Reinvestigating the Origins of Chinese Exclusion (Chapter 2, Naruta 2006)

pages 22-70 of Naruta 2006

Reinvestigating the Origins of Chinese Exclusion………………22

Chapter 2: Reinvestigating the Origins of Chinese Exclusion

Accounts of California’s early development have long employed a hypothesis that attempts to explain the origins, rise, and widespread acceptance of anti-Chinese racism and the creation of Chinese Exclusion policies as part European American workers creating white group identity and solidarity. This chapter identifies this traditional hypothesis, portions of which are often un-articulated, and shows its rise and persistence in historiography regarding the Chinese Exclusion Movements. The hypothesis can be tested against empirical evidence. The first component of this hypothesis testing comes in this chapter’s examination of historical data available from contemporary newspapers, books, and pamphlets, and the archived papers of mainstream Anglo-American businessmen and politicians. Archaeological data in the following chapters provide an effective complimentary component of hypothesis testing.

The long-accepted account of the Chinese Exclusion movements is that they were created, participated in, and propagated through the actions of working-class whites, as a part of their agitating and organizing for better employment conditions. It posits the prime movers to be white laboring men, and especially unemployed Irish immigrants. This idea that discrimination against Chinese Californians allowed formation of male white laborers’ solidarity against big business received a definitive treatment in Saxton’s 1971 monograph, The Indispensable Enemy. Due to the symbolic role of unemployed Irish laborers in this explanation, it is heuristically referred to here as the Irish Laborer Hypothesis.

This chapter delineates the multiple components of the Irish Laborer Hypothesis. In a particular employment of the hypothesis—as often happens with explanations that have passed over into the realm of “common sense”—portions may be expressed though not directly unarticulated, and some components of the hypothesis are possibly contradictory. The Irish Laborer Hypothesis includes the idea that Irish immigrants were inherently prejudiced against and acted discriminatorily towards Chinese Californians. Related to this idea of essential prejudice is the conception of the processes behind Chinese Exclusion as having been a relatively static phenomenon, a sort of underlying racism that was natural among our backward predecessors but now—and equally naturally—eliminated through progress. Or, although in some contradiction, Chinese Exclusion sentiment among whites is seen as a phenomenon that arose with the 1877 riot in San Francisco, and after having briefly flared up, more or less concluded with the 1882 passage of Chinese Exclusion legislation. The traditional account also employs an economic determinism: seeing events as having been motivated by competition over jobs due to economic recession, it accepts a recession as an explanation, without examining whether causes of the recession may be contributing factors. It forgets that this period was also part of the Industrial Revolution, and neglects the role of mechanization in increasing job competition. Additionally, the Irish Laborer Hypothesis, by arguing that a sense of group solidarity brought about through people of European descent organizing against Chinese American workers (Sandmeyer 1973[1939]; Saxton 1971), alleges nineteenth-century Chinese American workers were anti-union, and ignores their documented work to both unionize themselves and participate in larger organizations such as the Knights of Labor (Friday 1991; Costello et al. 1999: 11; Lyman 2000). Finally, it posits an intriguing phenomenon, that groups of white laborers and unemployed for a time steered national policy. All these components of the Irish Laborer Hypothesis can be tested with historical and archaeological data.

In this chapter I critically analyze the historiography about the Chinese Exclusion movements in relation to primary source evidence about events held to be key in the Irish Laborer Hypothesis. I discuss the secondary and tertiary source account of these events, which are found to frequently name as responsible for events people different than those identified in historical documents from the time. Investigating primary source evidence indicates it was a number of wealthy and politically-connected Anglo-American Californians with networks connected with the San Francisco Bay Area, and Oakland in particular, who played pivotal roles in the Chinese Exclusion movements. These individuals made claims whiteness corresponded to entitlement to natural resources, and a sketch of their actions and financial interests suggests that it’s necessary to study how ideas about white and Chinese races, and assertions of inherent conflict between them, were constructed and used by a minority of European Americans striving for their personal benefit at the expense of others, regardless of “race.” I find that discourse about inherent characteristics of races, and assertions races were in inevitable conflict, increased during periods of economic hardship, especially when economic stresses on working people, farmers, and entrepreneurs of small or moderate means were exacerbated by monopolistic business practices. Data of subsequent chapters echoes and amplifies these findings.

Such suggestions indicate achieving a more accurate and nuanced account of the Chinese Exclusion movements requires looking at the roles played by individual and allied white political, social, and business leaders, as well as investigating whether and how racial identity formation may have been part of strategies used by certain wealthy white politicians and business leaders to deflect widespread criticism of their practices. As the political charge of racial identity formation processes colored both contemporary and subsequent accounts, it’s therefore essential to employ methodologies able to recover and evaluate empirical evidence about the associated events, and analyze them within their historical, social, economic, political, and physical contexts. The motivations, characteristics, and actions of individuals and groups cannot be merely inferred from some aspect of their presumed identity or affiliation.

If heuristically framing the traditional account of the origins of Chinese Exclusion as the Irish Laborer Hypothesis seems to be creating a straw man, it’s worthwhile to examine one instance demonstrating the pervasive influence this hypothesis has had on historical scholarship, even to the present day. With long acceptance of the assertion that unemployed Irish workers believed in an inherent conflict between Irish and Chinese immigrant laborers, the Irish Laborer Hypothesis often further transmutes into a conception of the Irish as inherently discriminatory against the Chinese. Researcher Pan (1995: 26) demonstrates this in mentioning a scheme whereby demolishing San Francisco Chinatown was proposed as a solution to the bubonic plague scare of 1900 (see C. McClain 1994: 234-76). Pan (1995: 26) explains

Mayor James Phelan, who had been dreaming of making San Francisco the jewel of the Pacific coast, was among the most ardent agitators for the removal of Chinatown. His Irish background made him hostile to the Orientals to such a degree that he would do anything to have Chinatown, the “shame of the city,” taken off the city map altogether, if possible. The quarantine was used as an excuse to serve his purpose.

Here Pan asserts the Mayor is hostile to the residents of Chinatown due to “[h]is Irish background.” Yet more relevant than Phelan’s Irish background is his financial stake in the redevelopment that would be made possible through removing the Chinatown from its prime downtown location. Pan (1995: 64) relays Phelan’s long-standing economic motive in a description of a 1906 attempt to dislocate the Chinatown and redevelop its land:

Now that [Phelan] was also the chairman of the new Sub-committee for City Planning, he earnestly wanted the Chinese out. Personally, James Phelan had faith in the speculation possibilities of San Francisco real estate, and in 1881 – 1882, he spent half a million dollars to construct the Phelan building on property owned at the north-western corner of Market, Dupont [now Grant], and O’Farrell streets, close to Chinatown.

Pan reports that Phelan would have directly profited from Chinatown being removed from the downtown. Pan’s attributing Mayor Phelan’s turn-of-the-century invective against the Chinatown as prejudice naturally arising from his Irish background, then, actually obscured evidence with far more relevance than Phelan’s ethnic background. Phelan’s documented real estate speculation gave a profit motive to his call to redevelop the Chinatown, demonstrating the necessity of research based in empirical evidence, rather than conjecture based on assumed essential natures.

The utility of re-examining the Irish laborer hypothesis is demonstrated in looking at a Bay Area event from the early U.S. period. In 1854, wrote an eyewitness, the San Francisco “authorities” ordered a shipload of six hundred newly-arrived Chinese people who had contracted typhus to be stranded without medical attention, food, or water on a barren island in the San Francisco Bay (Burrell 187-?: 399). One Oaklander, the adolescent daughter of a white family emigrated from New York, later recorded:

The authorities had [the six hundred Chinese] put upon Goat Island, then called Yerba Buena. They lay there abandoned without care or water or food. They died by scores. My mother and some of the other women declared that they would not allow such inhumanity to continue and they hired some whitehall boats and prepared to go to the rescue of these unhappy people. Then the men would not allow their wives to go but they got doctors, nurses, and medicines and went to the place which had no shade, even. In all about 60 of them lived (Burrell 187-?: 399).

Author Ellen Burrell is explicit that the perpetrators of this massacre of over five hundred people were not vigilantes or hoodlums, but “the authorities” of San Francisco. Ellen Burrell would know--her father was A.W. Burrell, at that time already a two-year member of Oakland’s first Board of Trustees (Kinnaird 1966 [Vol. 2]: 491).^[1]

If the 1854 Goat Island Massacre set a tone for white/Chinese relations in the Bay Area, it would not be the last time white governing authorities sought physical separation from Chinese Californians by imprisoning them on an island. Subsequent years saw the official creation of “The Chinese” or “Mongolian” race as the legal designation for anyone of Chinese heritage, regardless of country of origin (C. McClain 1994: 155-156). And with this codification came efforts to segregate of the people so designated and a systematic deprivation of their civil rights. When the federal government implemented a national scheme requiring all “Chinese” to register and carry special identification, white authorities proposed dealing with the resulting mass civil disobedience by creating a detention facility to which some 50,000 protesters would be exiled prior to removal to China (Oakland Enquirer, 15 February 1893). The year 1910 saw the opening of the Angel Island Immigration Station, and as its Detention Center began operations that would infamously detain hundreds on Angel Island (Lai, Lim, and Yung 1980), those pressing for Chinese Exclusion finally achieved their symbolic exile of “the Chinese.”

