The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 23 (2012)

From Race to Nation:
The Institute of Paciﬁc Relations,
Asian Americans, and George Blakeslee,from 1908 to 1929

Brian Masaru HAYASHI*

INTRODUCTION
The history of exclusion of Asian Americans from U.S. citizenship,
and political and social rights is a familiar story. We know much about
the historical events and the process leading to the exclusion of Asian
Americans from the broader “mainstream” of American society from theworks of Yuji Ichioka, Sucheng Chan, Ron Takaki, Roger Daniels, andothers. We can see, to use T. H. Marshall’s classic formulation of “citizenship,” how prior to World War II Asian American immigrants weredenied civil rights by a prohibition against their naturalization, limitation of the political rights of their American-born offspring by politicians
and labor leaders, and exclusion from social rights by the broader
American public. But we can also see how important changes in citizenship rights for Asian Americans came with World War II: Chinese exclusion was ended; Chinese and Asian Indians were given naturalizationrights; and, after the war, Korean and Japanese Americans were also
given naturalization rights, while anti-alien land laws, aimed at the latter, were ruled unconstitutional. While social rights were still denied—*Professor, Kyoto University

51

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BRIAN MASARU HAYASHI

the presence of “Asian” towns dotting the American urban landscapepoints to this unfulﬁlled dimension of U.S. citizenship—undeniablechanges in the civil and social rights dimension clearly took place.1
But why did these changes occur? To be sure, changes in the international order affected the disbursement of civil, political, and social rights
to Asian Americans. Moreover, the rise of Asian American political pressure groups in the 1960s no doubt contributed to the post–World War II
widening of citizenship rights. But could the bestowal of naturalizationrights on Asian American immigrants be attributable solely to these two
factors? Were other factors involved?
Nongovernmental organizations, especially those dealing extensively
with Asia and Asian Americans prior to World War II, may have contributed to this seemingly rapid change in the citizenship regime. The
Institute of Paciﬁc Relations (IPR) was one of the largest of theseorganizations numerically, and it had a very geographically diverse
membership for a nongovernmental organization; these two elements
bestowed on it the possibility of effecting ideological changes. Founded
in 1927 by Hawaiian businessman Frank Atherton (1877–1945),
Stanford University president Ray Wilbur Lyman (1875–1949), Clark
University professor George Blakeslee (1871–1954), and others, theInstitute quickly opened chapters in Australia, Britain, Canada, China,
France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand,
the Philippines, Thailand, the United States, and the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, with its headquarters in Honolulu before moving to
New York City in 1934. During its active pre–World War II era life, theInstitute sponsored a number of important studies on Asian Americans,such as Roderick McKenzie’s Oriental Exclusion, Eliot Mears’s Resident Orientals on the American Pacific Coast, and Carey McWilliams’s
Prejudice: Japanese Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance until it
met its demise in 1961.2
Yet much work remains to uncover how those in the IPR understood
the people of the region now known as the Paciﬁc Rim. Tomoko Akami
ﬁnds that these individuals were “post-League [of Nations] internationalists,” while Izumi Hirobe ﬁnds that some were concerned with modifying the Immigration Act of 1924, which says much about how they
understood the international order but far less about their racial outlook.
No doubt part of the reason for the mystery is because the Institute’s documents and the personal papers of many of its key academicians are scattered across the globe in Australia, Japan, Hawaii, British Columbia,

FROM RACE TO NATION53

New York City, and other locations, making it difﬁcult to piece the story
together. This article, therefore, begins the task with a narrow focus ona single founder, George H. Blakeslee, professor of History and International Relations at Clark University. I utilize the papers he left
behind to bring to light some of the ideas that fueled the Institute’s concern for Asians and Asian Americans. Blakeslee, in particular, is a good
choice since he has many important connections with Asian American
studies. From 1910 to 1919, he co-edited the Journal of Race Development, which published some of the earliest scholarly essays on Asian
Americans. He lobbied publicly and privately for the revision of the 1924
Immigration Act that discriminated against Asians and Asian Americans.
His papers, while incomplete, shed light on some of the thinking behind
the Institute.3
What emerges from these sources is that Blakeslee both challenged
and upheld the status quo on issues of “race.” On the one hand, the Clark
University scholar proved quite liberal for his time by deﬁning “race”
not as a permanent determinative factor of human behavior, but something far more malleable; thus he believed in, and even preached, that“superior civilizations” should take on responsibility for the development of so-called inferior peoples rather than simply ignoring them or
exploiting them, as many social Darwinists of his day recommended.
Moreover, the historian maintained a high view of Chinese and Japanese“civilization,” which, when linked to his idea of development, meant
Chinese and Japanese, both in Asia and America, merited being treatedwith equality. Once World War I broke out, Blakeslee, like many Wilsonian
internationalist liberals, accepted the nation-state as the entity that would
bring peace to the world. By 1919, he shifted the journal away from therace-based notion of human behavior supported by psychologist andpresident of Clark University, G. Stuart Hall, changing the journal’sname to International Affairs, which reﬂected the importance he attachedto the nation-state. He believed nation-states deserve acknowledgmentof their territorial integrity and protection of their citizens from discriminatory legislation, such as those pushed by the Japanese exclusion
movement, and in this regard Blakeslee’s advocacy of a fair immigration quota for Japanese immigrants appeared liberal. Yet his willingness
to accept limited quotas for the Japanese while leaving unchallenged themuch larger quotas for Europeans was in line with maintaining the racialcompositional status quo of pre–World War II America.

