On November 2 the citizens of Boston took a giant step along the path to rebellion by establishing a committee of correspondence to exchange information with other Massachusetts towns. The move had been prompted by the royal government’s latest attempt to assert its authority, this time over the judicial system. Since 1701 Massachusetts judges had been paid by the colonists themselves, but reports were circulating about a new plan to pay Superior Court judges from the royal treasury. On October 28 the Boston town meeting resolved to ask Gov. Thomas Hutchinson if the rumors were true. He refused to answer. Two days later it asked Hutchinson to convene the legislature. That request was rebuffed as well. Then on November 2, in an all-day meeting at Faneuil Hall, the freemen of Boston appointed a twenty-one-member committee of correspondence to bypass the governor’s obstructionism.

Seldom in history have taxpayers been so insistent on spending more of their own money. Yet the danger they faced was clear. Massachusetts judges had been paid 160 to 200 pounds a year in the depreciated local currency. The new plan would pay them 200 pounds a year (400 for the chief justice) in sound British money. With their service revocable by the royal governor, the king would have both a carrot and a stick to persuade judges to do his bidding.

Even worse, the salaries would nominally be paid out of revenues from the hated tea tax (though, in fact, the annual receipts of that levy totaled a few hundred pounds at most). Since colonists were already paying—or, more often, evading—the tax, the new salary arrangement would not add to their burden. But it would set a precedent for London to increase the tax or impose new ones to meet other needs.

On November 20 the town meeting adopted a set of resolutions written by the committee of correspondence. The opening section, by the fire-eating master propagandist Samuel Adams, prefigured the Declaration of Independence: “Among the natural Rights of the Colonists are these: First, a Right to Life; Secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property.” The ensuing bill of particulars, by Joseph Warren (who would die in the battle of Bunker Hill), ranged far beyond the salary question to list many complaints that would also reappear in the Declaration: taxation without representation, imposing laws without consent, sending swarms of officers, quartering soldiers, convening legislatures at inconvenient times and places, refusing assent to laws, conducting trials overseas. Dr. Benjamin Church contributed a cover letter filled with stirring phrases like “the Iron hand of oppression is dayly tearing the choisest Fruit from the fair Tree of Liberty, planted by our worthy Predecessors, at the expence of their treasure, & abundantly water’d with their blood.”

More than a touch of opportunism was behind the whole controversy. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., wrote that the committee manifesto was “largely a recitation of old grievances, and the leading new issue could scarcely be an enduring one to a people who had been complaining for generations against the burden of paying high salaries to governors and judges.” Nonetheless, the affair revived Massachusetts’ somnolent revolutionary fervor. Governor Hutchinson later wrote that “all on a sudden, from a state of peace, order, and general contentment, as some expressed themselves, the province, more or less from one end to the other, was brought into a state of contention, disorder, and general dissatisfaction.”

The committee circulated 600 copies of the resolutions throughout Massachusetts. More than half of the colony’s 260 towns formed their own committees of correspondence and issued their own inflammatory proclamations. As other states adopted the system, news of fresh outrages and strategies for response were exchanged up and down the Atlantic Coast, and thirteen disjointed colonies moved much closer toward unity and self-sufficiency.

On November 13, in Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Japanese immigrants were not eligible to become American citizens. The plaintiff, Takao Ozawa, was a native Japanese who had moved to Hawaii in the mid-1890s from California. In 1914 he had applied for citizenship and been turned down. In his lawsuit Ozawa pointed out that he was well educated and spoke excellent English; that his children (who, being American-born, were automatically citizens) attended American public schools; and that he had refrained from teaching them the Japanese language, culture, or religion. No matter, said the court. Since Ozawa was not white, he could not be naturalized.

The decision took pains to disavow “any suggestion of individual unworthiness or racial inferiority.” It relied instead on the long history of American immigration law, which since 1790 had limited naturalization to whites only (with those of African descent admitted starting in 1870). Although the 1906 law under which Ozawa had applied did not specifically mention this restriction, Congress had shown no intention to repeal it, so it was assumed to remain in force.

There remained the task of construing what was meant by white. “Manifestly the test afforded by the mere color of the skin of each individual is impracticable,” the court reasoned, “as that differs greatly among persons of the same race, even among Anglo-Saxons, ranging by imperceptible gradations from the fair blond to the swarthy brunette, the latter being darker than many of the lighter-hued persons of the brown or yellow races.” Therefore the distinction was racial, and the plaintiff’s Asian background disqualified him. Ozawa’s argument that white, as understood in the 1790s, excluded only blacks and American Indians was rejected, as was his assertion that the Ainu people of Japan, from whom he claimed descent, showed Caucasian characteristics.

The decision was hailed in the Western states, especially in California, long a center of agitation against the “yellow peril.” Earlier decades had seen much opposition to the Chinese, culminating in an 1882 federal law that barred them from entering the country. Japanese immigration was negligible then, but by the early 1900s it had increased to about seventeen thousand a year, and the nativists accordingly revived their old scare tactics. As had happened with the Chinese, the Japanese immigrants’ industriousness was prized when they worked as laborers but became a threat when they set up farms and businesses of their own. A 1907 “gentlemen’s agreement” between America and Japan had greatly reduced immigration, but some states went even further. California and Washington, for example, banned those ineligible for citizenship from owning land.

Most West Coast newspapers expressed satisfaction with the Ozawa decision, though the Sacramento Bee called for a constitutional amendment “which would confine citizenship by right of birth in this country to those whose parents were themselves eligible to citizenship.” The next year, following its reasoning in Ozawa, the Supreme Court declared a Hindu applicant ineligible for citizenship. In the next few years Arabians, Burmese, Filipinos, and Koreans were also excluded. The racial test was applied to a series of increasingly tough calls until, with Solomonic wisdom, the courts determined that Armenians and Syrians were white but Afghans were not. (Those of mixed birth generally could not be naturalized if one parent was on the ineligible list.) Not until 1952 did Congress remove all racial restrictions on citizenship, and not until 1965 were quotas based on national origin removed from the immigration laws.

This issue’s “The Time Machine,” plus more anniversaries not included here, is available on the World Wide Web at www.forbes.com/ah/timemachine.