Biotic Borders

Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890–1950

Jeannie N. Shinozuka

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226817309
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A rich and eye-opening history of the mutual constitution of race and species in modern America. In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nursery stock and other agricultural products shipped from Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. In Biotic Borders, Jeannie N. Shinozuka uncovers the emergence of biological nativism that fueled American imperialism and spurred anti-Asian racism that remains with us today.Shinozuka provides an eye-opening look at biotic exchanges that not only altered the lives of Japanese in America but transformed American society more broadly. She shows how the modern fixation on panic about foreign species created a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that flourished in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia inspired concerns about biodiversity, prompting new categories of "native" and "invasive" species that defined groups as bio-invasions to be regulated—or annihilated. By highlighting these connections, Shinozuka shows us that this story cannot be told about humans alone—the plants and animals that crossed with them were central to Japanese American and Asian American history. The rise of economic entomology and plant pathology in concert with public health and anti-immigration movements demonstrate these entangled histories of xenophobia, racism, and species invasions.

: 1 :

San José Scale: Contested Origins at the Turn of the Century

In the late nineteenth century plant and insect immigrants from Asia increased dramatically, coinciding with the emergence of a yellow peril image that followed the migration of Asian laborers sojourning to various places around the Pacific Rim. After consolidating a global empire by the turn of the century, the United States began to eye Asia as a key source of transnational Asian migrant labor to supplant slavery. The US also saw Asia as a new frontier for trade, investment, and other economic opportunities. A significant but often ignored dimension of transnational movements, in addition to the more commonly examined flow of capital, bodies, ideas, and technology, is the circulation of plants, insects, and pathogens.1 The movement of flora and fauna, as nonhuman but biological entities, forms a central part of this story. Science, including the health and environmental sciences, marked the Japanese as a foreign invasion in the native-invasive binary during this period.

United States officials increasingly preoccupied themselves with the origins of species invasions. Such species invasions included foreign pathogens, both plant and human, as well as injurious insects and menacing Japanese immigrant agriculturalists—all of which could destroy American agriculture in myriad ways. US officials applied a native-invasive binary to these newcomers in attempts to exclude and regulate them. US Department of Agriculture (USDA) officers engaged in contested debates about the origin of (Asian) San José scale in the era of Chinese exclusion, after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. From the late nineteenth century until the early decades of the twentieth, the US government deployed various mechanisms to gradually exclude and control Japanese plant, insect, and human immigrants at and within their borders.

Identifying Immigrant Insect Pests

Dangerous scale from Japan was not included in the desirable group of newcomers. The battle with the cottony cushion scale in 1889 and the appointment of a quarantine officer and inspector for the state of California in 1890 led to the rise of economic entomology—the need to classify dangerous insects and appoint individuals who could guard the nation’s ecological borders, especially as they pertain to their economic significance.2 As early as 1891, Alexander Craw, California’s newly appointed state quarantine officer and inspector, discovered in a shipment from Japan and destroyed two orange tree lots, or 325,000 trees, infested with the long scale.3 Craw condemned the trees as a public nuisance with the backing of the California Supreme Court.4 He published a report recounting how he destroyed the “two lots of orange trees infested with [long scale] that arrived here from Japan.” He then warned growers that they should carefully examine any trees imported from Japan and that if the scale was found, “prompt measures should be taken to eradicate it before it attains a foothold in the orchard or on adjacent trees.” In this same report, Craw wrote, “The most formidable of all insects that infest fruit trees in this State are those of the family Coccidae”—including the Aspidiotus citrinus of Japan. Craw warned that some of the coccidae could be “found upon indigenous trees,” carried far distances by wind, bees, birds, or other insects, becoming very destructive in the “salubrious California climate.”5 Although Craw cited other destructive insects in this publication, clearly Japanese insects posed a costly threat to indigenous trees. Such battles with scale pests occurred within a broader movement that sought to exclude insects and even the plants with which they arrived.