In between the Goat Island Massacre and the opening of Angel Island, individuals and groups of whites violently attacked and/or murdered Chinese people, excluded people of Chinese descent from the right to naturalization or the right to testify in court, and passed numerous discriminatory laws against Chinese and Chinese Americans. When following the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and its assurance of equal protection under the law, Chinese and Chinese American litigants successfully challenged a law that established segregation of “Mongolian” children in public schools, state legislators amended the law, and in San Francisco this segregation operated under the “separate but equal” argument for the next seventy years (Healy and Chew 1905; Chinn, Lai, and Choy 1969: 23-9; C. McClain 1994: 134-43). Ideas about “race” and appropriate “race relations” were further created through and reflected in anti-miscegenation laws—when challenged, for example, by a native-born Mexican citizen of Chinese ancestry and a white U.S. citizen, a court ruled the law did not rely on legal standing related to immigration, but reaffirmed it applied to race regardless of citizenship (Oakland Enquirer, 25 January 1892). Legislation and judicial rulings attempting to strip civil rights from Chinese seemed to be taken by some as authorization for violence and murder, and racially-motivated killings and attempted expulsions occurred throughout the later nineteenth century. In mainstream white public discourse there was created “The Chinese Question,” an argument that immigrant Chinese laborers both were necessarily in competition with white labors and were introducing to California a new kind of slavery. “The Chinese Question” rapidly became shorthand for a notion that “whites” and “Chinese” could not mutually coexist in the same geographic area.

In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, establishing laws and regulations ostensibly designed to prevent Chinese “laborers” from immigrating to the U.S. The definition of laborer was construed as broadly as possible, and Congress subsequently renewed and amended Chinese Exclusion laws to prohibit immigration of all persons of Chinese descent except well-capitalized merchants, students, and members of the clergy who could pass interrogation practices and standards of evidence designed to keep out even those eligible to entry (Fu 1907; Chew 1908; Chinn, Lai, and Choy 1969; C. McClain 1994; E. Lee 1997, 2003; Greene, Glass, and Nealand 2004). Immigration inspectors and the heads of immigration departments publicly prided themselves on working to exclude every person of Chinese ancestry from the United States, and were retained and promoted based on perceptions of their success. In California, the Angel Island Immigration Station was constructed to allow better enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion laws, where better enforcement was a shorthand for total exclusion.

The motivations for the Angel Island Immigration Station and the anti-Chinese sentiments it represented can be traced to the early development of California. When the U.S. made California a state in 1850, it was already established as a multicultural state, populated by people who had been drawn to the Gold Rush economy from all over the world. Whites had lived in the same areas and same dwellings as Chinese Americans, worked together, did business together, and bought and sold goods and services from each other (e.g. Minnick 1988; See 1995; Farkas 1998; Praetzellis 1999; Wen 2005). Whites and Chinese intermarried (e.g. Farwell 1885: 15-16; I. Chang 2003: 110-113, 196-197, 400-401, 87), and after a law forbade marriage between a Chinese and a white, some couples still found ways to wed by commissioning lawyers to draw up legally-binding contract marriages, as See (1995: 56) records in an 1897 example from her own great-grandparents. Such examples indicate the wide diversity of ways in which people of different backgrounds approached being a part of California’s multicultural setting. It is worth investigating by what processes did whites come to desire—or perhaps merely accept—the idea of Chinese Exclusion to the extent of allowing openly discriminatory laws and practices.

The dominant trend among historians has been to write about the era of Chinese Exclusion as though that period’s racism, discriminatory legislation, and harassment and violence against Chinese were all the work of a portion of the white working classes. Looking at a recent analysis by sociologist and historian Lyman (2000) indicates there’s no mystery about the beginnings of this historiographic pattern; Lyman notes early white labor historians actually counted Chinese Exclusion legislation as one of their accomplishments. In one example of what he’s identified as a larger pattern, Lyman relays a passage from Perlman’s (1922: 62) A History of Trade Unionism in the United States:

The anti-Chinese agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian labor and the labor movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of classes.

Perlman frames pushing for Chinese Exclusion as something that let early white unions get on with their task of organizing to gain workers’ rights. A similar perspective is seen in the seminal work studying the history of the Chinese Exclusion movements, historian Andrew Saxton’s 1971 monograph. Saxton’s analysis differs significantly in that he holds anti-Chinese racism and discrimination to have been a shameful episode. Yet, with the subtitle announcing the study of Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, Saxton choose as his title The Indispensable Enemy. As the title suggests, Saxton (1995[1971]: 263) records early California labor unions coalescing against big business via opposition to Chinese laborers, and holds that in the period from the end of the Civil War up to the “permanent exclusion” of Chinese and then Japanese immigrants in the early twentieth century, unions found polemical rhetoric against Chinese Californians and accompanying anti-Chinese discrimination “indispensable” organizing tools. In this thesis we see Saxton sharing with Perlman the idea that anti-Chinese discrimination facilitated trade unions meeting their goal. Yet to announce a viewpoint that Chinese were the enemy—“indispensable” or otherwise—unnecessarily frames the discussion in essentializing and deterministic terms. Naming Chinese laborers an “enemy” “indispensable” to the rise of labor unions would be anathema to many in the nineteenth and early twentieth century who espoused workers’ rights and socialistic causes without framing their struggle as being one of whites against Chinese. S. Miller (1969: 197) reports examples of such organizers, and Saxton (1995[1971]: xvi) mentions an 1880s organizer—a Polish Jew and Socialist named Sigismund Danielewicz—who, while founding the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, kept to “principles of interracial equality.” That the “indispensable enemy” thesis brings an unwarranted determinism has been pointed out by historian and sociologist Chris Friday (1991). His dissertation on “Asian workers in the Pacific Coast canned-salmon industry” from 1870 to 1942, in its title Indispensable Allies, indicates the error of assuming a necessary and inevitable antagonism between Chinese and white labor.

Neither would it be correct to create a non-racist history of early white union development. Without a doubt, the labor unions of this period who achieved sustained press coverage and official recognition relied heavily on an “us-against-them” position in organizing and attempting to wield their collective weight. This is readily visible in their later propaganda, such as the American Federation of Labor’s 1901-2 pamphlet, Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism (Lyman 2000: n. 199). The illustration on the Alameda County Workingmen’s Ticket for the 1878 election depicted the giant boot of the Workingmen’s Party kicking a Coolie caricature out of California towards China (reproduced in Dicker 1979: 59). Many everyday objects were used as an opportunity to reiterate this antagonistic position. Figure 2-1 reproduces one example, a full-page advertisement from an 1888 commemorative volume of the Oakland Enquirer. The ad promoted “Stylish Dress Suits to Order [from] the largest stock of suitings on the coast” and “neckwear, all the latest styles, as they appear in New York and Boston, received weekly.” Its headlining product was “White Labor Prize Medal Shirts.” The “White Labor” descriptor reflects labor unions’ movements to have certifications of “white labor only,” meant to signify absence of Chinese or Chinese American employees, attached to consumer products and services then popularly associated with Chinese businesses: cigars, shoes, clothing, and laundry (Saxton 1995[1971]:168-9; Chinn, Lai, and Choy 1969; R. Allen, et al. 2002: 14; Illustrated Directory Company 1896). Clearly, many emerging white labor unions were deeply involved in the anti-Chinese agitations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet to find that a small group of white workingmen were able to compel a nation to act in accordance with a view widely abhorred would be an unusual social phenomenon. The accuracy of this hypothesis can be investigated with further evidence from material culture.

We might note that the 1888 full-page ad for “White Labor Prize Medal Shirts” is not a certifying document passed between a manufacturer and a labor union, but rather an advertisement, soliciting the business of a customer of high enough social and economic standing to be interested in selecting from “the largest stock of suitings on the coast” in ordering a tailored dress suit and keeping up with “the latest styles” of New York and Boston. An advertisement might use a strategy of marketing to a lower socio-economic demographic through symbols associated with a higher socio-economic profile, but this advertisement was placed in an expensive commemorative volume. The market for the commemorative volume, combined with the fact it was advertising dress shirts and tailoring, require us to consider whether, and in what ways, an anti-Chinese message was part of a genuine attempt to appeal to white middle and upper class sensibilities. This single ad is not the only example of anti-Chinese racism exhibited in cultural products for or by middle and upper class whites, as demonstrated in works such as Choy, Dong, and Hom (1994) and Brown, et al. (2003). Considering such artifacts, it becomes harder to maintain that white discrimination against Chinese and Chinese Americans was in any way the exclusive domain of members of the white working class. The interpretation of these primary source materials urges us to look beyond the now-traditional viewpoint that working class whites held white politicians, business leaders, and other policymakers prisoner to their racism. Events like the San Francisco “authorities” stranding to their death on Goat Island six hundred newly-arrived and ill Chinese show us understanding the origins of Chinese Exclusion and its related racialization processes requires empirical research into actions supporting it.

