A Compromise to the Coast - the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

 Paper’s title: A Compromise to the Coast - the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

Central research question: Why was the anti-Chinese sentiment of the pacific coast able to overcome its opposition force in the country and prompted the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882?

 

Introduction

 

To the studiers of the history of Sino-American relationship, the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 has long been one of the most controversial policy of the United States.  Not only because of its discriminatory nature, or its significance in marking the outset of an ideological trend of anti-Asian immigration in the following century of America, but also for the fact that its occurrence was actually only about a decade later after the end of the Civil War, which to an extent did give outsiders an impression that the American had rather chose to “redirect” their racism than to truly break up with their past dishonorable practice, and made this case exceptionally ironic in history. And for the people who had been so used to the history of the oppression that the Chinese had suffered in the 19^th century of America, it might be hard for them to imagine that in the early 1850s, the first wave of Chinese were actually received pleasantly by the California people. As from an article of the Daily Alta California talking about the Chinese people on 27 April of 1852, it mentioned,

 

“They (the Chinese) furnish employment to our shipping in coming, to our steamers and carriages in the transportation of themselves and their freight ...They are contented with small piles, and generally go to places that have been abandoned by other miners because they did not yield enough to pay for working ...Let as many come as choose; we have room enough and to spare”.[1]

 

So, why was this harmonious picture in 1850s completely overturned in the later decades? And how prevalent the anti-Chinese sentiment actually were among the American society, after three decades of Chinese settlement in America? These are something what we are going to explore in this paper.

 

If anti-Chinese sentiment was something already established in American society, why did the Exclusion Act come so lately and exclusively in the early 1880s?

 

Past scholarships has often regarded the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 as a manifestation of domestic labor competition and racial conflict that had long beset the US society during the second half of the 19^th century. However, questions like why did the exclusion occur so lately, given that the first wave of Chinese miners actually arrived at the pacific coast since the late forties, and also why did the restrictive measure singly target the Chinese race but not the others continued to remain equivocal among researchers if not unanswered. Certainly, the exclusion later also extended its scope to include other Asians groups like the Japanese and the Korean in the subsequent century, but it is self-evident that the Chinese was the first racial group that was able to gain a nationwide media attention in US and also to “suffer” the first blade of its discrimination (if we are not counting the blacks), and the 1882 act was actually a symbolic legislation which indicated the outset of the US government to adopt an exclusionist policy towards immigrants with unassimilable characteristic or tendency. The change of the US government’s policy from an originally commercial-prioritized attitude which favored labor importation, to a later protectionist and self-isolationist manner which ultimately shut down the whole immigration gate from outsiders is also a worth pondering phenomenon in the diplomatic history of US, though this might be a bit out of the scope for this paper.

 

Back to the questions asked in the previous paragraph - what made the exclusion come so late, and also why was it set solely against the Chinese race in the 80s. The second question, though sounds sweeping in scale, is actually easier to explain by a contrast of timeline of the Asians’ arrival in North America as well as a quick look on the habitual appellation that the American had given to the Chinese since the 1850s. Leaving aside the Filipinos, the Chinese were in fact the first racial group to set foot on the pacific coast in significant number since the late forties. Both the Japanese and Koreans were late arrivers, given the Meiji Restoration was staged only in 1868, and before that Japan was under Sakoku. Therefore, even in the 1880s, the Chinese were still the largest Asiatic population in America which could definitely overshadow the other “yellows”. Then, for their appellation in the US society, we might notice that they were frequently called as the “Mongolian” throughout the fifties to the seventies, which suggests that the majority American at that time actually did not have a very clear understanding on the Asiatic races as well as their distinctions, or to say, they simply did not care much about these “nuances”. One of the most infamous example would be the verdict of The People of the State of California v. George W. Hall in 1854, in which the Chinese were not only deprived of the right to testify in court against white persons, but were also declared as “the same type of the human species” as “the American Indians and the Mongolian”. As it went, “the name of Indian, from the time of Columbus to the present day, has been used to designate, not alone the North American Indian, but the whole of the Mongolian race, and that the name... was afterwards continued as appropriate on account of the supposed common origin”.[2] The verdict made utterly no attempts to clarify the character as well as the uniqueness of the Chinese people within the whole Asiatic race. Instead, it blurred them deliberately. From the above we could see that even for a state’s Supreme Court of that time could treat the definition of a race with such rashness and irresponsibleness. So for the lower class people in America, it was not unlikely for them to use the term “Chinese” just as a convenient label for those “unpleasant Asiatic immigrants” in their eyes who they wanted to vent their anger on. After all, the Chinese at that time were unmistakably the largest portion of the Asiatic population in the country. So, maybe to borrow words from the verdict, during that era every racial terms should be understood in its “generic” sense, no matter how ironic it seems in nowadays’ perspective.

