneapolis and Chicago
out to Puget Sound.
That East/West transportation line is what helps
populate the Northwest with Midwesterners.
If 58.2% of Seattleites arrive from other American states,
and if 14.5% of Seattleites
have been born in Washington territory or Washington state,
what about the other 27.3%?
They were foreign born. They were immigrants.
Immigration has long loomed large in Seattle's tomography.
In many ways,
Seattle has made the national patterns of immigration.
The majority hailed from Europe for example.
The majority possessed at least some resources.
Immigration was mostly not feasible for the very poor.
Until the 1930s, men outnumber women in the migratory stream.
Many of the newcomers did not expect to stay in North America,
but rather hoped to build a fortune there and then go home.
Often their decisions to go or to come
were made in consultation with families
where they originated, in Europe or Asia.
So they're often single men, but they weren't really single.
They were part of families making decisions
about what to do with resources.
How long to stay.
How much money was needed and so on.
And often these decisions had to do with making
their life better in the place of origin,
rather than having the good life in the United States.
Migration to the US was just a stepping stone
to more prosperity in their original hometowns.
Wages and salaries in the United States
were generally higher than in Europe and Asia.
Jobs more plentiful.
But there was still plenty of pitfalls
that might undermine immigration dreams and opportunities.
So Seattle featured these broader patterns
or generalizations we might make about immigration.
But like most communities, it also had its own singular path,
its own singular mixture of newcomers arriving
from other places.
Perhaps the most notable thing about Seattle and immigrants
is that the city, in general, had more than its share of them.
Between 1870 and 1980 each census found
that Seattle had roughly twice as many foreign born individuals
per capita as to the nation as a whole.
The first time that the fraction of immigrants
fell below 20% was 1940.
As the whole percentage of the immigrants across the country
decreased in that decade.
Notice also that this data may actually understate
the presence of immigrants in Seattle.
The 1900 Census count and not only those who are foreign born
but also those Seattleites born to foreign parents.
So in 1900,
just over one-quarter of Seattle's population
was foreign born.
Just under one-quarter was born to foreign parents.
So you have households where both generations are --
speak the language or have the traditions
or practice religion of where they came from.
You have not just one generation,
but two with the same ethnic background,
same foreign language,
same set of expectations in these households.
So Seattle has more immigrants per capita
all at a factor of two compared to the rest of the country.
The high percentage of former residents of Seattle,
compels us to think about what made for such
a large immigrant population.
So many foreign born inhabitants.
Some key factors that made the town so appealing.
It was a port city. Lots of ships.
And trains coming and going.
It was close to international boundaries,
including Canada's.
It was close, relatively speaking,
from a sort of West Coast point of view --
it was close to Japan, Siberia, Korea, China.
And it developed strong connections back east.
It had developed strong connections across the Pacific.
It was a conduit for people in goods and capital
going to and from Alaska. And it had an economy
that was growing manufacture workers from around the world.
We sometimes think of Seattle as remote and isolated.
We certainly act provincial at times.
But in some ways it's pretty clear,
Seattle was a true global crossroads by 1870, 1880, 1890.
With more international traffic than the city the size and age
could have expected.
Apart from how they came,
there was another distinguishing pattern about Seattle
that revolved around where they came from.
First, let's look at the United States.
Immigrants from the United States.
Oh, I need to back up. I'm sorry.
Before I go into immigrants from other countries,
let me say that by the 1920s, within the United States,
fewer and fewer people were coming from the Midwest to Seattle.
More and more were coming from California and Oregon.
This, I think, reflects the rise by the 1920s of California
as a colossus, a huge state.
And it began to sort of be the place
where, send Seattleites or welcome them home.
So within the US,
the Midwest became less of an influence after 1920.
Never stopping in influence,
but became less of one with California and Oregon.
And some of the other western states and mountain states
of sending more people to Seattle.
Now let me turn to the foreign born immigrants
rather than moving past internal migration.
For both the Emerald City and the nation at large,
immigration remained largely the story
of Europeans moving to the United States.
However, those headed to Seattle
tended to overwhelmingly to come from nations in Northern
and Western Europe --
Scandinavia, the UK, Germany, Ireland.
The stereotype that Seattle represented a Pacific Coast
Scandinavia does have some basis in the census numbers.
Decade after decade for more than 100 years,
the same handful of nations furnished the bulk
of European newcomers.
Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Germany.
Southern and Eastern European began arriving too
as immigrants but Seattle never got as many Slavs,
Italians, Russians or Hungarians
as did other parts of the country.
One country that sent almost none was France.
I guess they felt the Northwest could not improve
on what France had to offer.
They just are never high up in the numbers,
even though they're part of the Western and Northern Europe
that make such a huge contribution.
A couple things to notice about this slide.
Japan.
So Asian nations seldom appear in the top five
or six countries contributing immigrants to Seattle.
But in this decade, 1910 to 1920,
Japan's population grew.
In fact, Seattle was on the march.
It was the second largest Japanese American community
on the West Coast after Los Angeles.
Also by this time for reasons that will become clear,
the Japanese in Seattle are making an attempt to get more
and more Japanese people to immigrate.
