"Our New Racial Problem: Japanese Immigration and Its Menace" (Sacramento Bee pamphlet, November 1920)
Our New Racial Problem (1920), the Sacramento Bee's pamphlet on Japanese immigration
The Sacramento Bee's November 1920 pamphlet calls Japanese immigration a "Menace" and casts citizenship and the birth rate as tools of Japan's plans.
Techniques named on the archive record
Fear appealTransfer
Date
November 1920
Made by
The Sacramento Bee (V. S. McClatchy)
Medium
Books and pamphlets
Country
United States
Regime
Wilson Administration
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
Internet Archive (microfilm copy of the pamphlet, item ournewracialprob00mccl) , retrieved October 2, 2026
Source
Public domain (published in the U.S. in 1920; more than 95 years old) V. S. McClatchy, Our New Racial Problem: Japanese Immigration and Its Menace, Sacramento Bee, November 1920; Internet Archive item ournewracialprob00mccl
Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.
Our New Racial Problem is a November 1920 pamphlet published by the Sacramento Bee and credited to V. S. McClatchy. Its cover calls Japanese immigration a "Menace," cites a congressional inquiry, and lists charges including "The Birth Rate as an Agency for Colonization."
The cover
Content note: the cover presents an immigrant group as a racial threat, and its words are given below as the Bee printed them.
The archive has the cover of the pamphlet, read from a microfilm scan on the Internet Archive. It is type only: a title, a subtitle, a line about a congressional inquiry, a list of charges, and the paper's imprint.
Our New Racial Problem
Japanese Immigration
and Its Menace .....
Startling Results of Congressional Inquiry
Why Japan's "Peaceful Penetration" of Continental United States? — Using American Citizenship to Foster Japan's Plans — The Birth Rate as an Agency for Colonization — Control of Lands and Localities in California — Colonization in Other States.
F-LIBRARY EDITION --- NOV. 1920
—Published by The Sacramento Bee
Who published it
The maker is the Sacramento Bee, with V. S. McClatchy named in the record. The issuer type is media, the audience the domestic public, and the event the California anti-Japanese movement. The purpose field is blunt: "Demonize." The themes are migration, and race and ethnicity. The archive tags fear appeal and transfer, and says the congressional hearing is borrowed as authority for the paper's own case. The cover does not say which committee held the inquiry or what it found.
What it gets wrong
Read the five charges in order. Two of them are about citizenship and births. "Using American Citizenship" treats the holding of citizenship as a scheme. "The Birth Rate as an Agency for Colonization" treats the births of children as an instrument of a foreign state. A charge built that way cannot be answered by anything a family does, because the offense is ancestry.
A newspaper could print this, and the record shows no office ordering it. That is the free-press side of the record, and it should be kept. The argument itself was wrong, and it was wrong in the way that matters most under a constitution of equal citizens: it sorted residents and citizens by race. The anti-Japanese propaganda hub covers the Second World War sheets, and its poster gallery includes this pamphlet. A Puck cover of 1907, As to Japanese Exclusion, argued the other way. In 1942 an exclusion order applied the same category by force.
Sources
FRAME object record, "Our New Racial Problem: Japanese Immigration and Its Menace" (Sacramento Bee pamphlet, November 1920). The Sacramento Bee (V. S. McClatchy). Source classed as openly identified.
Internet Archive, microfilm copy of the pamphlet, item ournewracialprob00mccl, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (published in the U.S. in 1920; more than 95 years old).