 

The specific targeting of the Chinese in the 1882 Act could be explained by the fact that the Chinese were simply the most “blamable” villain for the country at that time, given the precondition of both the anti-Chinese concept and the exclusionist discourse had already been well established for more than a decade. However, for the first question, which is why did the anti-Chinese sentiment have to be accumulated for more than thirty years before an actual nationwide legislation finally came to meet the expectation of its people, would require a more detailed examination on the social atmosphere of that time, especially of the late seventies. We have already learned from past researchers’ works that the fifties was an exploitation period for the newly-born California state after the Mexican - American War. Scholars like Kanazawa, has noted the context of the state’s financial predicament in its early years and also the correlations between the its finance and the change of its policies toward the Chinese. His paper indicates that although the Chinese had been perceived as competitors by native miners since the very start of the gold rush era, there was still a significant pro-Chinese voice in the state which effectively hindered the practical anti-Chinese legislation throughout the early and mid fifties. And the main reason is that the Chinese had already become an indispensable tax source to the state since the latter’s establishment, given that the foreign miners’ tax (a discriminatory tax for the Chinese miners since 1850) had long accounted for at least ten percent of the total state revenues throughout the fifties and early sixties, and the state had only managed to extricate itself from financial deficit since 1857.[3] This explains very well why was the exclusion not happening in the fifties. And for the sixties, it was occupied firstly by the Civil War (1861-65), then followed by a series of anti-racist legislations like the the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment and the 1870 Civil Rights Act, and also the signing of the Burlingame Treaty in 1868, which would all provide a certain extent of protections to Chinese immigrants in the country. Therefore, we could see that although throughout the fifties and sixties the anti-Chinese sentiment was still being visible and undiminished in the US society, it was clear that the sentiment was far from being as overwhelming and destructive as it did in the subsequent decade.

 

Scholars have often attributed the success of the anti-Chinese movement in the seventies to the effort of the “organized labor”, so a subtext here would likely be that the failure of the previous exclusionists’ attempts were mainly because of their lack of organization and solidarity.[4] The absence of a nationwide economic crisis (i.e. the Panic in 1873) was also a reason of why the workers did not radicalize in the early Reconstruction era. The 1870 Naturalization Act that revoked the citizenship of naturalized Chinese Americans could be seen as a sign of the country’s resurrected hostility towards the Chinese in the wake of a decade, and the Chinese massacre in Los Angeles of the following year also indicated that the anti-Chinese movement were now becoming more and more open and unbridled. The significance of the discharge of Chinese after the completion of First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 is unquestioned, as it immediately flooded the labor market with low-wage workers, and its impact was also felt even in the faraway northeastern states like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, given that the railroad had now granted the Chinese the accessibility to the east.[5] However, what I want to focus here instead of elaborating on the much-discussed anti-Chinese discourse and events, is rather the other side of the topic. We know that the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, but the transition from the original anti-Chinese agitations which were very much confined to the pacific coast in the seventies, to the gradual nationwide recognition of the Chinese problem and finally the victory of the exclusion campaign in the early eighties, was actually involved in so many intricate dynamics and struggles between various stakeholders of the country, such as the state and the federal government, the legislature and the judiciary, the Democrats and the Republicans, the companies and the working class, the conservative press and the Workingmen’s Party, and let alone fortuitous circumstance and the general climate of political opportunism of that time as specifically mentioned by Elmer Sandmeyer.[6] Yet, at least one thing is clear from the aforementioned phenomenon, which is the delay of exclusion indicates that even in the late seventies the American society had not yet reached its consensus with regard to the Chinese question. And I would argue that despite the pervasiveness of anti-Chinese sentiment in west America, there was still a notable opposition force to the exclusion of Chinese in the country which had to a certain level offset the influence of anti-Chinese agitators and also help to keep the sentiment in check even until the end of the seventies. I will roughly divided them into three main types, which were the pro-Chinese voices, the anti-exclusionists, and the anti-Kearneyists, though most of the time these terms were actually compatible and interchangeable with one another.

 

Three reports after 1876 - indicators of public opinions toward Chinese question

 

Most scholars have pointed out that 1876 was a defining year to the anti-Chinese movement in the Pacific coast. Due to the significant growth of Chinese immigrants in the past three years and also the nullifications of almost all immigration restrictive legislations of California by the circuit court, the sentiment rapidly intensified. As Sandmeyer mentions, “it was generally understood that in order to secure the labor vote a candidate must declare against the Chinese”, while drawing evidences from the discussions of various parties’ platform.[7] Moreover, in that year we can see a clear emergence of the what so called “organized labor”, as in spring, a significant labor union called the Anti-Chinese Union was formed in San Francisco, birthed by the merging of numerous anti-Chinese clubs from the past few years. It was not purely a union consisted of ordinary workers, but instead it owned Senators, Congressmen and a number of prominent politicians of the state as its central members. With the purpose “to unite, centralize and direct the anti-Chinese strength of our Country”, it obliged its members must pledge to four things before joining the union: to the constitution of the club, not to employ Chinese, not to purchase goods from the employer of Chinese, and not to sustain the Chinese or the employer of Chinese.[8] From the above we can see the California labor force had greatly strengthened its power by setting a common goal for the union and also by explicitly identifying the obligations of their members. The participation of the state’s well-known politicians were also advantageous to their exposure in newspapers as well as to their control in public discourse and most importantly, to show the solidarity and unanimity of the state upon their anti-Chinese stance as an unshakable image to the entire nation.