Especially women and children.
Let's look at the Russia figure.
This figure here is a source of controversy and interest
among historians.
A historian of Seattle named Mitch Burner,
who for a long time was the Director of Special Collections
in the library, writes that,
when you see in the early period a quantity of Russians,
you're probably actually seeing Jews who come from Russia.
They might see this as Russians, but probably do not.
But he would argue that --
does argue that these figures for Russia
really are talking about Jews.
How much this is accurate, I cannot say.
Fortunately Devin Naar,
and then Elena Campbell will be speaking
about Jews and Russians,
and their experience with Seattle
in the third and fourth lectures.
So some of this issue I hope can get resolved.
But these figures are interesting,
in all kinds of ways.
Finally, the nation consistently first,
the very most number --
the highest number of immigrants to Seattle wasn't in Europe.
It was next door.
Canada consistently sent the largest number
to Seattle's foreign-born population.
Both then and now -- that is both then at the time
and now among historians thinking about that time --
these Canadian newcomers seemed to blend in,
meaning that they spoke English and were white.
Canadians in the United States
have been called the visible minority.
Perhaps they blended in best in the American West.
Some historians argue
that Canadians in British Columbia and Alberta
had more in common with people in Washington,
Oregon, Idaho and Montana
than they would have had with provinces back east,
Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec. So it was a sense not only
that Canadians are a lot like the Americans,
but also that Western Canadians are a lot
like Western Americans.
Whether these things were true or not, I'm not sure.
They're sometimes more impressionistic
than hard numbers.
But this Canadian presence is something that I think
deserves a lot more attention than historians have given it.
Also, both Asians and Europeans figure out at different points
that they can get into the United States easier
if they go to Canada first and then come to the United States.
We're going to talk about the impositions
of restrictions on immigration,
especially Southern and Eastern Europeans.
Until 1965 there were no restrictions or limits or caps
on immigrants coming from Canada or Mexico.
So all the countries are treated differently
and this is a crucial point to keep in mind.
What to make of these immigrants from the north.
I propose to see Canada really as an extension of Europe.
Yes, I know it's a separate nation unto its own self.
But in some ways it might be better characterized
as a new Europe or an extension of Europe.
It was known for a long time of course as British North America.
And its non-Native residents came primarily from Europe
or had European backgrounds, spoke European languages.
Now, immigration between Canada
and the United States was distinctive.
From 1850 to 1950, speaking about the nation as a whole,
not the Northwest but about all of Canada
and all of the United States,
Canada sent far more migrants to us than we sent to Canada.
One historian writes,
"Despite Canada's much smaller population,
the southern flow of Canadians
has been a torrent compared to the trickle
of American residents who moved north."
In 1900 the census counted 1.2 Canadian born residents
of the United States.
That 1.2 million was almost a quarter of the population
of Canada itself. Think about that.
A quarter of the population is now moving to the United States.
Another feature,
a torrent of Canadians may have come to the United States.
But they were one of the least eager to get naturalized.
So they came in great numbers
but they didn't necessarily want to be Americans
in terms of their citizenship status.
Among Americans moving north,
you have a different set of motivations.
Canadians moving south often
were concerned about economic issues.
But the Americans moving north
are often seeking something of a refuge.
Blacks, for example, traveling the Underground Railroad
often made it to Canada.
The Lakota Chief Sitting Bull escaped from the US Army
across the Canadian border in 1877.
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce in the same year
tried to do the same thing,
escape across the Canadian border.
In the late 19th century, a faction of Mormons
who disagreed with the church's decision to end polygamy
tried to protect its own ways of doing things
by moving across the border to Canada and trying
to extend the practice of polygamy among themselves.
And of course, in the 1960s and 1970s,
young men from the United States went to Canada
to avoid the draft and resist the war in Vietnam.
So Americans going to Canada
often had non-economic motives in mind.
And it's just a really unusual kind of --
form of immigration.
And discussing population movements
between the United States and Mexico,
scholars describe what they call a borderland.
To help account for the complexity
of the patterns observed there.
Perhaps we would understand Seattle better
if we concede them as belonging to a northern borderland.
That would link Canada to the United States in enduring ways.
In this borderland
we find people going back multiple times.
Back and forth, back and forth.
Again, there's no cap on immigration coming from Canada
to the United States.
There's no limit.
You can go back and forth as many times as you want.
Transnational migration was not a one and done experience.
Especially because the US didn't have a cap on immigration
going back and forth between these nations
was actually kind of easy.
Given that movement back and forth,
north and south, it might be more helpful to conceive
of that strip of land as a borderland.
A place where people go,
and come and go rather than a simple line
that's a strong border.
This is a zone of substantial movement to and fro.
Not just for jobs.
Go to Billingham Coastal on the weekend.
And the number of Canadian license plates
they're indicated.
There's a borderland here going on.
People coming for specific purposes.
Back and forth, back and forth across the nation.
Note that this Seattle borderland might be shared
with Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo,
cities that also have a Canadian population.
Seattleites don't consider themselves
part of the Rust Belt,
but they might have something in common
because of the Canadian origins of so many foreign-born.
