Cousin Delbert confronts the "Yellow Peril"

Swami Mazzanandi

Cousin Delbert

It's always refreshing to arise and find in social media feeds new or recycled memes warning me of the "brown peril" at our southern border and the perceived need for the current president's wall, or fence, or whatever it is.

Xenophobia, of course, is as American as apple pie and I was able to find modest affirmation of that in my own family thanks to The Chariton Leader of Oct. 26, 1905, which published on its front page a lengthy letter from Delbert Miller, a first-cousin of my maternal grandfather. Delbert, his siblings, his parents (Harvey and Alice Miller) and members of Pleasant Township's allied Shore family had relocated some years earlier to Santa Ana, California, where they established themselves as farmers, orchardists and merchants.

The headline on Delbert's letter to the homefolk in Lucas County reads, "The Yellow Peril: The Influence is Adverse to the True Faith Held in America." The headline was editor Henry Gittinger's contribution.

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Now it's unlikely that Delbert actually knew anyone of Asian descent, but what he had encountered (and shared with Lucas countyans via The Leader) was a newspaper report about a gentleman who called himself Swami Mazzanandi and who was organizing the Udana Karana Sangha Buddhist Brotherhood, then enjoying modest success in the greater Los Angeles area.

Swami Mazzanandi actually was a Cockney Englishman, a talented conman who had cobbled together a new "religion" that referenced --- without attempting to understand --- various western ideas of what Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism actually were all about. The result was sufficiently appealing to a number of white southern Californians to part them from their cash and provide a comfortable income for the Swami. No actual Asians, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain or otherwise, were involved. 

Delbert apparently sensed danger when he read about the Swami, however, and felt the need to warn his Midwestern family and friends of the peril that might wash over them from the far west were they not on guard. Here's Delbert's preface to the republished article:

Santa Ana, Cal., Oct. 19, 1905

Editor of Chariton Leader:

If you will pardon me for the liberty I am taking, I wish to write you a few lines. In today's paper, The Los Angeles Examiner, I read an account stating that twenty-seven people of that city reared from childhood in the Christian faith are to denounce Christ and take up the religion of the Japanese, which will be best explained in words of the Examiner which I will cut out and send to you.

There are thousands of dollars spent every year in sending missionaries to Japan and China, and yet all the Christians and millions of dollars in America could not make Christian out of one Chinaman in Los Angeles and to convert a Jap is just about the same proposition. And yet many people in the east who are ignorant of essential facts favor granting them admission to our country. It seems to me that it is time for the American people to awaken to the facts as they really are. Otherwise Christianity itself will be endangered by these foreign enemies which we admit to our own homes.

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I'll spare you the Examiner article, but can add that Swami Mazzanandi's new religion had a relatively short shelf life and has long since vanished. Near the end of his life, reportedly, the Swami was regalaing anyone who would listen with accounts of his multiple visits to Mars.

But that inexplicable fear of the "other" that cousin Delbert experienced --- and shared with Lucas County --- continues to flourish.