 

It is crucial for us to understand how the Chinese problem was presented to the whole nation instead of just quoting and analyzing on some empty anti-Chinese lines of the radical newspapers in California. As we know, what was experiencing currently in a state did not necessary entail what had been exactly felt in the other parts of country, and given that the Chinese question was still more or less a local problem in the Pacific coast, it had in fact very limited influence in no matter national affairs or decisions. Just as the Governor of Nevada had once said, “the problem had been taken from the state and placed in the hands of a government three thousand miles away, that know as little of our wants and are as indifferent to their correction as was the Parliament under George III to the wants of the colonies a century ago”.[9] And therefore, it would be of particular importance when a Joint Investigating Committee of the US Senate and the House of Representatives was finally sent to San Francisco to investigate the Chinese question in Oct, 1876 after large petitions had been made to the capital in the same year. The committee would later prepare reports to Congress, and would deliver a sufficient number of its copies to all the leading newspapers in the country, as well as ten thousand of them for general distribution.[10] And after the investigation, one official report and two minor reports were successively produced in the following two years. The most important value of these reports is that they were all written in a national perspective, so unlike many other voices in California at that time which could only represent their sectional interest, these reports would have been seen as a much more authentic, comprehensive, and unbiased accounts of the situation in California in many people’s mind, and would have left an incomparable influence on the understanding as well as public opinions of the whole United States upon the Chinese question. And that is why it would be vital to scrutinize these reports first if we are trying to sort out the public opinions of the American to the Chinese immigrants in the late seventies. As for this source is more important than many others is not solely because of their coverage and representativeness, but also because of the fact that they did to an extent shape the direction of public discussion in the coming few years.

 

It must be acknowledged that the official report that released on 27 Feb 1877 was strongly anti-Chinese in tone. Written by Senator Aaron Sargent from California, the report recognized the impact of Chinese workers on the local labor wages as well as their unassimilatory tendency, and deemed the further influx of immigrants to be “a great future evil”.[11] Therefore, it recommended “the Executive should seek a modification of the existing treaty with China, confining it to strictly commercial purposes, and the Congress should legislate on the restriction of Asiatic immigrants to this country”.[12] However, it is worth noting that Sargent was not the chairman of the Committee. The seat belonged to Senator Oliver P. Morton, who was a Republican from Indiana with Chinese sympathy, and only because of his illness, the official report was eventually penned by the strongly anti-Chinese member Sargent. In fact, even from Sargent’s report we could see the traces of Morton’s influence, such as in the beginning of the report it admitted that “the resources of California and the Pacific coast have been more rapidly developed with the cheap and docile labor of Chinese than they would have been without this element”, and “the Pacific coast has been a great gainer (from the Chinese labor)”.[13] The report also mentioned quite a number of religious leaders were actually pro-Chinese, as they thought that “the presence of Chinese among us imposes a duty and gives an opportunity of christianizing them”.[14] Given that there were also enterprising men and employers who were supportive to the presence of Chinese, we could see that although restricting the Chinese immigration was undeniably the majority thought in California as reflected by the report, the idea was still clearly far from achieving unanimity in the state.

 

People have often trivialized the content and significance of the two minority reports which were also generated from the Joint Investigating Committee, one was by Representative Edwin Meade from New York in the same year, and the another was by Senator Morton in early 1878. However, it would be too “take for granted” to think that just reading the official report is already sufficient for assessing the public attitude to the Chinese immigrants, as we should not underestimate the influence of the other two on the nationwide public opinion, given that they were also able to get plentiful appearances in a number of renowned newspapers throughout the country. For example, Meade’s report was mentioned in The New York herald, The Silver state of Nevada, and the Chicago daily tribune of Illinois, and Morton’s one had even gained a much wider coverage, as newspapers like The Vancouver independent and National Republican of Washington, The New York herald, The Wheeling daily intelligencer of West Virginia, The Jackson standard of Ohio, Daily globe of Minnesota, and the Daily Los Angeles herald of California all gave lengthy reports to the content of his memoir.[15][16] Therefore, it is also necessary to look into the substance of these two reports, especially for the one which was written by Morton.