One more detail.
I just got obsessed with this Canadian stuff, I'm sorry.
One more detail.
More than 60%,
more than 60% of Canadians live to the south of Seattle.
Think about that.
That means that on the borderland,
of course it's the warmest part of Canada.
It's the Great Lakes.
That borderland is much more popular by Canadians
than it is by Americans.
It's a really interesting thing.
While thinking about where Seattle immigrants came from,
you really need to consider
where they went to live in the city.
In 1944, a University of Washington sociologist named
Calvin Schmid began looking at immigration to Seattle.
And his map is kind of funky.
These are a map of foreign born Canadians living in Seattle.
And what he's done here is the bigger the circle is,
the more there are arriving.
Black indicates males. White indicates females.
Again it's going to be hard to kind of read these in.
And there's a number there that indicates a count.
So the key is kind of difficult to grasp.
But what Schmid is doing here
is sort of showing the increase in population over the years
and where different groups are located.
Norwegians, of course, are a big deal in Seattle.
Swedes and Danes.
English, Welsh, Scotch -- Scottish.
Irish and Germans.
Notice all of these have the same...
They all head to the same area.
North Seattle, right? That's where they concentrate.
All the Scandinavians are accounted for.
They Italians are known for having a little bit
of a different pattern.
More down here in Radio Valley.
But again, you see where these folks ended up.
Now the census talked about these people.
And Schmid talked about these people
in regards to the nations it came from.
Finland, Russia, Sweden, Norway.
But those national origins matter much less than the fact
that they're white.
The fact that they're white allows them to live
in the parts of Seattle that are the most segregated.
You might live next to a Norwegian or Russian or a Greek,
but you're all going to be called white
and you'll all be eligible to buy houses in the North End.
For Japanese and blacks, it's different.
You can't buy property or lease property
or own property outside of certain districts.
You can't have households in the North End.
Seattle's segregation by residents
and by some other factors is made clear.
Think about all the time Schmid spent.
How many Canadian Americans?
How many Swedish Americans?
All that, and he overlooks the biggest point --
that they're all white,
and they can all choose to live in blocks
that are not open to other groups.
By the way,
the final lecture in this series will be by Jim Gregory,
and it's going to be on redlining,
on segregation in Seattle.
I didn't mean to steal your thunder Jim,
but I wanted to get the appetite going.
It's just, he's done great work on it.
And it's such a huge topic.
In sum, Seattle was a highly discriminatory city.
Immigration strove to reinforce segregation
as much as it worked to undermine it.
Why do I raise this point?
There are different views about how immigration shaped America.
One emphasizes the United States as a melting pot.
Suggesting different groups getting blended together.
Another metaphor is a salad bowl.
Each has something to contribute,
even if they don't get melted together.
They each have a flavor to add to the salad bowl.
Neither of the metaphors
conveys the kind of discrimination found
in Seattle housing.
This isn't a melting pot. This isn't a salad bowl.
I tried to figure out if there was a metaphor
that was appropriate to Seattle.
I began thinking about airplanes and first class and coach.
Got to be kind of elaborate.
I was going to bring in airline food,
but the thing fell apart.
And part of the issue is it's so challenging,
because of so many complexities or layers to this issue.
I need some sort of metaphor
that accounts for different levels of citizenship.
First class, second class, and so on.
I need to account for different amounts
of power or influence in society.
I need to account for a growing amount of interracial marriages.
I need to account for a host of changes of forms
that take place over the decades,
trying to make the system fair sometimes.
Trying to make it harsher on some people at other times.
There are so many different groups -- women, blacks,
Native Americans, Catholics, Jews, Mexican Americans,
and the whites themselves,
many Canadian, Norwegian, Swedish, and so on.
It's just really difficult, so many variables
to make it difficult to have a nice, clean cut metaphor.
Thinking about how Americans concede of citizenship.
We have somewhat mythic ideas about citizenship
and immigration in our country.
The myth of immigration,
the myth of citizenship
is symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1886.
Emma Lazarus' poem, attached in 1903,
it's one of the most moving statements
about the United States that there is.
I can't read it because I'll tear up.
But it's also aspirational rather than accurate
as a description of what took place.
In fact, people weren't unanimously thrilled
about the Statue of Liberty in 1886.
Women pointed out that no women were invited
to the dedication ceremony.
They'd been left out.
They chartered a boat
and went out to be part of the proceedings.
And pointed out that liberty was a woman
and she deserved the right to vote.
In Cleveland, a black newspaper was even more biting.
These people aren't reverential for the Statue of Liberty,
like we are. They see it for what it is.
A sham. Well, partly a sham.
And their language is -- the newspapers' language is
sarcastic, bitter, and reminds us that, yes,
the 14th and 15th amendments have been passed,
yes, they were in effect,
but they still were not doing a whole lot of good
in terms of creating equality.
Helping people who had been free of service for 20 years.
Helping them truly overcome the disadvantages,
overcome the race and move to a more equal position
with other things in society.
The protests against the Statue of Liberty
point to another national myth
that is related to the message regarding
the US being a welcoming land of opportunity.
