The Chinese Must Go Read online

  THE

  Chinese Must Go

  THE

  Chinese Must Go

  VIO LENCE, EXCLUSION, AND THE MAKING

  OF THE ALIEN IN AMER I CA

  Beth Lew- Wil iams

  Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts · London, England

  2018

  Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of Amer i ca

  First printing

  Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

  Names: Lew- Williams, Beth, author.

  Title: The Chinese must go : vio lence, exclusion, and the making of the

  alien in Amer i ca / Beth Lew- Williams.

  Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press,

  2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017032640 | ISBN 9780674976016 (cloth)

  Subjects: LCSH: Chinese— United States— History—19th century. |

  Chinese— Vio lence against— United States. | Border security—

  United States— History—19th century. | Race discrimination—

  United States— History—19th century. | Emigration and immigration

  law— United States— History—19th century. | Aliens— United

  States— History—19th century. | Citizens—United States—

  History—19th century. | United States— Race

  relations— History—19th century.

  Classification: LCC E184.C5 L564 2018 | DDC 305.895 / 1073— dc23

  LC rec ord available at https:// lccn.loc .gov / 2017032640

  Cover photo courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society, image number

  28159

  Cover design by Jill Breitbarth

  In memory of Lew Din Wing

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Vio lence of Exclusion 1

  PART 1 • Restriction

  1. The Chinese Question 17

  2. Experiments in Restriction 53

  PART 2 • Vio lence

  3. The Banished 91

  4. The People 113

  5. The Loyal 137

  PART 3 • Exclusion

  6. The Exclusion Consensus 169

  7. Afterlives under Exclusion 194

  EPILOGUE

  The Modern American Alien 235

  APPENDIX A

  Sites of Anti- Chinese Expulsions and

  Attempted Expulsions, 1885–1887 247

  APPENDIX B

  Chinese Immigration to the United States, 1850–1904 253

  ABBREVIATIONS 255

  NOTES 259

  ACKNOWL EDGMENTS 337

  INDEX 341

  THE

  Chinese Must Go

  INTRODUCTION

  The Vio lence of Exclusion

  THEY LEFT IN driving rain. Three hundred Chinese mi grants trudged down

  the center of the street, their heads bowed to the ele ments and the crowd. They

  were led, followed, and surrounded by dozens of white men armed with

  clubs, pistols, and rifles. As if part of a grim parade, they were encircled by

  spectators who packed the muddy sidewalks, peered from narrow doorways,

  and leaned out from second- story win dows for a better view. One of the

  Chinese, Tak Nam, tried to protest, but later he remembered the mob

  answering in a single voice: “All the Chinese, you must go. Every one.”1

  The date was November 3, 1885, and the place was Tacoma, Washington

  Territory. But that hardly mattered. In 1885 and 1886, at least 168 commu-

  nities across the U.S. West drove out their Chinese residents.2

  At times, these purges involved racial vio lence in its most brazen and basic

  form: physical force motivated by racial prejudice and intended to cause

  bodily harm.3 The vigilantes targeted all Chinese people— young and old,

  male and female, rich and poor— planting bombs beneath businesses,

  shooting blindly through cloth tents, and setting homes ablaze. Once physical

  vio lence had become a very real threat, the vigilantes also drove them out

  using subtler forces of coercion, harassment, and intimidation. They posted

  deadlines for the Chinese to vacate town, leaving unspoken the conse-

  quences of noncompliance. They locked up leaders of the Chinese commu-

  nity and watched as the rest fled. They called for boycotts of Chinese workers

  and waited for starvation to set in. This too was racial vio lence.

  While historians often claim that racial vio lence is fundamental to the

  making of the United States, rarely are they referring to the Chinese in the

  1

  Alaska

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  Washington Territory

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  Montana Territory

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  Oregon

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  Wyoming Territory

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  Nevada

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  Utah Territory

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  Colorado

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  California

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  Arizona Territory

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  Sites of Anti- Chinese Expulsions, 1885–1886. Vigilantes drove out Chinese residents

  through harassment, intimidation, arson, bombing, assault, and murder. Map based

  on data collected by the author (see Appendix A).

