The Chinese Must Go
Page 39
19–43; Madeline Yuan- yin Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home:
Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China,
1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
18. William H. Seward, The Works of William H. Seward, vol. 1, ed. George E.
Baker (New York: Redfield, 1853), 248.
19. Gordon H. Chang, Fateful Ties: A History of Amer i ca’s Preoccupation with
China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 16–20; Chen,
Chinese in San Francisco, 11–44.
20. The Wangxia Treaty of 1844 and Tianjin Treaty of 1858.
21. Chang, Fateful Ties, 29–40; Michael Schaller, The United States and China
into the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), 9–13; Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (New
York: Twayne, 1991), 7–8; Warren I. Cohen, American Response to China: A
History of Sino- American Relations, 5th ed. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010), 2–31.
22. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold; Chen, Chinese in San Francisco, 11–44; Mei,
“Socioeconomic Origins,” 463–501.
23. Lon Kurashige, Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti- Asian
Racism in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2016), 25.
270
NOTES TO PAGES 26–27
24. Chan, Asian Americans, 5–8, 28–32.
25. Sue Fawn Chung, In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and
Merchants in the American West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011),
xviii– xix; Sucheng Chan, This Bitter- Sweet Soil: The Chinese in California
Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989);
William F. Chew, Nameless Builders of the Transcontinental Railroad: The
Chinese Workers of the Central Pacific Railroad (Victoria, BC: Trafford,
2004).
26. Coo lidge, Chinese Immigration, 498.
27. “Hon. William H. Seward: His Departure from Hong- kong— Reception
and Speech at the American Consulate,” NYT, February 25, 1871.
28. There were exceptions, such as Charles Sumner. Edward L. Pierce, Memoir
and Letters of Charles Sumner, 1860–1874, vol. 4 (Boston: Roberts Brothers,
1893), 424.
29. Oliver Perry Morton, “Views of the Late Oliver P. Morton on the
Character, Extent, and Effect of Chinese Immigration to the United
States,” [45th Cong. 2d Sess. (1878) Senate Misc. Doc. No. 20], Chinese
Immigration Pamphlets, vol. 6, Stanford University Special Collections,
Stanford, CA, 9. ; for similar sentiments see RJSCCI, 667–668; Wallis
Nash, Two Years in Oregon (New York: D. Appleton and Com pany, 1882),
202–205; Augustus Layres, The Other Side of the Chinese Question in
California: or, a Reply to the Charges against the Chinese: As embodied in the
Resolutions Adopted by the Anti- Chinese Mass Meeting held April 5th, 1876, in
San Francisco (San Francisco, 1876).
30. Mr. Seward to Mr. Fish, March 23, 1876, American Diplomatic and Public
Papers: The United States and China, series 2, The United States, China, and
Imperial Rivalries, 1861– 1893, vol. 13, ed. Jules Davids (Wilmington, DE:
Scholarly Resources, 1979), 38.
31. Frederick W. Seward, Seward at Washington as Secretary of State: A Memoir
of His Life, with Se lections from His Letters (New York: Derby and Miller,
1891), 504. For discussion of expansionist and imperial visions of China, see
Gordon H. Chang, “China and the Pursuit of Amer ica’s Destiny:
Nineteenth- Century Imagining and Why Immigration Restriction Took
So Long,” Journal of Asian American Studies 15, no. 2 (June 2012): 145–169;
Kurashige, Two Faces of Exclusion, 14–35; Chang, Pacific Connections, 1–16, 19–43; Paul A. Kramer, “Imperial Openings: Civilization, Exemption, and
the Geopolitics of Mobility in the History of Chinese Exclusion, 1868–
1910,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14, no. 3 (2015): 317–347;
NOTES TO PAGES 27–29
271
Andrew T. Urban, “The Advantages of Empire: Chinese Servants and
Conflicts over Settler Domesticity in the ‘White Pacific,’ 1870–1900” in
Making The Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism, ed.
Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipman (New York: New York University
Press, 2015), 185–207.
32. Kin, Reminiscences, 33–36.
33. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion,
1860–1898, 35th anniversary ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998),
24–32.
34. Chang, Fateful Ties, 92–96.
35. Anson Burlingame to George F. Seward, June 15, 1864, American
Diplomatic and Public Papers, 32–35.
