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

Chapter 4. McCarran Act Persecutions and the Fight for Alien Rights

117 chapter 4 McCarran Act Persecutions and the Fight for Alien Rights When David Hyun and Diamond Kimm were arrested as part of a nationwide sweep of aliens suspected of subversive activities after the 1950 McCarran Act went into effect, their detention illustrated how the outbreak of the Korean War intensified the nation’s fear of an internal communist subversion that threatened to overthrow the government from within. The rise of anticommunist hysteria in the United States not only prompted the federal government to enact measures such as the 1950 McCarran Act for the purpose of monitoring the nation’s political activities, it also led federal agents to identify the foreign-born, especially those from countries that had become communist , as most susceptible to communist infiltration. The arrest of Hyun and Kimm, two immigrants from Korea, revealed this increased scrutiny along with the fate of those who refused to acknowledge the American political system. This was because the path to Americanization that required immigrants to affirm the American way of life as the good life and the most desired in the world applied to all in the nation. The arrests of Hyun for his labor activism and of Kimm for running a pro-communist newspaper revealed which activities the federal government believed undermined the superiority of American democracy, activities it deemed “un-American.” Their arrests further revealed how the federal government maintained the legitimacy of the American political system during the early Cold War 118 McCarran Act Persecutions years by suppressing viewpoints that called into question the capacity of U.S. democracy to ensure freedom and equality for all. Notably, the political dealings of Hyun and Kimm also brought to the fore an understanding of “subversive activities” that differed from the state’s conception of this term. As Hyun and Kimm related their fight against unjust practices in the United States to the fight for an independent Korea, they built on the nationalist activities of Koreans in the United States who had endeavored since the turn of the twentieth century to liberate Korea from the colonial rule of Japan. Following Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and its suppression of the 1919 March 1 demonstrations for Korean independence, many Koreans fled the country and sought refuge in places such as Shanghai, Manchuria, and Hawaii. Those who came to Hawaii joined a small but growing community of Korean immigrants who had been recruited by planters to work on the sugar plantations. These early immigrants in Hawaii coalesced with those who settled in California and in other parts of the United States to work for the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule. Despite trying to remain united in their support for the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai, Korean nationalists in the United States were deeply divided over the political structure of an independent Korea and over which leader was to head the liberated country .1 During World War II, the vast majority of Korean Americans backed the U.S. efforts to defeat Japan. Many, however, opposed the subsequent establishment of the American military government in Korea in 1945 and especially the unilateral decision of the Allied powers to divide the Korean peninsula along the 38th parallel. While this imposed division epitomized the strained relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, it also spoke to the political and ideological differences of the Korean nationalist movement that had been at play since the first two decades of the twentieth century. The historians Alice Yang Murray and Lili Kim have effectively shown in their respective studies of the political activities of Koreans in the United States that Korean American women were the backbone of the Korean nationalist movement and the principal fundraisers for nationalist activities .2 Although this chapter will not expand on these important insights, it nevertheless seeks to highlight through an examination of the Hyun and Kimm cases an aspect of Korean nationalist activities that is rarely if ever touched upon by scholars of Asian American studies. This chapter McCarran Act Persecutions 119 will examine how the Cold War effectively transformed into “subversive activities” the nationalist efforts of Korean Americans to establish an independent Korea that did not cater to the interests of the wealthy landowning Korean elites. This transformation was significant, for it explained why the federal government was unable to comprehend that Hyun and Kimm’s communist activities did not advocate the expansion of a Soviet...