 

We will firstly look at Meade’s report. Although it was also anti-coolie in tone and shared many similar views with Sargent’s one, it specifically highlighted that the growing commerce of with China was something “needed weighing” before the Congress should enact any exclusion acts. It also suggested that the immigration of merchants, students and capitalists should be encouraged (a more positive term than tolerated), while the others should be removed. And quite remarkably, it is for the first time a report mentioned there was a need for the country to “understand the Chinese people more thoroughly”. He then drew on the example of “even the French government had set up a professorship of the Chinese language”, so there was no reason that the US should lag behind. He then added that “a liberal endowment (to the Chinese people) for a similar purpose (of knowing more about them) would be a great benefit in developing business and political relation with them”.[17] Meade’s suggestion was more of a consideration for political manipulation, but it also partly revealed the curiosity of many other American might have in common towards the “Chinese ways of things” at that time. More importantly, it was actually quite rare for an American statesman to openly confess his lack of understanding toward a race that had often been marked as inferior, and this also implied his inclination of treating the Chinese in a more equal and non-racist manner.

 

Then, we might now turn to Morton’s report. As mentioned before, he was the original chairman of the Investigating Committee and also a Chinese sympathizer, and if he had been healthy enough to stay on writing the official report, it was not unlikely that the final conclusion of the report toward the Chinese would go completely the other way round. Nonetheless, his unfinished report was made public in Jan 1878 after his death, and it was strongly pro-Chinese in tone. In fact, the publicization of his report was quite a bit of a groundbreaking news at the time, and it also brought unease to some of the California politicians given that Morton himself was a prestigious statesman during the sixties and seventies. Here I will summarize some of the main points in his report. Firstly, it gave the Chinese a good character for industry, honesty, and temperance. It argued that their intellectual capacity were actually much the same as the American race, and the current intellectual stagnation of China was simply the result of their institutions. Then, it emphasized the important contributions that the Chinese had made in the past two decades to the prosperity of California, as “they had laid the foundations of the state’s manufacturing interests, and without them, the production and harvesting of grapes and wheat would be impossible, and the railroads of California would not even have been built”. Along with that, it mentioned the problems that were likely to arise if the Chinese labor were driven out of the American market, such as the white men might now need to degrade themselves to do the low class of labor that were used to be done by the Chinese, and California might no longer be able to sustain its famous “wheat culture” in the coming years. Most importantly, it pointed out the field in California was actually so varied and extensive, and the presence of Chinese should not have possibly hurt the interest of the white laborers. In contrast to what was commonly believed in the society, it argued that there was a scarcity of labor on the Pacific coast, and the laboring men of California actually had ample employment, and were better paid, than in almost any other part of the country. As Morton wrote explicitly in his report, “their (the Chinese) difference in color, dress, manners, and religion have, in my judgement, more to do with this hostility than their alleged vices or any actual injury to the white people of California...”. Aside from this, he also questioned the feasibility for the US government to prohibit Chinese laborers from landing on the Pacific coast when he discussed the complications that were likely to arise with Great Britain given that the Chinese immigration was almost entirely coming from the British port Hong Kong.[18] As he reminded his audiences, “though subjects of the Chinese Empire, they (the Chinese) embark at a British port, and in that respect are invested with the rights of British subjects... With the laws of England, or the marine regulations by which the people of China are permitted to enter a British province and to embark from a British port, we have nothing whatever to do...”.[19] His anxiety of seeking collaboration with the British government as well as the foreseeable difficulty of executing the restriction policy in Hong Kong was also shared by some of the other authorities in the country, such as Frederick Low, who was the United States minister plenipotentiary in China since 1870 to 1873, agreed that “the stoppage of immigration involves treating with another nation rather more than with China”, while pointing out that “the British already had its own law to forbid any but voluntary emigrants embarking on ships and requires a compliance with the law to be officially certified before a vessel leaves port”. So apparently, he asked, what more can be done by the American government at the present moment?[20] In short, from Morton’s report we could see a complete overturn of interpretation to the Joint Committee’s investigation result, as he argued that no matter from the viewpoint of the country’s founding spirit or the white labor’s interest, or simply the practicability of the policy itself, there was no reason for the United States to prohibit the Chinese from landing on the Pacific shore. And the evidences that he drew on from various interviewees of the investigation further confirmed the fact that despite the longstanding display of anti-Chinese sentiment in the Pacific coast, there were still a considerable amount of pro-Chinese voices among the Californian society by which their speakers were well-aware of the benefits that the Chinese had brought to their state, and were unabashed in opposing the exclusion of Chinese laborers even up to the mid seventies.