This other national myth says
that things get better over time.
America is the land of progress.
Conditions improve, by and large.
In terms of citizenship, the nation becomes more inclusive.
In fact, when considering matters of citizenship,
rather than emphasizing inclusion,
it makes more sense to recognize the co-existence
of inclusion and exclusion.
On the inclusion side of the scoreboard,
for decades the US offered
our rules of the open door to Europeans.
It was one of the most generous places for newcomers
in the world, in the modern world.
Moreover the nation still extended citizenship
to more and more people.
The 14th and 15th amendment made,
once enslaved African Americans into citizens,
the 19th amendment granted women suffrage in 1920.
In 1924, Congress extended Natives
Native American citizenship
for those Indians who hadn't achieved it yet.
In both the case of women and indigenous peoples,
Congress argued that their participation,
their service, their sacrifices in World War I
merited them citizenship,
earned them citizenship.
In this point of view, America does become more inclusive.
The Statue of Liberty kind of works.
From another angle, however, exclusions seem fairly constant,
progress came slowly.
Women were able to vote in Wyoming in 1869,
and you don't let the rest vote until 1919?
50 years later? Does it have to take that long?
The argument against women and other groups not voting is
they aren't capable of self-government.
Haven't men proved their own incapacity
to good govern by that point?
The inclusiveness of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924
was compromised when Arizona and New Mexico and Utah
continued to deny Indians the right to vote for 20 more years.
Sure, they became citizens. You just can't vote.
That's like fourth class or fifth class, right?
The 14th and 15 amendments often have been transformative.
And yet, as the Cleveland newspaper indicated,
there was still a lot of ways
to go to make those amendments more meaningful.
And in fact, it wasn't until the Civil Rights Act of 1964
and the Voting Rights Act of '65 that the 14th
and 15th amendment began to have more teeth and more punch.
It's a long time.
The South also devised a system
of race relations called Jim Crow,
which tried to keep formerly enslaved peoples subservient
and "in their place."
Lynchings were a part of that system of Jim Crow.
And Jim Crow was hardly confined to the South
and spread around to the rest of the country.
Consider the career of Horace Cayton, a native of Mississippi.
Cayton moved to Seattle
and began publishing a newspaper called The Seattle Republican.
The Republican is the party of Lincoln, party of emancipation.
Moreover, Cayton was part of the Republican establishment.
He served on party committees,
his press published party or state papers.
He made good money, and his family and he
owned a home on Capitol Hill.
But Jim Crow racism got worse, not better.
Jim Crow racism became more pronounced in Seattle.
Cayton resisted.
His newspaper featured stories about lynchings in the South.
And in doing so, he lost subscribers and advertisers.
He was no longer asked to serve on Republican party committees.
And he and his family were sued to get out of their house
because it reduced the property values
in a neighborhood going all white.
So this Jim Crow comes home to roost.
Things get worse,
not better in terms of race relations in Seattle.
As with race relations,
so with immigration policy.
We find both inclusion and exclusion.
Immigration policies were tools for extending membership
to the nation for being more inclusive.
However, from the beginning of the United States,
with particular force over the period of decades
from 1882 to 1942,
there was within the society in the immigration system,
a trend of counter -- a counter trend of exclusion.
And this limited the number of specific groups who could come,
and in many cases deny the rights and privileges
of citizenship to those who arrived.
Exclusions one of the most pronounced among non-whites,
and it affected Asian immigrants on the West Coast in particular.
I indicated at the start, as a nation,
the US made it clear it wanted to continue immigration,
wanted to continue to welcome immigrants.
But at the same time, it passes a law in 1790,
the Act of Naturalization, that prohibits Asians and blacks
from becoming citizens.
So people are welcome to come and contribute to the society,
but not all people can get naturalized.
Only free white persons.
With the 14th amendment, people of African descent
can now be naturalized too.
But after this happens, Asians are left out.
They're not able to get naturalized.
They can never become citizens.
One way to limit the impact of immigrants on the border
was to restrict their ability to get naturalized.
It was to put quotas or limits on how many could come.
Around 1890, arriving Southern and Eastern Europeans
began to outnumber immigrants to the US
from Northern and Western Europe.
One response was for Congress to establish quotas
that reduced the number of immigrants arriving
from the set nations of Eastern and Southern Europe.
After the First Quota Act of 1921
and the Second Quota Act of 1924,
immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe declined.
Those Southern and Eastern Europeans
could still be naturalized,
they could still become citizens,
because they're white.
But their numbers declined
because people are more suspicious or hostile towards
especially Catholics and Jews,
as opposed to people from Northern Europe.
Asians now become known
as "aliens ineligible for citizenship,"
a euphemism coined to describe them, and in a series
of laws by Congress and indecision by the Supreme Court,
between 1882 and 1924, East Asians
were barred from emigrating to the United States.
All East Asians.
In the mid 1920s, exclusion reined supreme.
I want to explain how this happened with experience
for groups in Seattle,
but let me turn quickly to one little detail
before I get to those groups.
The Naturalization Law of 1790 modified by the 14th amendment
indicated that Asians weren't eligible to become citizens.
