Exotic Orientals and Chinese Immigrants

From the book, "An American Legacy: Racism, Nativism, and White Supremacy," by David R. Morse

WHEN CHINESE workers began arriving in large numbers to work the gold mines of California in the middle of the 19th century, contact with Asians on American shores had been only sporadic, limited to encounters with the occasional merchants who wound their way to North America or those Chinese or Filipinos that escaped the Asian slave trade in Latin America after having been brought to the Americas on Spanish galleons that frequented the port of Acapulco. However, perceptions of Asia have a long history in Western Civilization, dating at least as far back as Ancient Greece. As the centuries rolled on, these attitudes had a palpable impact on how subsequent generations viewed Asians.

The Exotic Oriental

Perhaps the most influential book about Asia was?The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which made a powerful impact on Europeans’ views of Asia from about 1366, when the book was first published, into the eighteenth century. “Mandeville” was a pseudonym for the author or group of authors who claimed to have traveled from England as far as Cathay. The book, which made a great impression on Christopher Columbus, constructed Asia as a fanciful place, describing one-eyed and headless beasts, giants, pygmies, and cannibals, not to mention bounties of gold, silver, and other precious gems.1?About the island of “Calonak” near Java, Mandeville wrote:

The king of that country hath as many wives as he will. For he maketh search all the country to get him the fairest maidens that may be found, and maketh them to be brought before him. And he taketh one one night, and another another night, and so forth continually suing; so that he hath a thousand wives or more.

And he lieth never but one night with one of them, and another night with another; but if that one happen to be more lusty to his pleasance than another. And therefore the king getteth full many children, some-time an hundred, some-time a two-hundred, and some-time more. And he hath also into a 14,000 elephants or more that he maketh for to be brought up amongst his villains by all his towns.

Describing the great emperor Chan of Cathay, Mandeville writes:

[He] hath his table alone by himself, that is of gold and of precious stones, or of crystal bordered with gold, and full of precious stones or of amethysts, or of lignum aloes that cometh out of paradise, or of ivory bound or bordered with gold. And every one of his wives hath also her table by herself. And his eldest son and the other lords also, and the ladies, and all that sit with the emperor have tables alone by themselves, full rich. And there is no table but that it is worth an huge treasure of goods.2

It was out of these tales, that the vision of the Orient came to be spun, an image soaked in opulence, exoticism, and mystery, in dramatic opposition to the rational and organized West. In his classic book?Orientalism, Edward Said meticulously traces the development of Western conceptions of the East, encapsulated in fabricated journeys, fables, and stereotypes, to form a “polemical confrontation”:

Consider how the Orient … became known in the West, as its great complementary opposite since antiquity. There were the Bible and the rise of Christianity; there were travelers like Marco Polo who chartered the trade routes and patterned a regulated system of commercial exchange … there were fabulists; there were the redoubtable conquering Eastern movements, principally Islam, of course; there were the militant pilgrims, chiefly the Crusaders … These are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West.3

For Said, the construction of the Orient in Western minds was an exercise in the self-affirmation of European identity, one deeply rooted in the power politics of imperialism and domination. He writes: “The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached … The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness.”4

In the early years, Americans, as former colonial subjects had a much different relationship with Asia than did Europe, although they inherited the outlook that Asia was an exotic and otherworldly place. In the dawning years of the new republic, England was the “Other” against which Americans measured themselves, their culture, and their political identity, according to historian Shelley Sang-Hee Lee. China, in particular was “an imagined place of fabulous luxuries, an advanced civilization that the founding fathers and mothers sought to emulate, which held a prominent place for revolutionaries.” Americans, like Europeans, were fascinated with Chinese luxury goods. It was Chinese tea that was dumped into the harbor during the Boston Tea Party, a protest against England’s excessive tax on tea imported into the colonies, and sipping tea and displaying fine Chinese porcelain was a means for elites to demonstrate their status.5

Additionally, Chinese culture played an influential role in the thinking of the founding fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Franklin wrote, “Could we be so fortunate so as to introduce the industry of the Chinese, their arts of living and improvement in husbandry … America might become in time as populous as China.” For many early Americans, China also represented a potential important trade partner. In 1783, John Ledyard, who voyaged with Captain James Cook to Asia, published the first book in the United States dealing with the Pacific, and he gave detailed descriptions of goods made by Chinese artisans and noted what price could be had in China for North American furs.6