Of those analyzing the rise of Chinese Exclusion legislation, historian Gyory (1998) investigates whether labor unions might not have been the prime mover. He attempts to answer “a simple question: Why did the United States pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882?” and declares that the actual driving force “was national politicians who seized and manipulated the issue in an effort to gain votes, while arguing that workers had long demanded Chinese exclusion and would benefit from it” (Gyory (1998: 1). Gyory analyses politicians’ speeches and legislation, and demonstrates encouraging white racial identification and white versus non-white racial antagonism was used for political manipulation. Yet he never investigates facts around politicians’ claims that “workers had long demanded Chinese exclusion and would benefit from it.” Avoiding merely echoing nineteenth-century stereotypes requires researching a number of issues. Research is needed to investigate whether Chinese Exclusion as the solution to economic problems was actually was the opinion held by those trying to achieve more equitable relations between large corporations and those whose economic well-being came under their influence, farmers, workers, and entrepreneurs of small and moderate means. Investigations should also consider whether particular politicians felt there might have been some benefit to inaccurately asserting worker demands hinged on Chinese Exclusion. That anti-Chinese racism was pushed as a wedge issue to divert agitation for business and corporate reforms is indicated in evidence such as the speech given by E.J. Dahms at an 1886 Anti-Chinese Rally in Alameda, California. Claiming “a man who supported the Chinese was a man without conscience,” Dahms “asked for unity between [white] capitalists and working men” against the Chinese (Alameda's Architectural & Historical Survey 1979). The speech not only hints of objections among whites to an anti-Chinese program, it makes clear politicians’ strategies of supporting Chinese Exclusion was not simply a matter of winning votes through pandering to a preexisting sentiment. Instead, it functions here as a diversionary tactic to assert the existence of a common cause among an array of “whites” whose goals were anything but shared. Despite such evidence from his study period of interrelationships between politics and big business, Gyory frames his study under an assumption that politicians and businessmen exist and operate in separate spheres, and this compromises the ability of his study to account for the origins of Chinese Exclusion.

In his acknowledgments, Gyory (1998: xi) discusses his desire to redeem East Coast labor by crafting a history wherein the movement wasn’t racist. He wishes to rehabilitate the white working class—or rather, the organized labor portion of it—from the racism and violent persecution of Chinese “indispensably” associated with it in historiography. Working with this goal, Gyory (1991; 1998: xi) finds Chinese Exclusion was “a classic top-down” phenomenon, and can clear “the national labor movement” from having a lead role in fostering anti-Chinese racism. He then splits his monolithically conceptualized national labor movement into East Coast and West Coast portions. Gyory then concludes participation of the California labor movement—again construed as a monolithic entity—was key in anti-Chinese racism after all. Consequently, his thesis that racism and discrimination expressed through Chinese Exclusion was “a classic top-down” phenomena—except in California—gets so eviscerated by this exception that even following his own terms it ends up crumbling. The possible plausibility of East Coast labor unions having been inherently ‘innocent’ of anti-Chinese agitation by virtue of their working-class constituency is impossible to sustain when evidence demonstrates members of the working class on the West Coast were clearly culpable. Historian Lyman (2000) composed a point-by-point critique of the bending or omission of facts he sees Gyory committing in the desire to create an anti-racist heritage for organized labor.

It’s clear there’s no justification for making a blanket clearance of any stratum of white society from participation in racist discrimination. If evidence shows that the major, officially-recognized white labor unions participated in and even advocated for racist laws, ignoring this hinders effectively analyzing the processes that produced Chinese Exclusion. To understand this social, cultural, and historical phenomenon, historical documents and other physical evidence must be studied without deciding in advance what or who are the prime movers.

I began this research into how anti-Chinese discrimination developed in California with empirical research into the origins of the Angel Island Immigration Station, violent attacks on Chinese and Chinese Americans, and anti-Chinese rhetoric and laws. Evidence from a wide range of primary sources converges to point to a storyline quite different from that in the now-traditional historiography.

Perlman and Saxton’s framing an idea of white labor unions in an unfortunate but necessary and productive opposition to “Chinese labor” ignores the history of Chinese and Chinese Americans pushing for labor rights through strikes, participating in unions, and organizing separate unions when expelled by those advocating white-only unions (Costello, et al. 1999: 11; Lyman 2000). It also ignores, as previously mentioned, white laborers who worked to organize without framing their issues in racial terms. Second, histories written after acceptance of the Irish Laborer Hypothesis do not convey the leadership roles that primary sources reported white political, social, and business leaders to have played in anti-Chinese agitation. Saxton, for one, conducted research for his “indispensable enemy” account thoroughly enough that he found evidence of anti-Chinese acts originating with higher economic classes. The following passage is instructive for how he interprets this evidence:

But involvement of white workingmen from certain extractive industries by no means fully explains the expulsion campaigns of 1885-1886, especially as it developed in California. The newspapers, while generously ascribing acts of violence to the workers, spoke frequently of local businessmen as the real leaders. Unquestionably there was an element of class prejudice in the assignment of roles; yet the evidence is nevertheless conclusive. There can be no doubt that Seattle merchants and bankers raised money for passage to San Francisco of the expelled Chinese, nor that local businessmen organized and executed the Tacoma and Eureka expulsions as well as the removal at Truckee and played leading parts in many less dramatic actions in the hinterland towns of Oregon and California.

[footnote:] The expulsion committee at Eureka, after setting up permanent machinery to prevent any return by Chinese, made clear its own socioeconomic status in the following resolution: “That every man who has no visible means of support and who habituates a house of prostitution or gambling dens to be allowed until Saturday the 14th day of February to leave this city. (Chronicle, February 8, 1885). On participation of businessmen, bankers, property-holders, etc., Tacoma: Call, November 17, 1885; Seattle: Call, November 8, 17, 1885, February 9, 1886; Truckee: Call, December 20, 1885, January 3, 1886; and for other examples in California; Pasadena, Stockton, Moore’s Station (near Marysville), Merced, Arroyo Grande, Sebastopol, Dutch Flat, respectively: Call, November 8, December 24, 1885; February 5, 12, 16, 27, March 7, 1886 (Saxton 1995[1971]: 212).

Saxton states “[t]he newspapers spoke frequently of local businessmen as the real leaders” of the expulsions and admits the evidence “is conclusive.” But the idea of politically-influential, economically-elite whites—the “merchants and bankers,” “businessmen,” and “property-holders”—taking leadership in the ethnic cleansing “expulsion campaigns” counters his story of white laborers using shared racial discrimination as a tool to unite and seize control of their fate. Saxton does not provide any evidence arguing in support of dismissing contemporary reports of leading white businessmen’s participation and even leadership. It is entirely arbitrary for Saxton to state contemporary newspapers calling socioeconomically elite whites “the real leaders” was “[u]nquestionably” due to “an element of class prejudice in the assignment of roles,” particularly when he himself indicates overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Primary source reports of major white businessmen’s leading roles are instead indications of the need to further research individuals’ actions and the contexts in which these events took place.

The Irish Laborer Hypothesis assumes an unwarranted economic determinism. The traditional account interprets events as being touched off by competition over jobs due to economic recession. It thereby accepts a recession as an explanation, without examining causes of the recession.

Examining the economic and political context of the Chinese Exclusion movements emphasizes this era saw the growth of big businesses leveraging positions and connections in local and state government to create ever bigger and more voracious trusts and monopolies. Major capitalists and corporations worked to more effectively extract public funds and resources in a strategy of socializing costs and privatizing profits. In California, the Southern Pacific Railroad grew rich on state land grants and profits made from subcontracting to itself, and achieved virtual dominance over local and state elected offices and the courts until the early 20th century (Beck and Haase 1974: 67; Staniford 1955: 1-23). The grievances to which their practices gave rise were considered so widespread and egregious, the characture of the SPRR as an octopus strangling Californians resonated for decades (e.g. The Wasp 1882: 520-521; Norris 1901; Griffiths 1970; Lindley 1999). With the exception of a few independent newspapers, major capitalists owned the media and, in Oakland at least, repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to conduct public relations campaigns in favor of their business affines. The following chapters show how these major capitalists, politicians, and heads of monopolies and trusts--at a time when people were clamoring for the end of their monopolistic business practices and exploitation of public funds and resources--actively channeled massive and growing public outrage away from themselves by promoting anti-Chinese discrimination. They and their associates created “the Chinese Question” in concert with the post-Civil War reconfigurations of whiteness, advocated that white laborers would achieve full and prosperous employment if only the Chinese were gone, and supporting others who said the same. They acted to define Chinese and Chinese Americans as not really belonging in the U.S. They worked to make Chinese and Chinese Americans marginal in legal rights; attempted to bar Chinese and Chinese Americans—unless they already had large capital—from pursuing livelihoods other than the most economically marginal; and repeatedly acted to coerce Chinese and Chinese Americans into living in only the most marginal areas, wherever that might be at a particular moment in a region’s development. They tacitly supported violence against Chinese and Chinese Americans by not prosecuting lynchings (Coolidge 1909: 267). Further, these white capitalists, politicians, and monopolists worked to identify being white with white racism and entitlement, propagating the doctrine of white supremacy though a multitude of bully pulpit forums. Through repeatedly declaring the source of people’s problems to be the Chinese, and the vice and degradation with which they insisted the Chinese were associated, they attempted to divert attention away from their own continuous acts to exploit workers and seize inequitable advantage of natural resources. And when white business leaders in the later 1800s faced civil unrest throughout the U.S., they further worked to divide organized labor by intervening in the development of labor unions, emphasizing anyone who took anti-Chinese discriminatory positions over other voices, and eventually choosing the most vehemently anti-Chinese racists as those they would recognize at the table.

