A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy Over "Whiteness"

9. The Racial Classification Policy: Problems and Successes

152 9 The Racial Classification Policy: Problems and Successes once the fdr administration began to implement the uniform racial classification policy, it began to see great success. Further , the policy was also successful in the long term, although it did have to overcome several obstacles, including objections from within the administration itself. Success in the Short Run As soon as Edward Shaughnessy issued the May 18 order to the naturalization examiners, the Labor and Justice Departments allowed the pending cases to go before the judges in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York. Henry Hazard of the Immigration and Naturalization Service reported that the judge in the Eastern District had approved all petitions. In the Southern District, however , the judge had denied one petition, that of a Mexican national named Godoy. Hazard believed, however, that this would be a single case, and he assured legal adviser Flournoy that “no opinion giving the grounds for denial of naturalization would be published .”1 Racial Classification Policy 153 Flournoy, however, was not so optimistic. Like Sumner Welles, he believed that the only solution to the naturalization problem lay in following the traditional approach and amending the existing laws to allow for the naturalization of Western Hemisphere natives. Flournoy viewed the situation entirely in constitutional and legal terms, and argued, “Indians of the Western Hemisphere, including Mexican Indians, are not ‘white persons’. This is a simple fact which any school boy knows. It is a matter of common knowledge that from the beginning, Indians have been spoken of as ‘red men’, to distinguish them from persons of white European extraction.”2 Flournoy reasserted the legal precedents of Thind and Camille and maintained that there was no reason to believe that the courts would go against these rulings with respect to Latin American nationals of more than 50 percent Indian blood. Finally, Flournoy argued that “the problem of the naturalization of natives of these countries . . . can never be satisfactorily settled unless (1) the racial discrimination is removed entirely from the naturalization law, or (2) the law is amended by express provision to the effect that persons born in the Western Hemisphere and descended from the aboriginal inhabitants thereof shall be eligible to naturalization.”3 Flournoy, however, assumed too much. After the State and Labor Departments issued their formal orders, Godoy’s petition was the only one rejected on the grounds that the petitioner was racially ineligible for naturalization. Judicial acquiescence, it seems, had played its role in this area of administrative law. The success of administrative law, however, did not stop Flournoy from drafting Section 303 (permitting the naturalization of Western Hemisphere natives ) of the bill, which became the Nationality Act of 1940. Long-Term Success: The End of Exclusionism In addition to the “switch in time” in the Supreme Court and further judicial acquiescence in the lower federal courts, another important aspect of the State Department’s success was the changing political mood in the United States during the New Deal era. Those who had the political power and the desire to crusade against clas- 154 a quiet victory for latino rights sifying Mexicans as white, the California exclusionists, were losing power after 1938. That year was a turning point for the California Joint Immigration Committee, in a negative sense. On May 15, Valentine Stuart McClatchy, the committee’s executive secretary, died at the age of eighty. In the same year, California Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb retired after serving for thirty-six years. Webb was succeeded by Republican Earl Warren—the same Earl Warren who, as chief justice of the US Supreme Court, presided over some of America’s most important civil rights rulings, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Hernandez v. Texas, and some of the most important cases of the rights of the criminally accused, such as Gideon v. Wainwright, Escobedo v. Illinois, and Miranda v. Arizona. Because of Warren’s progressive attitudes, President Eisenhower said that his appointment was “the biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made.”4 Without the leadership of McClatchy, the legal presence of the state attorney general’s Office, and the political clout of both, the committee weakened after 1938. The committee received little attention until the United States entered World War II, and the new executive secretary, H. J. McClatchy (son of the late V. S.), used the war to publicly argue against the concept of dual citizenship. He cited...