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BRIAN MASARU HAYASHIRACE DEVELOPMENT
Blakeslee’s malleable conception of race was readily apparent in thevery ﬁrst issue of the Journal of Race Development. In explaining the
purpose of the journal, he wrote that it aimed for discussions of “the problems which relate to the progress of races and states generally consideredbackward in their standards of civilization.” Promising academic freedom in the discussion, Blakeslee guaranteed his journal was not wedded
to any particular school of thought and that its authors were free to express their views as long as they conformed to the intent of assisting thedevelopment of so-called inferior races. Blakeslee said of his journal:
It is not the organ of any particular school of thought; it does not even holditself responsible for all of the statements of its contributors; but it aims topresent, by the pen of men who can write with authority, the important facts
which bear upon race progress, and the different theories as to the methodsby which developed peoples may most effectively aid the progress of the
undeveloped.

He reiterated his point again by saying the journal “seeks to discover, not
how weaker races may best be exploited, but how they may best be helpedby the stronger.” He then stipulated the kinds of authors he wanted forthe journal–intellectually well-informed and with a matching social conscience: “It is to provide a means for the discussion of these problems,by those who really have the interests of the native peoples at heart, as
well as for a presentation of the facts bearing upon racial development.”4
He promised readers that that the journal would cover a large rangeof topics, including eugenics, since discoveries in this ﬁeld might help
the “inferior races” to do better in the future. Blakeslee said: “Superior
vitality may make the backward races of to-day the world leaders tomorrow.”5
REPRESENTATIONS OF CHINA AND KOREA IN 1908
Unlike those who supported the Chinese exclusion movement, Blakeslee
held considerable respect for Chinese cultural achievements. In 1910, in
his university course lectures he pointed to the Mongol dynasty as thegreatest empire in the history of mankind in terms of geographic spread,the Great Wall as an engineering marvel, and the institution of the civil

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55

service examination system as a great administrative achievement. As
well, he had high praise for Confucius, whom he called “the Ben Franklinof China,” since the two men were both “distinguished gentlemen” whoemphasized “moral precepts for conduct of affairs of this life.” In fact,
he held Chinese civilization in such high esteem that he claimed that thatfrom 2000 BC “the Chinese were very well advanced on the road to civilization.” He added: “At the time when pre-historic man in Europe andAmerica was rubbing his back against the trees of primeval forests, theChinese student was working out his mind to six places of the decimals.”6
Yet, in 1908, Blakeslee said that contemporary China had its share of
weaknesses as well. While admitting that most Chinese were law-abiding and physically strong, he found them “selﬁsh” and “self-centered,”lacking a sense of public virtue and even heedless of those suffering rightin front of them. Moreover, he found them wanting in government andoverall “civilization.” “Their government,” Blakeslee declared, “is without honesty, their civilization is without science, and their religion islargely without God. You may smell China before you land. And when
you once have gone ashore, you see that the Chinese people have absolutely no conception of the rules of hygiene.”7
While Blakeslee did not directly blame Western imperialism for China’s
contemporary impoverishment, he certainly was critical of it. Though heportioned out blame to both sides for the Opium Wars, he clearly viewed
favorably the Boxer Rebellion. “The Boxer movement,” the young historian claimed, “was a great patriotic protest against the robbery ofChinese territory,” which thus made him willingly to excuse the antiforeign “excesses” of the participants by saying that “the horrors whichwere perpetuated on the whites by the Chinese in China have more thanten times been paid by the horrors which the whites have perpetuatedupon the Chinese.” Blakeslee did not excuse the Western imperialist
nations carving up China. He compared their actions to a hypotheticalsituation in which Russia seized Governor’s Island (New York), Englandgrabbed Fort Monroe (Virginia), Germany occupied Charleston (South
Carolina), and France took Galveston (Texas)—in other words, many
coastal ports of the eastern United States. He summarized his analysis
of Western imperialism in China:
As a matter of policy, the system of spoliation was all wrong. It has accomplished and will accomplish no beneﬁt to China or her oppressors. . . . What
I contended . . . for still is that China should remain the mistress of her own

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BRIAN MASARU HAYASHI

destiny, that mechanical progress should come, but under her own auspices,and that her autonomy in the common interest of all nations should be preserved.8

Hence, in 1913, Blakeslee called the Chinese “a gifted race which isstruggling to compress the natural evolution of centuries into a span ofa few years and whose national future, as a growing Paciﬁc power, will
be closely associated with our own.”9
Despite Blakeslee’s disparaging remarks about contemporary Chinese
culture, his condemnation of Western imperialism found a responsive
chord among Chinese Americans in San Francisco. When his China andthe Far East came out in 1910, the San Francisco Chinese Chamber ofCommerce recommended it for wide circulation on the West Coast. As
one enthusiastic reader said: “I have given a copy to a representative of
the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco who has just called
upon me, with the recommendation that he should see that it secures purchasers among the Chinese of the Coast.”10
Blakeslee’s representation of Korea, however, was a different matter.
He saw the country as initially similar to China, but then his line of thinking changes.
When our ancestors, the Angles and Saxons, were half-naked barbarians,
wandering about in the damp, foggy villages of Germany, at that time the
Koreans were civilized people. It was from the hands of China that theyreceived the torch of civilization. And after they had lighted the ﬁres of learning in their own land, they reached across the waters and handed the torch toJapan. Then Korea fell asleep. To-day it is Japan . . . who is waking her up
vigorously from her long, Rip Van Winkle sleep of hundreds of years.11