All these practices were a continuation of processes white business leaders had worked to establish since the moment the discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill made California the next hot property. White individuals with sufficient wealth from their own (or their family’s) East Coast ventures, or who were able to capitalize on their education in law or surveying, came West to strike it rich, and not necessarily in gold. Through business ventures and investments, and by establishing themselves or their confederates in local, county, state, and eventually national government, these individuals worked to give themselves entitlements to public funds and lands, arrange legislation to maximize their benefits, and form exclusive business agreements ranging from monopolies to trusts and combinations. In later years they worked to systematize these advantages to ensure their perpetuation for themselves and their descendants. As evidence in this and later chapters shows, they attempted to ensure California would never be a level playing field.

One of the principal actors in large capital investments in California, the Bay Area, and Oakland, in state-wide exploitation of natural resources, and in anti-Chinese agitation was George C. Perkins. In the years 1869 through 1912 Perkins sat as a State Senator, Governor, and U.S. Senator with seats on powerful committees, including the influential committees on Civil Service and Retrenchment, Naval Affairs, and the Railroads (U.S. Congress n.d.). Perkins’s name is virtually absent from present-day scholarship on Chinese Exclusion; indeed, he’s rarely mentioned in any present day history of the United States or California. His primary role in anti-Chinese activities is nearly forgotten. The one exception is significant. In their groundbreaking 1969 reference work, A History of the Chinese in California, Thomas Chinn, Him Mark Lai, and Philip P. Choy reported that in 1882, while Congress was deliberating the Chinese Exclusion bill, Governor Perkins didn’t just lend support to anti-Chinese sentiment; he went so far as to create a legal holiday to encourage statewide anti-Chinese demonstrations (Figure 2-2). At the time of Perkins’ proclamation, decades before Congress passed union-advocated reforms in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the regular work week was six days, and extended through Saturday (see also Naruta 2005c). To build support for “The Anti-Chinese Demonstration,” Perkins gave workers a day off, and declared

Saturday, the 4th day of March, a legal holiday, that it may be made the occasion for one universal demonstration [against Chinese immigration], conveying to Congress and to our Eastern [U.S.] brethren the deep interest which inspires us to check this evil.... This request is made by a large and influential class of merchants, and by both the great political parties. And influenced by the same motives, partaking of kindred spirit with them, and seeing that the time has come for the exercise of one great harmonious and simultaneous effort to rid the State of this evil, I, George C. Perkins, Governor of the State, do, by the authority invested in me, proclaim Saturday, March 4, 1882, a legal holiday, and ask that in the several cities and localities of the State, much demonstration be had, as will show the feeling of our people on this question. (Oakland Tribune, 2 March 1882)

Perkins emphasizes Chinese Exclusion is supported by “both...political parties,” and his phrasing the proposed action as a “harmonious and simultaneous effort” springing from sharing a “kindred spirit” with “by a large and influential class of merchants” shows Perkins’ emphasis on constructing an idea of whites having shared interests and goals. Further, Perkins asserts anti-Chinese activities are the means to fulfilling those common interests.

Perkins’s motives for nurturing anti-Chinese discourse begin to present themselves when we look at a passage from one of the few works about him. In a brief biographical sketch compiled from an interview, H.H. Bancroft wrote:

At thirty, senator, at forty, governor, and while in both positions attending to large and complex personal affairs, he entered upon the latter office at a period when the community was distracted by the labor question, the Chinese question, the Debris question, involving a controversy of extreme importance between the farmer and hydraulic miners of the state; and the perplexing issues connected with the new Constitution (1888a: 16).

Bancroft was no advocate of discriminatory legislation against the Chinese (e.g. 1884-90 [Vol. 7]: 335, 342, 351-2), and had received direction to produce a sketch that could induce the Governor to further financial support of the biography project (Morrison n.d.). Bancroft’s mention of “The Debris Question” gives the reader a diplomatically-phrased cue to Perkins’ “large and complex personal affairs” in the context of his gubernatorial actions.

The Debris Question referred to widespread environmental destruction resulting from the rise of hydraulic mining, an industry requiring a high capital investment in equipment, offset by low labor requirements, that reached its peak in 1876 (Brechin 1999: 35-38). In this industry, cast-iron hydraulic cannons, some with bores as large as 12 inches, blasted mountains, washing away all associated soil, trees, and other materials to allow the recovery of the sought-after mineral material. Hydraulic mining washed the eroded material into the rivers, causing massive environmental damage (Brechin 1999: 48-53). The debris from hydraulic mining threatened shipping, agriculture, and even cities: debris flushed into the rivers silted in San Francisco’s port, and forced Sacramento property owners to rebuild on top of landfill, in what would be a piecemeal project to raise their city. State Engineer William Hammond Hall reported that by 1880 hydraulic mining had ruined 40,000 acres of farmland and orchards and severely damaged another 270,000 acres. The causes of these problems were widely known, and Brechin (1999: 48) also notes hydraulic mining’s practitioners “could hardly claim ignorance of the results of their activities, for as early as 1855, the Yuba, Feather, and American River canyons had begun vomiting torrents of mud and gravel into the Sacramento Valley.” Brechin (1999: 48-52) found that despite widespread public outrage, it proved nearly impossible to curb an industry with so much money behind it.

When Perkins sat for his Bancroft interview, he named hydraulic mining as one of his major investments. He spoke of the power of his earth-moving operations, saying his Butte County operation conveyed blasting water through a pipeline with the diameter of two-and-a-half feet (1888b: 28). Perkins noted with pride that another of his hydraulic mining ventures, the Spring Valley Water Company, was the largest operation in the state. When queried as to what valuable mineral substance he was pursuing with these massive extraction technologies, Perkins replied he was after quartz and other gravel.

The interview records that hydraulic mining was not Perkins’s only major capital venture. He founded, directed, and/or held important board positions on ventures in logging redwoods and other timber, railroad building, steamship lines—Hittell (1882: 202) called then-Governor Perkins “The most notable ship-owner in California”—banking, insurance, mining in the U.S. and in Mexico, speculating in California, Southwestern, and Mexican real estate, and other business ventures too numerous to list. The infamously-managed Oakland waterfront—a public property Oaklanders today still note was stolen by an Oakland politician in conjunction with Oakland’s founding as a U.S. town, and used to generate private profit until citizens’ efforts to wrest back control finally succeeded in the 1920s (Oakland Enquirer, 2 July 1892; Baker 1914: 421; Griffiths 1970; Bagwell 1982: 42-52)—had as one of its partners the well-connected Perkins (Oakland Tribune, 4 March 1890, 8 January 1902). In summary, when H.H. Bancroft wrote that Perkins “while...attending to large and complex personal affairs” decided policy on “the labor question, the Chinese question, [and] the Debris question...”, he was discreetly drawing our attention to the fact that Perkins as legislator and Governor decided public policy directly related to his capital investments.

Other contemporaries did not share Bancroft’s diplomacy, and criticized Perkins outright for his governing to serve the interests of his own and his affiliates’ investments. Perkins told of receiving, during his campaign for Governor, a telegram from a member of the convention that had nominated him. In the telegram, the former supporter informed Perkins he was now campaigning for “Glenn and the people, against Perkins and monopoly” (Bancroft 1888b: 22). Clearly, then, the shape of the economy was not a neutral occurrence.

With vocal criticism of his priorities in governance in the air, Perkins worked at framing “the Chinese” as the real enemy of the people. He worked towards normalizing virulent anti-Chinese racism and discrimination, claiming Chinese Exclusion a “universal demand” (Perkins 1893: 14-5). Yet this assertion, set in terms of fulfilling a “universal” desire, like his 1882 proclamation of a holiday for anti-Chinese demonstrations is not supported by the evidence.

There were whites who publicly objected to anti-Chinese discourse and discriminatory actions. Acting against claims racists spoke for everyone, they joined Chinese Californians in condemning racial discrimination and refuting the trumped up charges against “the Chinese.” The full spectrum of these contesting actions is currently unknown, but providing an indication of the breadth and endurance of oppositional acts are published refutations of racist propaganda. A short list includes works such as the white Reverend William Speer’s translation of San Francisco merchant Lai Chun’s 1855 commentary on racially discriminatory remarks Governor Bigler delivered at his inaugural, Remarks of the Chinese Merchants of San Francisco upon Governor Bigler's Message and Some Common Objections with Some Explanation of the Character of the Chinese Six Companies and the Laboring Class in California (Lai 1855; also Speer 1856). White Oakland News editor William Gagan reported on and editorialized against egregious racial discrimination against Chinese, asserting to his readership that “Abusing Chinamen is cowardly and mean” to take an 1867 example (18 July 1867; 21 February 1867). Augustus Layres and J. Stratman connected the issues of Governor Haight’s anti-Chinese remarks with attacks on Reconstruction in their 1868 work, A Defense of the Reconstruction Acts of Congress, and Critical Review of the Inaugural of H.H. Haight, Governor of California, Comprising Important Points at Issue in the Present Campaign. Acting against another phase of discrimination, the white Reverend Dr. O. Gibson, as translator, participated in another refutation by Chinese San Franciscans, The Chinese Question from the Chinese Standpoint, Signed on Behalf of the Chinese by Lai Yong, Yang Kay, Ah Yup, Lai Foon, Cheung Leong, Translated by Dr. O. Gibson and Read before the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco, May, 1873. Published in the Oakland News (4 April 1876) was a letter to the editor decrying political manipulations aimed at scapegoating Chinese, signed only with the stereotypically Irish pseudonym “Mick.” Augustus Layres addressed the same issue, in 1876 and 1877 attempting to stem “a wide-spread conspiracy against the Chinese” with compendiums of fact-based argument. These included The Other Side of the Chinese Question in California: or, a Reply to the Charges against the Chinese: as Embodied in the Resolutions Adopted at the Anti-Chinese Mass Meeting held April 5th, 1876, in San Francisco (Layres 1876), and the following year with A. F. Woodbridge in the 1877 publication Woodbridge printed, Both Sides of the Chinese Question, or, Critical Analysis of the Evidence for and against Chinese Immigration as Elicited before the Congressional Commission; Also, a Review of Senator Sargent's Report; with an Appendix, Concerning a Wide-spread Conspiracy against the Chinese; Respectfully Dedicated to the Friends of Right, Justice and Humanity (Layres and Woodbridge 1877). Layres continued his work into the next decade, in 1886 again attempting to intervene with a publication: The Other Side of the Chinese Question: To the People of the United States & the Honorable Senate & House of Representatives: Testimony of California’s Leading Citizens: Read & Judge. During the 1877 riots in San Francisco, anonymous letters to the editor voiced a condemnation of the riots that went beyond the widely-held condemnation by those merely concerned about property damage, and redirected those locals lashing out against Chinese workers to the fact that increased use of machines was causing the loss of jobs (Oakland Transcript, 28 March 1877; Oakland Times, 12 July 1878). White newspaper writer and financial analyst Alexander Del Mar published protests against anti-Chinese discrimination pseudonymously in the San Francisco Argonaut, which were reissued the same year as Letters of Kwang Chang Ling: The Chinese Side of the Chinese Question (1878) and then again as Why Should the Chinese Go? A Pertinent Inquiry from a Mandarin High in Authority (San Francisco: Bruce's Book and Job Printing House). The white Mrs. S.L. [Esther E.] Baldwin wrote and paid to publish an 1881 pamphlet Must the Chinese Go?: An Examination of the Chinese Question in protest of the pending Chinese Exclusion legislation. She paid for a second edition, and received donations allowing a third (Baldwin 1890), writing in the preface