Yet these injurious insects entered US borders within shipments of plants and specimens from Japan because there was a demand for the exotic plants. The establishment of the nursery industry helped facilitate the increasing numbers of plant and insect immigrants. In 1882, Louis Boehmer, a German nurseryman, founded the first nursery that specialized in exporting Japanese plants to Europe and North America.6 Before the Japanese nursery industry had taken off, plant auctions were held in London and New York, providing a way for collectors to purchase premium plant specimens, such as bonsai. In their 1903 catalogue, L. Boehmer and Company declared, “The growing demand for garden and houseplants from foreign residents of China, Korea, and Japan have induced us to present this condensed list of trees, shrubs, and other plants. . . .”7 Likewise, another export company, Suzuki and Iida, claimed in their 1899 catalogue, “The demand for Japanese bulbs, plants, and seeds is steadily increasing year by year, and our products have met with the highest approval by all who have bought them.”8 In the Tokyo Nurseries catalogue, F. Takaghi effused, “Japanese plants, and the peculiar art of training them, have recently opened a new field to the gardeners of the West, exciting their interest, and bringing every week something novel to them, as may be easily seen from the many standard papers on landscape gardening and botany.”9

With the increasing demand for Japanese flora and fauna, however, came the increased risk of injurious insects and even fatal plant diseases. In the preface to their nursery catalogue, Suzuki and Iida reassured their customers:

San José Scale All of our nursery stock will be thoroughly fumigated in our own fumigator, which was built according to instructions one received from Mr. [Alexander] Craw, State Entomologist of California.10

Although at this time government officials and entomologists did not seek to exclude plants altogether, it was virtually impossible to exclude injurious insects and deadly pathogens without excluding the plants with which they traveled.

By the mid-1890s, the introduction of foreign species from Japan, as well as from Mexico, increasingly concerned nativists who worked for the USDA.11 After a series of biological invasions ranging from gypsy moth to the “Mexican” boll weevil, the USDA began to focus on these introduced pests. The discovery of the (Asian) San José scale in 1893 on the East Coast, along with the Mexican cotton boll weevil by 1894, alarmed the Chief of Entomology, Leland Howard, and Charles Marlatt.12 In the bulletin Some Mexican and Japanese Injurious Insects Liable to Be Introduced into the United States (1896), Howard stressed, “Our danger from Mexico is fast becoming realized,” and the Board of Control of the New Mexico Agricultural Experiment Station adopted resolutions in order to place horticultural quarantine officers at southern ports, as well as to appoint a specialist to conduct studies of injurious insects in Mexico and Central America. Howard noted that while the danger of injurious insects from Japan and the Pacific Islands was not the same as it was from Mexico, this difference was due in large part to highly restrictive legislation previously passed by the California State Board of Horticulture.13

However, Howard still felt it important that the officers of the State Board of Horticulture remain aware of those injurious insects that could be imported from Japan and the Pacific, such as the Japanese gypsy moth, Oeneria japonica, which could devastate the native biota just as the European gypsy moth had done in Massachusetts. To learn more about lesser known injurious insects, Howard’s predecessor, C. V. Riley, had hired the Japanese entomologist Otoji Takahashi, who had been trained by J. H. Comstock at Cornell University.14 In a report that introduced a newly discovered subgenera, Pulvinaria (Takahashia) japonica, Howard’s colleague, Theodore D. A. Cockerell, wrote:

2 Charles Marlatt, ca. 1890–1910, Chairman of the Federal Horticultural Board and later the Bureau of Entomology, United States Department of Agriculture. Courtesy Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, Library of Congress.

Mr. Takahashi must forgive me for saying that this is a truly Japanesque insect, and well deserves a subgeneric name which may recall not only its discoverer, but the land from whence come many quaint and beautiful things. . . . [Female:] Legs and antennae very small. . . . Claw straight, a little hooked at end; the usual digitules of claw and tarsus present, but all very slender and small.15

In comparing Takahashi to the insect he identified, Cockerell’s statement illustrates that the Asiatic racial form does not always take the shape of a human body.16 Cockerell’s observations, like those of many other American entomologists of his time, engaged in both orientalist anthropomorphism and naturalization by conferring human traits on insects and likewise endowing Takahashi with the physical attributes of the very pest that he categorized.17 However, these metaphors that humanized and sexualized insects and plants and naturalized Japanese immigrants carried tangible implications that moved beyond the rhetorical.