Blakeslee saw Koreans in a very different light than the Chinese or
Japanese. He believed Koreans and Japanese were “essentially the samegeneral [racial] stock,” though he thought there was a “frightful abyss”
between the two peoples. While the Japanese were “quick, lively, [and]energetic,” the Koreans were nice but the opposite:
They lack energy, they lack vigor, they lack the get-up qualities which havemade other nations what they are. Now, since they do lack these qualities,
there is [a] danger on the other hand of under-estimating the Koreans. When
you come to know them, you ﬁnd they are really a kind-hearted, lovable people.12

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57

But unlike the imperialist situation in China, Blakeslee supported
Japanese imperialism’s nasty awakening of the Korean Rip Van Winkle.
He noted in his 1908 lecture that Queen Min was murdered by a “a gangof rufﬁans and cut-throats” rather than Imperial Japanese troops and their
Korean collaborators and acknowledged that many individual Koreans
have “suffered greatly” under Japanese rule, but he pointed to the “wonderful reforms” the Japanese brought to Korea in the area of infrastructure building (railroads, roads, bridges, water systems), sanitation andhealth, and public education. But the greatest beneﬁt, the history professor pointed out, was the termination of the “abuses of Korean [governmental] administration.” His assessment of the previous Korean
government under Emperor Kojong was harsh. He said:
The Korean government has been unbelievably corrupt. The Court at Seoul
has been control[l]ed by soothsayers, eunuchs and sorcerers. Corrupt factions
there have contested control, using as means midnight assassination[s] andstreet riots. The ofﬁcials have lived off the peasants, and the peasants havestarved, and the people as a whole have no initiative. They have been trodden down for centuries, and they have no push, no energy, no life.13

Furthermore, he invoked an unnamed “immutable law,” perhaps fromsocial Darwinism applied to international relations, to justify Japaneseimperialism:
There is danger in wasting altogether too much sympathy over the loss of
Korean independence. It is a law of history that if a state or a society will notmake progress, it must be destroyed, and if it will not make reforms, thenthose must be made from without. There are no international asylums for feeble-minded states. There are no retreats for imbecile governments. And the
Korean government was not ﬁt to live: the Korean nation, independent, did
not have the moral power to reform itself, and Japan was carrying out an
immutable law when it smashed independence in Korea.14

Did Blakeslee condemn Koreans to a colonial status in perpetuity?
Probably not. While he never stated explicitly what he thought the futureof Korea held, in general, he maintained that all countries of the AsiaPaciﬁc region were headed for some form of self-governance, since thewhole Asian Continent was headed toward a “constitution-securing
epoch,” as Europe had entered its own little more than a century earlier.
Noting on the eve of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 that the empress

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dowager had promised a constitution, Blakeslee declared that the futureof Asia included some form of constitutional government and that to ﬁght
against this trend was senseless: “To attempt to rule over a dependent
Oriental people forever is simply hopeless; the recent history of Japan
has made laughing-stock of the old idea of inferiority of all Asiatics andtheir incapacity for modern self-rule.”15
REPRESENTATIONS OF JAPAN IN 1912
While Blakeslee left behind no lecture notes on Japan, the journal hecofounded at Clark University provides us with further clues as to how
he constructed the Japanese. The Journal of Race Development had as agoal counteracting the “international slander” the founders perceived to
be to be circulating among the American public as a result of the Japanese
exclusion movement’s rise after the 1907 “Gentlemen’s agreement,”
whereby Japan would voluntarily restrict labor emigration to the UnitedStates and in return the United States would make no formal restrictive
immigration law targeting the Japanese. Although, on paper, he and Hall
were co-editors, in reality Blakeslee ran the journal, as his editorial assistant Mary Treudley later recalled.16
Under Blakeslee, the journal took a decidedly liberal stance for its
times. It was founded at the same time as the annual conferences on the
Far East at Clark University. Blakeslee held a similar concept of “race”
as the exclusionists, but he inserted the key word “development” to thejournal’s title to indicate that the journal’s authors did not seek the
exploitation of allegedly inferior races nor view their racial characteristics as immutably ﬁxed but, rather, as malleable. As he stated in the introduction to the ﬁrst issue:
The Journal of Race Development offers itself as a forum for the discussionof the problems which relate to the progress of races and states generally considered backward in their standards of civilization. It is not the organ of any
particular school of thought; it does not even hold itself responsible for allof the statements of its contributors; but it aims to present, by the pen of men
who can write with authority, the important facts which bear upon race
progress, and the different theories as to the methods by which developed
peoples may most effectively aid the progress of the undeveloped. It seeks
to discover, not how weaker races may best be exploited, but how they may
best be helped by the stronger. . . . We trust that the Journal of Race

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59

Development may aid, in some degree, at least, in so educating public opinion, that it shall secure for the peoples of weaker civilizations a treatment
marked by continually greater justice and wisdom and sympathy.17