Again, with increasing humiliation for the necessity, I reissue this pamphlet, with added pages of disgraceful history made by our National Government since the first issue in 1881. I feel that it is criminal for Christian people to remain silent, while oppression and bitter wrong stalk forth from our Congressional Halls. We are told that $500,000 have been subscribed, and as much more will be added if necessary, to circulate anti-Chinese literature, and affect political action. … I herewith desire to...express my earnest hope and prayer that [the reissue of this pamphlet] may contribute not only towards creating an effective sentiment against further wickedly discriminating laws, but also toward forcing the repeal of every such law against the Chinese, and helping to place them as they should be, on just the same footing in this country as all other foreigners – just as fully protected in their “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Efforts at countering the racial discrimination strategies pursued by some whites continued throughout the remainder of the study period. Reputable historian and long-time California booster J.S. Hittell placed in the California periodical Overland Monthly his article asserting “The Benefits of Chinese Immigration” (1886), and in print denounced the portions of the 1882 California Constitution that legalized various forms of discrimination against Chinese (1884-90: 335, 342, 351-2). White and Chinese authors used national forms for anti-propaganda efforts (e.g. Yan 1889; Young 1892; Yung 1892; Ho 1901; Fu 1907) and intervened with a local focus when that seemed more relevant; when the pro-Exclusion Meat vs. Rice pamphlet pitted “American Manhood vs. Asiatic Coolieism,” (American Federation of Labor 1901) it was answered by an anonymous (c.1901) pamphlet Truth vs. Fiction. Justice vs. Prejudice. Meat for All and Not for a Few. A Plain, Unvarnished Statement Why Exclusion Laws Should Not be Reenacted. The white Reverend P.J. Healy collaborated with pioneering Chinese-language newspaperman Ng Poon Chew in issuing the evidence-laden A Statement for Non-Exclusion (Healy and Chew 1905). Ground-breaking sociologist Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge attempted to counter anti-Chinese propaganda being repeated and given Congressional-commission endorsement (e.g. San Francisco Call, 28 March 1907, 11 November 1907, 5 July 1908) with a research-based refutation in Chinese Immigration (Coolidge 1909). Clearly, the claims by Perkins and others that they spoke for whites and in the interest of whites were false. Like any other racial or ethnic group, whites were far from being a homogeneous entity with unified actions predictable as a reflection of their racial or ethnic essence or interests (Hanley-Lopez 1996: xiv, 2).

Against this background of objections, a range of publications attempted to push ideas of white solidarity based on discrimination against Chinese. For the white working classes, ‘Us-or-them’ anti-Chinese propaganda such as the American Federation of Labor’s (1901) Meat vs. Rice pamphlet was churned out. For the white middle class (and those who aspired to it), there was ostensibly more genteel propaganda, by figures of national and city government or by men with the title “Reverend” next to their name, in respected national periodicals like Forum and the North American Review to influence individuals to smooth the apparent hypocrisy of increasing racial discrimination (see also Choy, Dong, and Hom 1994; Ignacio et al. 2004). George C. Perkins wrote widely-disseminated anti-Chinese propaganda for such audiences. His speeches worked at normalizing anti-Chinese discrimination and Chinese Exclusion for middle-class whites (and white middle-class aspirants), many of whom were among those who found anti-Chinese legislation in conflict with their Christian values or their actual experience living or working with fellow Californians of Chinese descent. Perkins’ anti-Chinese speeches were often published, and one, an 1893 speech in the Senate on the eve of an Exclusion renewal vote, was even anthologized as an exemplary work in the series Modern Eloquence (Figure 2-3). The speech contained such headings as “Thoughtful People Demand Exclusion” and “Not a Partisan Political Question” (1893: 14, 8). His address to the U.S. Senate on April 8, 1902, on “Why the Chinese Menace Our Institutions,” formed part of the anthology Notable Speakers of the Greater West by Harr Wagner (1902), also author and publisher of the children’s history textbook Pacific History Stories (1918). In a North American Review article, “Reasons for Continued Chinese Exclusion,” Perkins (1906: 18) even played both sides of the trade union question, writing

There is still another danger that unrestricted immigration from the Orient would bring upon us. This is particularly conspicuous in the case of the Chinese. If they were firmly entrenched here, there would be introduced a trades-union system compared with which the American system is child’s play. China is a nation in which the guild principle is a necessary part of the industrial system. It exists among the mercantile class, as well as among the members of the handicrafts. What it is capable of doing, and how silently and irresistibly it works, we have had good reason to learn from the [1905] boycott on American goods which it has made so effective.

With this article, Perkins indicated that whether the reader’s sympathies aligned with business or with labor, they could agree that “the Chinese” threatened their way of life.

For all Perkins’ rhetoric, one of his actions upon taking Governor’s office shows his interest was not in improving the lot of Californians in general. Jute factories, which produced grain bags used by farmers, were one of the industries associated with Chinese workers (Chow 1974: 109, citing Lewis Publishing Co. 1892: 319; Saxton 1995[1971]: 147, citing San Francisco Examiner, 16-18 February 1880). Governor Perkins proposed a plan for overriding the 1880 state constitution’s provisions against using convict labor (Bancroft 1888a: 12). He caused construction of a jute factory at the state penitentiary, so that convict labor could be made to supply the 25-30 million grain bags annually consumed in California. Perkins claimed this would keep “more than $2,000,000 a year [from being] sent out of the country,” referring to the myth that wages paid to Chinese Californians were a drain on the state’s economy. Perkins’ efforts to shift the jute industry away from Chinese workers did not assist other laborers, at least not adult workers; by 1883, the jute industry was one of many that came to depend on child labor (see also Naruta 2005c). According to historian Baker (1914: 391), “the manager…[of the Jute Mills in East Oakland] sent East for expert operators who were used to instruct local boys and girls in the art of weaving,” and “Young girls worked there and earned from $5 to $9.50 per week.”

Perkins’ anti-Chinese propaganda efforts were backed by his mainstream newspaper-owning friends. One illustrative example comes from the Oakland Tribune, which, according to Gothberg (1968), was then owned by a family influential in mainstream Republicans politics, the Knowlands, who operated the paper with the aim of furthering their political goals. On June 30, 1885 the Tribune reported with approval, “It is proposed to wipe Chinatown off the map of Oakland.” I discuss the on-the-ground significance of such efforts in Chapters 4 and 5.

Beyond his activities in anti-Chinese rhetoric, Perkins shaped both anti-Chinese legislation and its implementation, as the following chapters attest. Wielding his influence as a major capitalist and State Senator, Governor, or U.S. Senator with key committee positions, Perkins shaped the local political landscapes of California and the Bay Area through political patronage appointments. These appointments (and the hiring decisions the appointees would later make) largely determined how laws and policies about Chinese immigration were carried out, insuring a focus on the alleged dangers of Chinese Immigration.

A few examples demonstrate how Chinese Exclusion policy was shaped further towards extreme racial discrimination through appointing avowedly racist enforcers. Researcher E. Lee (1997: 6) documented how the 1889-93 Collector of Customs of the Port of San Francisco, the immigration enforcer prior to the development of a specialized bureau, established a detailed interrogation scheme. Its use in discrimination was elaborated by his successors. In an 1899 letter, the Collector of Customs wrote departmental policy regarding the Chinese was that immigration officials should act to “facilitate their departure and keep them from coming back” (E. Lee 2003: 52, 3; 1997: 8, quoting Jackson 1899). If this position seems equivocal, E. Lee (1997: 8, quoting Link and Smith 1899) reports that previous correspondence instructed that Collectors of Customs

should be guided by the policy of our law.…That Chinese are an undesirable addition to our society – that their presence is a disturbing element that tends only to evil and corruption, and that every presumption, every technicality and every intendment should be held against their admission and their testimony should have little or no weight when standing alone.

