The Chinese Must Go
Page 24
American and I appeal to Americans,” he declared. “Of the two methods,
the lawful and unlawful, I favor the American method.”
Burke believed that “the American method” was already working; agita-
tion and boycotts alone were convincing white employers to discharge
Chinese workers, and jobless mi grants were fleeing Puget Sound. To Burke,
intimidation was a legal and nonviolent means of driving out the Chinese, but
forcible expulsion was a punishable crime, a crime of insurrection, riot, or
conspiracy. He saw a clear division between the vigilantes and himself,
but he did not think it was a division of class, politics, or even racial beliefs.
The divide was between the “true men” who respected U.S. law and the
“wicked” “un- American” vigilantes who did not.65 By supporting law and
order, Burke hoped to shore up his own manliness, whiteness, and citizen-
ship, and encouraged other Irish Americans to do the same. Fearing the effects
of anti- Irish nativism, Burke unintentionally unleashed his own brand of
scorn.66
Few Irishmen were receptive to his message. One worker professed as-
tonishment at hearing “a man of Judge Burke’s caliber heap such burning
insults upon Irishmen.” Calling his speech nothing but “slurs and insolence,”
vigilantes accused Burke of caring only about the effect of the agitation on
his Chinese clients.67 It was true that Burke continued to represent Chinese
clients throughout the vio lence in Washington Territory, but mostly he was
helping them flee. He wrote to customs collector H. F. Beecher, for example,
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VIO LENCE
on behalf of Wan Lee, a merchant based in Seattle. Explaining that “public
prejudice” and “depression in his line of business” were forcing Lee to sell
out and permanently leave the country, Burke asked the collector to allow
him to travel to Victoria and back to settle his affairs. His advocacy only
sped Lee’s departure from Seattle.68
When the expulsion began in Seattle on February 7, 1886, Burke heard
the news from “a frightened Chinaman.” Leaving his half- eaten meal, he
rushed to his office and began sending messages to spread the news to
supporters of law and order. Soon Governor Squire, Haller, and other com-
munity leaders arrived at his law office and turned it into a temporary
headquarters for the militia. The territory’s militia, unlike its law enforce-
ment, was primarily composed of Washington’s cosmopolitan elite, in-
cluding former military officers, lawyers, businessmen, petty merchants, and
a few skilled laborers. Burke himself was a member of the Home Guard, one
of several militia companies or ga nized in Seattle. Unlike the police and
deputy sheriffs in Seattle and Tacoma, the militia raised armed re sis tance
against the vigilantes, but it came too little and too late. That after noon the
militia could not successfully stop the vigilantes from driving hundreds of
Chinese to the docks of Seattle.69
When the militia proved unable to stop the expulsion, Burke turned to
the law. He helped draft a plea of habeas corpus in the name of Gee Lee
and delivered the petition into the inviting hands of Judge Roger Greene, a
Republican known to be sympathetic to the Chinese and distrustful of work-
ingmen. Fearing the anti- Chinese vio lence was part of a “socialist conspiracy,”
Judge Greene was eager to stop the expulsion and ordered all expelled
Chinese to his courtroom the next morning. There, he told them they could
stay, but most declared their intention to go.70
It had been easy enough for the militia to escort the Chinese to Greene’s
courtroom. But returning them to their homes in Seattle, while they awaited
the next available steamer, proved difficult. A crowd of irate workingmen
met the militia downtown and refused to disperse. The commanding officer,
Captain John Haines, tried to make the situation clear: the militia was only
returning the Chinese to their homes temporarily, as a first step in an imagined
orderly and voluntary exiling of the Chinese. “The Chinese are going,” he
told the crowd; they “must go.”71 But the vigilantes did not believe him.
Burke’s biographer believed that Burke’s presence among the militia,
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161
holding a double- barreled shotgun at the ready, helped further antagonize
the rioters. His speech the previous November had made him a prominent
leader of the so- called white Chinese and a few cries of “Burke, Burke, give
us Burke” rose from the crowd.
Threatened by the jeers, militiamen fired their guns in warning, chaos
ensued, and several men fell wounded.72 It was a battle of white elites versus
white workingmen, with the unarmed Chinese trying to dodge the fray.
Years later the pattern of buckshot that hit the door of the nearby New
England Hotel was remembered as “Burke’s mark,” but Burke never admitted
to having fired his weapon that day. That did not, however, stop the vigi-
lantes (with the help of sympathetic policemen) from swearing out an arrest
warrant for Thomas Burke and three other men, for the murder of their fallen
comrade, Charles F. G. Stewart.73
As a lawyer and a militiaman, Burke believed he represented the interests
of American law, but the warrant for his arrest showed that he was not the
only one who claimed the law to be on his side. The agitators found willing
supporters in the courts, the police force, and the press. Haller, for one,
blamed the Seattle Daily Call and its “insolent and outrageous account” of
the shooting. In his diary, Haller accused the paper of “throwing blame on
the Deputy Sheriffs, and exciting the populace against law and order, by such
headings as ‘ Peaceful and law abiding mea sures of Expulsion’ when the laws
in the premises protect the Chinaman.”74 The militia acted in the name of
the law, but, to Haller’s disgust, the agitators did as well.
