Hate Has a Long History
April 10, 1850: Albert Maver Winn, the future founder of the Native Sons of the Golden West, was appointed brigadier general by Governor Peter H. Burnett.
California’s anti-Japanese hostility did not begin with Pearl Harbor.
Long before World War II, institutions were already being built around exclusion. One of them would become the Native Sons of the Golden West, later founded by Albert Maver Winn, a man tied to the same early California political world shaped by Governor Peter H. Burnett.
Burnett’s vision for California was openly racial from the beginning. As the state’s first governor, he championed exclusionary policies targeting Black, Native, Chinese, and other nonwhite communities, helping lay the political foundation for later anti-Asian movements across the state.
By the 1920s and 1930s, the Native Sons had become one of California’s loudest anti-Asian voices, openly opposing Chinese and Japanese immigration while promoting the idea that California should remain a white state.
Pearl Harbor didn’t just spark a war overseas. It emboldened people at home who believed they now had permission to target anyone who looked Japanese.
A. M. Winn founded the Native Sons of the Golden West, one of California’s most powerful organizations and later a force in anti-Japanese exclusion.
Peter Hardeman Burnett, c. 1860. A leading figure in Oregon’s early exclusionist politics and later California’s openly racist first governor. 
The Native Sons of the Golden West was one of the most influential groups relentlessly campaigning for anti-Asian legislation in California.
For the Native Sons, removing Japanese Americans was not enough. They continued lobbying to make exclusion permanent through mass deportation and anti-return campaigns.
San Diego Journal, August 23, 1945
Kajirō Ōyama (right) with attorney A. L. Wirin following a 1945 court ruling ordering land he operated for his son to revert to the state of California.
Courtesy of Lilian Hoffecker
Taro Takahashi and family. Takahashi v. Fish and Game Commission (1948), one of the civil rights cases A. L. Wirin later called among the most important he ever handled.
From Prejudice to Policy
When Japanese Americans were forcibly removed in 1942, the Native Sons did not stop at supporting incarceration.
They pushed the same exclusionary vision that Burnett had helped normalize nearly a century earlier.
Working with the American Legion, they backed Regan v. King, a lawsuit meant to strip Nisei citizens of voting rights and challenge birthright citizenship itself.
The courts rejected the effort.
But even after losing in court, the Native Sons continued lobbying to keep Japanese Americans out of California, supporting discriminatory laws involving land, housing, and fishing rights that later fed into landmark civil rights cases such as Oyama v. California and Takahashi v. Fish & Game Commission.
The Legacy of Organized Hate
The story of Japanese American incarceration was never just about wartime fear.
It was also about organizations that spent decades preparing the legal and political ground for exclusion.
In many ways, the road from Burnett’s California to the wartime anti-return campaigns of the Native Sons was not a break in history.
It was a continuation.
But they later reinvented themselves as historic preservationists.
Courtesy of the National Japanese American Historical Society
A California woman points towards an anti-immigrant sign posted outside her home.
Courtesy of UC Berkeley / Bancroft Library
The Native Sons were only one part of a much larger anti-Japanese movement. Across California, politicians and other groups helped normalize anti-Japanese hate.
AP Photo
Shigeo and Chiseko Nagaishi, along with their two children, return from an incarceration camp to their vandalized home in Seattle, May 10, 1945
Swallowtail California Bear Flag, 1890. The Native Sons helped elevate symbols like this while also helping shape California’s politics of exclusion.
Native Sons gathering, San Jose, mid-20th century. Exclusion was not driven by fringe voices alone, but by respected civic organizations with deep roots in California life.
The grave of A. M. Winn, founder of the Native Sons of the Golden West. The man is gone, but parts of the system he helped build endured long after him.
The Contradiction of California Memory
The Native Sons helped preserve California’s landmarks, popularized the state’s historic memory, and even played a role in making the bear flag official. They later supported some Native land-rights efforts as well.
But that same organization also became one of California’s most influential anti-Asian voices, lobbying against Chinese and Japanese immigrants and later campaigning to keep Japanese Americans from returning home after World War II.
That contradiction is part of the story.
They are still around.