The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  There can be no doubt but that the presence of numbers among us of a degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race, and, to a certain extent, repel desirable immigration. It will afford me great pleasure to concur with the Legislature in any constitutional action, having for its object the repression of the immigration of the Asiatic races.93

  These views were quite commonplace at the time. Leland Stanford was also a hypocrite: his anti-immigration rants did not prevent him, as president of railroad companies such as the Central Pacific (he was a classic ‘robber baron’), from employing thousands of Chinese workers. Stanford University is named after him, unsurprisingly, since he funded and founded it.

  Discrimination against the Chinese, in a country that welcomed immigrants from everywhere in Europe, had already been established in law by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, was extended in 1892, and made permanent in 1902 – the only US immigration law openly discriminating on grounds of race. It was repealed only in 1943, while the Californian state law prohibiting non-whites from marrying whites was upheld until 1948 when the California Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Elsewhere in America such legislation survived until 1967, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that all anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional.

  The Chinese Exclusion Act was supported by the official labour movement, the American Federation of Labor (AFL). It demanded that Chinese and ‘Orientals’ be kept out of the country since they brought ‘nothing but filth, vice, and disease’. The head of the AFL, Samuel Gompers (a Jew), told his members in 1901 that ‘every incoming coolie … means so much more vice and immorality injected into our social life’.94 In 1905 Gompers declared that ‘the caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, China-men, Japs, or any others’.95 This union racism played a major role in the development of American organized labour.96 The Chinese Exclusion Act was, however, opposed by the Industrial Workers of the World (the ‘wobblies’), a radical union formed in 1905 which, unlike the AFL, recruited mainly unskilled immigrant labourers.

  In 1902, Samuel Gompers and Herman Gutstadt published a racist pamphlet called Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive? (reprinted in 1908 by the Asiatic Exclusion League), quoting with approval remarks made in 1879 by James G. Blaine (twice Secretary of State, abolitionist, presidential candidate, Speaker of the House): ‘I am opposed to the Chinese coming here. I am opposed to making them citizens … You cannot work a man who must have beef and bread alongside a man who can live on rice.’97

  Henry George, the radical reformer, author of the best-selling Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (1879), railed against the Chinese: ‘their moral standard is as low as their standard of comfort’, they were ‘filthy in their habits’ and ‘incapable of understanding our religion’ or ‘our political institutions’.98 The progressive journalist Jacob Riis in his famous social exposé How the Other Half Lives (1890) wrote that the Chinese in New York ‘are in no sense a desirable element of the population’ and ‘serve no useful purpose here, whatever they may have done elsewhere’, though, since they were here, we ‘should make the best of it’ and ensure that they can bring their families.99

  Archibald Coolidge, professor of history at Harvard and editor-in-chief of the distinguished journal Foreign Affairs, in his influential text The United States as a World Power (1908), replete with vacuous barroom generalizations about race, thought that the natives of Africa were mere savages and that those of the Middle East and India were better, but the more their living conditions improved the more they were likely to become impatient.100 He was also worried about the mixing of races in the United States:

  Dogs, for instance, can often be profitably crossed … but if kinds that are too alien to one another are bred together, the product is a worthless mongrel. May not something of the same sort hold true of human beings?101

  Much of the anti-Chinese prejudice was extended to the Japanese. In 1901, Henry Gage, Governor of California, warned that Japanese immigration was a menace to American workers just as much as the Chinese were. White workers formed the Asiatic Exclusion League ‘to preserve the Caucasian race upon American soil’.102 In 1888 the newly formed American Economic Association offered a prize of $150 for the best essay on ‘The Evil Effects of Unrestricted Immigration’.103 The winner was the Chicago professor Edward Webster Bemis, who argued in various lectures that immigrants were over-represented among criminals and the insane.104

  American Indians, decimated by diseases imported from Europe and by settlers’ violence, were kept in reservations, though various attempts were made to ‘Americanize’ them. Thomas Jefferson Morgan, commissioner of Indian Affairs (1889–93), aimed to build a one-nation identity among Native American children by means of compulsory education and placing them with white families during the holidays in order to turn them into good Christians and good Americans. By 1900, 10 per cent of Native American children had been placed in special schools where American history, seen as a history of progress, challenged Native American traditions regarded as backward.105

  In the 1880s immigration from eastern and southern Europe increased sharply and so did anti-immigrant feeling among well-established American settlers. New immigrants were seen as an economic threat. Two groups were singled out: the Italians and the Jews. The Italians were regarded as bloodthirsty criminals, quick with the knife; besides they were Catholics and, if not Catholics, dangerous anarchists. A lynching of Italians occurred in New Orleans on 14 March 1891, the largest lynching in American history, when a group of vigilantes slaughtered eleven Italians who were being tried for the murder of David Hennessey, the chief of police. The New York Times of 15 March 1891 approved heartily: ‘Chief Hennessy Avenged; Eleven of his Italian Assassins Lynched by a Mob’. Equally approving were the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle as well as The Times of London. Later a grand jury condoned the lynching, as did the governor of Louisiana.106

