Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans - Couverture rigide

Pfaelzer, Jean

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1400061342 ISBN 13 : 9781400061341

Editeur : Random House Inc, 2007

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Book by Pfaelzer Jean

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Chapter 1
GOLD!

“PEACEABLY IF WE CAN,

FORCIBLY IF WE MUST”

On February 2, 1848, a vanquished Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and ceded California to the United States, unaware that just nine days earlier, nuggets of pure gold had been found in a creek at a sawmill in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada range. The discovery of gold did not make the front page of the San Francisco papers until March 15, but sailing vessels quickly carried the news to countries that bordered the Pacific Ocean. Word soon spread from Mexico to Panama to Chile. In April, the Pacific Mail Steam-ship Company launched five side-wheel steamships to carry eager South American miners north to San Francisco.

At the dawn of 1848, 150,000 native people and a few thousand Mexicans and Californios lived in the northernmost corner of Mexico. Yuroks, Miwoks, Nisenan, Yokuts, and Karuks were among fifty tribes or nations who first inhabited the area. Mestizos, rancheros, peons, Spanish priests, and runaway African American slaves were the first settlers. Their worlds were about to collide.

Word of gold traveled across the Pacific to the Sandwich Islands and from there to China. In port cities across Asia, captains and crews altered their routes, sailed for California, and abandoned laden ships in San Francisco Bay. Many ships rotted and sank in its cold waters as officers and sailors headed for the Sierra mountains. Other ships anchored at the docks and were promptly rebuilt as saloons or restaurants to serve the tide of gold seekers. In San Francisco and Sacramento, stores and offices closed, houses were boarded up, crops were abandoned, and Mexicans, Californios, and white laborers, merchants, artists, and physicians all rushed into the Sierra foothills. They traveled any way they could, on burros, horses, or wagons, sometimes hiking, sometimes buying overpriced tickets on steamships to carry them up the Yuba, Bear, and American Rivers.

From the East Coast, unemployed veterans, just home from the Mexican War, returned to the West—back overland by carriage, on horseback or foot, across the mountains and jungles of the Isthmus of Panama, where they desperately awaited ships to finish their voyage up the Pacific coast. These new “argonauts” joined mechanics, ranchers, laborers, merchants, and professional men and stormed up California’s mountains, sharing an expansionist vision and a military determination. None was interested in laboring as a waiter, servant, mill worker, or field hand, even at wages of ten to twenty dollars per day.

When news of gold reached the newly “open” port cities in China, shipmasters in Hong Kong and Canton had little difficulty convincing Chinese men to sail for California. In rice-growing and fishing villages in Guandung Province, shipping companies circulated broadsheets and maps urging men to forswear country and clan for gold. Facing warlords, destitution, and British battleships, villagers read ads promoting America as a haven of plenty and equality:

Americans are very rich people. They want the Chinaman to come and will make him welcome. There will be big pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description. You can write your friends or send them money any time, and we will be responsible for the safe delivery. It is a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers. All alike; big man no larger than little man. There are a great many Chinamen there now, and it will not be a strange country. China God is there, and the agents of this house. Never fear, and you will be lucky. Come to Hong Kong, or to the sign of this house in Canton and we will instruct you. Money is in great plenty and to spare in America. Such as wishes to have wages and labor guaranteed can obtain the security by application at this office.

Dreaming of wealth on “Gold Mountain,” as California came to be known, Chinese villagers sold their fields or fishing boats, or borrowed money to sail to California. They landed in a raw new territory, a land without traditions of nationhood, authority, ethnic commonality, or even clear geographic borders.

Few Chinese women journeyed across the Pacific. Unlike their brethren, most Chinese women who entered California in the mid-1800s were slaves. Kidnapped for prostitution from the southern ports of China, they were brokered and owned by Chinese merchants who also emigrated to in San Francisco.

The Chinese arrived as California was growing from a cluster of harbor towns and mining camps into a national financial and political force. From San Francisco up through the Sacramento Delta and north to Crescent City, fishing villages and small towns built to trade in hides and tallow rapidly became staging and supply centers for miners eager to move into the mountains. Ninety percent of California’s workforce was tied to gold.

