History Forum / General / General Topics / June 2007

"Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears ..."

So goes the song that many Americans believe should be their national
anthem.

But in reality, that song - our nation -- shamelessly and conveniently
overlook the fact that the United States, purported home of "liberty
and justice for all," and where millions of duped, brainwashed, close-
minded, and ill-informed citizens believe that "all men are created
equal," fatuously celebrates a history and legacy that is factually
way off the mark.

Many of you know the truth -- that centuries of slavery, lynchings,
racism, segregation, prejudice, religious intolerance, and ethnic
persecution are still glossed over in school history lessons and are
swept under the carpet of "tradition."

A new book about how the United States treated Chinese immigrants
provides many insights of incredible cruelty and criminal policy
directed toward human beings, beyond the "spacious skies and amber
waves of grain."

It sure would have been difficult to find anybody "good" then to
"crown with brotherhood."  Maybe tougher even today.

----------------------------------------------------

Book Review
By Rachel Hartigan Shea,
A Senior Editor at Book World
The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 19, 2007; C08

"DRIVEN OUT"
"The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans"

By Jean Pfaelzer
Random House. 400 pp. $27.95

Between 1850 and 1906, thousands of Chinese were systematically
expelled from roughly 100 towns in the Pacific Northwest. Chinatowns
were burned to the ground, their residents sent on forced marches to
the next settlement. Chinese laborers were murdered at work or in
their beds. Some were lynched. Others were starved out as white
citizens fired them from their jobs and refused to sell them food.

"The term expulsion doesn't fully represent the rage and violence of
these purges," writes Jean Pfaelzer, a professor of English, East
Asian studies and American studies at the University of Delaware, in
"Driven Out," her comprehensive account of these events. "What
occurred along the Pacific Coast, from the gold rush through the turn
of the century, was ethnic cleansing." Words such as ethnic cleansing
and pogrom, which she also uses to describe the purges, clang
unpleasantly against the ears of Americans, conjuring as they do
faraway, foreign violence, but Pfaelzer makes the strong case, as do
several recent books about expulsions of African Americans, that the
words accurately convey America's bloody racial history.

The Chinese had no fear of racial violence at first. They'd traveled
to the American West for the same reason most everybody else had --
gold fever. Shipping companies recruiting miners promised that
Americans "want the Chinaman to come and will make him welcome."
Fleeing poverty and dangerous warlords, the Chinese made their way
across the Pacific to America, where "money is in great plenty and to
spare." But it wasn't: Most miners came out of the gold fields poorer
than when they'd started. Instead of making their fortunes, writes
Pfaelzer, the Chinese "became the workforce for California's new
manufacturing industries and construction projects -- road building,
irrigation, land reclamation, in canneries, jute mills, and cigar-
rolling factories, and large-scale agriculture on the new vineyards
and orchards."

For reasons both racial and economic, whites came to loathe them. The
Chinese, many of whom maintained their traditional dress and
hairstyles, looked more foreign to Americans and Europeans than other
immigrants did. And the federal government passed laws to keep them
foreign, forbidding longtime residents from becoming naturalized
citizens, unlike all other immigrants. They could not vote or testify
in court. Cities, including San Francisco, passed cubic air ordinances
-- limiting the number of people who could live together -- that were
aimed directly at the overcrowded Chinese in Chinatown. So were laws
forbidding laundries in wooden buildings and the use of shoulder poles
to carry baskets.

In an echo of today's immigration debate, the Chinese had become
caught between big business and the working man. Big business, which
controlled industries such as mining, timber and agriculture, wanted
cheap Chinese labor, but white laborers believed the Chinese kept
everyone's wages down. "White workers who had come west with dreams of
opportunity, individualism, rugged endurance, and equality," writes
Pfaelzer, "faced instead corruption, radical disparities in political
power, and an increasing concentration of wealth." It seemed easier to
attack the Chinese competition than the powers that pulled the
strings. "For the many unemployed white laborers, the Chinese became a
hated surrogate for absentee factory owners and distant landlords."
Organizations with names such as the "Supreme Order of the Caucasians"
and the "Anti-Coolie Union" sprang up, determined to drive the Chinese
out.

The white workers had more power than they realized. When it came to
the purges, the businessmen always caved, though it went sorely
against their economic interests. According to Pfaelzer, "The roundups
were also led by mayors and governors, judges and newspaper editors,
wealthy timbermen and ranchers willing to betray their needs for cheap
labor in order to mark their common whiteness." In Truckee, a lumber
town high in the Sierra Nevada mountains, the editor of the newspaper
organized a boycott of all the businesses that still employed Chinese.
Almost every Chinese worker was fired, several were murdered, and the
Chinatown was destroyed. Within 10 weeks, the second largest
population of Chinese immigrants in California had dispersed.

But in hardly any of these incidents did the Chinese succumb without a
fight. Indeed, the most interesting thread of this exhaustive book is
the Chinese immigrants' sense of entitlement to justice and equal
treatment. Chinese residents under threat of a purge would organize
small but potent acts of civil disobedience: refusing to sell much-
desired vegetables to whites, for instance, or to pick crops at
harvest time, and returning laundry folded but still soiled. And it
was a given -- the municipalities trying to expel them knew it -- that
Chinese immigrants would sue for damages if they were forced out.
Despite the legal system's built-in biases, and with the help of good
lawyers, they often won. The Chinese had the benefit (and sometime
curse) of being beholden to the Six Companies, Chinese merchant
organizations based in San Francisco that controlled immigration and
trade and had "learned how to negotiate with state and town
governments on behalf of the overseas Chinese, thus providing them an
institutional buffer unavailable to African Americans or Native
Americans," according to Pfaelzer.

The expulsion of the Chinese is recorded encyclopedically in "Driven
Out," with many towns earning their time in Pfaelzer's harsh
spotlight. And the research Pfaelzer did to recount each step along
the way toward "ethnic cleansing" in Eureka, Truckee, Tacoma, Shasta,
Chico and elsewhere must have been grueling. But so, regrettably, is
the reading of this worthy catalogue of injustice, for expulsion
methods did not vary much from town to town. The terrible details
amass, and their power to shock diminishes. What a shame, for we need
to be reminded how easily the law can be twisted away from justice and
how quickly communities can turn toward hate.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/18/AR2007061801587.html