The majority of studies on Chinese labour in the United States have been occupied with answering a somewhat narrow question, why was the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 passed (the Act excluded Chinese labourers from entering the United States).1 The first to address the Chinese Exclusion Act was not a historian but a sociologist, Mary Roberts Coolidge in 1909. Coolidge argued that California and its working people were the key agents in instigating the Act. Workers, and in particular Irish immigrants, led by Denis Kearney, the president of the Workingmen’s Party of California, and his call of “The Chinese Must Go!” created an atmosphere of racial hatred and discrimination. This, Coolidge concluded, “was sufficient to change the policy of a nation and to commit the United States to a race discrimination at variance with our professe[d] theories of government.”2 Thirty years later in 1939, Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer’s Anti-Chinese Movement in California reaffirmed Coolidge’s thesis on Sinophobia but argued that the anti-Chinese sentiment crossed all classes in California. Investigating the cause of the racism, Sandmeyer argued that Chinese customs were incompatible with American norms, consequently laying the cultural grounds for racial hostility and ultimately the Exclusion Act of 1882.
The core arguments of these publications, all written at a time when the Exclusion Act was still enforced (it was not repealed until 1943), prevailed until the late 1960s and early 1970s. New broader approaches, chronologically and geographically, were taken by Alexander Saxton with The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California and Stuart Creighton Miller’s The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882.3 Alexander Saxton traced the roots of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the working class ideology of the Jacksonian era. This ideology was steeped in racism, for when the white working class of California encountered not blacks but Chinese they transferred racial hostility towards the perceived economic threat of the newly arrived immigrants. For the white working class of California, the Chinese represented the “indispensable enemy” of American labour, a common foe that people could unite against. Stuart Creighton Miller took an approach from an intellectual history perspective, examining thousands of books, magazines, and newspapers from the nineteenth century. Miller found numerous negative stereotypes of the Chinese, images that long preceded their arrival in North America. From this catalogue of primary sources, Miller concluded that anti-Chinese prejudice was well established and nationwide. It was this prevalence of anti-Chinese imagery that ultimately led to the Exclusion Act in 1882.
Many of the methods and approaches deployed by Alexander Saxton and Stuart Creighton Miller have been utilised by historians such as David Roediger. Roediger openly acknowledges the influence of Saxton’s “new social and cultural history of race and labor,” while at the same time tackles sources in the manner of Creighton Miller. Roediger notes, “the use of racial language and racist precedents … ran through the postbellum labor movement.” So much so that, “the labor and anti-Chinese movements overlapped so thoroughly as to be scarcely indistinguishable in California, where the exclusion issue provided the basis for labor unity at key points.”4
The focus on Sinophobia and the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act has created a historiography that mirrors the debate over white working class racism. While historians such as Gwendolyn Mink have forcefully made the connection between national organized labour and the passing of the Exclusion Act, others such as Andrew Gyory have dismissed the connection.5 Gyory instead argues that politicians used Chinese immigration as a smoke screen. In a period of rising class conflict, Gyory contents that politicians aimed both to propitiate working-class voters and to deflect attention from genuine national problems-economic depression, mass poverty, and growing unemployment. This culminated in the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act.6
Two articles published in the journal New Politics typify the historiographical debate; the first, “The Chinese Question and American Labor Historians,” an attack on Andrew Gyory’s Closing of the Gate by Stanford Lyman; and the second, Andrew Gyory’s response to Lyman’s accusations.7 Lyman sets forth his argument, pointing the finger at white working class racism for the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act. For Lyman, Gyory’s thesis, effectively laying the blame on politicians for the Exclusion Act, amounts to the denying of the racist tradition in the white working class. Gyory’s reply charges Lyman with a lack of evidence. The debate, fierce and often personal, is regarded by Gyory as an “ideological Cold War.” For Lyman it is a battle over whether organized labour’s history was from “left multiracial” roots or from “right-racist vices.”
References
1 See Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina, 1998), 1.
2 Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: 1909), 182.
3 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1992), 10-11; Matthew Frye Jacobson’s analysis although focusing on European immigrants mirrors that of Stuart Creighton Miller.
4 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1992), 179.
5 See Joanne Pope Melish, “Workers and Whiteness Revisited,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 5:4 (2008), 65-68.
6 Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina, 1998), 15.
7 Stanford Lyman, “The Chinese Question and American Labor Historians,” New Politics 4:28 (2000) <http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue28/lyman28.htm>; Andrew Gyory, “A Reply to Stanford Lyman,” New Politics 1:29 (2000) <http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue29/gyory29.htm>.
The Chinese Question 