The warrant for Burke’s arrest was not immediately served, only because
Governor Squire declared martial law to quell the vio lence and to protect
his militiamen.75 In the meantime, Burke continued to serve as part of the
militia and wrote to friends declaring his innocence. To Mrs. Louisa Ack-
erson, Burke explained that ever since his speech at Frye’s Opera House “the
hoodlum ele ment here, and some well meaning but misguided people
have felt very bitter towards me.” He did not mention having any part in
the shooting, but justified the actions of the militia. He admitted that the
shootout was “very mortifying” but believed “it is infinitely better than let-
ting the law be trampled under foot and let[ting] this town be run by a
mob.”76 Burke was more direct when writing to another friend, Reverend
J. F. Ellis. He explained that “the order to fire was given by the proper officer,
and that every step taken by the militia was within the law.” He went on
“The Anti- Chinese Riot at Seattle.” This illustration by W. P. Snyder appeared
in Harper’s Weekly on March 6, 1886. Panel 1 depicts Chinese mi grants who
have been forced to gather at Seattle’s harbor awaitin
g passage to San Francisco.
Panel 2 shows the militiamen marching the expelled Chinese to Chief Justice
Roger Greene’s court house following a writ of habeas corpus. The largest
drawing shows the vio lence that followed Greene’s order to return the Chinese
to their residences. Digital reproduction courtesy of Harp Week, LLC.
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163
to further disparage the mob as a group of unpatriotic immigrants. “The
man Stewart who was killed,” wrote Burke, “was a foreigner, and didn’t value
the distinction of American citizenship enough to become naturalized.” As
he had in his infamous speech, Burke continued to condemn the agitators
as disloyal foreigners and, in turn, strengthened his own claim to American
citizenship and belonging.77
As he awaited trial, Burke cofounded the Bar Association of King County,
which took a public stand against the action of the “roughs” and in support
of the militia’s re sis tance. Repeating the themes of Burke’s opera house
speech, the Bar Association’s resolutions declared that the vio lence “ ought
to meet the strongest condemnation of every honest, loyal man residing in
[Seattle], and of every true American in the whole country.” The association
appealed to the white people of Washington Territory to unite behind law
and order. In this frontier community, argued the draf ters, “the prosperity
of one class is intimately associated with the prosperity of all” and therefore
there was “no occasion for jealousy, animosity or strife.” Recognizing that
class warfare had recently bloodied the streets of Seattle, they urged a cease-
fire among the white community.78
In June 1886, a grand jury was fi nally convened for the murder trial, the
People v. Thomas Burke et al. The primary evidence used against the accused
was the hastily recorded statement of Charles Stewart, the murdered man,
which was taken on February 8. According to his dying words, Stewart was
“struck” in the arm by “something,” but he did not realize it was a bullet
until he had been carried away from the scene. “I did not see anybody shoot
me,” he testified.79 While the jury lacked evidence that an order had been
given for the militia to fire, they did find that the shooting was warranted.
The grand jury found that the rioters had met the militia with “jeers and
hisses,” refused to move aside to let the Chinese pass, and attempted to seize
the guns of the militiamen. Considering these circumstances and the “ex-
cited state of men’s minds during those troubulous [ sic] days,” there were
grounds “to render it unsafe and dangerous to await an order to fire.” The
grand jury ruled the shooting an act of force, not a murderous assault,
drawing a legal line that divided state vio lence from vigilantism.80
With the case dismissed, Burke could rest assured that his good name as
a loyal patriot had been preserved. And this was every thing to him. His fight
against the vigilantes was a bold declaration of his patriotism, made more
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urgent by his status as a probationary citizen in a probationary state. Under
western eyes, he may have passed as an elite white businessman, but he knew
that to many East Coast nativists he would always be the lowly son of Irish
farmers. Burke trumpeted law and order, in front of that imagined eastern
audience, more in the interest of proving his loyalty to Amer ica than in the
interest of ending the expulsion.