The diaries, journals, and letters of American traders who arrived in China, beginning in 1785, betray an ethnocentric fascination with the Chinese, laden with a mocking contempt. According to one account, “The first impulse of an American, when he sees for the first time a Chinese, is to laugh at him. His dress, if judged by our standards, is ridiculous, and in a Mandarin, a stately gravity sets it off for a double derision. His trousers are a couple of meal bags … his shoes are huge machines, turned up at the toe, his cap is fantastic and his head is shaven except on the crown, when there hangs down a tuft of hair as long as a spaniel’s tale.”7

Common themes were the Chinese alleged taste for dogs, cats, and rats, their theater music, which one trader likened to “ten Jackasses braying, five brazier’s pounding on the copper boiler of a steamboat, thirty bag-pipers and a sexton pulling a cracked bell.” The focus on “strange and curious objects” was complemented by a featuring of gambling, prostitution, and drugs, which demonstrated the “moral debasement” of the people, including polygamy and infanticide.8

Beginning in the 1840s and 1850s, Chinese laborers, mostly from the Guangdong province, sojourned to Hawaii and the United States, in hopes of striking it rich and one day returning home, though many were also seeking sanctuary from conflicts at home, including the British Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860, peasant rebellions, and the clan wars between 1855 and 1877 in Guangdong between the?Punti?and?Hakkas, in which close to a million died and thousands of villages were destroyed. The Chinese gave names to their destinations –?Tan Heung Shan?(“Fragrant Sandalwood Hill”) for the kingdom of Hawaii and?Gam Saan?(“Gold Mountain”) for California.

Nearly all the early migrants were men; the majority were married and left their wives in China. They were generally illiterate or with little schooling, and when gold was discovered at John Sutter’s Mill in 1848, they went with high hopes of mining gold or seeking other opportunities of employment. One of the labor brokers who frequented Chinese port cities declared, “Americans are very rich people. They want the Chinaman to come and make him very welcome. They will have great pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description.… It is a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers.… Money is in great plenty and to spare in America.”9

The first Chinese to migrate to Hawaii were skilled at sugar making, including a “sugar master,” who arrived in 1802 on a ship engaged in the sandalwood trade. By the 1830s, several sugar companies run by Chinese entrepreneurs were operating on the islands of Maui and Hawaii. However, they were soon supplanted by?haoles?(Caucasians) who, observing their success, began to establish larger, more capital-intensive plantations. At first, sugar plantation managers relied on Hawaiian labor; however, many Hawaiians had subsistence plots of their own, and opted against the harsh working conditions of the plantations. Importantly, Hawaii’s indigenous population was in sharp decline – by 1860, it was about a fifth of what it had been when Captain Cook first landed on the island – and many succumbed to the diseases brought by Americans and Europeans.

In 1850, producers organized the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society and commissioned a British ship captain to recruit laborers from China. He returned with 200 laborers in 1851. By 1864, sugar demand had skyrocketed in the United States, and the Hawaiian government organized a board of immigration to recruit contracted Chinese in Hong Kong; between 1876 and 1899, an average of a couple thousand a year, mostly men, entered Hawaii..10?However, because of the unforgiving work and abusive?luna?(overseers), most of these Chinese plantation workers did not sign on for a second term after their contracts expired. They became peddlers and merchants or rice cultivators.11

Chinese in California

Far more Chinese landed in California than anywhere else in the United States. California was taken from Mexico during the war in 1848, the same year that gold was discovered, and a year later, at California’s first constitutional convention, which began the process of California becoming a state, delegates made it clear that they wanted no competition from slave labor in the mining districts, for “the labor of the White Man brought into competition with the Negro is always degraded.” By the end of the first week, the California delegates unanimously resolved the issue: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this state.” Although Chinese men who came to the United States were not enslaved, Chinese immigrants were quickly labeled “coolies,” a designation that indicated they were in the country against their will.12