36. Text of the treaty between China & the United States, generally known as the
“Burlingame treaty of 1868” (San Francisco, 1879); Cohen, American Response
to China, 31–33; Gyory, Closing the Gate, 26–28; Shirley Hune, “Politics of
Chinese Exclusion: Legislative- Executive Conflict 1876–1882,” Amerasia
Journal 9, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 8–9; John Schrecker, “ ‘For the Equality of
Men— For the Equality of Nations’: Anson Burlingame and China’s First
Embassy to the United States, 1868,” Journal of American- East Asian
Relations 17, no. 1 (2010): 9–34. Through the first half of the nineteenth
century, Americans habitually likened mi grants to imports and assumed
that the governance of migration was a diplomatic matter. American
treaties with Eu ro pean nations routinely granted the free movement of
people between nations along with the free movement of goods. Treaties
have the power of law in the United States. Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign
Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Prince ton, NJ:
Prince ton University Press, 2012), 53–57.
37. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship, x; Chang, Fateful Ties, 90–129.
38. P. W. Dooner, Last Days of the Republic (1880; repr., New York: Arno Press,
1978), 15, 27, 202.
39. Ibid., 32, 40.
40. In real ity, federal law had relegated the Chinese to permanent alienage
since 1790. “An Act to establish an uniform rule of naturalization,” (the
Naturalization Act of 1790) chap. 3, 1 Stat. 103 (March 26, 1790).
41. Dooner, Last Days of the Republic, 127, 47, 172, 145, 256–258.
42. For similar depictions of Chinese mi grants, see Henry Josiah West, The
Chinese Invasion: Revealing the Habits, Manners and Customs of the Chinese
(San Francisco: Bacon, 1873); Samuel Gompers and Herman Gutstadt,
272
NOTES TO PAGES 30–31
Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall
Survive? (San Francisco: American Federation of Labor, 1908); Charles
Frederick Holder, “ Chinese Slavery in Amer ica,” North American Review
165, no. 490 (1897): 288 –2 94; John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats,
Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti- Asian Fear (London: Verso, 2014),
227–272.
43. RJSCCI, 31, 34.
44. For Reconstruction in the U.S. West, see Elliott West, “Reconstructing
Race,” The Western Historical Quarterly 34 no. 1 (Spring 2003), 7–26; Elliott
West, The Last Indian War:
The Nez Perce Story (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), xx– xxii; Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur ed., The World
the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2015); Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction
of Amer i ca after the Civil War (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press,
2008); Joshua Paddison, American Heathens: Religion, Race and
Reconstruction in California (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2012).
45. Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the
19th- Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2017); William J. Novak, “The Legal Transformation of
Citizenship in Nineteenth- Century Amer ica,” in The Demo cratic Experiment:
New Directs in in American Po liti cal History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J.
Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton University Press,
2003), 85–119.
46. West, “Reconstructing Race,” 7–26; Najia Aarim- Heriot, Chinese
Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States,
1848–82 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 194–95; Paddison,
American Heathens, 114–117; Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and
Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Ser vice, 1869–1933
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 18–20, 26–29;
Sarah H. Cleveland, “Powers Inherent in Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens,
Territories and the Nineteenth Century Origins of Plenary Power Over
Foreign Affairs,” Texas Law Review 81, no. 1 (2002): 1–284.
47. Rosanne Currarino, The Labor Question in Amer i ca: Economic Democracy
in the Gilded Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
48. Paddison, American Heathens, 1.
49. Here, I diverge from foundational works on the anti- Chinese movement,
which have deemphasized the role of racial ideology and emphasized
NOTES TO PAGE 32
273
economic and po liti cal explanations. Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The
Anti- Chinese Movement in California (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1939), 38; Robert Wynne, Reaction to the Chinese in the Pacific Northwest
and British Columbia, 1850–1910 (New York: Arno, 1978), 477; Gyory,
Closing the Gate, 13; Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 2, 258. On the specificity of race to time and place, see Barbara Fields “Ideology and Race in
American History,” Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C.
Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 143–177. On racial bound aries and
their formation, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation
in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edition (New York:
Routledge, 1994); Ian F. Haney López, “The Social Construction of Race:
Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice,” Harvard Civil
Rights– Civil Liberties Law Review 29 (1994): 1–62; Andreas Wimmer, “The
Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Bound aries: A Multilevel Pro cess
Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 113, no. 4 (January 2008): 970–1022;
Andreas Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power and
Networks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–15.