Obstructions were compounded, even in cases of persons the law specifically exempted from Chinese Exclusion policies. E. Lee (1997: 9-10) reports that according to files of the Secretary of State preserved in the National Archives, San Francisco Chinese students and merchants in 1900 frequently wrote to the Chinese Legation in Washington, D.C. in complaint of the U.S. immigration officials mishandling their countrymen and the legally-required “Caucasian witnesses.” In one example, the Minister of the Chinese Legation wrote to the U.S. Secretary of State objecting that

Merchants are often imprisoned in the detention dock for weeks and months. Caucasian witnesses are put to all sorts of inconveniences and annoyances and treated with suspicion and discourtesy; when present to sign identification papers they are compelled to await the pleasure of the Chinese bureau for examination and are plied with all sorts of immaterial questions from an inspector who assumes the character of an inquisitor. The result of this is . . . untold mental and financial suffering (E. Lee 1997: 9-10, quoting Wu 1900).

Objection to such practices that extra-legally extended the discrimination of Chinese Exclusion continued, and had a notable flashpoint in the early 1900s. The combination of the 1902 renewal of the Exclusion Legislation and the sudden arrest in 1905 of over a thousand long-time residents for their non-compliance with the 1892 Geary Act’s registration scheme touched off a transnational boycott of U.S.-manufactured goods in protest (Geneson 1997: 27-8; Arkush and Lee 1989: 59).

Another outspoken advocate of racial discrimination was appointed to serve as U.S. Commissioner-General of Immigration from 1897 to 1902 (Lyman 2000; Kaufman 1986: 582). Terence V. Powderly, the former three-time mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania from 1878-1884 on the Greenback-Labor ticket, was already known to Chinese American unionists. In 1887 Chinese Americans formed Assemblies of the Knight of Labor. Powderly, who after 1883 held the title of Knights of Labor General Master Workman, ordered the Chinese assemblies disbanded, as he had

gone on record as not only opposing Chinese labor but also declaring that Chinese and Japanese were unfit to reside in the United States (R. Lee 1999: 66, quoted in Lyman 2000: n.p.).

Powderly kept to this stance: While serving as U.S. Commissioner-General, he published in Collier’s Weekly an article with a title exhorting that U.S. policy must be to “Exclude Anarchist and Chinaman” (1901). In 1905 he addressed the National Civic Federation, a think-tank led by “big businessmen of great wealth” who believed, as member and banker Charles G. Dawes elaborated, that problems from the “great combinations and corporations” need to be “settled by conservative men” so the result “will not prove a barrier in the path of commercial and national progress” (Domhoff 1970: 158, 163, citing Jensen 1956: 57-9, quoting Dawes in Jensen 1956: 268-9). The New York Times (9 December 1905) reported

Powderly, very much in earnest, spoke uncompromisingly against the least relaxing of the lines against the Chinese. He denounced them as morally unfit for association with the American people.

Terence V. Powderly served as Chief of the Division of Information in the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization from 1907 until his death in 1924. The example of Powderly is worth examining for its indication of how big business figures and politicians were strategizing to cope with the growing demands of organizing white workers. When there was a choice of labor leaders to recognize, it was those who advocated racial discrimination who were promoted and given wide-reaching authority.

After Chinese Exclusion had been national policy for multiple decades, Perkins also helped in attempts to bring about the end of public discussions of “the Chinese Question.” He claimed an inevitable naturalness to the alleged opposition between white and Chinese races, and asserted those who took this view should not consider themselves extremists. In the North American Review Perkins (1906: 16) wrote

The opposition to the Chinese is not an unthinking, unreasonable prejudice. In the early days of the Pacific Coast they were gladly welcomed. … Yet our experience has created an intelligent public opinion which is unalterably opposed to the immigration of Chinese peon labor. The reasons are not far to seek. They are fundamental—racial—and are bound to make themselves felt in spite of theories as to moral obligations or the assumed needs of foreign trade. They bring to the front again the pitiless truth of survival of the fittest. [emphasis added]

Continuing this rhetorical strategy, in the early twentieth century, Perkins, acting as a powerful U.S. Senator sitting on numerous key committees, brought both the federal government and academia into the work of authorizing and normalizing racial discrimination. A Congressional Immigration Commission was formed and a Cornell professor, Jeremiah Whipple Jenks, and a San Francisco businessman, William R. Wheeler, were to “objectively” investigate immigration and labor conditions in the United States with a special eye to the West Coast (San Francisco Call, 5 July 1908, 24 May 1908, 17 November 1910). The results were approval of white immigration and support of those who claimed Asian immigration was an evil threatening white society. The commission’s findings propelled the businessman into a federal appointment as assistant Secretary of Commerce and Labor, and he subsequently enjoyed a lucrative career in politics and newspaper publishing (San Francisco Call, April 28, 1908; San Diego Union, February 18, 1935). The academic, Jenks, in turn co-authored a book, The Immigration Problem (Jenks and Lauck 1912), in which his professorial background was employed in authorizing its theme of framing race-based discrimination as completely reasonable, acceptable, and even logical. Offering an authoritative answer to the “the Chinese Question,” and declaring the threat to the U.S. was Chinese and Japanese immigrants, not corporations and big capital, The Immigration Problem was widely distributed, being printed in at least six editions within only a decade and a half, and offered an authoritative answer to the “the Chinese Question:” the threat to wellbeing in the U.S. was Chinese and Japanese immigrants, not the practices of corporations and big capital.

Contemporary commentators noted Perkins was never elected by the people of California—charging “The members of the legislatures that elected him were the choice of Mr. Herrin and were personally selected and fixed in advance by Mr. George Hatton.”—and called for an explanation as to why Senator Perkins, “as a capitalist interested in transportation by sea” was opposed to “installation of a government line of steamships between Pacific coast ports and Panama,” as this would help free Californians from the railroad monopoly (San Francisco Call Editorials, 11 July 1907, 22 March 1908, 6 January 1909). In 1913 the newly-ratified 17th Amendment abolished the system of U.S. Senators being selected by their State Legislatures. A populist reform, it established Senators’ direct election by voters of their home state. Following its introduction, Perkins announced his retirement (San Francisco Call, 29 August 1912).

Historical evidence shows how Perkins and others created a broadly-construed lineage, the white race, on whose behalf they then claimed to speak. It also illustrates how they further used lineage to position themselves within that race and thereby bolster their claims to also having entitlement among whites, a strategy identified in Brechin’s 1999 study of San Francisco family dynasties jockeying for control over natural resources. Particular family lineages were developed and employed as testimony of an individual’s worthiness, responsibility, and therefore right to privilege. Tracing one’s family heritage to early colonists of the East Coast seems to have been a basic requirement for making such a claim; it was even better to be able to claim blood relatives who distinguished themselves in service in the war for U.S. independence, or as a governor or prominent business family—and most often both—in the British colonies and young U.S. states. The importance of such claims can be seen in contemporary descriptions of Governor and U.S. Senator George C. Perkins’s own lineage, where the illustrious list of the governor’s ancestors claimed relation to his home state’s Governor Fairfield and “Governor King, the first chief executive of Maine after its separation from Massachusetts,” and trails off into the murky past with ancestors of ranking no less great than English peerage of the time of James II (Bancroft 1888a: 1-2; Oakland Tribune, 26 February 1923). It seems to not have been relevant that Perkins ran away from his Maine home at the age of twelve, becoming a stow-away and then a cabin boy before eventually immigrating to the Gold Rush mines (Bancroft 1888a: 2; also Hittell 1882: 202); his genealogical claim was not damaged by his not having been brought up by his illustriously-descended family, but rather blood descent was enough for him to draw on his governing ancestry. It is also worthwhile noting that the kind of economy practiced by people working to better their position—working hard and living frugally—was when Perkins practiced it a virtue while at the same time he denounced it as a bad characteristic of “the Chinese.”

Further insight into the use of lineage comes from those we might anthropologically label Perkins’ business affines. The association of George Perkins with early Massachusetts Governor King was reiterated in the honorific obituary of Perkins published by Joseph Knowland, whose own family built a dynasty around publishing the Oakland Tribune and shaping California politics (Tribune 26 February 1923; Montgomery, Johnson, and Manolis 1998). Knowland also worked to inscribe the landscape with claims to lineal inheritance; in 1902 he become chairman of the Historic Landmarks Committee of the white-only organization Native Sons of the Golden West (Wagner 1918: 184). Membership to the Native Sons of the Golden West was restricted to white males who came to California during the Gold Rush and their white male descendants. There were members of the Native Sons of the Golden West organization who took the position that because their families had arrived in California’s early days under the U.S., they were especially entitled among Californians. Native Son member Willard B. Farwell was prominent enough in the organization that he gave orations at least two major celebrations of the Native Sons of the Golden West (Society of California Pioneers 1892, 1900) and two of the Society of California Pioneers (1884; Farwell 1859). A former State Assemblyman and editor of the Alta California, Farwell as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (Shuck 1897, 1894) authored the 1885 volume The Chinese at Home and Abroad; Together with the Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco, on the Condition of the Chinese Quarter of that City. The first page asserted “The Chinese Question should be discussed dispassionately,” before opening into chapters entitled “The Inhumanity of the [Chinese] Race,” and “The Races in Conflict.” Sections described “The Chinese as Murders” and asked “Shall we become a nation of lepers?” The subcommittee’s building-by-building map of Chinatown used color-coding to indicate the area was rife with gambling houses, white and Chinese prostitution, and opium resorts, arguing “The seriousness of the problem” of Chinese being part of the United States.