The coolie trade refers specifically to Chinese and East Indians bound under contract to provide service for a specified period of time, usually between five to eight years. It was “a forced international labor migration of immense proportions,” notes historian Evelyn Hu-Dehart, totaling well over half a million people between 1842 and 1870.13?Between 1838 and 1917, more than 419,000 South Asians went to British West Indian plantations in British Guiana, Trinidad, and Jamaica as coolies; an estimated 140,000 Chinese men were taken to Cuba from 1847 to 1874, and 90,000 more arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874. By the end of the 19th century, Asian indentured laborers were settled in Cuba, Peru, British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Panama, Mexico, Brazil, and Costa Rica.14

Writes Gary Okihiro, a scholar of Asian American studies:

Chinese and Asian Indian “coolies” were sold and indentured to European and American ship captains in a barter called by the Chinese “the buying and selling of pigs.” The Chinese coolies, or “pigs,” were restrained in “pigpens” … Once on board the ship, they were placed below deck in the hold, where they were usually confined for the duration of the transpacific passage.

Overcrowding and a short supply of food and water led to revolts, suicides, and murders … As many as a third of the coolies died during the journey across the Pacific on board ships bound for the Americas. Coolies were sold in the open market, following advertisements that appeared in the local newspapers. Prospective buyers inspected the human merchandise, lined up on a platform, before the bargaining began, and the Asians were “virtually sold to the planters.”15

According to historian Ronald Takaki, the Chinese migrants to the United States and Hawaii were not coolies per se. Some paid their own way. However, most of them borrowed the necessary funding under the credit-ticket system, whereby a broker would loan the money for the voyage, which would be paid back with exorbitant interest.16?However, because Chinese arrived in the United States in the middle of the slavery controversy and due to the fact that American ships often carried Chinese coolies to South America and the Caribbean, the association between Chinese immigrants and slavery took hold.

Abolitionists were concerned that Chinese immigration amounted to a kind of “quasi-slavery.” Congressman Robert McLane of Maryland, who had been commissioner to China between 1853 and 1855, testified that Chinese bound for California were held in jails prior to their departures. C.E. De Long, the former minister to Japan, declared “These coolies are more absolute slaves than ever the negroes of the South were.”17

According to historian Elliott Young, although there were differences between the contract labor systems in Cuba, Peru, and the British West Indies and the credit-ticket system employed in the United States, “these were distinctions of degree and not kind.” Both bound Chinese labor to multiyear contracts, and though the practice was banned by the 1862 Anti-Coolie Bill and the 1865 Alien Contract Labor Law, the practice continued well into the twentieth century. The primary difference was that while in Cuba and Peru, the coolie trade was regulated and overseen by the government, the credit-ticket system was “largely invisible to state authorities.” As a result, the U.S. government could “wash its hands” of the matter and “maintain the illusion that Chinese migrants were all voluntary free laborers.” Young writes:

The distinction between a coolie and a free laborer was ideological. Coolie was not a legal term but rather a vague notion of cheap and easily exploitable labor that was almost inextricably linked to Asians … In the popular imagination, all Chinese in California were seen as “coolies,” whether or not they were contract laborers.18

The United States did play an active role in the recruiting and transportation of Chinese laborers. In 1848, an American policymaker, Aaron H. Palmer, submitted a plan to Congress recommending the development of steam transportation in the Pacific whereby Chinese laborers could be imported to build the transcontinental railroad and cultivate land in California. “No people in all the East are so well adapted for clearing wild lands and raising every species of agricultural product … as the Chinese,” he declared.19

Yet nothing was more alluring than gold. Despite the arrival in 1849 of about 100,000 Whites in California, the boom created a remarkable labor shortage, and according to Roger Daniels, mining paid the highest wages in the world.20?By the early 1850s, many local newspapers claimed the Chinese had overrun California. In July 1852, the?Daily Alta California?wrote that “every gulch and ravine” is now filled with Chinese miners, and “an American emigrant can hardly find room to pitch his tent.” One miner complained to his parents: “This country is fast getting filled up with Chinamen. They are coming by thousands all the time. The miners in a great many places will not let them work. The miners hear [sic] drove off about 200 Chinamen about two weeks ago but they have com [sic] back about as thick as ever.” That year, the state reenacted The Foreign Miners’ Tax which forced foreign miners to pay exorbitant amounts for the right to mine. During these years, in which miner’s removed a billion dollars’ worth of untaxed gold, Chinese miners paid $58 million to the state, amounting to one-fourth to one-half of California’s revenue. Writes Jean Pfaelzer, a professor of American Studies, by 1852, “In the eyes of the American legal system, the Chinese were becoming Black.”21