  INTRODUCTION

  3

  U.S. West. Instead,
they are thinking of moments when racial prejudice fu-

  eled the vio lence of colonization, enslavement, and segregation.4 It has long

  been recognized that these transformative acts of racial vio lence anchor not

  only the history of Native Americans and African Americans, but also the

  history of the entire nation. Anti- Chinese vio lence, however, is routinely left

  out of the national narrative.5

  It is easy to see this omission as simply due to the relative numbers. There

  were comparatively few Chinese in nineteenth- century Amer ica, and fewer

  still who lost their lives to racial vio lence, making casualty counts from anti-

  Chinese vio lence appear inconsequential. The 1880 census recorded 105,465

  Chinese in the United States; at least eighty- five perished during the peak

  of anti- Chinese vio lence in the mid-1880s. However, these numbers do not

  capture the full extent of the vio lence, since some of the most egregious in-

  cidents occurred before or after this period. In 1871, for example, a mob in

  Los Angeles lynched seventeen “Chinamen” in Negro Alley in front of dozens

  of witnesses and, in 1887, the “citizens of Colusa” (California) took a com-

  memorative photo graph after the lynching of sixteen- year- old Hong Di.

  Events like these have drawn attention for their exceptional brutality, but

  often anti- Chinese vio lence was not fatal or recorded. By relying on the

  metric of known fatalities, historians have often viewed anti- Chinese vio-

  lence as a faint echo of the staggeringly lethal vio lence unleashed against

  Native Americans and African Americans.6 When we use black oppression

  and Indian extermination to define racial vio lence in nineteenth- century

  Amer ica, Chinese expulsions seem insignificant. Or, even more inaccurately,

  they appear not to be violent at all.

  The omission of this history can also be explained by the vio lence itself.

  Chinese migration to the U.S. West began in the 1850s, when thousands

  of Chinese joined the rush for gold in California. While other newcomers

  claimed a place in Amer ica and American history, however, vio lence pushed

  the Chinese to the outer recesses of the nation and national memory. In Ta-

  coma, there were no Chinese after 1885 and, thanks to arsonists, there are

  no physical remnants of what once had been. Indeed, the city of Tacoma, in

  a present- day effort at “reconciliation,” spent over a de cade searching for de-

  scendants of the Tacoma Chinese, but has yet to find any.7 Successful ex-

  pulsions left little behind, even in the way of memories.

  Above all, this history has been neglected because it has been misunder-

  stood. The violent anti- Chinese movement was not a weak imitation of

  It was rare for Chinese mi grants to be lynched, and rarer still for a lynching to be

  photographed. Hong Di was a convicted murderer sentenced to life in prison, but

  unnamed “citizens” removed him from jail and hanged him on a railroad turnstile.

  “Hong Di, Lynched by the citizens of Colusa, July 11, 1887 at 1:15 a.m.,” BANC

  PIC 2003.165. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  INTRODUCTION

  5

  racial vio lence elsewhere. It was a distinct phenomenon that must be con-

  sidered on its own terms. Even without lethal force, anti- Chinese vio lence

  had profound and lasting consequences, although not the ones we might

  expect.

  What made anti- Chinese vio lence distinct was its principal intent, together

  with its method and result.

  The intent was exclusion. At the local level, anti- Chinese advocates fought

  to prohibit Chinese from entering spaces and working in occupations

  deemed the sole entitlement of white citizens. At the national level, they fought

  to bar Chinese mi grants from entering the United States and to deny citizen-

  ship to those already in the country. At the international level, they fought

  to exclude China from the conversation about immigration, hoping to turn

  a bilateral policy into a unilateral one. Though scholars sometimes separate

  these demands into disparate strains of racism, nativism, and imperialism,

  respectively, anti- Chinese advocates rarely drew these distinctions. In their

  minds, the threat of Chinese immigration demanded exclusion across mul-

  tiple spheres.

  At the time, national exclusion was a particularly radical objective. Al-

  though border control may seem natu ral and inevitable today, the United

  States began with a policy of open migration for all. In the early nineteenth

  century, the federal government was more concerned with attracting “desir-

  able” immigrants than prohibiting “undesirable” ones. Though individual

  states sometimes regulated immigrants they deemed criminal, poverty-

  stricken, or diseased, the federal government was not in the business of border

  control.8 This meant that there was no need for passports, no concept of an

  “illegal alien,” and no consensus that the United States should determine

  the makeup of its citizenry by closing its gates.