California serves as an important site to examine these humanized insects and naturalized immigrants.18 The science historian Philip Pauly notes that California became a central location for scientists’ intervention since it was a “novel environment where American settlers, European and Asian vegetation, and oriental insects had converged within a few years.”19 California formed a central agricultural region not only due to its climate and fertile soil, but also because of its position along the Pacific Ocean where a great deal of commerce occurred. Additionally, the environmental historian Linda Nash observes that California’s Central Valley has endured a history that includes “the nearly unrestrained introduction of highly toxic pesticides and nonnative species.”20 In To Make a Spotless Orange, the historian of science Richard Sawyer wrote that ornamentals and other agricultural plants from nurseries posed a threat to California with imported pests:

Almost no native American insects attacked citrus, a foreign crop still expanding largely through the importation of nursery stock. With so much exotic plant material coming in, it was only natural for California to lead other states in enacting plant quarantine legislation. . . .21

However, plant quarantine was no more natural than the racial stereotypes imposed upon Chinese and Japanese immigrants as disease-breeders and the subsequent legislation that barred them at America’s medical gates. Furthermore, although many elite entomologists who advocated plant quarantine appeared to do so for practical reasons, scholars such as Pauly and Coates investigate how the exclusion of plants from Asia was similar to the exclusion of Asian immigrants themselves. Linking diseased plant immigrants to the contagious yellow peril that resided in Asian bodies not only blurs the boundaries between ecological and medical borders, but also tells a more multidimensional narrative of the exclusion of these so-called invasions.

One key invasion was the (Asian) San José scale (also known as Quadraspidiotus perniciosus or SJS), which had already reportedly entered California in 1870 with flowering peach trees. The Bureau of Entomology reported that the scale first appeared in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1893, threatening all orchards in the East. In 1896 and 1897, investigations of the scale were carried out, and thousands of circulars, bulletins, and monographs were issued.22 In 1897, a technical series bulletin published by the USDA’s Division of Entomology discussed the difference between the San José scale and other similar insects. In this report, Cockerell, the world’s leading expert on bees and an entomologist at the New Mexico Agricultural Experiment Station, claimed that the San José scale originated in Japan: “It is now to be shown, for the first time, that A. perniciosus is, with little or no doubt, a native of Japan.” Cockerell noted that in “Japan . . . there occur two varieties or subspecies of perniciosus: andromelas and albopunctatus.” Although Cockerell acknowledged that Alexander Craw, the state quarantine officer and inspector, only once discovered A. perniciosus, or San José scale, upon Japanese imported stock, Cockerell reasoned, “there are various Japanese scales which Mr. Craw has found only once, and several found by Mr. Takahashi on cultivated plants in Japan have not yet come into Mr. Craw’s hands.”23 Cockerell added that if indeed Japan is the native country of the scale, its natural enemies would have kept it in check. Cockerell implied that in its country of origin, the San José scale could be controlled. However, in America, where this scale appeared to have no natural enemies, it could multiply, destroy valuable crops, and threaten the native ecology.

In the US the San José scale fed upon a wide range of plants, attacking nearly all deciduous fruit trees, along with small fruits. The scale also subsisted on a variety of ornamental shrubs and native trees. The scale attacked about 137 species of plants, with 72 in particular subject to severe infestation and the remaining 65 species rarely attacked.24 San José scale frequently attacked pear and apple trees, with the native pear and wild cherry generally free from the pest. In Japan, the scale appeared to favor pear, apple, and peach as food plants, among other fruit and ornamentals.25 An article in the Kew Bulletin of the Royal Botanic Gardens in London reported, “There is perhaps no insect capable of causing greater damage to fruit interests in the United States, or perhaps t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Plant and Insect Immigrants
• 1   San José Scale: Contested Origins at the Turn of the Century
• 2   Early Yellow Peril vs. Western Menace: Chestnut Blight, Citrus Canker, and PQN 37
• 3   Liable Insects at the US-Mexico Border
• 4   Contagious Yellow Peril: Diseased Bodies and the Threat of Little Brown Men
• 5   Pestilence in Paradise: Invasives in Hawai‘i
• 6   Japanese Beetle Menace: Discovery of the Beetle
• 7   Infiltrating Perils: A Race against Ownership, Contamination, and Miscegenation
• 8   Yellow Peril No More? National and Naturalized Enemies during World War II
• Conclusion: Toward a Multi(horti)cultural Global Society
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index