Rolling Back Reconstruction

During the debates over the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), Western mounted arguments to appeal their Southern colleagues. Southerners in their turn employed the Western arguments against Chinese rights to limit the rights of Southern African Americans. Cozy bedfellows in racial politics.

According to Andrew Gyory’s study of the Chinese act (Closing the Gate, 227-8). “westerners pushed the race button at every opportunity, likening the Chinese to ‘rats,’ ‘beasts,’ and ‘swine.’ ‘The Caucasian race has a right,’ said Henry Teller (R-Colo.), ‘considering its superiority of intellectual force and mental vigor, to look down upon every other branch of the human family.” The United States, Senator Jones added, should admit only ‘favored races,’ not those ‘molded in the spirit of despotism.’ Race and civilization became one; whether skin color or culture, it was ‘impossible for a Chinaman to change.’ Jones stated the issue baldly: ‘Does anybody suppose for an instant that if the African were not in this country to-day we should be anxious to welcome him? Does any reflecting man believe that he is an advantage to this country? Is it not true if his place were occupied by smaller numbers of intelligent men of our own creative race that the country would be stronger than it is?’ As with blacks whose ‘presence here is a great misfortune to us to-day,’so with Chinese. ‘In dealing with foreign immigration,’ Jones concluded, ‘the only question we have to consider is what is best for our own race.’”

Gyory goes on, “southern senators deftly converted the anti-Chinese argument into a stinging attack on Reconstruction. Whites on the Pacific Coast were unanimously opposed to the Chinese, said Wilkinson Call (D-Fla.), and the federal government was about to grant them relief. Why not grant similar relief to the South where whites thoroughly opposed blacks? For Washington to cave in to the demands of one region and ignore those of another was unfair.”

Gyory concludes that neither racism nor labor issues in themselves could have produced the Act. Instead, it was the work of politicians: “By spewing, amplifying, and propagating racist stereotypes of the Chinese and linking the well-being of workers to the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, politicians manipulated the two most volatile issues in American societyrace and classand combined them to produce the first race-based immigration act in American history. This manipulation is the essence of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Perhaps no better example of top-down politics exists than this 1882 statute. Both West Coast agitation and general racist tendencies nationwide were essential elements contributing to the climate conducive to Chinese exclusion, but the engine fueling and steering exclusion was politics. Politicians and national party leaders were the glue welding the active anti-Chinese racism of westerners with the nascent anti-Chinese racism of other Americans. In all senses of the term, Chinese exclusion was a political act.”