California’s new leaders promptly abandoned the area’s ties to Spanish priests and Mexican ranchers. They identified with the Anglos and debated how to govern thousands of Chinese, Chilean, French, Mexican, and Peruvian prospectors. In the Sierra Nevada the Chinese argonauts encountered Native Americans and Mexican Americans who were facing death, enslavement, or violent pogroms by white men eager to quickly gather the golden ore that had lain sparkling in California’s rivers for thousands of years.

The gold rush also offered a serendipitous finale to a war premised on national expansion and the extension of slave territory. By 1845 abolitionists had lost their decadelong struggle to prevent the annexation of Texas. The Washington Union, a paper of southern Democrat views, wrote, “Who can arrest the torrent that will pour onward to the West? The road to California will be open to us. Who will stay the march of our Western people?” That year John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, declared that it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

Ideas of white superiority bracketed the image of white expansion, “free development” and industrial inevitability in California and the West. The Illinois State Register insisted, “Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance? . . . myriads of enterprising Americans would flock to its rich and inviting prairies; the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in its valleys; cities would rise upon its plains and sea-coast, and the resources and wealth of the nation be increased in an incalculable degree.” Mexicans, wrote the American Review, must yield to “a superior population, insensibly oozing into her territories, changing her customs, and out-living, out-trading, exterminating her weaker blood.”

At the same time, the final push for the abolition of slavery was taking hold. The American Anti-Slavery Society declared that the Mexican War was “waged solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery through the vast territory of Mexico.” The poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell, through his character Hosea Biglow, a New England farmer, announced,

They just want this Californy

So’s to lug new slave states in

To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye,

An’ to plunder ye like sin.

Newly organized workingmen in New England well understood that despite the military’s promises to enlistees of plunder, pay of seven dollars per month, and a land grant of 160 acres, territories seized from Mexico “would be giving men that live upon the blood of others an opportunity of dipping their hand still deeper in the sin of slavery. . . . Have we not slaves enough now?” As the war began, a convention of the New England Workingmen’s Association announced that its members would “not take up arms to sustain the Southern slaveholder in robbing one-fifth of our countrymen of their labor.”

The young labor movement had reason to be fearful. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the vast territory seized by the United States could extend southern slavery to the Pacific coast. And so, in the Compromise of 1850, in return for admitting California as a free state, the United States would absorb remaining territories without “any restriction or condition on the subject of slavery.” That year Congress also passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which stated that any federal marshal who did not arrest a runaway slave could be fined one thousand dollars; any person suspected of being a runaway slave could be arrested without a warrant and turned over to anyone claiming to be the owner; a suspected slave could not ask for a jury trial or testify on his or her behalf; and any person who aided a runaway slave by providing shelter, food, or transportation faced six months’ imprisonment and a one-thousand-dollar fine. The law also offered a “fee” or bribe for every slave remanded back into slavery. The presumptions of the treaty, of the law, of national entitlement, and of race would soon shape the history of Chinese America.

At the end of the Mexican War, most returning veterans could not hold on to their allotments of land, but they still clung to the myth of white possibility and expansion in the West. Wrote a young naval officer, “Asia . . . will be brought to our very doors. Population will flow into the fertile regions of California . . . public lands . . . will be changed from deserts into gardens, and a large population will be settled.”

This “large population” was to come to the Pacific Northwest from all over the globe. From 1845 to 1849, the Great Hunger in Ireland, caused by Britain’s long interference with Ireland’s agriculture and also by a potato fungus killed between five hundred thousand and a million people from 1845 to 1849 and destroyed the Iri...

Présentation de l'éditeur

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

The brutal and systematic “ethnic cleansing” of Chinese Americans in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century is a shocking–and virtually unexplored–chapter of American history. Driven Out unearths this forgotten episode in our nation’s past. Drawing on years of groundbreaking research, Jean Pfaelzer reveals how, beginning in 1848, lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians purged dozens of communities of thousands of Chinese residents–and how the victims bravely fought back.
In town after town, as races and classes were pitted against one another in the raw and anarchistic West, Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and field workers, prostitutes and merchants’ wives, were gathered up at gunpoint and marched out of town, sometimes thrown into railroad cars along the very tracks they had built.