The worst, however, was yet to come. In the spring of 1853, Governor John Bigler predicted that the number of Chinese living in California would swell to millions and called for “novel if not extraordinary legislation” to halt Asian immigration. City codes and town ordinances emerged that outlawed intermarriage and denied non-Whites the vote, the right to sit on a jury, and access to homesteads. In 1855, the California state legislature assessed a fifty-dollar fee on immigrants ineligible to become citizens of California – by U.S. law, only Whites could be naturalized. The state forced Chinese immigrants to pay medical indemnity bonds and required shipmasters to post five hundred dollars for each Chinese passenger to “relieve the government of the expenses of sick immigrants.” In 1858, the legislature announced that it had the constitutional right “to exclude any class of foreigners she may deem obnoxious to her interest, either socially or politically.” In 1862, it levied a “police tax” of $2.50 per month on all Chinese over the age of eighteen who did not mine or produce rice, sugar, tea, or coffee, all items that were not produced in California at the time. The logs of collectors are replete with tales of extortion, harassment, torture, and murder. Said one “I was sorry to have to stab the poor fellow; but the law makes it necessary to collect the tax; and that’s where I get my profit.” Said another: “He was running away, and I shot to stop him.”22

The Civil War and, with it, the building of a transcontinental railroad, opened a new chapter in the lives of Chinese immigrants, one of backbreaking work under treacherous conditions. In 1862, the Central Pacific Railroad Corporation was awarded the contract to lay tracks eastward from Sacramento, and the Union Pacific obtained the contract westward from Omaha. It was the Central Pacific Railroad, which had to traverse several mountain ranges, that recruited Chinese workers away from the mines, and they became the backbone of the company’s construction crew for both skilled and unskilled tasks.

The railroad printed handbills, sent recruiters to China, particularly Guangdong province, and negotiated lower rates with the steamship companies for the ocean voyage. Additionally, in 1868, China and the United States signed the Burlingame Treat, whereby China, in exchange for “most favored nation” status, agreed to recognize the “inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance and also the mutual advantage of free migration and emigration of their citizens … for purposes of … trade or as permanent residents.…”23?Historian Sucheng Chang describes the ghastly working conditions on the railroad:

Thousands of Chinese worked underground in snow tunnels around the clock through the winter of 1866. It took all summer and fall to grade the route thus created, but before tracks could be laid, winter descended again with even heavier snowfalls. As one of the Central Pacific’s engineers admitted years later, “a good many men” (i.e., Chinese) were lost during the terrible winter of 1867. The bodies of those buried by avalanches could not even be dug out until the following spring. Once the tracks descended the eastern slopes of the Sierras, the Chinese crews sped across the hot, dry plateaus of Nevada and Utah until the two ends of the railroad joined at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869.24

When railroad construction jobs dried up, after 1869, thousands of Chinese laborers drifted into San Francisco, where they helped to expand the city’s emerging industries in shoes, textiles, and cigars, marking the transition of an increasing number to urban dwellers. By the 1870s, the city’s Chinatown was home to almost a quarter of all Chinese in California; they comprised nearly half of the men working in the city’s factories, and there were an estimated 5,000 Chinese entrepreneurs. At the pinnacle of power were six powerful district associations, known as the Chinese Six Companies, with the purported mission of brokering passage, resolving disputes, protecting members, and advocating on behalf of the entire community.25

However, the Six Companies also had a dark side, often torturing Chinese immigrants who defied them. According to one officer’s account, he inflicted “severe corporal punishment upon many of his more humble countrymen…cutting off their ears, flogging them or keeping them chained.” Additionally, the Six Companies brokered a deal with the shipping companies, which enabled them to issue exit permits that verified that a miner had paid his debts before he could sail back to China, giving them an absolute grip over any Chinese hoping to return.26

