During the Gold Rush, men from China were solicited to work as laborers in the United States. However, when the economy entered into a depression following the Civil War, labor leaders saw the Chinese immigrants as a threat to the white working class. Driven by economic precarity and racism, many labor groups began producing anti-Asian propaganda and performing hate crimes against Asian immigrants. Following the first ethnically based immigration law, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, groups such as the Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) formed to fight for the “white man’s country,” actively discriminating and committing violence against people of Asian descent.

The Asiatic Exclusion League was founded in 1905 in San Francisco, California, as the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League. In 1908 the organization changed its name to the Asiatic Exclusion League. Participants in the founding convention were mostly delegates from trade unions and included Andrew Furuseth and Walter Macarthur for the San Francisco Labor Council, and P.H. McCarthy and Olaf A. Tveitmoe for the San Francisco Building Trades Council. The Cooks’ and Waiters’ union was also especially active due to the significant number of Japanese employed in restaurants.

The building trades unions were a dominant force in the League, and Tveitmoe assumed the presidency. Tveitmoe, a Norwegian immigrant, began as a leader of the Cement Workers’ Union in San Francisco and rose to prominence as secretary of the San Francisco Building Trades Council and editor of its newspaper, Organized Labor, eventually becoming financial secretary of the California Building Trades Department. The purpose of the League set forth in its constitution was the exclusion of Asian immigrants through legislation. The League hoped to "educate" people so as to "create a sentiment which will prove to the Congress of our country the necessity of the enactment of a law for the preservation of our race." The Preamble to the League’s Constitution claimed that "The Caucasian and Asiatic races are unassimilable. Contact between these races must result, under the conditions of industrial life obtaining in North America, in injury to the former, proportioned to the extent to which such contact prevails." The anti-Japanese activists campaigned to abolish Japanese-language schools and segregate the public schools, prohibit Japanese from commercial fishing, and forbid Japanese land ownership and long-term leasing. In response to the efforts of the AEL, the State of California increased enforcement of laws prohibiting Asian people from owning property. The Asiatic Exclusion League and similar groups successfully lobbied for laws restricting immigration from Asian countries such as the Immigration Act of 1917 and the Quota Act of 1921. The League was financed by the voluntary contributions of affiliating organizations, which numbered about 200. Over half of these organizations were labor unions, although the League also received money from fraternal and community organizations, businesses, and individuals.