In 1905, at its 25th Annual Convention, the AFL argued that the “American workingman ” had enough to deal with “without being required to meet the enervating, killing, underselling and under-living competition of that nerveless, wantless people, the Chinese. Rice American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive? Originally published by the AFL, the book was republished a few years later by the Asiatic Exclusion League. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was defended in 1902 by Gompers in a coauthored book, Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. ” This view was held not only by white supremacist elites, it was also the position of the leading trade union association (the American Federation of Labor or AFL) and its leader ( Samuel Gompers). In sum, as Lothrop Stoddard, the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy, put it in 1920, the “obviously dangerous Oriental ” had to be barred from entry into the United States because Asians posed “the greatest threat to Western Civilization and the White Race. White supremacists routinely reviled Asians, who were seen alternatively as deviant (opium smokers and sexual predators) or as coolies (who would lower the wages of white Free Labor). In the century that preceded Petersen's article little augured the birth of the “model minority ” stereotype. Not for nothing did Fortune label Asian Americans a “Super Minority ” (November 1986). ’ ” In 1971 Newsweek published “Success Story: Outwhiting the Whites ” (June 21), which called to task not only non-Asian minorities, but also white Americans for their failure to keep up with Asian immigrants into the United States, whose cultural traditions more closely matched those that had historically pushed Northwestern Europe into world dominance. ” As with Petersen's article, this one pointed to the importance of family values and Chinese cultural traditions, for “till being taught in Chinatown is the old idea that people should depend on their own efforts -not a welfare check -in order to reach America's ‘Promised Land. This latter article opened with an explicit comparison between different minority groups: “At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation's 300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on their own. ” A few months later, US News and World Report weighed in with an article about Chinese Americans entitled “Success Story of One Minority in the US ” (December 26, 1966). Petersen asserted that by dint of their cultural resilience, Japanese Americans had saved themselves from the fate of “problem minorities. On January 9, 1966, sociologist William Petersen published “Success Story: Japanese American Style ” in the New York Times Magazine.
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