Anti-Chinese Political Cartoon

Editorial cartoon

By: Anonymous

Date: 1877

Source: "Anti-Chinese Political Cartoon." © Bettmann/ Corbis.

Source: This cartoon is a part of the Bettmann Archives of the Corbis Corporation, an international provider of visual content materials to a wide range of consumers in the communications industries. The artist is unknown.

INTRODUCTION

The discrimination practiced against Asian peoples in North America as reflected in this 1877 political cartoon had its impetus from the completion of the American transcontinental railway in 1869. Although there was a significant Chinese labor force in California after 1850, the easier rail access to the West Coast across the American continent had created a movement of Caucasian labor to California after 1870; there quickly arose a feeling in the white population that Chinese and later Japanese laborers, often referred to as "coolies," had driven down the available wages and therefore contributed to greater unemployment in the region. The Asian workers were stereotyped from the earliest days of their immigration to California as fanatical in their desire to work for the lowest possible wage.

The cartoon reflects contemporary societal views of its Asian immigrants on two distinct levels. Miscegenation is a technical term that describes the inter-marriage—or more broadly, the inter-breeding—of two separate races. It is a word that was invented for use in 1863 by D.G. Croly, a New York Democrat who published a pseudo-scientific paper about the inter-marriage of American black and white races to undermine the Lincoln administration and its campaign to emancipate the slaves in the Southern states. Miscegenation became an unintended term of art that was used by the forces opposed to Asian immigration for the next eighty years.

On a broader level, the image of the young Chinese male taking the arm of the young Caucasian female was intended to symbolize the perceived incursion by the Chinese into American society at large.

Anti-Chinese sentiments were not restricted to the United States at the time the cartoon was published. The Canadian province of British Columbia had also experienced a significant increase of Chinese immigration in the late 1870s; as the successful construction of Canada's transcontinental railway hinged on the completion of the dangerous blasting operations that were necessary to build the passes through the Rocky Mountains that were undertaken in the early 1880s. Thousands of Chinese laborers were engaged in the work. It was estimated that in some of the most perilous blasting operations, where liquid nitroglycerine was employed, a Chinese coolie died for every 10 feet (3 meters) of rail line laid.

The Chinese were the most prominent Asian immigrants to North America in the late 1870s. The hostility directed toward their presence in the work-force was later broadened to include the Japanese, who began to arrive in greater numbers on the West Coast of North America and Hawaii after the Japanese government abolished its death penalty in 1888 for those who sought to emigrate from Japan. The feelings against Asian immigration were heightened across North America when Korean and Indian laborers arrived in significant numbers after 1900.

PRIMARY SOURCE

ANTI-CHINESE POLITICAL CARTOON

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

The primary significance of the 1877 Anti-Chinese cartoon is that the cartoon represents a North American public sentiment that was then just beginning to find its political expression. Policies directed against Asian immigration would be a component of both American and Canadian government policy for the next seventy years.

In the United States, the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 was the first of seven significant Congressional acts directed at Asian peoples in America. The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese immigration for ten years and it was subsequently extended. After its transcontinental railway was completed in 1885, Canada determined that it had no need to further encourage Chinese immigration; Canada imposed a "head tax" of $50 on every Chinese person seeking to enter Canada, a figure that approximated the annual net wages of an unskilled laborer. The head tax was increased to $500 per prospective Chinese immigrant by 1923. Canadian policies through this period toward the Chinese are contrasted with the free land made available through its homestead policy to thousands of eastern European farmers who were encouraged to settle on the Canadian Prairies in the early 1900s.

North American efforts to legislate restrictions against Chinese labor were replicated in Mexico, the countries of modern Central America, and Peru by 1900. The collective anti-Chinese prohibitions have been termed the "Great Wall Against China" in the modern scholarly reviews of this question. Attacks on coolie labor and elements of fear-mongering, seen in expressions such as "Yellow Peril," were common editorial themes in the West Coast newspapers throughout this period. American legislative actions included the exclusion of Asian children from San Francisco schools in 1905, two specific anti-Japanese statutes in California in 1909, and the Johnson Act of 1924, a Federal law that imposed racial quotas on the immigration of all Asian people to the United States. The American ban on Asian immigration was not lifted until 1952.

The most visible example of overt public discrimination against Asian persons in North America occurred with the formation of the Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) in San Francisco in 1905. The AEL was the creation of the local trade unions to combat the effect of Asian labor in the California economy. An AEL was also formed for a brief period in Vancouver, an act that precipitated riots in that city's Chinatown in September, 1907. The participation of numerous trade unions in the AEL was consistent with the forceful campaign waged against Asian immigration by Samuel Gompers (1850–1924), the founder and president of the American Federation of Labor. Gompers wrote a series of political pamphlets directed at Chinese and Japanese labor after 1900, including "Meat versus Rice" and "American Manhood versus Asiatic Coolieism—Which Shall Survive?"

The determined position of Gompers and the San Francisco unions is significant as it stands in contrast to the later prominent role taken by the American labor movement in liberal causes such as women's rights in the workplace, a shorter work week, and various efforts to improve working conditions generally in the United States.

In many respects, the internment of Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian citizens and naturalized persons in both Canada and the United States after 1941 was a natural extension of the sentiments reflected in the 1877 cartoon. In both countries, persons of Japanese ancestry were either forcibly relocated to places removed from the Pacific coast and the presumed prospect of a Japanese attack on North America or interned in government camps, often with a resulting loss of their property. The impact of internment was felt by a significant population. In the United States, 126,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were subject to internment in 1941, with over sixty percent of these persons being American citizens. In British Columbia, 22,000 such persons were interned or subject to relocation; seventy-five percent of these persons were either naturalized Canadians or were born in Canada.

The ultimate official acknowledgement of the anti-Asian practices common in North America after 1877 took separate but similar turns in Canada and the United States. In 1948, limited compensation was made available to American Japanese internees. In 1988, President Reagan issued an official apology to the Japanese-American community for the policy of internment.

In Canada, the federal government issued a formal apology to the Chinese people who had paid its head tax in the period between 1885 and 1923. In 1988, the government had issued a formal apology and compensation package to the Japanese-Canadian survivors of wartime detention.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Daniels, Roger.Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1999.

Lee, Erika.At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Miki, Roy.Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice. Vancouver, Canada: Raincoast Books, 2005.

Web sites

City of San Francisco. "Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco." 2005 <http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/ invasion.html> (accessed June 11, 2006).

City of Vancouver. "1906–1908." May 29, 2006 <http:// www.vancouverhistory.ca/chronology5.htm> (accessed June 11, 2006).