But despite that fact,
in 1910, the census counted about 1,400 Chinese
and about 420 Japanese who had been naturalized.
Despite the law of 1790.
How could that be?
Until 1880 there is no federal system, system of immigration.
It's back to the States,
the localities and private companies.
It's state courts, local courts that determine
whether a person is worthy of becoming a citizen.
It's captains of passenger ships who keep track of records
and collect the fees and count the heads
and report somebody who's sick who arrives.
It's the city of New York,
forming the Castle Garden reception center for immigrants,
long before Ellis Island is run by the federal government.
Also, it took a long time
for the Supreme Court to go group by group
and decide who is white and who wasn't white from Asian.
All these things take time.
And there isn't a big immigration bureaucracy
for years and years.
But between 1880 and 1920, beginning slowly
and moving faster, a big immigration gets established.
Part of that was Angel Island, near San Francisco,
where Asian immigrants began getting processed.
Asians immigrated to the United States
for most of the same reasons that Europeans did,
economic goals loom large.
Chinese began coming to the West Coast
during the California Gold Rush,
but ended up living all around the West
and working on a variety of things, including railroads,
but also many other projects.
The West generally had a shortage of workers.
And that meant the Chinese were welcome.
But keep in mind the Western economy was full
of booms and busts.
And often those busts made people feel more competitive
or disadvantaged by the presence of immigrants in the West.
Political pressure from white working men
resulted in the federal government
in 1882 passing the Chinese Exclusion Act,
which forbade Chinese workers,
Chinese labor, from coming to the United States.
Merchants, students, scholars, tourists could still come.
But the great body of Chinese --
the population was no longer allowed to come
to the United States.
This is basically the first national piece
of legislation in immigration policy.
And what it does is exclude a group based on race.
It's the first national policy piece of legislation.
And what's it do? What about Seattle?
Well, first of all, not all Americans,
white Americans, agreed with the Chinese Exclusion Act.
A lot of people regarded the Chinese as really good laborers,
their work at the railroads had been highly complemented.
And here is a bunch of people on the left, communist,
nihilists, socialists, Fenians, hoodlums
who they think ought to be expelled first
before the Chinese are.
"Fenians" refers to Irish Catholics
and reflects a sort of anti-Catholic bias
of a lot of Americans nativists.
What about Seattle?
Seattle in 1880s had a small Chinese population
of a few hundred,
but it would attract the attention of white workers.
And they felt that the fact that there were
so many Chinese in Seattle was indicative of the fact
that the exclusion law wasn't working.
So they felt they would expel the Chinese.
And in February 1886, white Seattleites,
especially led by working men, by unions,
chase the Chinese out of town.
This was an act of vigilantism.
And followed the example of many other cities around the West.
But, and this is a Portland drawing of different episodes
in rooting out the Chinese and the so-called way that occurred.
Opinions about the Chinese differed however.
Some communities did not want to expel the Chinese
or started to do it and then backed off.
Port Townsend started to do it,
started to expel the Chinese, and then remembered
how much the Chinese had invested in downtown buildings.
Portland had a lot of people who wanted to expel the Chinese,
but Portland had really strong business ties for shipping
and other means with China.
And didn't want to antagonize their partners.
So this expulsion wasn't uniform from town to town.
But it was substantial
and it did reflect an important set of attitudes
that were handed down
when whites encountered other groups from across the Pacific.
The 1920 census marked the first time
that migrants from the Philippines
were counted as part of Seattle's population.
I can't say how many Filipinos there were. It is unclear.
The census counted 537.
But that figure was later lowered to 458.
None of these people were categorized as foreign-born.
In fact, they had been born and raised on American territory,
because the Philippines were part of the American empire.
The US had acquired them in 1902,
defeating first Spain and then a Philippine insurrection movement
to insert their control.
And the archipelago became an American colony.
I love this cartoon about what happened of American takeover
and their increase in empire.
Over here are states like California and Texas,
children who are mostly white becoming educated
to be self-governing.
Here are the Americans and the oppositions,
the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba.
They're ready to be schooled.
Again the thought is you can't be a citizen
until you're educated to be self-governing.
But here a Chinese kid looking inside.
He's not -- he can't get in the school.
Here a Native American kid reading a book,
but it's upside down.
Here, an African American kid doing the windows.
Not really educated to be a citizen.
Puck was skeptical of what the US could
and would do as it colonized parts of the world.
As colonial subjects,
Filipinos were assigned an anomalous status
of American nationals.
This meant that they could travel freely
between the United States and the Philippines
or between the Philippines and Hawaii.
And they could stay for long times.
So they had rights that other immigrants didn't always have,
other immigrants -- they're not immigrants, they're colonized.
They're subjects.
But American nationals were not eligible to vote in elections.
In the 1930s and the Great Depression,
competition on the part of whites
with these American Nationals grew to be keen.
And in 1934, Congress converted Philippines
from American nationals
to "aliens ineligible for citizenship."
They went from having at least a foothold in the United States
to having no foothold.
And in 1946, they were their own country,
and they now could immigrate,
but they no longer were American nationals.
Although they didn't have a large population,
Filipinos thought Seattle was important for them.