 

The tenacious resistance of federal judiciary to California’s anti-Chinese legislations throughout the 1870s

 

If the above-mentioned positive opinions in California were still seeming partial and unrepresentative to some of our minds, as for their actual impacts to the society of that time was indeed hard to evaluate, we might now turn to look at the state’s policies regarding the Chinese during the seventies. Just as Sandmeyer points out, that after the American Civil War, three new “barriers” which had objectively restrained the California legislature from exercising their state’s right in dealing with the Chinese immigration had been set up, and thus had protected the Chinese from a number of unfavorable legislations. The barriers were the Fourteenth Amendment and the Burlingame Treaty in 1868, and the Civil Rights Act which was ratified in 1870.[21] To say it simply, the first and the third one had guaranteed the equal protection of laws to all person in the United States, so no specific race of immigrants should face any extra tax or charge unless it was also equally imposed on the others, and the Burlingame Treaty was the foundational treaty which granted the Chinese the rights to reside in the country.[22] Yet, in spite of this reality, the California State Legislature was single-minded in restricting the Chinese immigration, and had proven itself to be unrelenting by its repeated enactments of various anti-Chinese legislation during the entire 1870s. Some main legislations include a statue in 1870 concerning the importation of lewd women from China (its scope amended and broadened in 1874), the Pigtail Ordinance in 1873, and the adoption of a new California constitution in 1879 which contained an article of prohibiting the employment of all Chinese in any corporation or public work.[23] Conceivably, when these vigorous restrictive measures were put into effect, they soon faced legal challenges from their victims since almost unexceptionally all the prosecuted Chinese would appeal to the federal judiciary, and the anti-Chinese efforts of the California legislature were now being recurrently offset and nullified by the decisions of circuit courts throughout the whole decade. And aside from the fact that the court’s verdicts were usually considerate of the Chinese interests, it was also often for their tones to be blunt and unfaltering in denouncing the discriminatory nature behind those anti-Chinese legislations, which was likely to generate antipathy from many people in California who were in favor of restricting Chinese immigrants. For example, in both the verdicts of In Re Ah Fong and Chy Lung v. Freeman, the character of the amended version of the “lewd law” in 1874 was mocked as “extraordinary”, as the former went,

 

“A statute thus sweeping in its terms, confounding by general persons widely variant in character, is not entitled to any very high commendation... It is certainly desirable that all lewdness, takes the form of prostitution, should be suppressed, and that the most stringent measures to accomplish that end should be adopted. But I have little respect for that discriminating virtue which is shocked when a frail child of China is landed on our shores, and yet allows the bedizened and painted harlot of other countries to parade our streets and open her hells in broad day, without molestation and without censure.”[24][25]

 

Similarly, the ordinance of 1873 was also criticized harshly later in the case of Ho Ah Kow v. Matthew Nunnan for its obvious discriminatory nature, as the verdict bitterly remarked,

 

“The ordinance is known in the community as the "Queue Ordinance," being so designated from its purpose to reach the queues of the Chinese, and it is not enforced against any other persons. The reason advanced for its adoption, and now urged for its continuance, is, that only the dread of the loss of his queue will induce a Chinaman to pay his fine. That is to say, in order to enforce the payment of a fine imposed upon him, it is necessary that torture should be superadded to imprisonment.”[26]

 

And for the state’s constitution that was newly adopted in 1879, its article that concerned the Chinese was almost completely voided in the case In re Tiburcio Parrott and In re Ah Chong of the subsequent year, with only one of the four sections that was allowed to remain in effect.[27] In short, by the end of the decade, practically all anti-Chinese legislations set forward by the California legislature were defeated in the circuit court. So if the actual impact of the aforementioned pro-Chinese public opinions in the previous part was still contestable and hard to confirm, here we could see the demonstration of a more “concrete” opposition force which had so tangibly hindered the arrival of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Apparently, the resentment in the Pacific Coast was now deepened by the failure of all these legislation attempts, and a notable tension had evolved between the state and the Federal government. As the California politicians could do nothing but to reiterate their arguments of why should the state have the right of self-protection from the “invasion” of Chinese, the Federal Court insisted that the power of prohibiting Chinese emigration should lie and retain on the national government’s hand, and any state’s legislation regarding the Chinese should respect and comply with the national constitution as well as the international treaty. The deadlock added the frustration that had already been widely felt in the society, which was a crucial factor of why did the anti-Chinese sentiment soon become volatile in the end of the decade, and the state-federal conflict had now given populism a good reason to rise.

