Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

San Francisco exclusionists attempted to segregate Japanese children out of the city’s schools, causing an international crisis necessitating the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt, who got the school board to back down and negotiated a deal with the Meiji emperor to confine the immigration of Japanese laborers to Hawaii. “The infernal fools in California, and especially in San Francisco, insult the Japanese recklessly, and in the event of war it will be the Nation as a whole which will pay the consequences,” Roosevelt told his son, presciently, but California’s Anglos kept pushing.