It was halfway between the fish canneries in Alaska
and the fields and ranches of California.
And Filipinos came to Seattle to look for a job,
the next job, often seasonal.
So it was what one historian calls a colonial metropolitan.
A town where people were given opportunities
where they can spend a night or a week in a hotel,
find a dentist, get some mail.
Filipinos are described by this historian as
both non-urban and non-stationary.
One of the censuses couldn't' get an accurate count.
Some, however, were there for schooling.
One of the sort of missions of Americans in the Philippines
was to promote education.
And many Filipinos took this seriously,
and they wanted to get their diplomas.
They went to Seattle's public schools
and the University of Washington and Seattle U
to get their education.
And often went back to the Philippines
and made a difference there in government or other fields.
To a certain extent in this time period,
Seattle was also serving as the metropole for Native peoples.
Increasingly over time, those Native peoples
came from a wider and wider catchment areas.
There weren't Natives by and on reservations or nearby Seattle,
but increasingly in Alaska, British Columbia,
bits of Washington, Montana, from afar came to Seattle.
And also sought it out as a colonial metropole.
So the idea doesn't just apply to Filipinos,
it also applies to Native peoples as well.
And you see the sort of
numbers of Native peoples coming from a broader area.
Not being just local, but also being from other states
and from British Columbia.
So, the Chinese got removed from Seattle in 1885, 1886.
They were back in time to help rebuild after the fire of 1889,
so it wasn't a permanent dislocation.
But the Chinese didn't grow
to be a very large community in Seattle.
By contrast, Japanese Americans arriving in Seattle,
amounted to 6,000, 7,000, 8,000
and became the second largest Japanese American community
on the West Coast after Los Angeles.
Whites saw the Japanese and imagined
that they'd be replacements for the Chinese.
To some extent that was true.
But the Japanese also did things differently.
They couldn't escape white resistance.
And in 1906,1907,
President Roosevelt negotiates the so-called
Gentlemen's Agreement,
which says that labor from Japan will not come.
As with the exclusion act of the Chinese,
tourists, scholars, merchants, and others could come.
The Gentlemen's Agreement was more generous, though,
to the Japanese by permitting children and families
to come more readily.
And this is important,
the country is going to close the door on Asian immigration.
Chinese, excluded 1882. Japanese limited 1906, 1907.
In 1917 Congress passed the Asiatic Bar Zone,
which eliminates other Asian groups from coming.
And in the second quarter act of 1924
cuts off further immigration from Japan.
But the Seattle Japanese Community is fairly large,
and if you throw in King County,
it's almost 10,000 people by 1920, by 1940.
But there's something different about the Chinese,
about the Japanese compared to the Chinese.
And that is the Japanese were able to get
more women and children in and far more families,
more nuclear families.
This creates a fault line within the Japanese American community.
Japanese parents are considered non-white
and they're permanently banned from being naturalized.
Japanese kids, say born in this country, are which amendment?
Which amendment is birth right citizenship?
Fourteen, same one we're looking at right now
for other purposes, right?
By virtue of the 14th amendment,
Japanese American kids born in this country
are citizens with their first breath.
They're going to have the right to have citizenship
that the parents can never get in their lifetime.
That means that when during World War II
the federal government wants to lock up Japanese Americans,
it locks up 60% of the people that are American citizens.
Who are American citizens, right?
It locks up its own citizens.
We can date the beginning of the end
of the exclusion era very precisely.
February 19, 1942,
President Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066,
authorizing the imprisonment of all Japanese on the West Coast,
one of the most flagrant violations
of civil rights in US history.
The Supreme Court initially supported this.
In fact,
cases supporting this were still on the books as late as 2018.
But the Supreme Court begins to wobble about that
in the case known as Ex parte Endo at the end of 1944.
Also by 1943,
Congress has repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
What's going on with this?
China is an ally in World War II.
And it makes no sense to insult them so much
with the exclusion act.
And so Congress in 1943 passes a law abolishing it.
They're still not welcoming many Chinese, a small quota.
But at least Chinese can now be naturalized
in the United States.
It's a gesture to an ally in World War II.
Prior to Pearl Harbor, the messy considerations --
labor supply, nativism, racism,
competition with white workers --
those factors loomed largest in determining
immigration policies.
World War II and the Cold War changed everything.
It marked the end of American Isolationism.
And beginning the new war in the world
where public relations was important.
The Soviet Union criticized our treatment of minorities,
criticized our treatment of other nations
and their peoples.
That was a sore point in a world polarized by the United States
and the Soviet Union.
Each side competing to get,
to do well independent countries like India and elsewhere,
to divide up Africa.
So what had been a strong trend of exclusion
begins to break down.
And the United States begins to reform its immigration policies.
Year by year, law by law,
from 1943 to 1990, the immigration restrictions,
the quotas, the exclusion are defeated.
The US develops policies to deal with refugees,
displaced persons and asylum speakers.
In the 1930s, America's court system is so troubled
that the United States couldn't come to the aid
of many Jews trying to escape Russia.
After World War II, they're more aware of
displaced people and refugees and people seeking asylum.
