Responses to Immigration in the Gilded Age in two minutes
- Anti-Chinese feeling grew in the West, where Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party used the slogan “The Chinese must go,” and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese laborers for ten years.
- The 1882 law also barred Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens, and in 1885 white miners killed 28 Chinese miners at Rock Springs, Wyoming.
- Congress excluded immigrants likely to become public charges in 1882 and banned imported contract labor in 1885, and the Immigration Restriction League (1894) pushed a literacy test that Cleveland vetoed in 1897.
- Nativists in the American Protective Association targeted Catholics, while Social Darwinism and Josiah Strong's Our Country (1885) used survival of the fittest to justify Anglo-Saxon superiority.
- Reformers tried to help and Americanize newcomers: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull-House in Chicago in 1889, and Florence Kelley became Illinois's first factory inspector in 1893.
- The Geary Act renewed exclusion in 1892, and in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) the Supreme Court ruled that birth in the United States made someone a citizen.
- On the exam: expect questions comparing nativist, exclusionist, and reform responses to immigrants; the topic links to the Immigration Act of 1924 and to Asian exclusion in Period 7.
Topic 6.9 key terms
- Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
The first federal law to bar immigrants because of their nationality. It suspended Chinese labor immigration for ten years. Congress renewed it in 1892, extended it without an end date, and did not repeal it until 1943.
- Page Act (1875)
Barred women brought to the U.S. "for lewd and immoral purposes," and forced-contract laborers, from Asia. Officials used it to keep out most Chinese women, so Chinese America stayed mostly male for decades.
- Workingmen's Party of California
Founded in San Francisco in 1877, in a depression. Its slogan blamed Chinese workers for low wages. It helped put anti-Chinese clauses into California's 1879 constitution and pushed both national parties to act.
- Geary Act (1892)
Extended Chinese exclusion ten more years and required Chinese laborers to register and carry a certificate of residence or be deported. The Supreme Court upheld it in Fong Yue Ting (1893).
- Social Darwinism
Applying “survival of the fittest” to society: the rich are the fittest, so charity and reform interfere with nature. Nobody used the label then; historian Richard Hofstadter popularized it in 1944.
- Nativism
Hostility to immigrants and a preference for native-born, often Protestant, Americans. The APA (founded 1887) targeted Catholics; it claimed millions of members and denied the published oaths.
- Immigration Restriction League
Boston group founded in 1894 to cut immigration, mainly from southern and eastern Europe. Its main tool was a literacy test.
- Literacy test
A requirement that immigrants read a short passage. Restrictionists pushed it because it would fall hardest on the “new” immigrants. Passed over Wilson's veto in 1917.
- Settlement house
A house in a poor immigrant district where college-educated residents lived and ran classes, clubs, child care and baths, and studied local conditions to push for reform.
- Municipal reform
Citizen campaigns to make city government deliver basic services: clean streets, garbage collection, safe housing and inspectors who do their jobs.
- Americanization
The push to make immigrants adopt American language, dress, habits and civic values. Reformers offered real help, but often expected newcomers to give up their old ways.
- Sweatshop
A crowded workshop or tenement flat where workers, often women and children, sewed for long hours at very low pay. Reformers like Kelley pushed states to inspect and limit them.
- United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898)
Supreme Court case ruling that a child born in the United States to Chinese parents is a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment, even though the law barred those parents from ever becoming citizens.
- Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
Its first sentence makes everyone born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, a citizen. Ratified after the Civil War to secure citizenship for freed people.
- Birthright citizenship
Citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment whatever the parents' nationality. Confirmed for the children of Chinese immigrants in Wong Kim Ark (1898). Exceptions: children of diplomats and of enemy occupiers, and of members of Native nations owing tribal allegiance.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Nationality
1869–1892
Key terms: Page Act (1875), Workingmen's Party of California, Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), Geary Act (1892)
Washington wrote the law. The demand came from the West.
By 1880, about 105,000 Chinese lived in the United States. They mined, farmed, cooked, ran laundries and rolled cigars. Few were women.
In the hard times of 1877, San Francisco's jobless cheered Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party. Its slogan was 'The Chinese must go!'
Employers had used Chinese workers to cut wages and break strikes. Kearney was an immigrant too, from County Cork.
Frederick Douglass saw it differently. In Boston, he said:
Frederick Douglass
I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races;
Frederick Douglass
but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.
In 1882, Congress passed exclusion. President Arthur vetoed a twenty-year ban as 'a breach of our national faith.' Then he signed a ten-year one.
In fiscal 1882, nearly forty thousand Chinese arrived. In fiscal 1885, twenty-two.
On September 2, 1885, at Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, white miners attacked the Chinese miners beside them. Most of the attackers were immigrants too.
