Two Faces of Exclusion

The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Lon Kurashige

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469629445
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then has shaped the memory of past discrimination. In this first book-length analysis of both sides of the debate, Kurashige argues that exclusion-era policies were more than just enactments of racism; they were also catalysts for U.S.-Asian cooperation and the basis for the twenty-first century's tightly integrated Pacific world.

Chapter 1: Before the Storm

RACE FOR COMMERCIAL EMPIRE, 1846–1876

In July 1852 Senator William H. Seward projected an expansive vision of the young United States as a global power surpassing even the great British Empire. The growing importance of transpacific trade, Seward emphasized, marked a turning point in which Europe “will sink in importance; while the Pacific Ocean, its shores, its islands, and the vast regions beyond, will become the chief theatre of events.” Given that the recent statehood of California and claiming of the Oregon Territory had put America onto the shores of the Pacific, the young nation in Seward’s eyes was poised to complete its “emancipation from what remains of European influence and prejudice, and in turn develop the American opinion and influence which shall remould constitutions, laws, and customs, in the land that is first greeted by the rising sun.” The democratization of Asian nations, he proposed, would emerge as a natural result of East-West commercial relations. In this way, transpacific commerce would enable the United States to become an empire “greater than any that has ever existed.”¹

Immigration was integral to Seward’s dreams of global expansion. Not only would commerce transform the Pacific basin but also the region’s surplus populations would be relied upon to develop America’s fledging West Coast cities, industries, and economic infrastructure. Seward highlighted the recent migration of Chinese laborers to California and the Caribbean, calculating that the North American continent had the ability to absorb at least two hundred million people from China alone! Aware of America’s anti-Chinese sentiment, which was already producing discriminatory policies in California, Seward assured that Asian immigrants were no different from the nation’s millions of European foreigners: “As for those who doubt that this great movement [of Chinese migrants] will quicken activity and create wealth and power in California and Oregon, I leave them to consider what changes the movements [of European immigrants], similar in nature but inferior in force and slower in effect, have produced already on the Atlantic coast of America.”²

Seward’s vision met stiff opposition in Congress. The notion of hundreds of millions of Asians in North America was a nonstarter on Capitol Hill, notwithstanding the many Californians who were already calling for Chinese exclusion. In addition to conflict over immigration, the senator’s florid dreams faced opposition from entrenched regional, party, and ideological interests. The Civil War, however, boosted his chances, as Seward became secretary of state under President Abraham Lincoln, while the secession of the South left the business-friendly Republican Party firmly in power. Secretary Seward improved relations with China and Japan in order to increase transpacific commerce and migration. His actions, as much as anyone else’s at the time, fixed a positive construction of Asian immigrants firmly within the federal government. Even after his death in 1872, an expansionist immigration constituency, with deep roots among Republicans and bipartisan congressional support, managed to hold off increasingly strong attempts to exclude Chinese immigrants.

This chapter explores the exclusion debate during the first three decades of America’s engagement as a Pacific nation. While most Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century celebrated expansion from “sea to shining sea,” few grasped what Seward had already known: unencumbered commercial relations with Asia meant the beginning of free-flowing transpacific migration. Joining Seward were fellow Republicans friendly to the maritime interests of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Missionaries, too, championed Chinese immigrants as a sign of healthy U.S.-China relations, as did proponents of mining, railroads, and other western industries that came to rely on Chinese labor. After the Civil War, Radical Republicans, who opposed slavery and defended the freedmen’s and freewomen’s rights, added a racial egalitarian element to the expansionist constituency in seeking to include Chinese immigrants as part of sweeping civil rights protections designed to empower African Americans in the defeated South. The exclusionists, on the other hand, wanted to reap the benefits of becoming a Pacific nation without having to pay the price of Asian immigration. They were concerned about the economic opportunities for everyday Americans that West Coast expansion made possible. Exclusionists opposed Chinese immigrants as a tool of western capitalists and northeastern financiers leveled against the economic rights and racial privileges of the nation’s landless poor, growing industrial workforce, and downtrodden European immigrant groups. Often—though not always—foes of Radical Republicans, exclusionists also viewed the Chinese as a threat to the nation’s whiteness, as well as to its European-based culture and institutions.

Expansionism and Divergent Notions of Empire

America’s Pacific adventures grew out of the thriving China trade that, beginning in the early Republic, involved scores of merchant houses and clipper ships based largely in Boston, New York, and other northeastern ports. American vessels brought items such as sea otter skins, seal pelts, ginseng root, Hawaiian sandalwood, Mexican silver, and eventually opium to China in return for teas, silks, porcelain, and refined cotton cloth. Starting in the 1820s the trading ships would also carry an increasing number of missionaries on their way to China, Hawai‘i, and other Asia-Pacific outposts. Yet it was not until the 1840s that the U.S. government became directly engaged in transpacific commerce. During this crucial decade the nation claimed its first territories on the Pacific coast and also signed its first commercial treaty with China. American traders and missionaries welcomed President James K. Polk’s support for their endeavors. In settling the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain and wresting California from Mexico, the president put the country in a prime position to forge a transpacific commercial empire—something he, Seward, and numerous other public figures and private profit seekers had long desired. Most Americans mistook the grabbing of western ports in California and the Puget Sound as the nation’s “manifest destiny,” as if God, rather than the calculating designs of American statesmen, had ordained the course of expansion.³