 

The agitation of the Workingmen’s Party vs the denunciations on “hoodlumism” in nationwide newspapers

 

No historians specialized in the topic of Chinese exclusion would have denied the significance of the Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC) to the final victory of the anti-Chinese campaign in America. The only question left is that if it was sufficient for a single party, which had established for less than a few years with only moderate success in the past elections of the California state and municipal, to alter a nationwide foreign policy which had been implemented for more than a decade and was tangled with countless commercial interests from different sectors of the American society. In view of this, some people had argued that the restriction of Chinese immigrants had already become a national consensus due to the severe labor competition in the country, while others inclined to interpret the outcome as the result of effective propagandist war waged by the WPC. And the argument here I offered, is that instead of a sheer overwhelm in public opinions which forced the federal government to act at last on the immigration issue, it was the continuous radicalization of the polemics of both anti-Chinese and anti-exclusionist sides in newspapers, which had become far too belligerent and even suggestive to national instability in the late decade, that prompted the nation to revise its policy as a sort of “appeasement” to the coast. To prove my point, I would now examine some of the prominent examples of the WPC’s anti-Chinese discourse and also its counterpart, to which I name them as the “anti-hoodlumist’s opinion”, through the newspapers of the late seventies. While past scholarship had often only focused on the newspapers of California, my following writing will also incorporate newspapers from the eastern states in America, in order to better illustrate the overall picture of national opinions toward the issue as well as the potential danger of the polemics between the aforementioned two adversaries.

 

On 8^th May, 1878, a full page report was given in the New York herald to the newly risen WPC’s leader, Denis Kearney, a man who was later known for his inflammatory speeches toward the Chinese immigrants in history. The report was objective and rich in detailed, as it provided an almost all-rounded portrayal of the man’s background, appearance, proposition, associates, and manner, and had even included a direct interview with Kearney himself. And from the reporter’s quotation, we could see the excerpt of a speech given by Denis Kearney in an occasion of which he was about to be arrested, and this speech was considered by the reporter as an exemplar of his “extraordinary” language,

 

“I am glad to see the cooks at San Francisco preparing to make fishballs. At the outset we had a great deal to say about powder and bullets, but this was so disagreeable to our rulers that we changed it to fishballs and coffee. We want you to make these fishballs, and when they are ready we will fire them for you. Someone said to me this morning, ‘you are going to cut our throats.’ I told him, ‘I don’t care a damn whose throat is cut so long as it is not mine.’”[28]

 

Aside from the staggering metaphor of “fishballs”, his menacing message was also explicit as he pointed out that the existing anti-Chinese sentiment was very likely to resort to violence if their demands were still not meet by the federal government. Without the slightest hint of fear, he even instructed his supporters with the following words,

 

“We are going to use force now to carry out our plans... How many of you have muskets? That’s good. Form yourselves into a military organization, and when the next steamer comes are you ready to march down to the wharf and stop the leprous Chinamen from landing? I will make all the necessary preparations and buy up all the second hand guns we can get.”[29]

 

Even so, there was no lack of intense denunciations among the newspapers of the same period toward this new rise of “hoodlumism”. For examples, an article titled as “Kearneyism” in the Weekly Trinity journal, wrote that “the most insane mutterings of the Paris Commune slink away into shadow in the bright glare of the more beastly threats and venomous denunciations of Kearney and his gang… Free speech in that city seem to be utterly crushed by the freedom allowed the mob”.[30] The previous report of the New York herald also suggested that there was actually a resemblance between Kearney and Robespierre. Moreover, in the next year, an article from the Jackson standard of Ohio described the situation of California was no different from a fallen state, as it started by saying “San Francisco, a brave city, hardly dares utter her mind on the Chinese question, when her sandlot orators threaten conflagration, riot and murder... Anti-Chinese clubs crack the defiant whip of lawlessness over the heads of California’s Mayors, Governors, and Senators”.[31] And a report from the Gold Hill daily news of Nevada in 1880, even prophesied bloodshed in California,

 

“According to all the latest news from San Francisco, that sinful city with the golden gate is no very agreeable place to live in at the present time. The ‘agitators’ are agitating worse than ever, and the ‘unemployed’ employ their time parading the streets, men and women, in procession demanding work and bread, and yet arrogantly dictating to business people as to whom they shall employ”

 

“The city is threatened with grave danger. A riot may break out at any moment.... If a conflict begins it will result in the speedy death of Kearney and every other prominent leader of the sandlotters... It is yet hoped that the danger may pass away, but the best informed men do not believe that bloodshed can be averted”. [32]

 

Obviously, the prophecy was unfulfilled, but it shows that how close the country once was to the outbreak of a disastrous domestic clash. In short, as for the nationwide image for the WPC and Denis Kearney of that time, we can see that there was a persistence of negative commentaries in the newspapers of both the eastern states and western states. The anti-Chinese agitators were frequently called as a tons of unemployed “hoodlums” who took hostage of the whole California state for their own political purpose and at others’ expenses. Moreover, some opinions even tended to label them as communistic in nature, and analogies were also frequently made between them and the notorious Robespierre or the Paris Commune.

