The Yellow Menace (1916), produced by William Steiner and directed by Aubrey N. Kennedy, was a sixteen-part “preparedness” serial explicitly designed to make Americans feel the urgency of military readiness. Based on a story by British novelist Louis Tracy, with a scenario written by Kennedy, it focused on Ali Singh, “The Higher One” (played by veteran stage actor Edwin Stevens), a fanatical Mongolian scientist and brutal race zealot who is intent on destroying the United States, and on the efforts of an international banker who supports a bill to exclude all non-whites from American shores. With the help of the Secret Service, the Mongolian is ultimately defeated and killed and the U.S. is saved from his domination.

That threat was closely linked to the fear of miscegenation or race pollution promoted by white supremacists. Such a fear—that whether by force or by intermarriage, the “Orientals” would corrupt the race from within—was largely a racialist fantasy. Nevertheless, the stereotype of the rapacious Asian “Other” who wanted only to conquer and to subjugate whites took root in the fevered popular imagination.

An unfortunate form of xenophobia and racism, the distrust of Asians had increased after the rise of Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century. It was reinforced by racist pogroms in California and elsewhere, and strengthened by legislation such as the Immigration Act of 1917 that created an “Asian Barred Zone” and instigated other nativist efforts. The anti-Asian sentiment was further inflamed by such prominent and influential people as pro-German William Randolph Hearst, who was opposed to involvement in the war in Europe (and to President Woodrow Wilson, whom he regularly excoriated in his newspapers and publications). Embracing the conspiracy theory that Japan was interested in subjugating America to further its domination of the Pacific by secretly working with revolution-plagued Mexico to invade the United States from the south, Hearst regularly took slaps at the Japanese in his newspapers and journals and peppered the serial films (such as Patria [1917]) that he underwrote with his inherently racist beliefs.
 
The Yellow Menace was hardly the first picture to demonize Asians or depict them as threats to American sovereignty and the American way of life. Many other films of that period had emphasized the fear of Asians and minorities in order to stoke hatred. Serials such as the Whartons’ The Exploits of Elaine and Beatrice Fairfax (produced with financial support from Hearst), for example, had featured sinister Asian characters desperate to expose American secrets and undermine national interests. Other serials released in the same year as The Yellow Menace had a similar theme. For example, in The Secret of the Submarine, a fifteen-episode thriller released by Mutual, Cleo Burke, together with Lt. Jarvis Hope, foils the efforts by agents of the Japanese and Russian governments to steal plans for a new submarine that can remain underwater indefinitely by means of an apparatus that operates like the gills of a fish and thereby establish military superiority.

The anti-Asian prejudice would continue to be fanned and exploited in films over the next two decades, especially with the Fu Manchu pictures; and the racial stereotypes would persist and be resurrected in numerous later films.