The vio lence certainly cooled Burke’s public enthusiasm for Chinese
workers, but the effect proved only temporary. Once the vio lence had ended
and Chinese exclusion was in place, Burke found it pos si ble again to hire
Chinese workers and invest in China. When his law offices burned in the
Great Seattle fire of 1889, he sought out Chin Gee Hee’s help to find Chi-
nese builders. And when he joined investors of the Great Northern Railway
in the 1890s, he recruited Chin to serve as a labor contractor and, eventu-
ally, as a ticket agent. In 1916, Burke became the first president of Seattle’s
China Club, a group of white financiers, industrialists, and policymakers in
a bid to expand Seattle’s role in the China Trade. For Burke, it seems, en-
dorsing Chinese exclusion while facing the heat of vio lence was more a matter
of expediency than of conviction.81
The anti- Chinese vio lence struck a blow at every thing white elites held
dear: their government, social standing, profits, congregations, and position
at the top of the racial order. Instead of standing behind the Chinese, whose
labor and migration they had profited from, white elites deci ded that acqui-
escence was the best course of action. Some simply looked the other way as
vio lence consumed their communities, while others used their own money
and expertise to speed expulsions. They convinced themselves that sacrificing
the Chinese was the only way to quiet the threat of white working class vio-
lence. In the end, their loyalty to their Chinese neighbors proved weak
compared to their desire to reestablish a semblance of social order and to
preserve their positions at the top. It is clear from the stories of these cosmo-
politan elites that their decisions were personal, sparked by individual be-
liefs and circumstances. Nevertheless, together they represented a collective
turnaround on the Chinese Question that reverberated across the nation.
Haller, for one, watched with disapproval as his friends and colleagues
resigned themselves to the demands of the “anti- Chinaman party.” The gov-
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165
ernor’s “failure” to use force had, according to Haller, “obliged our best
men to dicker with the lowest ele ment, and aid them virtually in carry ing
out the violation of the treaty with China.” In private, Haller continued to
rail against the “roughs.” ( After a particularly biased piece of reporting in
the Seattle Daily Call, he remarked that “the publisher should be arrested,
his press and things packed . . . and he be put on board a steamer and sent
off— thus pass the chalice to his own lips, to see how that which has been
given to the Chinaman suits.”)82 In public, however, even Haller stood
behind the governor.
Governor Squire quickly helped to broadcast the elite’s new stance on
Chinese migration. Only one month after the Tacoma expulsion, he re-
quested that the Washington Territorial Assembly, a body ruled by local
elites, petition Congress in favor of Chinese exclusion. The petitioners as-
serted, rather defensively, that the “masses” of Washington Territory were
“law abiding, treaty respecting citizens of the Republic and neither encourage
nor believe in mob vio lence.” But on the Chinese Question, they now stood
with the vigilantes. Their letter to Congress, signed by the governor, declared
that the people of Washington Territory “unanimously” agreed, except for
a few “sentimentalists,” that the presence of Chinese on the West Coast
would mean the “complete degradation of American labor” and the end of
“Christian civilization.” The only sol
ution was Chinese exclusion.83
Part 3
Exclusion
6
The Exclusion Consensus
WHEN NEWS OF THE MURDERS at Rock Springs, Wyoming, reached China
in the fall of 1885, it was rumored that only five whole bodies lay among the
dead, and that of the rest, only burned fragments of bone remained. The
vio lence, of course, did not end with Rock Springs, and neither did the ru-
mors, true and false. In the winter of 1886, the people of Guangdong Prov-
ince heard whispers that thousands of Chinese had been murdered in San
Francisco.1 Wild fears seemed to be substantiated when a Cantonese news-
paper printed a tele gram from Chinese merchants in San Francisco to the
Zongli Yamen, or Chinese Foreign Office, on February 23, 1886. The tele gram
claimed there was “ great suffering and destitution among the laborering
[ sic] classes” and requested that the Foreign Office “immediately issue a
proclamation warning our people not to let any Chinese come to the United
States.” Public outrage at these reports of vio lence came most strongly from
Guangdong, the birthplace of most Chinese mi grants in Amer ica. There,
newspapers printed speeches by Cantonese merchants calling for military
retaliation. “I hope some day [ sic],” one merchant declared in fluent En glish,
“to see our fleets so power ful that we can point our guns at San Francisco,
and demand of them the rights they have rested [ sic] from us, and reparation
for the wrongs they have done us.”2
As news of anti- Chinese vio lence spread, U.S. officials feared that there
would be reprisals against U.S. diplomats, merchants, and missionaries in
China. Amer ica’s minister to China, Charles Denby, worried in par tic u lar
that hostility would turn to vio lence in Guangdong. Denby, a relatively un-
known Northern Demo crat and Civil War col o nel, had been appointed to
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170 EXCLUSION
his position by President Grover Cleveland in 1885. He had no training in
foreign relations or the Chinese language, but his ser vice in China was lauded
by both Demo crats and Republicans. He served thirteen years in China,
through three administrations and part of a fourth.3 In the weeks fol-
lowing the expulsion from Seattle, he urgently wrote to the Chinese Foreign