Members of the Native Sons of the Golden West kept track of and worked to promote their fellows. The following newspaper headlines provide an idea of the tenor and prominence of this organization that attended to intersecting realms of business, social activity, and politics: “Native Sons – And the lot of Prominent Gentlemen Initiated.” (Oakland Tribune, September 5, 1889), “Our Native Sons – Worthy Descendants of Our Argonauts – Men of Brains and Marked Ability.” (Weekly Commercial Gazette, 1 August 1889), and the lavishly illustrated

Some of Our Lawyers – Portraits and Sketches of Some Well-Known Lawyers – Native Sons Up In The Profession. – The Excellent Reputation of the Bench and Bar at Home and Abroad for Its Legal Acquirement and Acumen (San Francisco Examiner, 8 June 1890).

These items were collected into the scrapbooks of Frederick Smith Stratton, State Senator-turned Customs Collector of the Port of San Francisco, whose father, an early government surveyor of Oakland, was a business partner with George Perkins in some Oakland waterfront property (J. Stratton c.1859-1900; Oakland Tribune, 4 March 1890, 8 January 1902). His preserving and curating these articles (F. Stratton 1900-1917a) indicates the importance he placed on their announcement of his association with the group, which provided reinforcement for claims to authority.

Claims by the Native Sons of the Golden West to “super-American-ness,” or rather, “super-Californian-ness” were parried by a Chinese-American organization. After being barred from the white-only Native Sons of the Golden West, a group of Chinese Americans founded in 1895 the Native Sons of the Golden State. For decades the group fought for full civil rights for U.S. citizens of Chinese ancestry. Their legacy was continued by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, the name the organization adopted in 1915 (Smith 2001: 43, citing Hong 1992; also Wong 2004: 16, 14).

Another example of genealogical claims come in the positioning efforts by one of Perkins’s political “descendants,” or protégées. Perkins passed through federal appointment to head West Coast immigration a man who happened also to be the son-in-law of someone with whom he was partners, in a corporation that had been capitalized in 1882 with $1 million dollars (San Francisco Call, 11 July 1900; Wood 1883: 766). The career of loyal protégée Hart Hyatt North (1871-1950) as the Chief of Immigration at San Francisco culminated in the creation and opening of the Angel Island Immigration Station. North took care to record participation by his ancestors in the war for U.S. independence in the Register of the California Society of the Sons of the American Revolution of 1901, while his brother Arthur documented family stories of their ancestors’ 1600s arrival in New England and centrality in the founding of an eighteenth century white settlement in New York. Conspicuous among the pages of The Founders and the Founding of Walton New York is a plate—reproduced here as Figure 2-4—announcing the author’s ancestor Samuel North as the “First white child born in Walton” (A. North 1924: 32a). And genealogical claims were extended beyond legitimacy based on their ancestors being simply the first white bodies in an area. Arthur North (1924: 4) further noted

these men...were not typical frontiersmen, more nearly they approximated the highest professional and business type. Back of them stretched generations of culture, education and public service.

Such statements by the North brothers echoed their predecessors’ and contemporaries’ claims that they, among California residents, were especially entitled not only because their people had arrived in California’s early days under the U.S., but also because their pioneering ancestors were hereditarily “quality” people besides. The commemoration of Hart Hyatt North’s ancestor specifically as the “First white child born in Walton” draws attention to the way in which many of the study subjects claimed lineal rights to disproportionate social, political, and economic power through claims to entitlement as members of a larger blood lineage, “the white race,” construed so that it was “natural” for there to be in place the particular political and economic relations they desired.

Hart Hyatt North seems never to have strayed from this line. In an article published shortly before his death, he provided a master narrative of Chinese and Japanese immigration to the Pacific coast that asserted the immigration of people from Japan was part of a scheme for a racial takeover of the Pacific Coast, introducing a report of one of his supervisee's by writing that “From the report transcribed below, there can be little doubt that this migration to our shores was deliberately planned in all its steps” (H. North 1949: 346). North added that the enforcement practices of Chinese Exclusion legislation

caused much adverse criticism by well-meaning but ill-informed people, particularly by those living on the Atlantic coast. And during the last war those same people were bitter against the military for collecting those of Japanese blood in concentration camps as a war measure.

Although Exclusion enforcers invoked language of white racial solidarity and racial survival, their claims to genealogical determinism were not shared among all their desired audience. And those who “were bitter” about Japanese Internment were vindicated, by official government apology in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, and letters of apology to individual families signed by President George Herbert Walker Bush.

Despite ample evidence of the leadership role of major Capitalists who worked for the benefit of themselves and their corporations, by 1909 the story had become that Chinese Exclusion was something forced on the United States by white laborers, or, in slightly more nuanced accounts, such as Coolidge’s book of that year, white laborers under the manipulation of former slave-owning Southern Democrats in California government. The above information on the involvement of major mainstream white politicians such as George C. Perkins casts a very different light on the origins of Chinese Exclusion.

Yet we perhaps should not be surprised the anti-Chinese efforts of Perkins and his colleagues are forgotten. Beginning as early as 1883—the year of publication of entrepreneur-historian Wood’s History of Alameda County, California—they encouraged their roles being written out of history. Early historians interested in currying favor with city fathers and their cohort, who formed their subscriber base, learned chances of support were best when they followed the party line of white laborers forcing the nation into Chinese Exclusion. To achieve this goal, documented historical facts were revised, omitted, or just never consulted. Labor demonstrations reported by establishment papers at the time as being for fair wages and workers’ rights were now without evidence claimed to have been anti-Chinese agitations. Working class leadership was ascribed to anti-Chinese rallies when newspapers had at the time reported the rallies as being organized by city fathers and presided over by august personages including the Mayor.

It’s instructive to see how these processes of recasting events played out in retellings of the 1877 San Francisco riots. The economy had been in recession for four years (Bruce 1959), and with the later association of anti-Chinese demogauge—and unemployed Irish immigrant laborer—Dennis Kearney, the 1877 San Francisco riot is often taken as all the proof needed for the Irish Laborer Hypothesis. Yet examining the event in its context tells a different story. Figure 2-5 reproduces a portion of an item that ran in the Oakland Daily News of March 31, 1876 under the heading

Hateful Pigtails. – And how they were Twisted at the City Hall Last Evening—Large anti-Chinese Meeting in the Council Chamber – Much enthusiasm and great indignation expressed at the “animal with a head and tail on one end.”

We learn of the leadership role played by Oakland’s leading white mainstream politician, Mayor—and future California governor—Enoch Pardee:

Mayor Pardee was called to preside and J.R . Price was appointed Secretary.
Dr. Pardee, on taking the chair, said:
Fellow Citizens:—We have met here tonight upon a common cause. We must confront the subject, which interests directly every American citizen, whether foreign or native born. We have stood for twenty-five years looking at this sore until it has become gangrened. We can now stand it no longer, and it is necessary to apply to a physician and have it cauterized.

The paper reported a subsequent speaker, Dr. Hollister, continued the theme, and asserted that

if we let the evil grow and become ingredient in our institutions, we may as well fold our arms and let the Mongolian flood sweep us on to ruin. The Doctor then dwelt at some length upon the cranial capacities of the different natives, which were the measure of their energy. In the Chinese it was very small. Neither can they accommodate themselves to our philosophy, our religion, our politics, or our mechanical arts or sciences. They make cunning pass for force.

Clearly then, in 1876 leading mainstream white political figures took leadership roles in advocating racial discrimination against Chinese Californians. Following this public meeting, national events radically altered for mainstream white politicians the meaning of a public assembly to express “great indignation.” In the fall of 1876, the federal election had seen the previously unprecedented result of the presidential candidate who had won the majority of the popular vote losing in the electoral college, and the question of who would be President would result in the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, which ended Reconstruction by withdrawing from the South the federal troops charged with enforcing civil rights for African Americans (Omi and Winant 1986: 65; Wise 2004). The context of the summer of 1877 is shown in a portion of the Oakland Evening Tribune from July 25, reproduced in Figure 2-6. The newspapers were filled with reports of nationwide civil unrest and massive property damage. This one single page of the paper bore headlines including

THE STRIKE.
—
The Trouble Spreading in all Directions.
—
Trains Stopped and Tracks Torn up to Prevent the Passage of Troops.
—
Strikers in Chicago Close Railroad Shops and Manufactories.

and

The Latest.
—
The Strikers Still Inflamed.
—
Fight between the Mob and Police at Chicago.
…
An Express Train Thrown From the Track.
—
Railroad Business Nearly Suspended at Philadelphia.
…
Movements of U.S. Troops.
—
Passenger Trains Stopped by the Strikers.
—
Business Entirely Suspended at Louisville.

