As a followup to these posts (1, 2), and in honor of The West Wing, I note that Tacoma, Washington, was the recipient not only of electricity from the United States Navy, but, 45 years earlier, occupation from the United States Army.
In the winter of 1885, anti-Chinese sentiment swept the west coast. In Tacoma (and elsewhere) that sentiment took the form of a pogrom against the city’s ethnic Chinese residents, who were summarily and violently evicted from Tacoma in the first week of November:
At nine o’clock on the morning of November 3, 1885, steam whistles blew at the foundries and mills across Tacoma, to announce the start of the purge of all the Chinese people from the town. Saloons closed and police stood by as five hundred men, branding clubs and pistols, went from house to house in the downtown Chinese quarter and through the Chinese tenements along the city’s wharf. Sensing the storm ahead, earlier in the week, about five hundred Chinese people had fled from
Tacoma. Now the rest were given four hours to be ready to leave. They desperately stuffed years of life into sacks, shawls, and baskets hung from shoulder poles–bedding clothing, pots, some food. At midday, the mob began to drag Chinese laborers from their homes, pillage their laundries, and thrown their furniture into the streets….The mob marched the Chinese through heavy rain to a muddy railroad crossing nine miles from town. [3]
Some were able to pay passage on the next passenger train that came through; some hitched on freight trains; some struggled on foot to Portland.
U.S. Army troops were sent to restore order, which, the New York Times announced, had quieted the city:
The rabid, riotous anti-Chinese talk ceased with the arrival of the troops. Those who had so freely indulged in this chatter, who had discoursed so pathetically on this havoc created by the dreadful Chinaman and the danger of utter extinction to the American citizen by his presence, all at once became wonderfully scarce. The cry “The Chinese must go” was suddenly hushed, and the number of truly good and law-abiding citizens became unusually large.[4]
The unit was the 14th (U.S.) Infantry Regiment, who would be fighting Chinese, rather than protecting them, fifteen years later. [5].
(There’s a map of the mob’s route here. Warning: PDF!)
7 comments
February 26, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Jay C
Fascinating stuff: but it raised two questions:
1. Who actually called the troops in to “restore order”? It looks like most of the local Authorities were leading the riot….
2. Did any of the ejected Chinese get: a)their looted stuff back? b)compensation for destroyed stuff? c) to move back to Tacoma – assuming they’d want to, after that – ?
February 26, 2010 at 3:32 pm
ekogan
The link in 4 is fascinating. Thank you for including it. Hooray for articles from before political correctness.
As far as the present agitation is concerned it can have but one ending. It was started by the worst element in the community and largely from selfish motives, but many honest people were drawn into it because they could not control their hatred of the Chinese as a class. The chief agitators in Tacoma and Seattle, I am told are foreigners. They came to the United States on just the same footing as the Chinese. The American-born residents of this coast are in no way responsible for this silly agitation and why those of European, particularly Irish, origin should be allowed privileges over those of Chinese origin in what is called the “Land of the Free” is something no one can answer.
Bring on the paddy wagons!
The list of jobs that white workers consigned to the Chinese is also fascinating
February 26, 2010 at 3:33 pm
ekogan
That should’ve came out quoted
February 26, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Colin
(a) Is there a good monograph history of U.S. anti-Chinese violence? (b) To what extent can we trace this through to contemporary feeling against, say, Chinese-made goods?
February 27, 2010 at 6:26 am
silbey
@Colin: The Jean Pfaelzer book I linked to (fn 3) is quite good; I suspect that one of the roots of current anti-Chinese stuff is the same kind of racialized hysteria, but I haven’t seen any work on it.
@ekogan: Nice catch; love the fact that the Times somehow blames it on the Irish.
@Jay C: Grover Cleveland sent the troops. The fascinating thing is that this actually did lead to a lawsuit, in which a number of the Chinese sued for damages. Their depositions are why we know a fair bit about the whole event. Pfaelzer gives a lot more detail.
March 1, 2010 at 9:46 am
Mario
I just wanted to concur that the Pfaelzer is really good. Like, really good.
March 2, 2010 at 12:07 am
Colin
Thanks! It’s ordered.
I learned a lot from Nayan Shah’s _Contagious Divides_(UC 2001), on San Francisco. There’s a complex of tropes about labor, health, personhood, and living conditions in the story Shah tells that I keep hearing in contemporary anti-Asian xenophobia. You can see it in the 1885 NYT piece linked above, which uses the excellence of their work to *support* the argument that Chinese workers are intolerable — its logic is that only a servile worker would work so well, and servility is un-white, un-American.