James D. Phelan's Hateful Mouth
Reading the travel book written by my most infamous ancestor
When James D. Phelan landed at the port of Yokohama in 1921, the Tokyo-based newspaper Nichi-Nichi proclaimed, “The great enemy of Japanese arrives and opens his mouth hatefully.” Or at least that is how James D. tells it.1
James D. was not at all perturbed by this reception from the local press. The ex-senator was perhaps even self-satisfied by it. He had come to Japan with a specific story to tell and some infamy within the country would only help his cause.
His arrival in Japan was the first leg of a world tour starting that fall. The entire trip took him a year and served as his material for a book which he unceremoniously titled Travel and Comment.
When my family learned about this trip to Japan captured in James D.’s book, we were surprised. We had never known him as a traveler or writer. He existed in family lore, sure, but only as a West Coast politician. We vaguely knew of him as that ‘great grandfather or something’ who had been a Californian senator. He was the reason our last name showed up in the names of Bay Area buildings, streets, and parks.
More shocking was his choice to visit Asia. Though not outright infamous, James D. Phelan might be recognizable to the average Californian for one reason. He is regarded as one of the state’s most virulent anti-Asian voices from the early twentieth century. The thought that he would write a travelogue about East Asia seemed incongruous with what we knew about him.
Despite his reputation, the book initially intrigued me. I knew that the man’s worldview and politics would be poignantly dated, but I hoped that I might find some honest reflection in his world travels, both about our family and his impressions from the road. Plus, there was the obvious connection between us. We share an ancestry, a name, and, as I’ve even been told, have similar eyes.
When I rummaged through his life, I quickly discovered that I am not a direct descendant of James D. — he never had children, nor did he ever marry. There are rumors of an unrequited love affair with a cousin, but he died a bachelor. We are related only through his uncle John, my distant grandsire, making me and James D. first cousins five times removed.
Born to an Irish father and a second-generation Irish mother, James Duval Phelan was an elite member of San Franciscan high society in his day. He served as both the mayor of San Francisco for three terms and as a senator from California for one term. Well-educated, commerce-minded, and interested in city building, James D. was a politician of moderate success at a time of dramatic change on the Pacific Coast of the United States. He died in 1930 in his self-built estate, Villa Montalvo, in what is now Silicon Valley. In his obituary, the New York Times wrote that “He was one of the most distinguished men San Francisco had produced.”2
Travel and Comment, his only published book, is the product of James D.’s version of a bad breakup. After losing his re-election campaign to the Senate, he charted across the oceans to visit the important sites of the day. They were places that proved politically intriguing to him: Revolutionary Ireland, inter-war Palestine, and colonial Philippines, as well as several stops in East Asia. Each chapter of the book is a short essay in which James D. surveys the lands he visits or discusses their connection to contemporary American politics.
His travels dot the map at remarkable speed for a world still largely reliant on maritime travel. Somehow he managed to get from Beijing to Manila to Colombo in only two weeks. Either the dates of his journals are incorrect, or he spends a great deal more time at sea than anywhere in particular. Several times throughout the book, he raves about the seas.
“For fifty days I have been sailing the sea. As a matter of fact in all important respects there is no better, good-natured discipline than on board a ship.”
The discipline serves him well as he writes voluminously about everything which entertains him.
The exceptionalism of his home state of California is a favorite topic. When delighting in the thermal waters of Carlsbad, Germany, he comments about how there are equally good waters back home. In Italy, he finds that the Gulf of Naples looks remarkably like the San Francisco Bay. He devotes pages to the comparison, though he does admit to giving a slight edge to San Fransisco on account of the security of the harbor. Wherever he goes, home seems to follow. “As compared with other places…” he closes the book by writing, “California can be justly regarded as the treasure house and playground of the world.”
The state of California, and perhaps San Francisco in particular, embodies something grander to James D. than just home. To him, San Francisco is the shining city on the hill of Western modernity.
He makes this evident while visiting the Vatican halfway through his journey. There he observes the famous Hellenistic statue known as the Laocoön and His Sons. The statue depicts a muscular priest as he struggles to defend his two sons from the constriction of two massive serpents. It is, admittedly, a striking piece of marble that has over millennia been claimed to be the perfect representation of Western art.
