"The Chinese Must Go" (February/March 1993 | Volume: 44, Issue: 1)

"The Chinese Must Go"

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Authors: Bernard A. Weisberger

Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)

Historic Theme:

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February/March 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 1

One splendid morning during a recent West Coast vacation, I was turning the pages of a San Francisco newspaper over my coffee when I came upon a headline that clouded my cheerful mood: GERMAN POLL FINDS SENTIMENT AGAINST FOREIGNERS RUNS DEEP. According to the story below it, one-quarter of a group of Germans polled in a survey agreed entirely or partly with the slogan “Germany for the Germans,” which right-wing extremists had been chanting during several weeks of rampages against foreign refugees. Included in the atrocities were the rock-throwing attacks on refugee shelters and the torching of foreigners’ homes. “Shades of the 1930s,” I thought with the automatic shudder that any possible neo-Nazi activity sends through me—in Germany or anywhere else.

Then I thought a bit longer. Something tickled my memory, and it flashed a new message: “Shades of the 1870s, too. And not in Europe but in San Francisco, California!” I remembered that San Francisco had been seized, in 1877, by a violent spasm of anti-foreign, specifically anti-Chinese, feeling that broke into murderous riots against innocents of the “wrong” ancestry. The fever started among working-class whites, but before it ran its full course, it infected the governments of both California and the United States, with long-lasting results.

Please understand that I have no intention of drawing farfetched comparisons, or of calling Americans of the 1870s neo-Nazis—quite the contrary. Nor do I aim to exonerate the 1990s neo-Nazis by trite reminders that they are not the first, last, or only haters to sully history’s pages with brutality. Still, one of the best things about good history is its power to reduce national arrogance and to promote reflection and caution. So, this story needs telling.

Xenophobia wasn’t new in the United States a century and a quarter ago. A strong nativist movement before the Civil War had been responsible for discrimination and occasional violence against foreign-born Catholics. In the 1850s, the Protestant crusade went political in the shape of the American (or “Know-Nothing”) party and scored some short-term gains. But California’s nativism in 1877 was especially sharp after four years of a bitter depression that had begun in 1873. (Economic pain will do that every time; the 1992 wave of German anti-foreignism is strongest in formerly Communist East Germany, where unemployment is high and living standards low.)

 

America in 1877 was hurting all over, but as is often the case, the situation was special in California, particularly in San Francisco. It was less than thirty years since the gold rush had filled the city with brazen fortune seekers. The giddiness of their expectations was now offset by brutal reality, and most of them were facing the fact that they would spend their lives in a postboom economy. Gold and silver production was down, and unemployment now hovered around 20 percent. Where land had been plentiful, the best acreage was being concentrated into great estates.

Where San Francisco grocers