 

Conclusion

 

It is undeniable that the anti-Chinese agitation was surely making its way in pressuring a response from the government to its political demand in the late seventies. For example, before the final passage of the 1882 Exclusion Act, there were already attempts from the Congress to restrict further Chinese immigration, namely the Fifteen Passenger Bill in 1879 and a 20-year ban proposal in 1881 in which its content was very much alike to the 1882 one except for a double of its effective years. Notably, both legislation were actually able to pass the House and Senate without breaking much of a sweat, and their failures at the end were only caused by the vetoes of the two US Presidents, Hayes and Arthur respectively, which were both from the Republican Party.[33] We could see the resistance of the anti-exclusionist side was waning, especially when the November elections in 1878 had given the Democrats control of both houses, for whom had proven itself to be a more sincere helper in restricting Chinese immigration than the Republicans, which had objectively placed the US presidents in a very isolated position upon the matter.[34] In fact, after the two Chinese restriction bills were vetoed, both Hayes and Arthur were heavily criticized by the public opinions of the west. President Arthur was even burn in effigies throughout the whole California when news was released, and his decision was not sustained by many of his Republican comrades as they all thought that he was going to make the party lose all the coming elections in California, which is also a crucial reason of why he eventually backed down to the 1882 Act.[35] Nonetheless, it is never appropriate for us to understand the sequence of events as a mere impact-response paradigm and to simplify the act just as an outcome of the labor competition and ingrained racist culture of America, as we shall not overlook the existence as well as the effect that the afore-discussed anti-exclusionist force had toward the national politics of the seventies. This force, which had once been even able to fend off the exclusionists’ anti-Chinese efforts until the end of decade, had unpremeditatedly generated a state-federal conflict between the Pacific states and the federal government. To prevent further escalation of this conflict, the Chinese Exclusion Act thus became the only option left for the federal government to unstitch the tension.

And it might be best to sum up the paper’s argument by contrasting two documents which were both produced in the end of the 1870s,

 

“I am not afraid of the unconstitutionality of that law - and why? Because the man that tests its constitutionality stands in danger of losing his head... If Selby dares to test the Anti-Chinese bill, the trouble will come as suddenly as the firing on Fort Sumter. The Supreme Court will not declare it unconstitutional. I will go farther, and dare the Federal authorities to declare it unconstitutional”, a Sandlot speech given by Dennis Kearney on 15 February 1880, after the drawn up of the new California State Constitution.[36]

 

“But the fact is, the anti-Chinese legislation of the Pacific coast is but a poorly disguised attempt on the part of the state to evade and set aside the treaty with China, and thereby nullify an act of the national government. Between this and “the firing on Fort Sumter,” by South Carolina, there is the difference of the direct and indirect—and nothing more”, the verdict of the case Baker ct al. v. Portland on 21 July 1879.[37]

 

Though not a direct address to each others, the rhetorical revisit of “the firing on Fort Sumter” here illustrates the strained relation between the state and Federal government in the late 1870s, which could possibly lead to another constitutional crisis since the end of the Civil War. The “Chinese question” presented here was no longer merely a local issue in America, but rather a critical topic which was directly connected to the national stability in the coming years. Therefore, to say precisely, the final passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act was in fact a compromise made by the federal government in the objective of easing up the state-federal tension that had sustained throughout the 1870s.

4 May 2020

Footnotes:

[1] The Daily Alta California of 27 April 1852. From (https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DAC18520427.2.8&srpos=22&dliv=none&e=------185-en--20-DAC-21--txt-txIN-Celestials----1852---1)

[2] The People of the State of California v. George W. Hall, the California Supreme Court, 1854. From (https://cite.case.law/cal/4/399/).

[3] Mark Kanazawa, Immigration, Exclusion, and Taxation: Anti-Chinese Legislation in Gold Rush California, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Sep., 2005), pp. 786.

[4] Elmer C. Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, University of Illinois Press, 1939, p.40.

[5] Wellborn, Mildred, The Events Leading to the Chinese Exclusion Acts, Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California, Vol. 9, No. 1/2(1912-1913), pp. 49-58, 1913. Rhoads, Edward J. M., “White Labor” vs. “Coolie Labor”: The “Chinese Question” in Pennsylvania in the 1870s, Journal of American Ethnic History, Winter 2002, Vol.21(2), pp.3, 21.

[6] Elmer C. Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, University of Illinois Press, 1939, p.40.

[7] Ibid. P.57.

[8] Ibid.

[9] San Francisco Evening Post, Jan 6, 1877. Quoted from Elmer C. Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, University of Illinois Press, 1939, p.58.

[10] Elmer C. Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, University of Illinois Press, 1939, p.60.

[11] United States. Congress. Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration. (1877). Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration: February 27, 1877.--Ordered to be printed. Washington: G.P.O., p.vi.

[12] Ibid. P.viii.

[13] Ibid. P.iv. Also Elmer C. Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, University of Illinois Press, 1939, p.87.

[14] Ibid.

[15] The New York herald. [volume], March 01 and Sept 08, 1877. The Silver state. [volume] (Unionville, Nev.), 08 Sept. 1877. Chicago daily tribune. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.), 08 Sept. 1877.