Reader, memorial of 559 Chinese miners, Rock Springs
It was a sad and painful sight to see the son crying for the father, the brother for the brother,
Reader, memorial of 559 Chinese miners, Rock Springs
the uncle for the nephew, and friend for friend.
Twenty-eight Chinese miners were killed. Seventy-nine homes burned. No one was ever indicted.
Joseph and Mary Tape sued to get their daughter Mamie, eight and born in San Francisco, into the neighborhood school. In 1885, they won.
The legislature answered with separate Chinese schools. Mary Tape wrote the school board:
Mary Tape
Is it a disgrace to be Born a Chinese? Didn't God make us all!!!
Mary Tape
Mamie Tape will never attend any of the Chinese schools of your making! Never!!!
That April, the Chinese Primary School opened in Chinatown. Mamie was among its first students.
In 1892, Congress renewed exclusion and made Chinese laborers carry a certificate of residence or face deportation. New York's Chinese Equal Rights League answered in print.
Wong Chin Foo
Treat us as men, and we will do our duty as men
Wong Chin Foo
America is our home through long residence.
They asked for rights for those already here, not an open door.
Able to Read or Write
1882–1897
Key terms: Social Darwinism, Nativism, Immigration Restriction League, Literacy test
November 1882, Delmonico's, New York. A banquet honored Herbert Spencer, who coined “survival of the fittest.” Evarts presided. In 1886, by one famous story, the statue's dedication cut him off mid-speech.
Yale professor William Graham Sumner, 1883:
William Graham Sumner
The class distinctions simply result from the different degrees of success with which men have availed themselves of the chances which were presented to them.
Success proved fitness, he argued. Help for the poor, he said, came out of the Forgotten Man's pocket.
The minister Josiah Strong wrote a best seller in 1885:
Josiah Strong
And can any one doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the “survival of the fittest”?
An argument about rich and poor had become a way to rank races.
The American Protective Association organized Protestants against Catholics. In 1893 the Congressional Record printed an oath:
I will not employ a Roman Catholic in any capacity if I can procure the services of a Protestant.
In New Orleans in 1891, a jury failed to convict Italian immigrants accused of killing the police chief. A mob led by prominent citizens broke into the parish prison and killed eleven men. No one was indicted.
Emma Lazarus
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and through them presses a wild motley throng… O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well to leave the gates unguarded?
Two poems, one statue. Lazarus: open the door. Aldrich: guard the gate. Both poems see a crowd. Neither names a person.
Aldrich called her “white Goddess.” She was copper, the brown of a new penny. By 1906 she was green.
In 1894, three young Harvard graduates founded the Immigration Restriction League. Their tool was a literacy test. Congress passed one in early 1897. President Cleveland vetoed it.
Grover Cleveland
The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.
Every group of newcomers had heard it said about them.
Calling or Occupation
1888–1895
Key terms: Settlement house, Municipal reform, Americanization, Sweatshop
In April 1888, twenty-seven-year-old Jane Addams went to a bullfight in Madrid.
Jane Addams
I found that I had seen, with comparative indifference, five bulls and many more horses killed.
What horrified her was that she hadn’t been horrified.
Jane Addams
I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.
In September 1889, she and Ellen Gates Starr moved into a Halsted Street mansion, between an undertaker and a saloon.
They called it a settlement. You didn’t visit the neighborhood. You settled in it, as a neighbor.
Winter dusk on Halsted Street. Every window of Hull-House is lit.
Hull-House took on City Hall, too. The mayor made Addams the ward’s garbage inspector.
Jane Addams
Perhaps our greatest achievement was the discovery of a pavement eighteen inches under the surface in a narrow street
Addams on entertaining her immigrant neighbors:
Jane Addams
to preserve and keep whatever of value their past life contained and to bring them in contact with a better type of Americans.
Years later, Addams noticed a girl leave her kerchiefed mother at the front door and go in by the side. Some neighbors heard only the second half.
Hull-House also opened careers to college women. Resident Florence Kelley studied the sweatshops. In 1893, Illinois barred factory work under fourteen and made her its first factory inspector.
Whether Ever Before in the United States
1895 → 1903
Key terms: United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), Fourteenth Amendment (1868), Birthright citizenship
In August 1895, Wong Kim Ark sailed home to San Francisco from China. He'd been born on Sacramento Street. The customs collector wouldn't let him land.
On March 28, 1898, the Supreme Court ruled six to two.
Justice Horace Gray
The fourteenth amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory…
Born here meant American. Wong Kim Ark was a citizen, and so was Mamie Tape. The ruling didn't end exclusion. Congress repealed that law in 1943.
In 1903, a friend of Emma Lazarus put her poem on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal. By then, the people sailing past had already decided what the statue meant.
Everybody tried to decide who got to become American. The people on the boats decided too, by coming, and by staying.
Emma Lazarus
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!