Labor strikes consumed manufacturing and railroad areas throughout the nation. Mainstream white politicians seem to have decided this year was no time for public assemblies grandstanding against Chinese. With federal troops being unable to restore order in numerous cities, there was no guarantee they could shape or control a large public demonstration. As noted in Cooper (2004), mainstream white politicians called for committees of citizens to keep order and protect property. In Oakland, Mayor Pardee was a signatory of a public address that read

To the law-abiding citizens of the city of Oakland—Gentlemen: the Mayor and Council of your good city in view of the unusual excitement prevailing in many Eastern cities and in the city of San Francisco, and desiring to avoid similar occurrences within our limits, do most earnestly request that all good citizens refrain from holding or attending any public assemblies held for the purpose of discussing any grievances or topics of a public nature during the present week, and particularly any public gathering which may be held to-night, and that all good citizens will avoid joining at this time any public procession, believing such assemblies can be productive of no good, and that any real wrongs or grievances can be better and more satisfactorily adjusted without the danger attendant upon such public meetings at this time.
…
We therefore request, earnestly request that all citizens except those whose duty is to preserve the peace, repair to their homes an early hour every evening until the quiet which, at the second sober thought, always follows these excitements, prevails in our midst.
[The address will also be found in our advertising columns, together with the signatures of the Mayor, Clerk and Councilmen.] (Oakland Evening Tribune, 25 July 1877 [brackets in original])

The resolutions passed in St. Louis provide an idea of the demands of the strikers and others meeting in public assembly. The strikers

call[ed] upon the Legislature for the enactment of the Eight-hour law and a severe penalty for its violation, and the non-employment of children under fourteen years of age. (Oakland Evening Tribune, 25 July 1877)

Indicating the changed association brought to later accounts of Bay Area happenings in the summer of 1877, Healy (Healy and Chew 1905: 37-9) notes infamous Irish immigrant Dennis Kearney “was not a speaker at that [San Francisco] meeting” at the time of the 1877 strikes. “On the contrary,” he wrote, “he was a member of the ‘Pickhandle Brigade,’ a temporary body organized to preserve order,” and only later began his “sand lot” demonstrations of “the Chinese must go.” The semiotic role of the 1877 riots in the San Francisco Bay Area is revisited in Chapter 4’s discussion of Oakland Chinatowns.

In later telling of the events of 1877 they were revised radically, in favor of the Irish Laborer Hypothesis. In Oakland, historian Baker (1914: 203) incorporated the dramatic touch of a murderous threat against the Chinese district prevented by a police captain’s brave actions, although it’s unclear whether Baker himself invented the tale or merely served as its carrier. Once set into print, these serious factual inaccuracies became reference points for many later historians. Instead of these accounts being recognized as past acts of inscription, their misrepresentations of facts are unintentionally compounded into the present day. The consequence has been the ossification of the Irish Laborer Hypothesis or “indispensable enemy” myth, and perpetuation of the idea that early issues between workers and corporations were actually an issue of innate conflict between Chinese and white races.

An additional hindrance on the interpretative utility of much scholarship on the origins and processes of Chinese Exclusion is a misconception of it as a singular and relatively short phenomenon. Such portrayals generally contend the Chinese Exclusion phenomenon began after the financial panic of 1873, peaked with the July 1877 riots in San Francisco, and finally concluded in 1882 with Congress passing Chinese Exclusion legislation. This view sometimes accounts for the 1885-6 violence and expulsions some whites committed against Chinese in the West Coast states as a sort of residuum to the 1882 Exclusion legislation. What primary historical documents instead indicate is that while there were notable “peaks” in white anti-Chinese discourse and activities, Chinese Exclusion and its associated violence continued throughout the study period, even growing more severe in the 1890s and 1900s. In 1904 Chang Kiu Sing characterized the experience, writing “They call it exclusion; but it is not exclusion, it is extermination” (quoted in Coolidge 1909: 302), and Chinese Exclusion had by 1920 reduced the Chinese American population of the United States to half its 1880 level (Choy, Dong, and Hom 1994: 20). Although this study ends in 1910, with the opening of the Angel Island Immigration Station, the Chinese Exclusion movements and the racialization processes intertwined with them continued. Their deep impacts altered with changes in the geopolitical situation, when white politicians in the early twentieth century began a process of anointing “the Japanese” as the enemy of choice. Discrimination against Chinese did not end with increasing discrimination against Japanese. In fact, anti-Chinese discrimination broadened to become Anti-Asian discrimination, and in 1917 Congress legislated the U.S. “an Asiatic barred zone” (McMahon 2001; Act of Feb 5., 1917, ch. 29, 39 Stat. 874, quoted in Hanley-Lopez 1996:38).

How deeply the Chinese Exclusion movements played a part in new configurations of racial identity is seen in other portions of the processes by which whiteness was constructed. The very term miscegenation was invented at the close of the Civil War, the Oxford English Dictionary dating its first appearance to 1864. “The Chinese Question” was created at the same time as the creation of “the Negro Question:” both advocated an idea that whites would reach a greater prosperity if these racial others were gone, and both were identified as being part of political machinations (e.g. Washington-Williams and Stadiem 2005: 59-61), and Du Bois (e.g. 1969[1935]: 728) notes the parallels between increasing discrimination against Chinese and the end of reconstruction. The 1880s and 1890s lynchings of Chinese American individuals and attacks on communities proceeded in tandem with an epidemic of whites lynching African-Americans in the South (Wells 1969[1892]; Loewen 1999: 427). And if major government figures have a role in setting the tone for individuals’ interactions, such illegal acts were given a form of authorization with President Wilson’s institution of federal segregation (Loewen 1996: 26-9).

The persistence of the forces behind Chinese Exclusion is indicated by the fact that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was law into the later twentieth century. In 1943 it was repealed as a trade for China’s allegiance in World War II, but, as Chinn, Lai, and Choy (1969: 28-30) note, this action was largely a symbolic gesture, as strict quotas organized around arbitrary principles of “racial origin” continued until mid-1968 to severely limit immigration of people of Chinese descent, regardless of their country of origin. The 1875 law denying Chinese immigrants the possibility of citizenship through naturalization only voided in 1952 through the McCarren-Walter Act (Chinn, Lai, and Choy 1969: 26-30). The repeal of anti-naturalization laws also finally removed the restrictions of the California Land Laws forbidding those ineligible for citizenship from owning land (Chow 1974: 153). (This did not remove white discrimination against Chinese and Chinese American landowning in the form of racially-restrictive covenants--See Chow 1974: 130-8, 156-60, especially 1974: 146; Denton 1967: 1-8.) California kept its law preventing marriage between “Chinese” and “white” individuals until it was ruled unconstitutional in 1948, when recognition of WWII service by Chinese Americans was making it harder to continue denying Chinese Americans civil rights, although in ten holdout states “anti-miscegenation” laws had to be finally overturned by the Supreme Court in 1967 (Chow 1974: 154, 72). These examples of change and continuity demonstrate it is inaccurate to assume the Chinese Exclusion movements can be viewed as a single movement, one that was relatively homogeneous, occurred over a short duration, and culminated with the construction of the Angel Island Immigration Station.

Critically reviewing the historiography of the Chinese Exclusion movements shows the traditional explanation that holds working-class whites, and especially unemployed Irish immigrants, to be the prime movers behind the Chinese Exclusion laws and related discrimination is not supported by contemporary historical evidence. Instead, this Irish Laborer Hypothesis seems to have been adapted from popular narratives created after the fact. It neglects the leadership roles that sources at the time noted were played by mainstream white politicians and businessmen. Examining recorded political statements, actions, and business ventures of these politicians shows that while they held office, they pursued strategies to create conditions most favorable to their own and their affiliate’s business interests. Promoting anti-Chinese racism served to deflect widespread criticism that their political practices were undemocratic, and created in support of harmful business monopolies. When mainstream white political and business leaders argued it was people of Chinese descent who threatened the economic wellbeing of the state’s residents, they were attempting to create a sense of white racial solidarity and shared interests against “the Chinese.” The case of former California Governor and U.S. Senator George C. Perkins illustrates mainstream white politicians used racism and discrimination against Chinese as part of asserting they were working for the betterment of “the white race,” when in fact they were pursuing their own economic gain. These facts argue for reinvestigating the processes at work in creating new identities in California. Historic urban Chinatowns and their histories with the larger communities provide data speaking to nineteenth-century reinventions of race. In Chapter 3, I review archaeological data from excavations at the Chinatowns of Sacramento, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Riverside. After adding new results from Oakland in Chapter 4, in Chapter 5, I return to examining spatial and artifactual data that sheds light on racialization processes. The results again show the Irish Laborer Hypothesis to be not supported by the evidence. Instead, mainstream white political and business leaders used assertions about racial differences to claim authority and built support for redeveloping land to their profit. The very material consequences of these actors’ constructions of race underscore the potential for archaeology to conduct historicized investigations of the processes of creating social identity.

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[1] The Goat Island Massacre, recorded in Ellen Burrell D’Aprey’s “The Stormy Petrel,” a longhand manuscript the Bancroft Library estimates to date to the 1870s, seems to have been first uncovered in recent times by Bagwell (1982). To derive the 1854 date, Bagwell (1982: 85) uses internal evidence:

Burrell’s memoir dates the incident as about two years before the founding of San Francisco’s Committee of Vigilance to curb Barbary Coast violence. There was more than one such committee in San Francisco, the most notable being the “first” in 1851 and the “second” in 1856. Burrell apparently is referring to the 1856 committee, placing the event in 1854, most likely in the spring or summer from her hint about the weather conditions.

That Ellen Burrell did not arrive on the west coast until August 27, 1852 (Burrell 187-?: 265), lends support to Bagwell’s extrapolation that the 1856 committee is indeed Burrell’s reference point.