Asians and everyone else becomes eligible to immigrate
and get naturalized.
The racial barriers to that are struck down.
There's a reduction of quotas based on national origins.
There's still some national distribution,
but by 1980 people think more in terms
of hemispheres rather than nations
in terms of allocating quotas, or allocating visas.
There's more emphasis on family reunification,
leading to a huge increase unexpectedly
because of the chain of immigration.
And there's more attention to job skills,
whereas ethics training because less important.
So the nation becomes more reform minded
about its immigration policy.
Zip through these because I'm running a little late.
As results of these changes,
for the first time the number of immigrants from Europe
is no longer the top number in 1980.
This is Seattle.
It's the same data from the United States as a whole.
Europeans are no longer number one.
Asians and the Americas become large,
also caps are put on Canada and Mexico for the first time.
It's not fair compared to other countries
to let Canadians and Mexicans come in without a cap.
So that's another thing that happened.
This is Seattle's racial makeup.
I want to point out that some groups down here
to the bottom -- Koreans, Vietnamese --
that are again baggage from the Cold War, right?
Alliances obligations
that had not been there before to the same extent.
I need to get to the end.
Let me sort of leave you with immigration statistics
for the last few years.
Notice a couple of things.
Canada no longer is number one.
But it's still a contributing factor.
Ethiopia had not been, no place in Africa had been a big deal.
Now Ethiopia is.
The two most populous countries in the world are now number one.
Right? That in some ways represents a fairer system.
One thing I noticed in a lot of my work
is immigrants coming here saw something in Seattle
that reminded them of home.
That was obvious for Norwegians.
The fiords, that was obvious in comparison.
But Koreans, Germans, Japanese,
others saw in Seattle something that reminded them of home,
that's why they wanted to stay here,
or that's one of the reasons
they developed or invented for staying here.
That's a remarkable thing,
that so many people from so many parts of the world
can come here and see something they want to --
that's similar to their home.
And I'll stop there. I'm sorry, I ran over time.
But Canada stuff caught me up, on the maple leaf.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
-Thank you so much, can you hear me?
Thank you so much Professor Findlay
for that masterful integration of the history of Seattle
with national and international forces.
We learned so much.
So we have time now for some questions.
I hope you'll stick around for some questions.
If you absolutely need to leave,
please do so as quietly as possible.
So the first question I have concerns King County.
We're in King County right now.
This lecture took place in King County.
When did King County come into existence
and how did it get its name?
-King County has been King County since December 1852.
In 1985 King County was changed,
the name changed from the original namesake
to Martin Luther King.
The original namesake was William R. King of Alabama.
He had been a representative and a senator and a diplomat
and he had been the vice presidential candidate
with Franklin Pierce in the election of 1852.
They won.
And Pierce was the President, King was the Vice President.
Chris County was named after Pierce, Franklin Pierce.
King County got named after William R. King.
Who did the naming?
It was actually Oregon in December
that had done the naming.
Oregon -- At this point,
Oregon, Idaho, Washington, parts of Wyoming and Montana --
are all the same territory, Oregon Territory.
Oregon knows that Canada and the union remains that big.
So trying to downsize.
And so it's already doing that. Part of the strategy, though,
is to help get Washington up and running.
And so Oregonians in December of 1852 name it King County.
By March,
Washington Territory has been created
and Seattle has become King County's county seat.
Who was William R. King?
He was Alabama and a slave holder.
His peers respected him for his politics,
his way with other legislators.
But he was a slave holder.
And in 1985, that he was a slave holder meant
that he wasn't worthy of being --
or shouldn't have had the place named after him.
But here's more controversy about William R. King.
He's also said to have been gay.
So he was a gay, Alabama slave holder.
First of all,
trying to figure out in the year 2024 what people in 1850
were saying about sexual orientation
is a very difficult thing.
And whether he's gay or not is a matter
of debate and controversy.
But when people are thinking "Let's change the name
to Martin Luther King,"
some said, "Well, we have a gay namesake.
Do we want to forsake that namesake?"
They thought that he might be considered
because of his sexual orientation.
So he's actually quite an interesting story.
So Pierce and King are elected in November 1852,
and named King County in December.
Seattle's the county seat in January.
In 1853, it was still -- It took until March
for the new president to be inaugurated.
So although the county is being named as to Pierce and King,
it was Fillmore
who signed the law in March
to make it Washington into a separate from Oregon.
So a long sequence of things.
So it's always been King County.
But it was Oregonians who named us,
trying to jump us off to help on the way to be independent.
And yeah, so William R. King of Alabama.
-Thank you for that extremely comprehensive answer.
How many of you are surprised by the answer to the question?
Quite a few of you.
That leads me to say that if you have questions,
and you have a card,
an index card which you received when you came in.
If you could pass that to the aisle that would be great.
And we have time for about eight more,
eight more minutes of questions.
Okay. I have a question.
Can you talk a little bit about what you see
as the long term effects of Japanese immigration to Seattle?
-Yeah, just a narrow thing.
I'm stunned at the richness of the city's
response to and absorption in the incarceration
and expulsion [indistinct] the history of that episode.
