Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War

Notes

209 Notes In t ro duc t io n 1. President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), 30–32. 2. Ibid., 32–33. 3. Several studies have examined why Truman agreed to sign Executive Order 9808, which created in 1946 the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and requested the submission of a written report with recommendations on how the federal government could best act to protect the civil liberties of all. Some reasons include Truman’s need for the black vote, the urgings of more liberal members of the Truman administration, the rising influence of the NAACP, the Cold War, and Truman’s commitment to civil rights. While these studies often differed in their explanations for why Truman made civil rights a national priority, they nevertheless agreed that the signing of Executive Order 9808 marked a change in national policy, after which the federal government took an active role to ensure racial equality during the postwar era. See Barton J. Bernstein, “The Ambiguous Legacy: The Truman Administration and Civil Rights,” in Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), 269–314; Raymond H. Geselbracht, ed., The Civil Rights Legacy of Harry Truman (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2007); and Michael R. Gardner, Harry Truman and Civil Rights (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002). 4. President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights, 146–48. 5. The President’s Committee on Civil Rights emphasized the importance of civil rights with President Truman’s March 1947 address before a joint session of Congress in mind. In this address, known popularly as the Truman Doctrine, Truman declared that every nation must choose between two ways of life. The first is a life based on the will of the majority, distinguished by free institutions; the second is based on the will of a minority forcibly imposed on the majority. Truman proclaimed the United States the presumptive leader of the “free world.” As a result, the United States had a political obligation “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure” and to spread American democracy. These remarks came to define U.S. Cold War policy as one of communist containment and internationalism. See President Harry S. Truman, speaking for the Recommendation for Assistance to Greece and 210 Notes Turkey, on March 12, 1947, to the joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives , 80th Cong., 1st sess. Drawing on the analysis of the historian John Lewis Gaddis, I use the phrase “Cold War internationalism” to highlight the ways the federal government framed U.S. postwar expansionist initiatives as internationalism. Moreover, building on Christina Klein’s analysis of U.S. Cold War foreign policy, I use the phrase to underscore the way internationalism became inextricably linked to communist containment . See John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 19–60. 6. As the cultural critic Lisa Lowe has argued, the task of imagining the nation as homogeneous in its makeup, which I take to mean solely European American , requires the formation of a separate racial imagination whereby Asians in the United States remain “fundamentally ‘foreign’” and averse to the mores of American society. Thus, despite the repeal of the whites-only rule in naturalization and in spite of how many Asians were American-born, the task of imagining the nation as homogeneous continues to relegate Asians in the United States to the status of foreigners-within. See Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 4–6. Because the racialization of Asians as the foreigners-within works to mark Asians as mere extensions of their countries of ancestry, irrespective of being American-born or length of residence in the United States, I use the terms “Asians in the United States” and “Asian Americans ” to denote both American citizens of Asian descent and Asian immigrants. 7. As Harry H. L. Kitano and Roger Daniels have argued, following the communist takeover of China in 1949 and the entrance of China into the Korean conflict against the United States a year later, Chinese in the United States feared that they would be incarcerated the way Japanese Americans were in World War II. What...