  Anti- Chinese advocates demanded that the federal government change

  all this. Chinese exclusion warranted extreme mea sures, they argued, because

  the Chinese posed a peculiar racial threat to nineteenth- century Amer ica.

  Popu lar thought of the day held that the Chinese race was inferior to the

  white race in most ways, but not all. The Chinese were heathen and servile,

  but also dangerously industrious, cunning, and resilient. Chinese mi grants

  hailed from an ancient and populous nation, which Americans granted had

  6

  THE CHINESE MUST GO

  once been home to an advanced civilization. Assumed to be permanently

  loyal to China, the Chinese appeared racially incapable of becoming

  American. While white citizens worried that Native Americans and African

  Americans would contaminate the nation, they feared the Chinese might

  conquer it. One anti- Chinese leader in Tacoma, for example, openly wor-

  ried that if “millions of industrious hard- working sons and daughters of

  Confucius” were “given an equal chance with our people,” they “would

  outdo them in the strug gle for life and gain possession of the Pacific coast of

  Amer ica.”9 Therefore, as Americans turned to dispossession, subordination,

  and assimilation of Indians and blacks in the late nineteenth century, they ad-

  vocated exclusion for the Chinese. Behind these divergent racial scripts lay

  callous calculations. White Americans coveted Indian lands and required

  black labor, but many saw no reason to tolerate the Chinese.10

  Not all white Americans agreed, however. In the mid- nineteenth century,

  many U.S. traders, cap ital ists, and missionaries saw Chinese migration as

  key to American profits and power. Businessmen eyed luxurious Chinese

  products and vast Chinese markets, while Protestant missionaries saw an op-

  portunity to convert “heathens” on both sides of the Pacific. In the minds

  of cosmopolitan expansionists, American people and goods crossing the

  Pacific would extend U.S. power abroad, while the reverse movement of

  Chinese mi grants would accelerate the development of the West and

  strengthen U.S. claims on Chi
na.11 Envisioning Amer i ca’s future beyond

  the Pacific Ocean and the rewards they personally would reap, these influ-

  ential elites strongly opposed the movement for exclusion. This re sis tance,

  however, only emboldened the movement’s advocates and drove them to

  more dramatic tactics later in the nineteenth century.

  The principal method of anti- Chinese vio lence became expulsion. Since

  their arrival in the 1850s Chinese mi grants had been popu lar targets for

  harassment and assault, but systematic expulsion became the method of

  choice by the 1880s. In western states and territories (where 99 percent of

  Chinese resided), vigilantes used boycotts, arsons, and assaults to swiftly

  remove the Chinese from their towns and prevent their return.12 And

  while the campaigns to drive out the Chinese sometimes produced casual-

  ties, these were rarely by design. Two men died on the forced march from

  Tacoma, but according to Tak Nam, the deaths did not directly result from

  physical assault. At a redress hearing following the expulsion, he described

  INTRODUCTION

  7

  how the crowd used clubs, poles, and pistols “to shove[] us down” and

  “drive us like so many hogs.” It was in this context that, after an eight- mile

  forced march and a night “in the drenching rain,” “two Chinamen died from

  exposure.”13

  Though the vigilantes set their sights on ridding themselves of Chinese

  neighbors, the expulsions were not simply local means directed toward local

  ends. Using sweeping rhe toric and direct petitioning, vigilantes translated

  their vio lence into a broader cry for exclusion. Anti- Chinese vio lence, in other

  words, was a form of po liti cal action or, more specifically, what could be

  termed “violent racial politics . ” By directing racial vio lence against local

  targets, vigilantes asserted a national po liti cal agenda. These vigilantes, of

  course, lacked the power to determine U.S. law or diplomacy; a host of po-

  liti cal forces and contingent events created the ultimate policy of exclusion.

  But the vigilantes made Chinese exclusion pos si ble, even probable, when

  their violent protests drew the national spotlight. The federal policy of Chi-

  nese exclusion, touted as a solution to Chinese migration, was also designed

  to combat the more immediate threat of white vio lence.

  That vio lence held power over U.S. politics in the nineteenth century

  should not come as a surprise. Transformative moments of state vio lence—

  including the Mexican- American War (1846–1848), the Civil War (1861–

  1865), and the Indian Wars— clearly mediated politics through force, but so