And the way the story has been told to preserve the way
people resisted at the time -- Gordon Hirabayashi --
the way novelists like General Okada and David Guterson
and [indistinct] -- sorry, the author escapes me --
the Memoirs by Monica Sone.
Monica Sone writing hers in 1953
in the middle of McCarthyism.
Criticizing the government for incarceration.
These are just masterful works.
The first group of Americans,
Japanese Americans to be locked up,
to be incarcerated was on Bainbridge Island.
They were sent to Manzanar.
If you go to Eagle Harbor, there's a stunning work
of public art commemorating that episode.
It's just rich and thoughtful.
If Seattle was the home of much of the redress movement,
it's the home of Densho,
a tremendous archive about what happened.
I would say that this community especially in the way
it's taught about,
refused to forget about just deal with that episode,
which is historical but also important
in other ways is just such a rich place
to think about that topic.
You can walk down the international district, right?
Part China Town, part Japan Town, part Filipino Town.
There's streets and buildings
that honor Hirabayashi down there.
And that's just remarkable.
So the experience of Japanese Americans
and the way they share that and deal with that
here is just remarkable.
I don't think there's another city in Seattle --
I'm sorry, in the country -- that's quite like that.
-Thank you.
Okay we have some questions from the audience.
So the first question is what accounts
for the almost tripling of Seattle's population
from 1900 to 1910?
-So the city was growing quickly anyway, right?
40,000 in 1990, 80,000 in 1900 -- 40,000 in 1890,
80,000 1900 and then 237,000 1910.
So part of its growing anyway.
But something else happens.
That is between 1900 and 1910,
Seattle annexes Ballard, Georgetown,
and a whole bunch of other parts around Seattle.
So annexation is what really supercharges
that growth between 1900 and 1910.
There's all kinds of large scale annexations
that complement or underscore population increase.
-So if I could follow up on that,
what fuels this drive for annexation?
Territorial expansion,
the Seattle-ization of the hither lands?
-So there's a number of crises --
the fire of Seattle, the Great Fire of 1889.
The attempt -- Where are you gonna get your electricity?
Who is going to build your roads?
Once the roads are built,
who is going to go back and convert them
for cars and trucks?
There's all these things, all these utilities.
Where do they get the water supply?
How do we get electricity, right?
The city of Seattle does a lot of these things as municipality.
And those amenities, those resources,
the schools is another one.
All those things are important.
But as Seattle spreads,
as it grows, it also becomes more racist.
One of the reasons is you build street car lines
out to outlying areas, and people
who don't want to live next to people of color in the downtown
or don't want to live close to China Town,
don't want to live near African Americans in the subdivision,
they can take the street car out to Madrona or West Seattle
or other parts of -- they get around more easy.
And Quintard Taylor has a figure about this.
In 1900 I think they were after Americans living
in every political precinct,
in 1920 they're only in the subdivisions.
So there's also segregation
that a company is annexation and growth
from streetcars and transportation.
-Thank you so much.
I'm learning so much about this,
the city I've lived in since 1992.
One last question.
Can you talk about immigration from East Africa into Seattle?
When and why was Seattle a destination?
So this very question attests to Seattle
as a global crossroads over the centuries.
-So I don't have a great answer for you on that.
I tried to sort of look it up.
What is, where do Ethiopians come from?
And I didn't find it. I didn't find a great answer.
But I have a couple of thoughts.
So immigration and naturalization
is mostly done at the federal level.
But cities try to get their way in there.
In the 1980s, a number of American cities
declare themselves to be sanctuary cities.
And this was often the response to the crisis
in Central America,
and Salvadorans and Guatemalans escaping regimes
that they're supporting in some ways.
And cities and towns like Tucson, Chicago,
Seattle declare themselves sanctuary cities.
And they say we aren't going to help
federal authorities do some tasks like deportation.
So Seattle becomes aware of -- becomes more liberal,
more sort of immigrant centered, immigrant centric.
And in 2003, it changes to a welcoming city,
as opposed to a sanctuary city.
And it has its own office immigration and refugee affairs.
So Seattle itself develops a consciousness about
how it can intervene and help.
And then I think Ethiopian community members
from Washington try to create other opportunities
to have other Ethiopians come here, mostly refugees.
The Congress and the President passed I think in 1990,
a special provision called diversity visa.
And it tries to encourage visas to go into countries
that have under represented in the population.
So already factors city and national combined
to make people more receptive to Ethiopians.
Why Ethiopians as opposed to other groups, I can't say.
I haven't found that out.
But I did find that out there were a group of students
who met on the Ave,
in the Greek coffee shop that was there for a long time.
They were the ones who working with the city
and working with [indistinct] organizations,
medical organizations trying to find a refuge
for people escaping the civil war in Ethiopia.
-Thank you so much.
And I like to just take this opportunity to again,
thank Nick Rall and the rest of the history department staff
for all their heroic efforts over many,
many months in helping to make this series possible.
And I'd like to thank Dean Harris for introducing it.
So, on behalf of the Department of History
thank you so, so much.
And let's have a huge hand for Professor John Findlay.
[ Applause ]