James D. latches onto this idea so strongly that he purchases a full-sized copy of the Laocoön and has it shipped back to San Francisco, saying:
“The Laocoon may well personify California, after vainly protecting Washington, seeking protection for his children on the shores of the Pacific, only to be overwhelmed by the invading hosts that comes out of the sea; or it might as well symbolize world conditions today--the peril of Western civilization.”
Though never explicitly stated, James D.’s circumnavigation follows a conspicuous path through the mythologized history of Western civilization. Here, that means the idea that ‘The West’ is a singular, continuous tradition that claims cultural roots stretching back through Ancient Rome, Greece, and even Egypt.3 James D.’s trip mirrors this trajectory. After scrutinizing the colonized peoples of India, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka for their inability to self-rule, he charts the path of Western progress with his movements. He cuts from the Mediterranean to a conflicted Jerusalem all the way to Italy, France, and England before eventually returning to the United States.
While I don’t believe James D. purposefully set his itinerary to mirror the revisionist history of Western development, his choice of locations is telling. It is also no mistake that while in Rome, he bought a copy of the sculpture which is most closely associated with the concept of Western struggle, and with that sculpture, he then returned to San Francisco, the city which he perceived as bearing the torch of civilization.
Large numbers are another theme in Travel and Comment. James D. is obsessed with tonnages and millions. He pulls massive numbers out of thin air: 80,000 spindles working in Japan; 3,000,000 men wounded in France; 2,000,000 Mexican dollars in revenue for the Chinese city of Canton (now Guangzhou), one-fourth of which comes from “Sing Song girl licenses.” Though he does not usually bother to document his sources, his rigorous reporting can be impressive at times. These tallies would not have been easy to collect and lead to his travel commentaries reading like the work of an auditor.
People are his favorite thing to count. From small towns in Germany to the largest metropolises in Asia, James D. reports on the number of people living in each locale. In an audience with the king of Italy, Victor Emanuel III, in the Quirinal Palace, he asks the king for the total population of Rome. Emmanuel responds with a figure of 700,000 and, to the great amusement of James D., likens the size to that of San Francisco. The king was another man of statistics!
The number of Japanese people was of particular interest to James D. Whether in Japan, China, or Korea, he finds an excuse to tally up the Japanese populace: 2 million in Tokyo. 1.3 million in Osaka. 350,000 in the United States. 100,000 in California. The growth of those populations he also carefully notes. Deaths in Tokyo exceeded births by 433 in 1921. In California, their birth rate is “three to one against the whites.” The propagation of the Japanese people is concerning to James D. He finds that their “breeding grounds” are “swarming” the Golden State. The numbers, when thrown in a pot and read like tea leaves, warn him of grave danger.
Amid all this nativist bean counting, Travel and Comment can often read like a slog of racial tirades. However, by traveling the world in 1921 and 1922, James D. cannot help but find himself in interesting places at important times. So much was still undecided during those inter-war years. Major shifts in power were taking place regularly. Unrest and civil war were brewing in China under a fragile government. Korea was a colony of Japan, the Philippines of the United States. King Emmanuel III would be sidelined by the fascist Mussolini only a year after their meeting.
The Free State of Ireland was especially important to James D., presumably because of our Irish heritage. The state had declared its independence two years before and was still in conflict with itself over how to govern. While visiting toward the tail end of his trip, James D. secretly meets with Michael Collins, an Irish revolutionary and then Commander-in-Chief of the Irish National Army. The two have a conversation about the civil war while camped out in a college office in Dublin.
Collins laments having to fight against his neighbors. He tells the story of two friends he captured who had taken up with the Irish Republican Army, the enemy. Collins lets them go if they agree to return to their hometown of Cork and lay down arms. When they invariably take up against the National Army again, Collins is understanding, if not crestfallen. They had all fought for an independent Ireland and, in Collins’ opinion, were bickering about details. It ends as you might expect. Collins died in County Cork a week after his meeting with James D. and the civil war carried on.
The entire sequence is touching. In this period of great Irish strife, James D. manages to land himself directly at the center with a pen in his hand. It is a common occurrence in the book. Travel and Comment is simply too timely to be uninteresting. And with his level of access and finances, James D. is there to see and remark upon it all.
