Rising anti-Chinese sentiment in California during the late 19th century led to violent riots and calls for government intervention. Economic anxieties and racist stereotypes fueled prejudice against Chinese immigrants, who were accused of stealing jobs and undermining white society.
In April, 1876, a California state senate committee held a series of hearings in Sacramento and San Francisco on the social, moral, and political effect of Chinese immigration. By some estimates, well over a hundred thousand Chinese were living in the state.
Government officials, police officers, and civic leaders testified that they represented the dregs of their native land and were rife with a criminal element; they lived in crowded, filthy conditions (as one witness put it, more like hogs than human beings); they were vectors of disease and licentiousness. Perhaps most important, as a years-long economic depression settled over the country and San Francisco seethed with thousands of unemployed white men, the witnesses argued that Chinese workers drove down wages and took jobs away from Americans. A California pastor proclaimed that white laborers must either starve to death, or they must fall to the level with the Chinese, or else they must themselves leave the country. More than ten thousand people in California and Nevada joined local camps of the Order of Caucasians, an organization that aimed to protect the white man and white civilization. In July, 1877, a rally in San Francisco erupted into days of rioting as mobs rampaged through the Chinese quarter and vandalized Chinese-owned businesses, mostly laundries, across the city. Several weeks later, the state senators sent an urgent message to Congress, warning that white residents up and down the West Coast were beginning to feel a profound sense of dissatisfaction with the situation and there would come a day when patience may cease. A treaty between the U.S. and China guaranteed the free flow of people between the two countries, making politicians in Washington reluctant to impose restrictions. But, then as now, the nation was evenly divided politically, and the Western states were a strategic prize for both Republicans and Democrats
Anti-Chinese Sentiment Immigration California Riots 19Th Century
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