Americanization in the States: Immigrant Social Welfare Policy, Citizenship, and National Identity in the United States, 1908–1929

2. The California Plan: The Commission of Immigration and Housing, 1913–1917

2   • The California Plan The Commission of Immigration and Housing, 1913–1917 The immigrant welfare activities of the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration inspired progressives in other parts of the country to develop similar programs to address their states’ immigration issues. California, already under the leadership of progressive Governor Hiram W. Johnson, followed New York’s lead, and in 1912–1913 established first a temporary immigration commission and then a permanent agency, the California Commission of Immigration and Housing (CCIH). The CCIH shared the New York bureau’s progressive philosophy of Americanization through social environmental reform, but focused its energies on improving living and working conditions in California’s agricultural labor camps. California progressives believed that an unsanitary and dangerous social environment fostered social unrest and threatened the health of the larger society, and so they sought to interject the state into farmers’ businesses to ensure greater social stability and social justice. But there were limits to progressive Americanization in California: Radicals who rejected state social welfare and market regulation were to be excluded from the new “American” community that progressives were working to create. The driving force behind California progressives’ concerns about migratory labor, seasonal unemployment, and agricultural working conditions was a desire to undermine the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Seeing itself in competition with the IWW for the loyalty of California’s poorest workers, the Commission of Immigration and Housing worked to improve both foreign- and native-born Californians’ standard of living through progressive reform. The CCIH was one of three commissions Johnson created in 1913 (the others were the Industrial Accident Commission and the Industrial Wel39 40 Americanization in the States fare Commission) to institutionalize the progressive belief that it was the responsibility of the state to assist individuals when the private sector failed to provide adequately for their social welfare. Between 1911 and 1915, California instituted several components of the national progressive agenda: women’s suffrage; mothers’ pensions; workers’ compensation; and a ban on child labor. By 1913 the state had the structural political reforms of initiative, referendum, recall, nonpartisan local elections, and cross filing; a stronger Railroad Commission to check the powerful Southern Pacific “Octopus”; and a Board of Control to supervise state finances to ensure more honest and efficient government accounting. Working with Johnson was a coalition of progressive Republicans and pro-labor Democrats who dominated the state legislature.1 Thus, as in New York, Americanization was simply one component of a larger progressive reform effort. The first and longest serving members of the CCIH were: Simon J. Lubin, president from 1913 to 1923; the Archbishop of San Francisco, the Rt. Reverend Edward Joseph Hanna, vice president from 1913 to 1923 and president from 1923 to 1927; Paul Scharrenberg, secretary from 1913 to 1923; Mary Simons Gibson, from 1913 to 1922; and Dr. James Harvey McBride, from 1915 to 1927. These five individuals served at the pleasure of the governor and were uncompensated except for travel expenses to attend meetings. An executive director (first University of California–Berkeley economist Carleton H. Parker and then commission counsel George L. Bell) was responsible for implementing the policy decisions of the commissioners, running its San Francisco office and managing a staff of twelve to twenty-five employees.2 Unlike in New York, the California legislature was fiscally generous, appropriating $50,000 for the new agency for 1913–1915.3 Among the rules governing the operations of the commission, the most important were the bar against employing aliens (which assured that all the CCIH’s interactions with immigrants would be within the hierarchical relationship of citizen versus non-citizen) and the prohibition against lobbying for or against immigration.4 This was a concession to the California Federation of Labor (CFL), which had opposed the commission’s creation out of fear that the agency would be used by business groups to increase immigration and import strikebreakers. This enforced neutrality effectively shielded the commission from the heated national debate about immigration restriction. The fact that some members favored some types of restriction also meant that the requirement of neutrality on questions of federal immigration policy allowed the commissioners to maintain a consensus on domestic policy issues that was essential to their ability to work together harmoniously for several years.5 As was common with Progressive Era commissions, the CCIH was given several investigative powers to accomplish its charge of “expediting the distribution and assimilation...