Yet the product of his writing is continuously and painfully sour. Collins, who for better or worse is a fascinating character, is only an instrument of politics to James D. He expresses no interest in the individuals he meets, only curious about their connection to the web of global affairs. At no point does he make an honest effort to learn about the people or traditions of the places he visits. The Chinese are full of guile, Malaysians and Indians lack aspiration, and Native Americans are cowardly. Arriving in Korea, his first reflection of the people is to make fun of their hats and call their robes, worn in respect to a dead emperor, “a pathetic picture of helpless devotion and abused confidence.”
While James D. is unforgiving to most everyone in Travel and Comment, he carries a particular disdain for Asian people and customs. Any sliver of care exhibited for the people of Ireland is nonexistent while he’s traveling through Asia. Those specific xenophobic tendencies were also nothing new. By 1921, he had been fostering racist sentiments in the United States for two decades.
His ire primarily focused on Asian immigrants, specifically Japanese and Chinese laborers who were beginning to arrive in California in larger numbers by the turn of the century. He made his first notable anti-Asian speech in 1900 while mayor, before cementing his stance in 1901 with an article in the North American Review called Why The Chinese Should Be Excluded. From that point on, his life’s work was to squeeze out Asian migrants from California by denigrating their legal rights and public perception. He was a central voice in California’s ‘Yellow Peril’ scare and used his money and influence to support the creation of exclusionary legislation like the 1924 Immigration Act which prohibited immigration specifically from Asia.456
The opening chapters of Travel and Comment take place in Japan and provide some of the bleakest examples of his racism. Early in the book — presumably from his room at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo — he writes that incorporating any Japanese into American society is not desirable, “because biologically the race question is a menace.” He returns regularly to this belief that Asian and white American people are wholly incongruent, and that alone justifies the persecution of Asians in the United States. He decries that the Japanese people are “incompatible with white civilization and free institutions”. To allow them civil or property rights, he suggests, would ultimately lead to the erasure of the white race, an argument rooted in the ever-popular great replacement theory.
The most curious element of James D.’s visit to Japan is the apparent kindness shown to him by a country he loudly and continually derides. The media does mark him as a hateful mouth upon his arrival in Yokohama, but otherwise, he experiences nothing but respect from the government and his Japanese hosts. Local guides bring him to witness the Great Buddha of Kamakura, the shrines of Nikko, and the snow melting into Lake Chuizenji. The mayor of Tokyo personally invites James D. into his home to participate in a tea ceremony. Before leaving, he is feted by Japanese officials who invite him for dinner, if only to ask him why he is printing articles in the local newspapers about “The Japanese Problem” in California.
Japan was living through its own caustic era of nationalism at the time, and the country has long suffered from a unique brand of nativist thought.7 But during his visit, the Japanese welcomed James D. with open arms. Which makes his reaction all the more jarring:
“It would be a pity to destroy a people who have shown so much capacity when touched by civilization… We can treat them as an outside power, but we cannot incorporate them in our body-politic for reasons which affect the purity of the races and the perpetuity of our institutions.”
Throughout Travel and Comment, whether in Cairo or out at sea, he finds an excuse to segue into a diatribe against the Japanese. Even the appendices of the book have titles like Biology of the Oriental Aspect or White and Japanese Birthrate in California. Japan shows up exhaustively in his speeches to Congress, personal letters, and published articles both during and after his political career. He was plainly obsessed with Japan in a way that extends beyond simple political or economic justifications. I’ve wondered whether this total preoccupation is a holdover from his lost senate campaign — which he fought largely on a platform against Asian migration — because his words sound so blatantly aggrieved. His hatred of the Japanese is so stark and repetitive, it would be laughable if not for its venom. Did he somehow blame them for his loss of power?
The bare truth is that James D. was a racial purist. He was a man invested in the idea of a white America, a man deeply afraid of the white race losing its supremacy in the world. Thankfully, his white nativism has not gone unnoticed in recent decades.
