Valentine S. McClatchy

Valentine Stuart McClatchy (August 29, 1857 – May 15, 1938) was an American newspaper owner and journalist. Serving as publisher of The Sacramento Bee (now The McClatchy Company) from their father's death in 1883, McClatchy co-owned the paper with his brother Charles K. McClatchy until 1923. After leaving the newspaper business, he became a leading figure in the anti-Japanese movement in California, forming key exclusionary groups to lobby for alien land laws and race-based limits on immigration and naturalization.

Early life and career

McClatchy was the son of the prominent nineteenth-century publisher James McClatchy, who founded the Sacramento Bee (known as the Daily Bee when he took it over in 1857). "V.S." graduated from Santa Clara College in 1877, and after the elder McClatchy's death in 1883 he took on joint ownership of the Bee with his brother. "C.K." served as the editor, while Valentine took on the role of publisher. As early as 1915, he began writing about the menace posed by Japanese immigrants, and by 1919 he had largely retired from the paper, turning his efforts instead to publishing a series of anti-Japanese pamphlets. He officially left the Bee in 1923, when C.K. bought him out to obtain sole control of the company.[1]

Anti-Japanese lobbying

On September 2, 1920 McClatchy formed the Japanese Exclusion League of California, and thereafter he devoted most of his time and energy to the organization's "holy cause."[2] The League (along with other like-minded organizations) successfully lobbied for additional restrictions on California's Alien Land Law and less successfully pushed to remove the birthright citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.[1] Viewing Japanese immigrants, whose numbers had increased dramatically since the Chinese Exclusion Act and the rise of the picture bride practice, as "colonists" preparing for a Japanese invasion, McClatchy and the Exclusion League's goal was to stop East Asian immigration altogether. In 1924, McClatchy went to Washington, D.C. with James D. Phelan and Ulysses S. Webb to lobby in support of an exclusionary immigration bill then under consideration in Congress. He testified before a Senate Committee that Japanese immigrants "come here specifically and professedly for the purpose of colonizing and establishing here permanently the proud Yamato race," and reiterated the common argument that they were members of an unassimilable race and "never stop being Japanese."[3] The Immigration Act of 1924 was signed into law, effectively banning all immigration from Japan and the rest of East Asia.

Having won the fight over Japanese immigration, McClatchy formed the California Joint Immigration Committee in 1925 and turned his focus to Filipino immigrants. In 1937, he lobbied to strip Kibei, Japanese Americans born in the United States who were sent to Japan to study or visit family for an extended time, of their citizenship if they had been in Japan for more than a year.[1]

He died of a heart condition on May 15, 1938.[1]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Niiya, Brian. "V.S. McClatchy". Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 27 August 2014.
  2. ↑ Daniels, Roger. The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) p91.
  3. ↑ Daniels. The Politics of Prejudice, p98.
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