  As for the Jews, they were filthy peddlers whose God was money, out to take over native business.107 American populists made the identification between Jews and the power of money only too readily.108 They were certainly not the only ones. The distinguished historian Henry Adams, whose grandfather (John Quincy Adams) and great-grandfather had been President of the United States, wrote in 1895 that ‘in ten years … Jews will completely control the finances and Government of this country …’109 Views like these led to quotas being imposed against Jews in colleges and universities, hospitals and law firms. The appointment of the distinguished Jewish jurist Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court was bitterly contested – ironically he was the author of Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914), which criticized investment bankers, especially J. P. Morgan.

  Building the American nation on the basis of some kind of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nativism, leaving out blacks, orientals, Latinos, Catholics, and Jews, ultimately proved futile, its absurdity heightened by the slow but unrelenting demographic change that would made the phrase ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ (WASP) more a term of mild abuse than one of proud self-satisfaction.

  In Australia, too, white supremacist beliefs were regarded as normal among the political elites. In 1901 the White Australia Policy, limiting immigration to whites only via a dictation test in any European language (the Australian Labour Party had wanted to exclude explicitly Asians and Africans), was introduced by the country’s first Prime Minister and leader of the Protectionist Party, Edmund (‘Toby’) Barton, who declared:

  I do not think that the doctrine of the equality of man was really intended to include racial equality. These races are, in comparison with white races … unequal and inferior. The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.110

  Barton’s idea of the ‘white races’ did
, at least, include women and, in 1902, his government extended female suffrage throughout all parts of the country.

  The European labour movement was also not immune to racism. In France, for instance, at the Congrés Ouvrier of Lyon in 1878 a delegate referred to the Arabs as ‘ce peuple ignorant et fanatique’, and in the socialist daily L’Humanité (7 August 1913) Maurice Allard, a socialist and anticlerical MP, referred to ‘primitive and grotesque blacks’ with whom he claimed to have far less in common than with the Germans.111 Xenophobia in the trade unions was rife, reflecting the worries of many French workers about the influx of Belgian and Italian workers (in 1886 there were over one million foreign workers in France).112 Between 1881 and 1893, some thirty Italians were killed in a series of anti-Italian pogroms, mainly in the south of France. Clashes between French and Italian workers in Aigues-Mortes, north-west of Marseille (the capital of xenophobia), in 1893 resulted in the deaths of ten Italians.113

  The arch-liberal economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu was even worried about the Chinese, of whom there were hardly any in France (only 283 recorded out of a population of nearly 40 million, according to the 1911 census). In his Essai sur la repartition des richesses he argued against shortening the working day, saying that the ‘yellow men’ were ‘willing to sell their labour for less and work for longer hours’. He warned: ‘Beware of the Orientals whose ideal of happiness is a bowl full of rice.’114

  At least a bowl of rice meant cheap wages. With the end of slavery in America, the liberal weekly The Economist wondered how ‘the dark races’ could be ‘induced to obey white men willingly’.115 Of course, racism has long been part of the history of humanity, not least among so-called civilized peoples, including some remarkable minds, such as Hegel, who indulged, in his lectures on the ‘philosophy of world history’, in low-level stereotypes without even realizing it. In Africa, Hegel explained, ‘human development is arrested’. Africans exhibit ‘sensuous enjoyment, great muscular strength to sustain labour, childlike good nature, but also unreflective and unfeeling ferocity …’116 And it gets worse: ‘The Negro … exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state … there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.’117

  Immanuel Kant wrote of the American Indian who, being ‘too weak for hard labor, too indifferent for industry and incapable of any culture … ranks still far below even the Negro, who stands on the lowest of all the other steps that we have named as differences of the races’.118 Voltaire, the author of the famous Treatise on Tolerance (1763), wrote in the less well-known and much longer Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) about the ‘Negroes’: ‘Their round eyes, their flat nose, their lips always large, their odd-looking ears, their woollen head, even the measure of their intelligence, makes them prodigiously different from other men.’119

  A century later such stereotypes were still produced by distinguished intellectuals. Ernest Renan, in the first chapter of his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (1855) ranked the ‘Semitic race’ well below the ‘Indo-European’.120 The great liberal John Stuart Mill, in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), noted, with little regard for logic or evidence, that ‘The most envious of all mankind are the Orientals … Next to the Orientals in envy, as in inactivity, are some of the Southern Europeans …’, while noting ‘the striving, go-ahead character of England and the United States …’121 The young Mahatma Gandhi, on 26 September 1896, speaking in Bombay in order to gather support for the Indian community in South Africa, where as a lawyer he defended Indians against laws that regarded them no better than blacks (‘kaffirs’ in the pejorative language of the time), declared:

  Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.122

  Ranking civilizations as well as ‘races’ was common at the time. Thus Churchill spoke of the ‘gulf which separates the African negro from the immemorial civilizations of India and China’. Subjugation was one way of helping the ‘negroes’. Another, explained Churchill, was to put them in ‘Large reservations of good, well-watered land where the Africa aboriginal for whom civilization has no chance may dwell secluded and at peace.’123

  Anti-immigration feelings were present even in countries with a relatively low level of immigration, such as England. Margaret Harkness’s novel Out of Work (1888), published under the pseudonym of ‘John Law’, tells the story of a carpenter, Jos Corney, during the depression of the 1870s and 1880s, who tries to find some work in the docks only to be told all the jobs are going to ‘them furriners [foreigners] … Why should they come here, I’d like to know? London ain’t what it used to be; it’s just like a foreign city. The food ain’t English; the talk ain’t English. Why should all them foreigners come here to take the food out of our mouths, and live on victuals we wouldn’t give to pigs?’124

  Immigration did not need to be massive to give rise to racist prejudice. Between 1908 and 1911, Joseph Havelock Wilson, the Liberal MP and leader of the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union (NSFU), waged a campaign against Chinese labour in British shipping, framing the issue in terms of a universal conflict between the white and yellow races.125 Yet in 1911 there were only 300 Chinese in London and 403 in Liverpool, and there were fewer Chinese working on British ships (4,595) than Scandinavians (5,948).126 The image of the Chinese in England was imbued with racial stereotypes (immoral, violent people whose values were incompatible with those of whites).127 M. P. Shiel’s best-selling novel The Yellow Danger (1898) played its part, as did the creation of Fu Manchu, the criminal genius and opium addict, in Sax Rohmer’s popular novels, the first of which was serialized in 1912–13.128

  Outsiders have always suffered. But industrialization increased migration and hence the number of outsiders. It was an inevitable result of ‘progress’: greater mobility, better transportation, new lands to settle, and the realization of personal ambition. It was less and less likely that someone would live his or her entire life where they were born. The signs of this new modernity had been detected decades earlier. John Stuart Mill, in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), noted:

  It is hardly possible to overrate the value … of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Commerce is now, what war once was, the principal source of this contact …129

  Much of this movement of people was involuntary in the sense that the migrants were pushed by the need to improve their circumstances, in some cases not having enough to eat (though migrants tended to be better off than those who remained, as one needed to be able to fund one’s voyage), in other cases by persecution and war. In most cases it was a combination of poor prospects at home and better ones overseas. Thus in Germany, for example, in the early 1880s many of the annual 170,000 individuals who migrated to the United States were pushed by economic discontent at home and the prospect of land in America.130

  Immigration controls are a modern invention, part of the history of modern capitalism. Throughout most of the nineteenth century emigration (much of which was from Europe) was not restricted. By the end of the nineteenth century there were restrictions in many countries as industrialized nation states had passed legislation that required immigrants to register, to have some skills and to pay a tax. Governments asserted their sovereign right to exclude people from crossing their borders or stop them registering – the Netherlands in 1887, Sweden in 1894, Argentina in 1902, Chile in 1918, France after 1893, the United States after 1891.131 In Britain the Aliens Act of 1905, intended mainly against Jews from the Tsarist Empire, imposed border controls for the first time. In 1905 the eminent constitutional lawyer A. V. Dicey wrote that the aim of the legislation
was ‘to restrain any form of competition which may come into conflict with the immediate interest of … English wage-earners’.132 Laws such as these concentrated power in the hands of the state. Previously, at least in Britain, immigration control took the form of expulsion in cases decided by local authorities or voluntary agencies. Thus two Jewish organizations repatriated some 31,000 Jews to eastern Europe between 1881 and 1906.133

  Some ethnic groups were banned or had severe restrictions imposed on them. Venezuela banned non-Europeans; the United States banned orientals; Prussia deported some 40,000 Polish workers in 1885.134 These bans were usually supported by trade unions, while employers, understandably enough, opposed them. Max Weber noted that the people who were replacing the Germans on the sugar-beet estates of East Prussia were able to submit to conditions that Germans would not accept. Recruited by agents, they ‘cross the frontier in tens of thousands in spring and leave again in autumn’.135 Weber, who was always more of a nationalist than a liberal, advocated closing the eastern frontier. ‘From the standpoint of the nation,’ he wrote, ‘large-scale enterprises which can only be preserved at the expense of the German race deserve to go down to destruction.’136

  This lament was all in vain. Between 1890 and 1914 some 2 million people had moved to the western provinces of the German Empire, in particular the Rhineland.137 In the United Kingdom, Irish migration, which had increased sharply after the famine of 1846–50, continued steadily until, by 1911, there were more than 550,000 Irish in Great Britain.138 They were regarded as a source of disease and a burden on the taxpayer, a ‘collection of demoralised paupers and criminals threatening the well-being of the nation’.139