BOOK REVIEW:

Contemporary Lessons from a Tragic Chapter

The anti-Chinese pogroms in California, Oregon and Washington are largely missing from our collective memory.

Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese
by Jean Pfaelzer
2007. New York: Random House

After low-capital gold mining was exhausted in the early 1860s, white agitation against the Chinese shifted to the opportunities in lumbering, fishing and orchard farming. Isolated in small-town Chinatowns and lacking most of the legal rights of citizens, Chinese immigrants were targeted by racist agitators who mobilized the white majority by appealing to their economic, demographic and cultural anxieties. White economic boycotts, mob violence, and mass round-ups abetted by local officials purged Chinese from many of California’s small towns, often driving them toward the relative safety of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The expulsion of more than 300 Chinese from the lumber town of Eureka in 1885 took place amid attempted lynchings and the looting of Chinese homes and businesses before they were burned (pp. 121-128).

Pfaelzer’s Driven Out makes very timely reading not only because of the familiarity of the successful xenophobic agitation that begins locally and later emerges as a national issue, but also because of what it tells us about the limits of ethnic organization and resistance. Chinese immigrants and a handful of sympathetic whites were able to wage an uneven struggle by organizing Chinatown fire companies and Chinese unions, filing habeas corpus actions in federal courts, and organizing mass civil disobedience. Chinese across the United States unified after the passage of the Geary Act in 1892. Conceived by Congressman Thomas Geary, a Sonoma County Democrat, that legislation repeated the disability of Chinese becoming American citizens, extended the Exclusion Act banning further Chinese immigration for another decade, and made undocumented immigration a crime punishable by one year’s imprisonment at hard labor. What most enraged opponents, however, was that it required every Chinese to carry an identification card with photographs. The Chinese Six Companies in San Francisco, the largest ethnic Chinese organization at the time, responded by calling on all Chinese in the United States to refuse to register. Initially successful—only 3,169 of some 110,000 complied—the civil disobedience ended in 1894 at the urging of the Chinese government, which was pressured by the cost of U.S. trade sanctions. Chinese immigrants began registering and the pace of arrests and deportations for illegal immigration increased. “From 1890 to 1900, the total number of Chinese people in the United States dropped from about 107,000 to 90,000, a loss of 16 percent. In California, the drop was even more precipitous. In 1890, California had 72,000 Chinese residents; by 1900 that number had dropped by more than half, to 31,000” (pg. 330).

The lesson in all this is that anti-immigrant agitation is more than a device for politicians to win votes. Whether it is the bug-eyed anti-Hispanic posturing of Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo or less hysterical versions of the same message from other Republican politicians, agitation against immigrants may do more than persuade working Americans to vote against their own interests. Basic human rights may be trampled as a consequence, and the United States left with a shameful legacy.