To ensure the journal’s aims were carried out, Blakeslee formed a boardof contributing editors. Consistent with his liberal stance, the neo-progressive academic secured scholars of considerable stature for the board
who shared his outlook. Hence, Blakeslee welcomed to his board progressives of his day such as W. E. B. Du Bois, then president of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Franz
Boas, anthropologist at Columbia University; and Alfred Kroeber,anthropologist at the University of California (Berkeley). Although thelatter dropped out after a year, Blakeslee added more to his board, including A. F. Grifﬁths, president of Oahu College, who argued at the “China
and the Far East” Conference in 1910 that the Chinese in Hawaii had
already successfully assimilated.18
Blakeslee recruited other top-level scholars for his journal, including
academics from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia and nonacademics withconsiderable knowledge of a speciﬁc country such as India, the Philippines,
Korea, China, and Japan. Although the nonacademics were often missionaries, the one expert in Tokyo was the editor of the Oriental Review,
Masajirô Honda. It should be pointed out, however, that he had no other
Asians or Asian Americans on his board until long after the journal
became International Affairs in 1919.19
While it is not known how closely Blakeslee selected the journal’s
articles to match his own political perspective, it is clear that most of theauthors shared a similar belief in the progress of mankind and the obligation of the stronger to help the weaker. Blakeslee’s journal publishedan article by Alexander Chamberlain, professor of Anthropology, at
Clark University, who began his essay on the Japanese “race” by discussing how nineteenth-century scholars observing the Japanese foundthem the weakest physically of the Mongoloid race, which they partiallyattributed to their diet of rice, ﬁsh, and vegetables. These scholars, hewrote, had considerable doubts that the Japanese “will be able to standthe stress and incident to the acceptance of Occidental civilization andcompetition with the white race.” But once the Japanese defeated theRussians in the 1904–5 war, Chamberlain observed, scholars reassessed
upwardly the Japanese’s allegedly weak racial origins by claiming theJapanese had tropical origins or were “thin-skinned Tartars.” The current

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BRIAN MASARU HAYASHI

consensus, Chamberlain argued, was that the Japanese were a “mixed”
Mongolian “race,” whose future—and this was what was most stunningof Chamberlain’s conclusions—lay in equality with whites. Chamberlain
said: “And they are a race with whom, at some future time, the whiterace may happily contract a lasting physical and intellectual union.”20
BLAKESLEE ON ASIAN AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS
When it came to the question of Japanese immigration, the journal
under Blakeslee’s leadership gave voice only to those who contradicted
the claims of V. S. McClatchy and the Japanese exclusion movement
leaders. As early as 1912, Blakeslee got Jôkichi Takamine, president of
the Nippon Club of New York, to write about the Japanese in the UnitedStates. Trained in the physical sciences, Takamine had no formal education in social sciences. Yet he wrote as if he did, and in his defense of
the Japanese in the United States, he twisted the “facts” to suit his “emotional” stance against the exclusionists’ claims that the Japanese wereunassimilable. In contrasting Japanese with European immigrants, theformer chemist for the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture made an astounding claim—that the Japanese immigrated to the United States foreducational, not economic, reasons. Takamine wrote:
Herein is the decided difference between the Japanese and European immigrants. The European immigrants are in the main attracted here by stories ofhuge fortunes made and to be made in America. The jingle of the dollar is in
their ears all the way across the Atlantic. The Japanese do not know muchabout American millionaires. Their dreams are not of money but of books
and colleges.

Takamine further asserted that when the Gentlemen’s agreement wasarrived at in 1907, Japanese immigrants were disappointed because they
could no longer work while pursuing an education in America. He wrote:
A few years ago the Japanese government prohibited at the request of
American authorities, the coming of Japanese laborers to America, a vital
blow was dealt to the young men who were not rich enough to come toAmerica as regular college students, but who still wanted to come, not really
to work, but to learn.

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61

Given their educational aspirations, and their willingness to settle permanently in the United States, Takamine recommended these immigrants for U.S. citizenship: “They have peculiar characteristics that
education alone can impart to a man. They have a sense of honor, of duty
and of pride. They have weaknesses, too, but I do not hesitate to assert
upon their behalf, that when they become citizens of America they will
be worthy citizens.”21
Blakeslee’s journal also gave voice to others who spoke out in supportof the Japanese in America. A. F. Grifﬁths, president of Oahu College
in Honolulu, pointed out in his essay that the Japanese were assimilated
into white-dominated Hawaiian society, even though they outnumbered
whites 80,000 to 15,000, making it clear that if assimilation is simply amatter of numbers, then other areas of the United States can easily absorb
the Japanese.22
Charles Hicks of Los Gatos, California, and a former instructor at theFirst Commercial Middle School in Kyoto, was blunt in discussing thealleged Japanese “problem” in the United States: “Speaking solely forthis immediate section of this state, it is safe to say that there is noJapanese problem except in men’s minds. But some minds are very
active in this respect.” Hicks thought the very worst “offense” theJapanese committed, which was not worthy of the label “problem,” wastaking up residence in Santa Clara County, similar to Jews vacationing
in the Catskill Mountains or moving into gentile sections of New York
City. The real “problem,” as he saw it, was for the United States to ﬁx
its immigration laws so that all were treated fairly. He wrote:
In brief, there is justice in the outcry against the Japanese and there is justicein the outcry of the Japanese. In our wisdom, as an experienced democraticnation, we should be able to transcend pettiness to such an extent as would
allow us, in the stead of insults and discriminatory legislation, to frame a setof immigration laws that, to say the least, would treat all immigrants on thesame basis—so far as race is concerned, shutting out all undesirables andholding down the rates of desirables to a minimum to satisfy even California.23

About the Chinese and Koreans, Blakeslee said little. He brieﬂy mentioned how he thought discrimination against the Chinese in the UnitedStates stemmed largely from “social” (class) issues—the average American
might not want to dine with a Chinese coolie but would not hesitate toaccept a dinner invitation from the emperor of China. However, his