Villa Montalvo, his own estate, has distanced itself from James D. and is now a public park and arts center. Several landmarks that bore our name have also been re-christened. The National Park Service returned James D. Phelan State Beach to its original name of China Beach in 1974. The University of San Francisco changed Phelan Hall, a dorm on campus, to Burl A. Toler Hall, chosen for a respected graduate and the first black official in the National Football League. Phelan Avenue (actually named for James D.’s father, yet another James) became Frida Kahlo Way in 2018. Some monuments to the Phelans remain, but the people of San Francisco and California are fighting to bring to light the shadows of my forefathers and their peers. His legacy is being torn from the infrastructure of San Francisco one building at a time. This small reckoning is progress.
Perhaps there is no need to dwell on yet another glowering man in a suit destined to live on only through museum placards. Why give this one any air? History is brimming with racist men from all over. They fill our textbooks and street signs. They are rooted in many of our family trees, buried deep in the earth. Why track back with this one?
The simple answer is that my connection with James Duval Phelan is too strong for me to ignore. Reading through his travels, I can’t help but feel guilty. Call it white guilt or guilt over the sins of my father — both are true. James D. belongs to my clan. His hatred belongs to me and my family. His language, so precise in its educated putridity, is the direct result of what my family taught him. The version of racism in Travel and Comment are the words of a James Phelan. A person with my own name. A person with my own eyes.
That alone seemed worth the effort of trudging through his awful book.
The worst part is that I do see humanity in him. In his letters, he displays a protective concern for his friends and for his sister Alice Kelly (to whom the book is dedicated). Several times throughout the book, I caught myself laughing at one of his jokes or buying into the drama of a particular scene, like the one with Michael Collins in Ireland. I also identify with his need to do the titular traveling and commenting. Just like James D., I am compelled to see the world and voice my own take on what I encounter. That specific hobby of well-educated white dudes has not died in the last hundred years.
There is also something deeply sad about Travel in Comment. James D. is so blatantly questing for validation in his sunset years. He seeks narratives — about modernity and progress — to justify himself and his life’s work. The episode with the Laocoön in the Vatican is the clearest example. By bringing the statue’s copy back to San Francisco he not only draws a thread between the history of Western civilization and California but he also firmly plants himself as a key player in the grand narrative of the West. He sees himself as the great protector of California, and this book was meant to be his evidence.
His motive for writing Travel and Comment is so caustic yet recognizable. It’s an overt attempt at giving his life meaning. James D. wanted to be important, and he used his power and writing to justify his place within the grand scheme. What that striving has cost the world, I can’t even begin to tally.
This is according to James D. himself in Travel and Comment. I haven’t been able to verify this claim anywhere else.
James D. Phelan’s obituary from The New York Times Archive dated August, 8th 1930.
This article by Professor Naoíse Mac Sweeney distills the myth of Western Civilization in a way explainable to her son and understandable to us all.
Mark Phelan’s article ‘Keep California White’—James D. Phelan and the ‘Yellow Peril’ race controversy is the most comprehensive source I’ve found of James D. Phelan’s support of racist legislation.
James D. Phelan wrote Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 statement opposing Asian immigration. This article from Robert E. Hennings does a good job of exploring how and why James D. was allowed to do this.
This article by Leslie Solomon is thorough in tracking the history of anti-Asian legislation in the United States.
Japanese nationalism and/or nativism has a complicated, fraught history both pre- and post-Meiji restoration. This is captured in discussions around national pride and the Japanese concept of Kokugaku, sometimes translated as “national learning.”
Quotes
“The great enemy of Japanese…” — Travel and Comment pg. 18
“He was one of the most…” — James D. Phelan’s Obituary, New York Times Archive
“For fifty days I have been sailing…” — Travel and Comment pg.
“As compared with other places…” — ibid pg. 262
“The Laocoon may well personify…” — ibid pg. 167-168
“Sing Song girl licenses.” — ibid pg. 67
“three to one against…” — ibid pg. 16
“breeding grounds” & “swarming” — ibid pg. 7
“a pathetic picture of…” — ibid pg. 52
“because biologically the race…” — ibid pg. 39
“incompatible with white civilization…” — ibid pg. 82
“The Japanese Problem” — ibid pg. 33
“It would be a pity to destroy” — ibid pg. 25