By the 1870s, Chinese began to venture beyond San Francisco, within California and beyond, and they were frequently recruited as cheap sources of labor. In the Sacramento–San Joaquin River deltas, they were hired to construct levees, dikes, and ditches; they also constructed roads, cleared land, planted, pruned, and harvested grapes for the Napa and Sonoma Valleys’ wine industry. By the turn of the century, 95 percent of the Chinese population in the Sacramento and San Joaquin delta region worked as farmhands and fruit packers, as well as in other agriculture-related jobs, though they were paid considerably less than Whites doing the same work. Chinese were recruited to work in shoe factories in North Adams, Massachusetts and on plantations in the South. By 1880, there were Chinese communities in New Orleans and in Mississippi, where they occupied an “in-between” space between Blacks and Whites. There were emerging Chinatowns in Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as towns, like Butte, Montana. In New York, the number of Chinese was over 2,000, with most settling in the Five Points neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and many Chinese immigrants married Irish immigrant women.27

As the number of Chinese grew, not surprisingly, there was a backlash, with California being the focal point, but by no means was it the only locus of anti-Chinese sentiment. By 1870, there were a number of mass demonstrations in San Francisco calling for an end to Chinese immigration, the halting of federal subsidies to the steamship companies that profited from the influx of Chinese, and the repeal of the Burlingame Treaty. One of the slogans was: “We want no slaves or aristocrats. The coolie labor system leaves us no alternative – starvation or disgrace. Mark the man who would crush us to the level of the Mongolian slave.”28?Laws were passed, such as The Cubic Air Ordinance, which called for tenements to have at least 500 cubic feet of air for each inhabitant; it was enforced only in Chinatown, with the intent, as stated by the Board of Supervisors, to “drive [the Chinese] to other states.…”29?In 1870, during proceedings to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress debated whether Asians should be included in the naturalization statute which made “persons of African descent,” in addition to “White persons,” eligible for citizenship. Despite arguments by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner to make naturalization color blind, he was defeated, and Asians, as a group, would be ineligible for citizenship until 1952.30

Responding to what was becoming a growing clamor for immigration restrictions against the Chinese, in 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant declared:

I call the attention of Congress to a generally conceded fact – that the great proportion of the Chinese immigrants who come to our shores do not come voluntarily, to make their homes with us and their labor productive of general prosperity, but come under contracts with headmen, who own them almost absolutely. In a worse form does this apply to Chinese women. Hardly a perceptible percentage of them perform any honorable labor, but they are brought for shameful purposes, to the disgrace of the communities where settled and to the great demoralization of the youth of those localities. If this evil practice can be legislated against, it will be my pleasure as well as duty to enforce any regulation to secure so desirable an end.31

Chinese immigration at that time was a political hot potato, and many, especially those who were anti-union – the labor syndicates had coalesced on an anti-coolie platform –, were pro-immigration. In 1867, California Republicans passed a resolution “in favor of voluntary immigration … from whatever nationality it may come.” However, as Daniels notes, “This was a hedge, as Republican politicians could claim the Chinese were not ‘voluntary’ immigrants.” But their opponents, and probably many voters, interpreted it as simply “pro-Chinese.”32

The issue of prostitution by Chinese women was a cornerstone of the arguments employed by those against Chinese immigration during the 1870s and 1880s, as was that of opium use and gambling. In 1876, a congressional committee conducted an intensive investigation of Chinese immigration in San Francisco, and prostitutes were a central concern. According to the testimony of a San Francisco policeman: “As far as the Chinese women are concerned in San Francisco, with very few exceptions, I look upon them as prostitutes. The exceptions are very rare where they are not prostitutes … I look upon them as slaves, sold for such and such, an amount of money to be worked out at prostitution.” According to another account, out of 2,000 Chinese women in San Francisco, “there are not a half-dozen who possess any virtue.” The 1880 U.S. Census, which recognized prostitution as an occupation, reported that there were 101 Chinese brothels that year. However, as historian Yong Chen notes, the census likely overstated the number of prostitutes, as census takers “had a very strong inclination to register females, including even very young girls, as prostitutes.” In reality, many Chinese women worked as shoe binders, servants, tailors, launderers and gardeners.33

