American Loyalty League

Fresno-based organization founded by Dr. Thomas T. Yatabe that became an early inspiration for the Japanese American Citizens League.

Before the existence of the Japanese American Citizens League , very few Japanese American civic organizations existed. During the 1920s, amidst the rise of xenophobia and anti-Japanese sentiment, several Japanese American leaders began organizing community organizations with the goal of lobbying the American government to rescind discriminatory statutes.

That "something," for Thomas Tamotsu Yatabe, a Fresno dentist, would be the American Loyalty League. According to Yatabe, the league would mobilize the Nisei to become active in American politics in order to speak on behalf of the community:

We realized that our biggest drawback was that it sort of created a mental block in the minds of a lot of fellow Americans. We needed something to counteract this, to 'educate' and to get across to the American public that we were loyal American citizens. ^[1]

The league traces its origins to 1918, when Yatabe and several Nisei professionals decided to form the American Loyalty League after a lunch meeting where they discussed the discrimination they faced. As Bill Hosokawa detailed in Nisei: The Quiet Americans , the group decided to organize speaking tours that would encourage the Nisei to take advantage of their citizenship and fight back against discrimination through political engagement. One of the group's goals was to encourage the Nisei to register to vote and participate in elections. When Yatabe attempted to register as a voter, he was confronted by a clerk who asked to define his race as either "white," "black," or "Mongolian." Yatabe then argued with the clerk that he was an American of Japanese ancestry. After deliberating with her manager, the clerk allowed Yatabe to write-in his race as Japanese. ^[2]

Although the initial League organized several events, the group soon lost momentum and dissolved. At the same time, anti-Japanese movements continued to gain momentum. In 1919, the California Oriental Exclusion League pushed Congress to enact a constitutional amendment that would prevent the native-born children of immigrants illegible for citizenship from holding citizenship. This, and the passage of an amended California Alien Land Law in 1920, pushed Yatabe towards founding an organization that gave Japanese Americans a political voice.

On May 5, 1923, Yatabe held the first American Loyalty League meeting at the Tanigawa Hotel in Fresno. Later in the summer of 1923, Yatabe gathered new members of the League, mostly teenagers encouraged by their parents to go, at the YMCA building in San Francisco to establish a national organization. While Yatabe told the young members to "sleep on it," the new members later agreed on establishing chapters of the League among Japanese communities throughout California, and elected Yatabe as their first president. ^[3]

On August 5, 1925, the American Loyalty League made their first media appearance in the Nichi Bei Shinbun . League member (and future JACL leader) Kay Nishida argued in the article that "for many years thoughtful American citizens of Japanese parentage have felt the growing need of an organization to create a better understanding between the Japanese and the Americans." The American Loyalty League, Nishida claimed, was the organization that would serve as the platform for Japanese American political engagement. ^[4]

Over the years, the American Loyalty League established several small chapters throughout Northern California, including San Francisco, San Jose, Florin, Salinas, Stockton, and Marysville. In 1926, the League announced new chapters in Portland and Seattle, and in 1927 a Petaluma chapter was formed. In May 1928, Yatabe announced that the national meeting of the American Loyalty League would be held in Fresno in November of that year. The Nichi Bei announced that members of the newly-formed San Francisco New American Citizens League would send delegates. In September 1928, Clarence T. Arai spoke before the Fresno American Loyalty League as a representative of his Progressive Citizens League of Seattle.

Although Yatabe and the American Loyalty League made a concerted effort to enlist the support of Japanese Americans, most attempts at forming outside chapters failed. At the November 1928 convention, the question of formally uniting the various West Coast Japanese American organizations was discussed. A year later, in April 1929, Yatabe, Saburo Kido , and Clarence Arai of Seattle met in San Francisco to discuss the formation of a new organization. The three agreed the organization would hold its first convention in 1930 and, after some debate, titled it the Japanese American Citizens League. While Yatabe's Fresno chapter remained the sole survivor of the American Loyalty League by the end of 1928, the idea of forming a network of chapters among the West Coast Japanese American communities served as the basis for the structure of the JACL.

At the JACL national convention in San Francisco on October 20, 1934, the delegates elected Yatabe as the first national president—a testament to his influence upon the organization and a sign of the merger between his Loyalty League and the JACL. In accepting the presidency, Yatabe spoke before the convention about the need for undivided loyalty to the U.S. and the importance of unity within both the organization and the community. Yatabe called upon delegates to

make it our duty to enroll every eligible citizens as a member within our respective local chapters for the strength of our component chapters means the strength and unity of the JACL. Every individual member should become a salesman and sell the idea of the JACL to non-members. ^[5]

Yatabe's speech would later be reprinted in the February 1942 issue of the Pacific Citizen to bolster unity among chapters on the eve of the incarceration.

To this day, the Fresno JACL prides itself as the oldest chapter of the organization and maintains the title of the American Loyalty League, a testament to their origins as the American Loyalty League and their part in forming the JACL.