50. Dooner, Last Days of the Republic, 50–51. For discussions of the “coolie”
trope, see Moon- Hu Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the
Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006),
4–38; Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question,’ ” 1082–
1105; Stacy L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Strug gle over
Unfree Labor, Emancipation and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 95–112; Robert Lee, Orientals:
Asian Americans in Popu lar Culture (Philadelphia: Temple Press, 1999),
51–82; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015), 25–28; Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese
Migration in the Amer i cas from the Coolie Era through World War II (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 68–73; Kornel Chang,
“Coolie,” Key Words for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy J. Schlund- Vials,
Linda Trinh Vo, and K. Scott Wong (New York: New York University
Press, 2015), 37–38. For discussions of Chinese migration and indentured
labor in Cuba, see Evelyn Hu- DeHart and Kathleen López, “Asian
Diasporas in Latin Amer ica and the Ca rib be an: An Historical Overview,”
Afro- Hispanic Review 27, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 9–21; Kathleen López,
Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2013); Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured
274
NOTES TO PAGES 32–34
Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2009).
51. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and
the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), ix–xi, 1–3; Eric Foner, The Story of American
Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
52. Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 5–9, 100–101; Tamara Venit Shelton,
Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Mono poly in California,
1850–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press and
Huntington Library Press, 2013), 83–87; Lee, Orientals, 45, 56–61; Richard
White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the
American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 320–22,
340–342.
53. For some of the best discussions of the non- assimilation of Chinese, see
Lee, Orientals, 8–10, 28–31, 47; Stuart Creighton Miller, Unwelcome
Immigrant: American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969), 140–141, 145–147, 158–59. For homogeneity, see
David J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in
Amer i ca (Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton University Press, 2002), 88.
54. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism:
A History (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).
55. For regional distinctions in visions of whiteness, see Linda Gordon, The
Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001).
56. SDC, September 25, 1885; Ibid., October 16, 1885; SDC, October 27, 1885.
57. SDC, October 2, 1885, September 26, 1885, October 3, 1885. John Bodnar,
The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban Amer i ca (Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 1987); Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a
Dif er ent Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998).
The strug gle to construct a unified working- class whiteness was one
ele ment that helps to explain the collective racial vio lence against the
Chinese in the mid-1880s, but too often scholars of whiteness have implied
that whiteness subsumes other categories of difference. On whiteness, see
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Wh
iteness: Race and the Making of the
American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Dif er ent Color: Eu ro pean Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Peter Kolchin,
NOTES TO PAGES 34–37
275
“Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in Amer ica,” The Journal of
American History 89, no. 1 (June 2002). Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness,
59–60.
58. For previous critiques of this question, see Jung, Coolies and Cane, 4.
59. For example, see SPI, September 4, 1880. The vast majority of male
mi grants were voluntary and many hailed from a middling class status.
Mei, “Socioeconomic Origins of Migration,” 479–484. For Chinese
women, see Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women
in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); George
Peffer, If They Don’t Bring their Women Here: Chinese Female Migration
before Exclusion (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
60. Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Nineteenth-
Century California and Victoria,” 1082–1105; Lee, The Making of Asian
Amer i ca, 35, 64; Patricia Cloud and David W. Galenson, “Chinese
Immigration and Contract Labor in the Late Nineteenth Century,”
National Bureau of Economic Research (July 27, 2004): 22–42. For
comparison with Eu ro pean workers, see Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free
Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West,
1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
61. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 7, 63–66.
62. Ibid., 71; D. Michael Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and
Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850–1890 (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2013), 137.
63. “Trades Assembly on Chinese Competition,” Examiner, January 8, 1882.
64. Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California (Berkeley, 1935),
84–85; White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 321.
65. Dooner, Last Days of the Republic, 15, 29, 30–31, 63–64, 132.
66. West, “Reconstructing Race,” 8–9.
67. For an excellent study highlighting interracial interaction, see Anna Naruta,
“Creating Whiteness in California: Racialization Pro cesses, Land, and Policy
in the Context of California’s Chinese Exclusion Movements, 1850 to 1910”