The establishment of U.S. states and territories on the Pacific Ocean followed on the heels of continental expansion to Texas. In 1836 American settlers, who two decades earlier had been invited by Mexican officials to develop lands north of the Rio Grande River, fomented a revolution that launched Texas as an independent republic. The plan all along was for the vast southwestern territory to be annexed by the United States, but many U.S. policy makers feared this would provoke war with Mexico, which disputed the new Lone Star republic’s boundaries. More important, Texans’ embrace of slavery induced bitter sectional and partisan conflict in Congress. Northerners and members of the Whig Party opposed annexation as a plot by southerners to expand slavery. While Whigs and northeastern commercial interests favored the old nationalist economic vision of Alexander Hamilton, their rivals—Democrats and southern slave owners—shared Thomas Jefferson’s and, more immediately, Andrew Jackson’s suspicions of federal authority.

In the 1844 presidential election, Hamiltonians rallied around the Whig Henry Clay’s protectionist “American system” that emphasized high tariffs and infrastructural improvements, while Jeffersonians remained true to the laissez-faire tradition of Andrew Jackson and his fellow Tennessean Democrat James Polk. Polk won the presidency as a dark horse candidate mainly because he embraced the annexation of Texas and an expansive Oregon claim, while Clay equivocated on both issues. Even before Polk entered the White House, Congress welcomed Texas into the Union. Oregon followed in 1846 when President Polk pressured Great Britain to cede its land claims below the forty-ninth parallel and to set this longitude as the territory’s northern border. Meanwhile, the annexation of Texas provoked the feared war with Mexico in which the victorious Americans in 1848 confirmed its hold on Texas while acquiring the rest of Mexico’s northern territories, including the prize of California.⁴

Expansion to the West Coast united the U.S. policy makers in a way that had been impossible just a few years earlier regarding the annexation of Texas. Polk’s election proved that expansionism had become popular, and the Mexican war only raised the appeal of the Democrats’ cry for manifest destiny. But the boost to Pacific commerce made possible by expansion was more important to Hamiltonian Whigs and Yankees. This time they joined with Jeffersonian Democrats and southerners in celebrating the inclusion of vast western territories. Spacious dreams about the China market bridged partisan, sectional, and ideological divides. It was not just Yankees like Seward who championed Pacific commerce. In his day, Thomas Jefferson himself had stressed the importance of Oregon as the entry point to the vast riches of the Orient. So too did the inveterate southern Democrat John C. Calhoun, who well before Seward saw the opening up of ports in China, and potentially Japan and across East Asia, as marking a new day in world history. “These ports,” Calhoun predicted, “will be opened; and the whole of that portion of Asia, containing nearly half the population and wealth of the globe, will be thrown open to the commerce of the world and be placed within the pales of European and American intercourse and civilization.”⁵

Thomas Hart Benton was one of the most outspoken Democrats touting America’s Pacific destiny. Benton was a lion among western senators, who with his peers Stephen Douglas (Illinois) and Lewis Cass (Michigan) repeatedly stood for continental expansion. The Missouri senator’s fantasies about China’s riches and America’s commercial prospects in the Pacific matched those of his Whig rival William Seward. Benton, too, underscored the importance of Chinese labor migration to develop the American West, while couching his vision of U.S.-China commerce within a broad understanding of the transition from the Atlantic to the Pacific World. The Missourian portrayed Europeans, and now Americans, as the vanguard race that was destined to revive the once-great civilization of China through East-West commercial and racial integration. In defending the importance of the Oregon Territory in 1846, he proclaimed that the “sun of civilization must shine across the sea: socially and commercially, the van of the Caucasians, and the rear of the Mongolians, must intermix. They must talk together, and trade together, and marry together. Commerce is a great civilizer—social intercourse as great—and marriage greater. The white and yellow races can marry together, as well as eat and trade together.”⁶

Caleb Cushing was another American who epitomized the bipartisan appeal of Pacific commerce. The scion of a wealthy Massachusetts shipping magnate, Cushing graduated Harvard College in 1817 and eventually won election to the Bay State legislature and then to the U.S. Congress. He distinguished himself by serving, at different times, both the Democratic and Whig Parties. In 1843 President John Tyler, a lapsed Whig, appointed the New Englander to lead the first U.S. diplomatic mission to China, where a year later Cushing gained privileges for the United States that took advantage of Britain’s wedge into the China market introduced after its victory in the First Opium War. This war concluded in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking, in which defeated China agreed to replace the Canton system of highly restricted international trade with one much more favorable to the foreign “barbarians.” Following Britain’s lead, Cushing in 1844 negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia that accorded to Americans the same privileges enjoyed by the British or any other favored nation in China. Such rights rested on access to, and equal privileges within, five “treaty ports” newly opened up by the British. They also included protections for foreign missionaries as well as the controversial privilege of extraterritoriality, which granted foreigners immunity from Chinese law. Whether led by Democrats or Whigs, America’s China policy (if it can be called that) was essentially to follow Britain’s lead as it continued the pattern of military victory over Chinese forces leading to expanded trading rights and opportunities. By the end of the Arrow War (Second Opium War) in 1860, American merchants and missionaries were able to practice their trades and preach the Gospel across a wide swath of a nation that for centuries had been off-limits to foreigners.⁷