[16] The Vancouver independent. (Vancouver, W.T. [Wash.]), 24 Jan. 1878. The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]), 01 March 1879. The Wheeling daily intelligencer. [volume] (Wheeling, W. Va.), 18 Jan. 1878. The Jackson standard. [volume] (Jackson C.H., Ohio), 31 Jan. 1878. Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.), 18 Jan. 1878. National Republican. (Washington City (D.C.)), 18 Jan. 1878. Daily Los Angeles herald. [volume] (Los Angeles [Calif.]), 20 Jan. 1878.

[17] The New York herald. [volume], March 01, 1877.

From (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/1877-03-01/ed-1/seq-10/)

[18] Further details of how the Chinese took passage from Hong Kong to arrive at America could be seen from a report of The Rutland daily globe. [volume] (Rutland, Vermont.), 22 April 1876.

[19] Senate Misc. Doc. No. 20, 45th Cong., 2d sess., 4, 9. Quoted from Elmer Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, University of Illinois Press, 1939, p.88.

Also from (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3985848&view=1up&seq=653). See also The Vancouver independent. (Vancouver, W.T. [Wash.]), 24 Jan. 1878. From (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87093109/1878-01-24/ed-1/seq-4/)

[20] Arizona citizen. [volume] (Tucson, Pima County, Arizona), 16 Sept. 1876. From (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82014896/1876-09-16/ed-1/seq-2/)

[21] Elmer C. Sandmeyer, California Anti-Chinese Legislation and the Federal Courts: A Study in Federal Relations, Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Sep., 1936), pp. 191.

[22] Referring to The Burlingame Treaty, 1868. From (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Burlingame_Treaty). The Civil Rights Act of 1866. From (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1866) The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, 1868. From (https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv).

[23] Amendments to the Codes of California, 1873-4, 241-243. Senate Report No. 689, 44 Cong., 2 sess., 201-207, 1167. Both from Elmer C. Sandmeyer, California Anti-Chinese Legislation and the Federal Courts: A Study in Federal Relations, Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Sep., 1936), pp. 195, 198. Article XIX, the California State Constitution of 1879. From (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:California_State_Constitution_of_1879.djvu/19)

[24] In Re Ah Fong, 3 Sawyer 144-161, Sept. 21, 1874. From (https://cite.case.law/f-cas/1/213/)

[25] Chy Lung v. Freeman, 92 U.S. 275, March 20, 1876. From (https://reenactments.aabany.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/7.-22-LCW-FINAL.pdf)

[26] Ho Ah Kow v. Matthew Nunnan, 5 Sawyer 552, July 7, 1879. From (http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Ho_Ah_Kow_v._Nunan)

[27] In re Tiburcio Parrott. United States Circuit Court for the District of California, March 1, 1880. From (https://cite.case.law/f/1/481/). In re Ah Chong. United States Circuit Court for the District of California, June 9, 1880. From (https://cite.case.law/f/2/733/6722760/)

[28] The New York herald, 08 May 1878. From

(https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/1878-05-08/ed-1/seq-5/#date1=1875&index=9&rows=20&words=Dennis+Kearney&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=New+York&date2=1882&proxtext=Dennis+Kearney&y=14&x=12&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1)

[29] Ibid.

[30] Weekly Trinity journal. [volume] (Weaverville, Calif.), 23 March 1878. From (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025202/1878-03-23/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=1875&index=6&rows=20&words=hoodlums+Kearney&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=&date2=1882&proxtext=Kearney+hoodlums&y=13&x=12&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1)

[31] The Jackson standard. [volume] (Jackson C.H., Ohio), 20 Feb. 1879. From (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038180/1879-02-20/ed-1/seq-1/)

[32] Gold Hill daily news. [volume] (Gold Hill, N.T. [Nev.]), 27 Feb. 1880. From (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84022046/1880-02-27/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=1875&sort=relevance&rows=20&words=hoodlum+Kearney&searchType=basic&sequence=0&index=15&state=&date2=1882&proxtext=Kearney+hoodlums&y=13&x=12&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=2)

[33] Elmer C. Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, University of Illinois Press, 1939, p.93.

[34] Ibid. P.90

[35] Daily Los Angeles herald. [volume] (Los Angeles [Calif.]), 30 April 1882. From (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042459/1882-04-30/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=1872&index=8&rows=20&words=Arthur+Chinese&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=California&date2=1882&proxtext=Arthur+Chinese&y=12&x=15&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1)

[36] The Daily Alta California of 16 February 1880. From (https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DAC18800216.2.18&dliv=none&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1)

[37] Baker ct al. v. Portland, United States Circuit Court for the District of Oregon, July 21, 1879. From (https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F.Cas/0002.f.cas/0002.f.cas.0472.3.pdf)

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