References to Chinese opium use were ubiquitous in the 1870s and 1880s, though it was seen as being less threatening than prostitution, and according to the medical consensus at the time, it was considered less harmful to society than alcohol. In 1881, one doctor stated that “the effect of opium is peculiarly soothing and tranquilizing..…The effects of liquor or wine, as compared with those of opium, are coarse and brutalizing.” Said a missionary at the end of the century: “The Chinaman may yell over his drinking game, and curse and swear at the gaming table, [but] he quiets down in the opium den.” According to historian Yong Chen, even those who were anti-Chinese did not believe that opium consumption made them a social threat. A doctor declared in 1876: “It is rather better for us that they should smoke opium, for if they drink liquor to some excess, I do not know what would become of us.… When they smoke opium they are inoffensive, so far as we are concerned, because when they get under its influence they drop off and go to sleep.”34

Chinese opium dens, or “hop joints,” were “put on display” for White tourists, presented as an indicator of Chinese “inferiority and degradation.” In 1876, Dr. John L. Mears commented: “The higher civilizations prefer liquor-alcohol.” Writing of an opium den in the 1870s, another observed, “The opium smokers [are] each clinging to his pipe endeavoring to get one more full whiff, with the tenacity of a drowning man hanging to a floating wreck.” Still, for those opposed to Chinese immigration, the use of opium provided a strong argument that they were “physically and mentally self-destructive,” evidence of their “racial degeneration.”35

Writes historian K. Scott Wong:

In the eyes of the press and the critics of the Chinese, “Chinatown” was a site of cultural pollution. In this sense, “Chinatown” was a “borderland” where cultures collided and were often transformed, though usually for the worse … The theme of White women being lured into laundries or “opium dens” appears frequently in anti-Chinese literature. In each of the stories concerning raids on opium dens, soon after the raid, it was reported that White women or girls, in various stages of undress, were found at each site.36

By 1876, anti-Chinese fervor had grown to a fever pitch throughout the country, and according to Daniels, “principled political opposition to the anti-Chinese movement” was “all but nonexistent.” In 1878, following a congressional investigation of the Chinese “problem,” Congress sent President Rutherford B. Hayes the so-called Fifteen Passenger Bill, which stipulated that only fifteen Chinese per ship could enter the United States and called for the abrogation of certain parts of the Burlingame Treaty pertaining to immigration. In the main address in support of the bill, Representative Horace F. Page of California excoriated the Chinese as “filthy … aliens [who] are unfitted by education, habits, religious superstition, and by their inborn prejudices to assume any of the duties of American citizenship;” he continued, saying Chinese “inspire a profound irritation and discontent among all citizens of all classes” and “retard desirable immigration from Europe.”37

President Hayes vetoed the anti-Chinese bill, and his veto stood, but by this time, the exclusion of Chinese immigrants was just a matter of time. In 1880, a new treaty was signed with China, which gave the United States the unilateral right to “regulate, limit or suspend” the arrival of Chinese laborers. On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the notorious “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which suspended Chinese immigration for a period of 10 years. It was renewed in 1892, under the Geary Act, which extended Chinese exclusion for another ten years and imposed other restrictions, including requiring all Chinese in the United States to obtain a certificate of residence, for which each was required to demonstrate that his stay in the country was legal.38

Violence committed against Chinese became a fact of life in the West, and in the estimation of Daniels, “with the exception of American Indians, no group there suffered as much from violence as did the Chinese.”39?Political scientist Sucheng Chang writes that violence against Chinese and other Asian immigrants can be divided into three types: “the maiming and wanton murder of individuals, spontaneous attacks against and the destruction (usually by fire) of Chinatowns, and organized efforts to drive Asians out of certain towns and cities.”40

In Los Angeles, in 1871, 21 Chinese were murdered by White mobs, representing a sizeable percentage of the population. It is estimated that over 100 Chinese were killed in Idaho in 1866 and 1867, and there were major anti-Chinese riots in Denver, in 1880; in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885; and in Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland in 1885 and 1886. In the Snake River Massacre of 1887, 31 Chinese were mutilated and murdered by a White gang in Hells Canyon Gorge in Oregon. Daniels, writing of the escalation of violence in the 1880s, explains:

The national climate of opinion, pervaded by racism and a burgeoning feeling of ethnic superiority … certainly contributed not just to the violence but also to the virtual unanimity with which the White majority put its seal of approval on anti-Chinese ends if not means … Another factor was probably psychological. The national anti-Chinese campaign was not just a crusade for the halting of immigration. In terms of rhetoric, at least, it was a campaign to get rid of Chinese.41

Arguing in 1901 in favor of Chinese exclusion, California Senator James D. Phelan, who campaigned on a slogan of “Keep California White,” wrote:

The Chinese, by putting a vastly inferior civilization in competition with our own, tend to destroy the population on whom the perpetuity of free government depends. Without homes and families; patronizing neither school, library, church nor theatre; lawbreakers, addicted to vicious habits; indifferent to sanitary regulations and breeding disease; taking no holidays, respecting no traditional anniversaries, but laboring incessantly, and subsisting on practically nothing for food and clothes, a condition to which they have been inured for centuries, they enter the lists against men who have been brought up by our civilization to family life and civic duty. Our civilization having been itself rescued from barbarism by the patriots, martyrs and benefactors of mankind, the question now is: Shall it be imperiled? Is not Chinese immigration a harm?42

?

NOTES

1.??????Okihiro, Gary.?Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2014), 13.

2.??????Mandeville, Sir John.?The Travels of Sir John Mandeville: The Fantastic 14th-Century Account of a Journey to the East. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), 127.

3.??????Said, Edward W.?Orientalism. (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979), 142.

4.??????Ibid., 103.

5.??????Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee.?A New History of Asian America. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 12.

6.??????Ibid.

7.??????Miller, Stuart Creighton.?The Unwelcome Immigrant, The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 29.

8.??????Ibid., 35.

9.??????Takaki, Ronald.?Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. (New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 1998), 31.

10.???Leong, Yau Sing. ed. by Arlene Lum. “From Kwangtung to the Plantations, Farms, Stores and Beyond,” in?Sailing for the Sun: The Chinese in Hawaii, 1789-1989. (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 75.

11.???Chang Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. (New York, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 27.

12.???Pfaelzer, Jean.?Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans.?(New York, NY: Random House, 2008), 38.

13.???Hu-Dehart, Evelyn. “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor of Neoslavery,”?Contributions in Black Studies, 1994. Vol. 12, No. 5, 38.

14.???Lee, Erika.?The Making of Asian America: A History. (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 28.

15.???Okihiro, 38.

16.???Ibid., 35.

17.???Miller, 152.

18.???Young, Elliot.?Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 46.

19.???Takaki, Ronald.?Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. (New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 1998), 22.

20.???Daniels, Roger.?Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850. (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1988), 12.

21.???Pfaelzer, 53.

22.???Ibid., 54.

23.???Chang, Iris.?The Chinese in America: A Narrative History, (New York, NY: Viking, 2003), 57.

24.???Chang (Sucheng), 31.

25.???Chang (Iris), 77.

26.???Pfaelzer, 39.

27.???Lee,?The Making of Asian America, 60.

28.???Daniels,?Asian America, 38.

29.???Ibid., 39.

30.???Ibid., 43.

31.???Grant, Ulysses S. Sixth Annual Message to the Senate and House of Representatives, December 7, 1874. https://genius.com/Ulysses-s-grant-presidential-speeches-1874-written-annotated.

32.???Daniels, 44.

33.???Chen, Yong.?Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community.?(Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 2000), 81.

34.???Ibid.

35.???Ibid., 88.

36.???Wong, K. Scott. ed. by Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Min Song. “The Eagle Seeks a Helpless Quarry: Chinatown, The Police, and The Press, The 1903 Boston Chinatown Raid Revisited,” in?Asian American Studies: A Reader. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 73.

37.???Gyory, Andrew.?Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Caroline Press, 1998, 138.

38.???Daniels, 55.

39.???Ibid., 58.

40.???Chang (Sucheng),?Asian Americans: An Interpretive History, 48,

41.???Ibid., 65.

42.???Phelan, James D. “Why the Chinese Should Be Excluded,”?The North American Review. Vol. 173, No. 540, Nov., 1901, 674.