Despite bipartisan interests in China, Americans projected different visions of national development onto the nation’s Pacific destiny. To Democrats, the promise of Chinese markets justified the kind of continental expansion that Jefferson believed was necessary to maintain access to landholding for a growing republic of independent farmers. Benton typified the Jeffersonian vision while including not just yeoman farmers but also urban workers, artisans, and even manufacturers. Democrats embraced what Benton called the “productive and burthen-bearing classes” as the backbone to a developmental model that valued economic opportunity and social mobility as bulwarks against Old World concentrations of wealth and power. This Jacksonian “producer ethic” was at odds with bankers and other agents of monopoly capital that in the eyes of Democrats threatened to diminish the freedoms of the common man. Party members applauded the inclusion of California and Oregon because it not only expanded the nation but also, more importantly, enabled the long-term economic viability of their “Empire of Liberty.” Ever since Jefferson’s day, proponents of this kind of land-based empire celebrated westerners and the frontier as the taproot for American democracy. At the same time, they looked with dismay at the settled and “civilized” East Coast that was said to resemble the traditional and undemocratic ways of Europe.⁸

Whigs and Yankees, on the other hand, were less troubled by East Coast civilization or its Old World progenitors. Seward and other Hamiltonians were particularly impressed with the commercial power of the British Empire, using it as a model for America’s economic development. The three Whig goals of American development were to increase manufacturing, speed up movement of goods and crops to market, and open up and ensure overseas trade. Protective tariffs were to take care of the first goal and internal improvements the second. The final goal of overseas trade was to be met principally by the promise of Pacific commerce. Unlike Jeffersonians, Hamiltonians were more concerned with catching up and surpassing the global power of the British Empire than with access to landholding. While Democrats and westerners saw the China trade as means for maintaining land-based social equality at home, Whigs and Yankees saw the inclusion of Pacific ports as a means for transforming America into a global maritime empire.⁹

A crucial instrument for controlling the seas was the permanent placement of U.S. gunboats in China. Begun in 1835, the Navy’s Asiatic squadron anchored two ships in Chinese waters after the opening of treaty ports, and with the expansion of U.S.-China trading and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations, the force increased by 1860 to thirty-one vessels. The squadron, like those from Britain, France, Holland, and other imperial powers, escorted diplomats, protected the nation’s citizens, and served as a constant reminder to Chinese officials of its weakness vis-à-vis foreign powers. While America was not yet an imperial power like these other nations, its “gunboat diplomacy” in China revealed that it was not opposed to using military pressure to gain international advantages. The emerging outlines of American empire could also be detected after the inclusion of California and Oregon spurred northeastern financiers to explore plans for a transcontinental railroad, as well as an isthmian canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Moreover, in 1853 U.S. commodore Matthew C. Perry, upon threat of force, opened up Japan, which for two hundred years had isolated itself from world affairs. Perry’s naval steamships, known to the Japanese as “black ships” because of the soot they billowed, were a marvel of transoceanic technology that would transform the Pacific into a busy commercial thoroughfare. In 1858 the Treaty of Amity and Commerce established formal U.S.-Japan relations and guaranteed trading rights for the United States, as well as a coaling station in Japan and extraterritoriality for its citizens.¹⁰

Concurrent developments in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i foretold the nation’s imperial future as well. In 1848 the Hawaiian king initiated a process of land reform (mahele) that, in addition to creating legal claims to land, made it possible for foreigners to own property. This proved a great boon to American investment in the islands’ nascent sugar industry, which would experience an astronomical rate of growth and launch the political ascent of a handful of American planter families that would establish a kind of plantation-based oligarchy. The “Big Five” companies that came to control Hawai‘i’s political-economy were C. Brewer & Co., Castle & Cooke, American Factors, Alexander & Baldwin, and Theo. H. Davies & Company. But the mahele, for native Hawaiians, risked empowering acquisitive foreigners who placed profits and saving souls above local sovereignty.¹¹

All of the above proposed or actual components of Pacific commerce in the middle of the nineteenth century had one thing in common: they were northeastern, Yankee endeavors. The China trade at this point held little promise for the agrarian southern economy. While Chinese merchants bought manufactured cotton from New England factories, they had little use for the South’s raw cotton crop. The sectional difference regarding the China trade was evident in congressional voting on transpa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Before the Storm
• Chapter 2: First Downpour
• Chapter 3: Eye of the Storm
• Chapter 4: Rising Tide of Fear
• Chapter 5: Flood Control
• Chapter 6: Silver Lining
• Chapter 7: Winds of War
• Chapter 8: After the Storm
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliographic Essay
• Index