Here, in vivid detail, are unforgettable incidents such as the torching of the Chinatown in Antioch, California, after Chinese prostitutes were accused of giving seven young men syphilis, and a series of lynchings in Los Angeles bizarrely provoked by a Chinese wedding. From the port of Seattle to the mining towns in California’s Siskiyou Mountains to “Nigger Alley” in Los Angeles, the first Chinese Americans were hanged, purged, and banished. Chinatowns across the West were burned to the ground.

But the Chinese fought back: They filed the first lawsuits for reparations in the United States, sued for the restoration of their property, prosecuted white vigilantes, demanded the right to own land, and, years before Brown v. Board of Education , won access to public education for their children. Chinese Americans organized strikes and vegetable boycotts in order to starve out towns that tried to expel them. They ordered arms from China and, with Winchester rifles and Colt revolvers, defended themselves. In 1893, more than 100,000 Chinese Americans refused the government’s order to wear photo identity cards to prove their legal status–the largest mass civil disobedience in United States history to that point.

Driven Out features riveting characters, both heroic and villainous, white and Asian. Charles McGlashen, a newspaper editor, spearheaded a shift in the tactics of persecution, from brutality to legal boycotts of the Chinese, in order to mount a run for governor of California. Fred Bee, a creator of the Pony Express, became the Chinese consul and one of the few attorneys willing to defend the Chinese. Lum May, a dry goods store owner, saw his wife dragged from their home and driven insane. President Grover Cleveland, hoping that China’s 400,000 subjects would buy the United States out of its economic crisis, persuaded China to abandon the overseas Chinese in return for a trade treaty. Quen Hing Tong, a merchant, sought an injunction against the city of San Jose in an important precursor to today’s suits against racial profiling and police brutality.

In Driven Out, Jean Pfaelzer sheds a harsh light on America’s past. This is a story of hitherto unknown racial pogroms, purges, roundups, and brutal terror, but also a record of valiant resistance and community. This deeply resonant and eye-opening work documents a significant and disturbing episode in American history.

“Jean Pfaelzer has pulled back the veil on one of the most horrendous, frightening, violent, and little known moments in American history, when the Chinese were driven from their homes and businesses in an effort to expel them from communities, states, and ultimately the country.  This is the most comprehensive history of this period I have ever read, and Pfaelzer has written it with sensitivity and a keen eye for the horrifying, heartbreaking, and often uplifting and triumphant details.   Driven Out couldn't be more timely or important.”
 –Lisa See, Author, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
 
“Driven Out: the Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans is a meticulously researched and very readable recounting of America’s systematic effort to purge all Chinese immigrants, from the mid-19th into the early-20th centuries. Jean Pfaelzer documents hundreds of cases in which the Chinese were lynched, maimed, burned out of their neighborhoods, and forced at gunpoint to leave mining camps, small villages, Indian reservations, and Chinatowns. The methodical and ruthless nature of this ethnic cleansing was matched only by the resistance from the Chinese — sometimes with guns and knives or fists and sometimes with savvy recourse to their government representatives as well as petitions, public confrontations, and hundreds of lawsuits using white attorneys up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Pfaelzer has names and stories for these incidents — making the actors real and accessible. This is a valuable addition to our understanding of the making of modern America.”
–Franklin Odo, Director, Smithsonian Institution Asian Pacific American Program; Author, The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience

“Thanks to this gripping narrative, Chinese immigrants to the Far West — so long overlooked — now stand front and center in the saga of the struggle for civil rights in these United States.”
– Kevin Starr, University of Southern California; Author, California, A History

"Too few Americans have any idea that these events mark the nation’s past. Pfaelzer capably reconstructs a shameful history.”
– Kirkus Reviews

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House Inc
• Date d'édition: 2007
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1400061342
• ISBN 13: 9781400061341
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 400
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarie