The Celestials’ Last Game
I’ve been following Ben Railton on social media for a long time now, first on the site formerly known as Twitter (back in the good old days) and now on Bluesky, where he is @americanstudier.bluesky.social Among other things, he curates a fabulous list, #SundayScholar, of people to follow and stuff to read. I always find someone new to follow, and I am always chuffed when I make the list.
Railton responded to my request for stuff about Asian-American history with a recommendation of his podcast, The Celestial’s Last Game. I am so glad he did.
Obviously this is not a picture of the Celestials. Such a picture exists. But I did not want to go through the permissions process with the archive that owns it. Permissions are often painful, always slow, and sometimes expensive. Not worth the effort for a blog post. Luckily, you can see it on the podcast website.
The Celestial’s Last Game is the kind of historical project I enjoy the most: it takes a small, relatively unknown, event and uses it to illuminate a larger picture.* The podcast tells the story of a semi-professional baseball team called the Celestials made up of Chinese students in America and the last game they played before they went back to China. The sub-title sums it up: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America.
The podcast is structured like a baseball game. There are nine episodes, labelled as innings, followed by what Railton dubs a “post game press conference.” Each inning is broken into smaller units that could be considered times at bat.
The story of the Celestials carries the action. A group of Chinese students who had studied at New England prep schools and colleges, including some who had been star athletes at Yale, formed a baseball team. They made a name for themselves on the New England semi-pro leagues. But rising anti-Chinese sentiment drove them back to China. In California, waiting to depart, a local Oakland team challenged them to a final game. I’m not going to tell you how it ends; you’ll have to listen to the podcast.
Railton uses the story to talk about the broader experience of Chinese immigrants in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, racism in other American immigrant groups, and the rise of baseball as an American cultural marker. It is a fascinating blend, even for someone like me who is not much of a sports fan.
I strongly recommend it. You can find it here: https://americanstudier.podbean.com/
*To quote the brilliant Chuck Wendig, “The small story always matters more than the big story…We think we care about the Empire versus the Rebel Alliance, we think we care about Spider-Man versus the Vulture, we think we care about Buffy versus the Vampires. But we don’t. Not really. Not deeply. What we care about is the small story embedded in there, the small story that’s the beating heart of a larger one.” (Damn Fine Story, p. 79) It is as true for non-fiction as it is for fiction. Maybe even more true. It’s the reason Big Fat History Books are sometimes so hard to read, unless the author successfully links together a series of small stories that make you care about the protagonists and consequently about the big picture. If you don’t manage that you have what one of my professors described as “just one damn thing after another.” But I digress.
Impounded
As I headed into Asian American Heritage Month* I told myself that that I didn’t need to read more about was the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It is the one moment in Asian American history that most of us know something about. But I kept coming across interesting stuff with new perspectives. Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, is one of them.
Version 1.0.0
I have no doubt that you are familiar with Dorothea Lange’s work. She was one of the photographers hired by the Farm Service Administration to document rural poverty during the Depression. The purpose of their work was to document the need for FSA programs; Lange did much more than that. She created powerful portraits of the human cost of the Depression.
What few of us knew is that in 1942, the War Relocation Authority, which had been established to organize the internment of Japanese Americans, hired Lange to document the program. They, too, got more than they expected. And unlike the FSA, the WRA wasn’t happy with what they got. Lange’s photographs are an unflinching portrait and critique of a program that she did not support. Unlike her portraits of migrant and farm workers in the Depression, her photographs of interned Japanese Americans were suppressed by the United States military during the war—the word “Impounded” written across some of the prints— and then quietly buried in the National Archives. (Can you say “erasure”?)
Impounded is divided into three parts. The first tells the story of how Lange took the photographs, placing them within the larger context of her life and work. It grapples with the question of why the photographs were commissioned at all, and the way they were buried in the records. (But not destroyed.) The second part, titled “An American Story,” tells the story of the internment. The third is a large selection of Lange’s photographs, with their original captions. A brilliant and heartbreaking indictment of one of our most shameful moments.
It turns out I was wrong: I did need to read more about the internment camps.
*I've given up typing out the whole thing. Realistically, I’m not going to read anything dealing with Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders this month. But I’ll keep an eye out for the future.
From the Archives: A Great Book About Immigration Law
I went into this month of reading about Asian-American history with one thought clearly in mind: that the patterns of Asian immigration were often shaped by changes in United States immigration law. Reading Asian American Histories of the United States confirmed that idea, which led me back to a wonderful book on the subject that I read and reviewed here several years ago. It's a timely read now.
* * *
I have often complained that one of the failures of American history class as I experienced it in high school* was that everything after the civil war was taught as a series of legislation punctuated by two world wars. The world wars were taught as story, and subsequently stuck with me . But the history of legislation was essentially a list: a name, a date, a paragraph about what the law in question accomplished. Here’s what stuck: anti-trust legislation, labor rights legislation, and, inexplicably, the Taft-Harley Act (the name, not the content).**
It turns out that the history of legislation can be pretty thrilling in the right hands.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 began as an attempt by journalist and second-generation American Jia Lynn Yang to understand the law that allowed her parents to come to the United States, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The result is a gripping account of forty years of Congressional wrangling over immigration law in the United States.
Yang successfully argues that the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is a relatively new one—and demonstrates that laws controlling immigration are even more recent. The book centers on the passage of three major immigration laws—in 1924, 1952 and 1965—and the competing ideas about ethnicity, race and the nature of the United States as an entity that shaped those laws.
Yang never loses sight of the fact that laws are passed by people. She introduces us to the often colorful and sometimes awful politicians and activists who lobbied for and against changes in immigration policy, clearly evoking each man's character as well as describing his political career. She outlines ugly relationships between immigration laws and the eugenics movement, isolationism, anti-Communist rhetoric, McCarthyism, anti-Semitism, and calls to keep the United States true to its "Northern European roots."
Yang ends where she began, with the impact of the 1965 bill, which opened the door to non-white immigration, closed the border with Mexico for the first time and changed the United States in ways that its promoters had never anticipated.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is an important and sometimes surprising history of American immigration policy and the people who made it.
*I realize that this is not a universal experience. It wasn’t even my universal experience. My world history teacher did an excellent job of capturing my imagination despite the challenges inherent in the concept. Fabulous high school history teachers exist. My hats off to you all.
**I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up: formally known as the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, it restricted the power and actions of labor unions. The 80th Congress passed it over President Truman’s veto.