The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [71]
According to Miller, America belonged to white people and white people only. His vision of America was a land “resonant with the sweet voices of flaxen-haired children.” Pleading with his colleagues to preserve “American Anglo-Saxon civilization without contamination or adulteration ... [from] the gangrene of oriental civilization,” Miller asserted that group discrimination on the basis of ancestry was natural and sensible. “Why not discriminate? Why aid in the increase and distribution over ... our domain of a degraded and inferior race, and the progenitors of an inferior sort of men?”
Many of Miller’s colleagues wholeheartedly agreed with him, but one senator from Massachusetts rose above the passion of the moment and tried to remind his colleagues of the larger issues involved. George Frisbie Hoar, a progressive-minded leader who had opposed slavery and championed the civil rights of workers, believed that excluding people on the basis of race rather than conduct made a mockery of the high ideals set forth in our own Declaration of Independence. Denouncing racism as “the last of human delusions to be overcome,” a force that “left its hideous and ineradicable stains in our history,” Hoar blasted the hypocrisy of America’s race-baiting politicians: “We go boasting of our democracy, and our superiority, and our strength,” he said. “The flag bears the stars of hope to all nations. A hundred thousand Chinese land in California and everything is changed ... The self-evident truth becomes a self-evident lie.”
Few agreed with Hoar, either in Congress or across the nation. His speech provoked condemnation from both the press and the political establishment. “It is idle to reason with stupidity like this,” the New York Times proclaimed. The New York Tribune put Hoar in the class of “humanitarian half thinkers.” Legislators from western states pointed out that many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had owned slaves, and one Colorado lawmaker insisted that the Caucasian race “has a right, considering its superiority of intellectual force and mental vigor, to look down upon every other branch of the human family.”
Despite popular support for the bill, President Chester Arthur vetoed it. He claimed the twenty-year ban was too long, but it seems clear that he feared the Qing government might respond to such a law by shutting Chinese ports to American trade. In a speech no doubt intended to fortify diplomatic relations with China, Arthur praised the contributions of the Chinese émigré workers in building the transcontinental railroad as well as in developing industry and agriculture, and he argued the bill’s potentially adverse economic consequences. “Experience has shown that the trade of the East is the key to national wealth and influence,” he said. “It needs no argument to show that the policy which we now propose to adopt must have a direct tendency to repel oriental nations from us and to drive their trade and commerce into more friendly lands.”
The public swiftly retaliated against Arthur. Across the West the president was hanged in effigy, his image burned by furious mobs. Representative Horace Page, another Republican from California known for his anti-Chinese attitudes, immediately introduced a compromise bill that shortened the ban from twenty to ten years. In addition, under Page’s bill Chinese laborers would be barred,