The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [72]
Page’s bill passed both houses of Congress. This time, President Arthur, doubtless fully sensitive to the response after his previous veto, did not oppose it. On May 6, 1882, he signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act. Thus was enacted, as one scholar has put it, “one of the most infamous and tragic statutes in American history,” one that would “frame the immigration debate in the years that followed and [result in] greater and greater restrictions on foreigners seeking refuge and freedom in the United States.”
Far from appeasing the fanatics, the new restrictions inflamed them. Having succeeded in barring the majority of new Chinese immigrants from American shores, the anti-Chinese bloc began a campaign to expel the remaining Chinese from the United States. During a period of terror now known as “the Driving Out,” several Chinese communities in the West were subjected to a level of violence that approached genocide.
For example, on September 28, 1885, delegates at a mass anti-Chinese rally in Seattle issued a manifesto to force all Chinese out of the Washington Territory by November 1. To warn the Chinese of the impending deadline, they formed two committees to deliver the message from house to house in the cities of Tacoma and Seattle. By the end of October, most Chinese laborers had left town, but many merchants, unwilling to abandon their goods, remained.
On the morning of November 3, 1885, hundreds of white men held good on their promise in a giant raid against the Tacoma Chinatown. They kicked down doors, dragged the occupants outside, and herded six hundred Chinese to the Northern Pacific Railroad train station during a heavy rainstorm, where they kept them without shelter for the night. As a result, two men died from exposure and one merchant’s wife went insane; the rest were rescued by the railroad, which transported them safely to Portland.
The secretary of war dispatched troops to Seattle, preventing, temporarily at least, another anti-Chinese pogrom. But it is difficult to assess which posed the greater threat to the Chinese, the mob or the troops. Some soldiers decided to collect a “special tax” from the residents of Chinatown, seizing cash from the people they were sent to protect. Others joined in mob activities, beating up several Chinese, cutting off one man’s queue, pushing another down a flight of stairs, throwing still another into a bay.
The following February, months after the troops had left, white rioters in Seattle once again violently ousted the remaining Chinese from their homes. They dragged the Chinese from their beds, ordered them to pack, and marched them to a steamer bound for San Francisco. Even without an angry mob at their heels, most Chinese were anxious to leave town, but they lacked the funds to purchase steamship tickets. Some eighty Chinese who had the cash to pay for passage embarked immediately, while the rest, at least three hundred people, were left shivering on the docks, thronged by a crowd determined to prevent them from returning to their homes. The governor, Watson C. Squire, issued a proclamation ordering the mob to disperse, and volunteers were sworn in as policemen to protect the refugees from physical injury. When the Home Guard escorted the Chinese back to their old neighborhoods, a mob of two thousand rioters attacked them, resulting in gunfire that left one rioter dead and four wounded. After this fracas, President Grover Cleveland declared martial law and dispatched federal troops to Seattle.
In 1885, far worse occurred in a mining community in Rock Springs, Wyoming. The end of the silver boom had created a labor excess in the area, and white miners, unable to compete with the low wages the Chinese accepted, conspired to drive out their competition. Arming themselves with knives, clubs, hatchets, and guns, they headed for the local Chinatown, robbing and shooting the Chinese they met along the way. Once they reached Chinatown, they