| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Andrew Gyory. Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 354. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

This volume seeks to absolve organized labor of shared responsibility for enactment of exclusion in 1882 and to place primary blame for this legislation on the leadership of national political parties: "The motive forces behind the Chinese Exclusion Act were national politicians who seized and manipulated the issue in an effort to gain votes, while arguing that workers had long demanded exclusion and would benefit from it" (p. 1). According to Andrew Gyory, Chinese immigration attracted little attention east of the Pacific Coast until 1870, when a Massachusetts shoe manufacturer decided to contract for Chinese strikebreakers. His action prompted what Gyory regards as a critical albeit generally ignored statement clarifying eastern labor's position on the Chinese issue: labor would embrace anyone from China who came as a "free" immigrant but vehemently opposed the importation of Chinese workers. 1

The book then presents a chronology of the movement toward exclusion, from the 1876 visit between California's Philip Roach and Democratic presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden, to the nationwide railway strike of 1877, to Denis Kearney's "The Chinese Must Go" tour of the Midwest and East in 1878, to the vetoed Fifteen-Passenger Bill of 1879. Throughout, Gyory decries a pattern in which, despite labor's well-established record of opposing only importation, party leaders deliberately miscast exclusion as a "pro-labor" campaign to win western electoral votes. . . .

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