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BRIAN MASARU HAYASHI

journal’s publication of an article on the Chinese in Hawaii was revealing of where Blakeslee stood in a broad sense with respect to the acceptability of Chinese Americans. His board member A. R. Grifﬁths
published “The Chinese in Hawaii: An Example of Successful Assimilation,” in which he argued that the eighteen thousand Chinese in the
Islands had successfully adapted to “Occidental civilization.” Throughan analysis of a half-century of Chinese experience in Hawaii, Grifﬁths
found that Chinese American youth had “completely adopted American
ideals and ways,” while the older generation rapidly shed their cultural“conservatism of ages” to adapt to their new environment. Hence, Grifﬁths
concluded, “Hawaii has demonstrated that in the proper political, socialand educational environment the Chinese will become American citizens whose stability, patriotism and obedience to law will give them anhonored place under the Stars and Stripes.”24
What Blakeslee added to the debate came not in the journal itself but
in his lectures, speeches, and correspondence. He wrote to the Foreign
Policy Association in 1929, advocating serious consideration of revising the 1924 immigration act after the Japanese delegation at the IPR’s
Kyoto conference vociferously protested the law’s discriminatory
nature. At the Mid-West Institute of International Relations at Northwestern University, he publicly advocated granting Japan an immigration quota, saying, “The United States can and should place Japan on thequota basis.”25
BLAKESLEE’S INTEREST IN ASIA AND ASIAN AMERICANS
Blakeslee’s background was probably partially responsible for his
interest in Asians and Asian Americans. He was born after the Civil War
in New England in a region known for its support of radical reconstruction of the South that would do away with the planter class. Moreover,
the region he was raised in took a strong interest in U.S. trade with China
through the Open Door Policy. His surrounding environment of radical
governmental reform and commerce, therefore, possibly explain why hesupported China’s territorial sovereignty while denying the same for
Korea. His father introduced young Blakeslee to the educational worldof New England that that was rapidly expanding its inﬂuence across thenation and the Paciﬁc Ocean to places as far away as China. His father
was the principal of the old East Greenwich Academy, where young
Blakeslee prepared for college as a boarding student. After earning his

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63

college degree at Wesleyan University in 1893, he returned to the
Academy and taught there for a year. Blakeslee’s subsequent travel andeducation abroad may have shaped some of his attitudes toward thepeople of the region. Although he rarely mentioned it, he went to China
in some capacity with the State Department from 1894 until he entered
the University of Leipzig in Berlin in 1898. He stayed there until 1901,
and then spent a couple of years at Oxford. In 1903, Blakeslee went toHarvard where he earned both his master’s and doctorate degrees in thatsame year. Once his education was completed, he joined the History
Department at Clark University as an instructor. He had climbed to therank of full professor by 1909.26
Blakeslee’s epistemological outlook, too, contributed to his interest in
Asian Americans. Like so many of his educated generation, Blakeslee
was a progressive and thus believed in taking action once the “facts”
were known. Worshipping at the shrine of logical empiricism, Blakeslee
saw the university as the best place to begin the search for the “real truth.”Thus, he found it particularly galling that the “international slander” of
the Japanese exclusion movement had fueled tension between the UnitedStates and Japan. International relations was a domain that he thought
best left to those who were well-informed and thus able to make decisions about foreign policy. For him, the best counter against these diplomatic intruders was to bring to light the facts of the situation: “To bringthis about, no agency is better ﬁtted than the university whose purposein every ﬁeld of knowledge is ﬁrst to search for the real truth with animpartial mind; and second, to do its part in disseminating this truth in
the community at large.”27
Yet, he differed from his colleagues in that he also believed it was
important for scholars to grasp the “emotions” behind the “facts” toarrive at a true understanding of a given situation, especially as it applied
to international relations. In a university lecture, he stated: “Knowledge
is what we all need most of all—knowledge not merely of the cold facts,
but of the emotions these facts arouse in the minds and hearts of the peoples of the Paciﬁc.” That understanding of how the “emotions” related
to the “facts” may have been why Blakeslee, a young scholar growing
up in detached academic environment, was willing to wade into the public arena and “educate” the American public on issues as they pertained
to Asia and the Paciﬁc at a time when the Japanese exclusion movement
was at its peak.28
There were two additional reasons why Blakeslee was a racial liberal.

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The ﬁrst, which I call the “China syndrome,” was his belief in the
progress of the twentieth century toward a bipolar Asia-Paciﬁc world
with the United States and China as the major powers. Blakeslee hadalready recognized Japan as a world power when the island nation successfully negotiated the end of its unequal treaties with the West, enteredinto an alliance with Great Britain, and defeated Russia in the 1904–5
war. But he was also aware of that nation’s physical limitations, particularly in the area of natural resources and its growing dependence on
world trade—especially machinery imports from the United States.
China, however, was a different story. As Blakeslee wrote: “The strengthof our own western coast as well as that of the British Paciﬁc possessions
may be measured with reasonable certainty; while both the power andthe limitations of Japan are now understood; but the possibilities ofChina, when thoroughly awakened and organized on a modern basis, arebeyond computation.” He explained further why China might surpass
the West in the future. He observed that the chief of U.S. Forest Service,
Gifford Pinchot; steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie; and Swedish geology
professor, Alfred Tornebohm, forecast that Europe and the United Statesmight exhaust their workable deposits of coal and iron before the end of
the twentieth century, while China alone had enough coal and iron—“thevitals of civilization”—to possibly surge past the West. While he still
believed the United States would remain a “superpower” in the Paciﬁc,this meant that China and the United States would be the major powersof the Asia-Paciﬁc region in the foreseeable future. Moreover, Blakeslee
saw China modernizing, especially after the 1911 revolution. He wrote:
They have already left the ruts of their centuries-old civilization and begun
to adopt the new customs and institutions of the West and of Japan; this isespecially noticeable in their new system of scientiﬁc education. The revolution itself, considering the forces opposing it and the immensity of the country, has been carried out, notwithstanding the recent reaction, with a successwhich has surprised the closest student of Chinese conditions.

He noted further that that the Chinese Revolution was heavily inﬂuenced
by American ideals and educators, which, he thought boded well for therise of a democratic China in the future.
Americans have already most profoundly effected [sic] conditions in China.
The leaders of the present revolution have largely followed American ideas

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65

and ideals, and have taken as their heroes our own national heroes of the past.
American schools have laid much of [the] basis upon which the new China
has been built. With only a little exaggeration—for the important part played
by Japan must not be forgotten—one might write a history of the upheavalof the past two or three years under the title, “The American Revolution in
China.”29

A second possible factor in shaping Blakeslee’s racial liberalism was his
acceptance of the nation-state over “race” as a way to categorize people.
Perhaps it began with Japan. The island nation successfully negotiatedits way out of the unequal treaties of the nineteenth century, entered into
the “family of nations” as the ﬁrst non-European civilization-based country, and was victorious over a European power—Russia—all of whichwere noted by Blakeslee as evidence that “Asiatic” races were not inferior to Europeans. Blakeslee may have further unconsciously attachedimportance to the nation-state when he began serving as an adviser in
the U.S. State Department. He was pressed into service as an academic
adviser to the Colonel House Commission of Inquiry, which sought solutions to the world’s problems at the Paris Peace Conference in 1917–18.
There Blakeslee prepared papers on the German colonies in the Paciﬁc–territories that that the Japanese government gained control over. In
1921–22, he served as technical adviser to the Washington Conference
on the Limitation of Armaments, which allowed for Japanese naval superiority in the western Paciﬁc while restricting U.S. military buildup in
the region. And, ﬁnally, Blakeslee served as special assistant to the U.S.
legation in Peiping (Beijing) in 1931 for the Lytton Commission, at the
speciﬁc request of Secretary of State Henry Stimson, who called Blakeslee’s
service “very valuable in the present crisis.” While Blakeslee scarcely
mentioned it, he probably learned at this time how the problem ofJapanese expansion was linked to the issue of overpopulation and theneed for emigration, less than a decade after the passage of the raciallydiscriminatory 1924 immigration law. Indeed, Blakeslee’s connection
with the State Department was so strong that his daughter married a U.S.
vice-consul to Canada. All these things led, in 1920, to his renaming hisjournal International Affairs.30
Given the importance of Asia’s two powers and the new analytical
tool called “the nation,” Blakeslee sought to disseminate the “facts” ina manner consistent with the concept of the nation-state. Although hewas committed to changing the status quo ante in international relations,

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he sought to do it through “conventional” diplomatic means. This isespecially evident in his work with annual conferences for the Instituteof Paciﬁc Relations. Having worked on the mandated Paciﬁc islands
issue, Blakeslee was acutely aware of how the League of Nations in general did not adequately cover the Asia-Paciﬁc region.
The IPR’s nondiplomatic, informal, and informed discussion ﬁt wellwith Blakeslee’s desire to fall in line with U.S. State Department wishes.
For example, the Institute sponsored its annual conference October
20–November 9, 1929, in Kyoto. The Institute recruited from Japan agroup composed of Japanese House of Peers members, Diet members,
heads of major Japanese corporations, Japanese university professors,
and top journalists. They also brought out a younger, “intensely nationalistic” group from China, and placed both in roundtable discussions
dealing with the Manchurian issue. While no resolutions were adopted—
the Institute deliberately avoided such “ofﬁcial” statements in the interest of generating free-ﬂowing talks—Blakeslee took considerable pridein the Institute’s accomplishments. He thought the Japanese delegation
learned the “feelings” of the Chinese group while the latter learned thelimits of the liberal-minded Japanese in effecting changes in their foreign policy regarding Manchuria. The greatest achievement from
Blakeslee’s point of view was: “But, after all, the outstanding result of
the Institute of Paciﬁc Relations is the biennial conference as a permanent institution for the peoples of the Far East and the Paciﬁc.”31
Blakeslee was enthusiastic about discussions of creating a permanent
nongovernmental organization in 1925. From his perspective, the Leagueof Nations was inadequate for dealing with problems in the Paciﬁc Rim
region largely because two important powers—the United States andRussia—were not members of the League. A nongovernmental organization such as the Institute of Paciﬁc Relations, Blakeslee reasoned, would
provide an important site where informal discussion of problems andsolutions could be aired to an extent and fashion not possible within the
League of Nations. Moreover, he saw the institute doing two things right.
In the ﬁrst place, the National Council for the United States, at least, wasattracting the attention, if not participation, of “educated Americans,”
which he thought was necessary in order for the Institute to hold informed discussions. He applauded the fact that the 125–member council would have some of the most important and inﬂuential people in the
country on board, such as the presidents of Harvard, Williams, and Johns
Hopkins; the editors of the New York Times and the Review of Reviews;

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67

inﬂuential businessmen from the Paciﬁc Steamship Lines and the First
National Bank of Los Angeles; the former governor-general of thePhilippines; key religious leaders such as such as John R. Mott andBishop Francis McDonnell; and, ﬁnally, ﬁnancial backing from theCarnegie Foundation for International Peace and Charles Crane, thewealthy industrialist and former U.S. minister to China who was also amember of the World Peace Foundation. Hence, Blakeslee, the Institute’s founder, took an optimistic view of its future, given this combination of high-powered intellectual thinking, access to up-to-the-minuteinformation from the ﬁeld, and close connections with mass media outlets that could disseminate their ﬁndings to the public, as well as the likelihood of ﬁnancial backing from important foundations. He said:
The desire to know at ﬁrst hand of the problems and the ﬁelds of the neighbor[ing] peoples of the Paciﬁc is most hopeful of the future. . . . And to giveknowledge of each Paciﬁc people of the facts and the points of view of theothers is, it seems to me, the greatest service of our Institute of Paciﬁc
Relations.32

CONCLUSION
If Blakeslee and the Journal of Race Development reﬂected a significant portion of the northeastern intellectuals’ thinking on issues of“race,” then a couple of conclusions are warranted. In the ﬁrst place, intellectuals like Blakeslee saw “race” not as a ﬁxed entity that banishes
forever those deﬁned as “inferior” to the dustbin of history while privileging for eternity those deemed “superior” (such as Europeans andAmericans). Rather, he and those who contributed to the journal believed“race” was a malleable enough category so that races could “improve”
and that those who were in the “superior” position had a responsibility,
a noblese oblige, to “educate” and “elevate” the “inferior races.” Hence,
his journal carried articles in which both the Chinese and the Japanese
were considered “assimilable,” or even “assimilated.” Perhaps becauseof his training as a historian, Blakeslee saw progress and historical development as an important factor in human history, and thus was careful to
include in his analysis of those he deemed “inferior races,” such as the
Koreans, a discussion of their premodern past, which he viewed as “superior” to “Western civilization.”
Unlike many nineteenth-century anthropologists, Blakeslee and his

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cohorts clearly did not see the Japanese as an inferior race. They werecognizant of Japan’s equal status as a nation on the world stage prior toWorld War I. They recognized Japan’s success in renegotiating theunequal treaties, its important alliance with Great Britain, and its victory
over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Indeed, they deﬁned
Japan as a new world power, one that challenged effectively their own
ideas of how “races” should “progress” along the path toward “civilization” that Europeans had trod. Given these ideas, it should come as no
surprise therefore that Blakeslee and the northeastern intellectuals
opposed discrimination against Japanese immigration and immigrants
on racial grounds, viewing much of what the exclusionist movement
publicly professed as nothing more than “international slander,” even as
they accepted (or seemed to accept) another myth in its place—that
Japanese immigrants were all students—to represent the Japanese as arace, as “assimilable.” Liberals like Blakeslee rejected the notion that
the Japanese “race” was inferior, but they still accepted the underlying
assumption of the “development” of nations (or, in Japan’s case, the“maturity”), which, in the racial hierarchy of nations, meant they were
not yet equal.33
Eventually, Blakeslee and the northeastern intellectuals quietly dropped
the concept of “race” in favor of that of that of the nation-state. Exactly
when they switched concepts is difﬁcult to pinpoint, but it was probably
after World War I, when the academy and the American public lost
conﬁdence in the “progress” of the allegedly “superior” and civilized
Europeans. For Blakeslee, his shift was probably a result of his experience serving in the State Department. But other intellectuals, too, took
up the concept, so that in 1919, the journal dropped “race” from its title
and substituted “nation.”
Their transition from “race” to “nation” had important implications
for the study of East Asia and Asian Americans. Blakeslee and the northeastern intellectuals believed in China’s potential for becoming a world
power in the late twentieth century as Europe declined, which made themview the Chinese Revolution of 1911 in a positive light, believing it tobe the ﬁrst major step toward that country’s entry into the “constitutionsecuring epoch” that Europe, the United States, Japan, and the “familyof nations” had already traversed.
But when Japanese imperialists advanced farther into China following World War I, Blakeslee and the northeastern intellectuals saw theJapanese as violating the basic “right” of a nation-state to its own

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69

territorial integrity. This, in turn, meant Japanese could no longer be conﬂated with Chinese, and the idea of an alliance between them—the Yellow
Peril concept became more the work of the imaginative minds of ﬁction
writers than of the rational, “fact”-oriented northeastern intellectuals.34
NOTES
This work was supported by a 2009 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s
International Conference Subsidy, Kakenhi #18401027, and a 2006 Mitsubishi Foundation grant for “Diluting the Colorline: Asian Americans and the Ofﬁce of StrategicServices, 1942–1947.”
Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants,
1885–1924 (New York: Free Press, 1988); Suchen Chang, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Woodbridge, CT: Twayne, 1991); Ron Takaki, Strangers from a
Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1987); and Roger
Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle:
University of Washington Press Press, 1988). See also T. H. Marshall and Thomas
Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class (Chicago: Pluto Press, 1992).
2
Roderick D. McKenzie, Oriental Exclusion: The Effect of American Immigration
Laws, Regulations, and Judicial Decisions upon the Chinese and Japanese on theAmerican Pacific Coast (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1928); Eliot G. Mears, Resident Orientals on the American Pacific Coast: Their Legal and Economic Status(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1928); and Carey McWilliams, Prejudice: JapaneseAmericans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944).
For a discussion of George Blakeslee and the IPR, see Paul F. Hooper, “The Instituteof Paciﬁc Relations and the Origins of Asian and Paciﬁc Studies,” Pacific Affairs 61,
no. 1 (Spring 1988): 103, 107, 115. For general overviews of the IPR, see Tomoko
Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of the
Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–1945 (London: Routledge, 2002); and John
N. Thomas, The Institute of Pacific Relations: Asian Scholars and American Politics(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974).
3
Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 44; and Izumi Hirobe, Japanese Pride,
American Prejudice: Modifying the Exclusion Clause of the 1924 Immigration Act(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 13, 93, 114, 126. The latter discusses
Blakeslee but does not utilize fully the materials deposited at the Robert Goddard
Library, Clark University, Worchester, Massachusetts.
4George H. Blakeslee, Introduction, Journal of Race Development 1 (1910–11): 1,
2.
5
Ibid., 4.
6
China Lecture, March 17, 1908, 4, 2, 1, George H. Blakeslee Papers, Special Collections, Robert Goddard Library, Clark University, Worchester, Massachusetts (hereafter cited as GHBP/CU).
7
China Lecture, March 17, 1908, 18–20, GHBP/CU.
8
Ibid.,7, 15, 11, 12, GHBP/CU.
9
George H. Blakeslee, ed. Recent Developments in China (New York: G. E. Stechert,
1913), xi, GHBP/CU.
1

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BRIAN MASARU HAYASHI

10John Ford to Prof. George H. Blakeslee, March 28, 1910, folder 7: Correspondence
Concerning Addresses, Books, Teaching, 1910–1949, box C BLAK 2–1 General
Correspondence, GHBP/CU.
11
Lecture by Dr. George H. Blakeslee, Clark University, February 25, 1908, 1, box C
BLAK 3–1, GHBP/CU.
12
Korea-2 Lecture by Dr. George H. Blakeslee, Clark University, March 3, 1908, 13,
12, box C BLAK 3–1, GHBP/CU.
13
Lecture by Dr. George H. Blakeslee, Clark University, February 25, 1908, 4–5, 14,
7–13, box C BLAK 3–1, GHBP/CU.
14
Ibid.,13–14, box C BLAK 3–1, GHBP/CU.
15
Blakeslee, China and the Far East (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1910), xviii.
16
William A. Koelsch, Clark University, 1887–1987: A Narrative History (Worchester,
MA: Clark University Press, 1987), 14, 15; Anon., “Interview with Dr. Mary Bosworth
Treudley, Winter Park, Florida, March 14, 1972,” n.d. ca. 1972, folder 1972; Interview
with Dr. Mary Bosworth Treudley (PhD 1916), box U1–2, University History Records,
Series: Histories and Memoirs, Robert Goddard Library, Clark University, Worchester,
Massachusetts.
17
Journal of Race Development 1 (1910–11): 1, 4.
18
See A. F. Grifﬁths, “The Chinese in Hawaii: An Example of Successful Assimilation,” in Blakeslee, ed., China and the Far East, 295–316.
19
George H. Blakeslee, ed., Japan and Japanese-American Relations (Baltimore:
Waverly Press, 1913), x.
20
Alexander Francis Chamberlain, “The Japanese Race,” Journal of Race Development 3 (1912–13): 177, 186, 187.
21
Jôkichi Takamine, “The Japanese in America,” Journal of Race Development 2(1911–12): 238–39.
22
A. F. Grifﬁths, “The Japanese Race Question in Hawaii,” Journal of Race Development 6 (1915–16): 424, 440.
23
Charles Roger Hicks, “The Japanese Problem in California,” International Affairs
11, no. 4 (April 1921): 606, 616–20.
24
China Lecture, March 17, 1908, 18–20; A. R. Grifﬁths, “The Chinese in Hawaii: An
Example of Successful Assimilation,” in China and the Far East, 315.
25
Hirobe, Japanese Pride, American Prejudice, 126, 206.
26
Vita, p1., box C- BLAK 3–1; GHB to Mr. Gren O. Pierrel, July 1, 1949, folder 15:“Letters from George Hubbard Blakeslee re: testimonial, commencement, 5/49,” box C
BLAK 2–1 General Correspondence; G. H. Blakeslee to Conrad C. Parker, December
2, 1913, folder 4: Correspondence concerning Conferences, 1913, box C BLAK 2–1,
General Correspondence, GHBP/CU.
27
Blakeslee, Japan and Japanese-American Relations, x, GHBP/CU.
28
George Blakeslee, “To the Members of the Institute of Paciﬁc Relations,” January
1, 1925, 4, GHBP/CU.
29
George H. Blakeslee, ed., Recent Developments in China (New York: G. E. Stetchert,
1913), ix, x.
30
Department of State to Wallace W. Atwood, Western Union telegram, February 9,1932, folder “Blakeslee, Dr. George H., Feb 1930–May 1932,” box B4–18–1, W. W.
Atwood Papers, and [GHB] to Dr. Clara E. Schieber, June 16, 1941, folder 11: Correspondence concerning Honorary Degree, 1941, box C BLAK 2–1, General Correspondence, GHBP/CU.
31
Blakeslee, “What the Kyoto Conference Means,” 1929, box C Blak 3–1, GHBP/CU.

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32
George Blakeslee, “To the Members of the Institute of Paciﬁc Relations,” January
1, 1925, 2–4, GHBP/CU.
33
Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 5–6.
34
The State Department adopted the nation-state approach to its geographical divisionof the world in 1907, recognizing China and Japan as separate nations. See Richard
Hume Werking, The Master Architects: Building the United States Foreign Service,
1890–1913 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1977), 115–16, 247.