Book Review

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 marked a turning point in U.S. history as the first major piece of federal legislation that banned immigrants on the basis of race or nationality. It set the precedent for future restrictions against other Asian immigrants and against Eastern and Southern Europeans in the twentieth century. Andrew Gyory has set out to revise the dominant historical interpretation that the Exclusion Act was generated by the racist ideology of organized labor. He argues instead that the political process was top-down, Flowing from national politicians and foisted on workers who were against Chinese exclusion. Gyory's argument is detailed and fresh, a shifting of focus from the importance of popular, mass political action in the creation of legal change, concentrating instead on the rhetorical manipulations of federal politicians in producing legislation. His book highlights the important role of cynical politicians in the eventual passing of the 1882 Act. Explicitly addressing Alexander Saxton's 1971 book, The Indispensable Enemy, as well as Saxton's later work on race and labor politics, Gyory shifts attention away from the explicitly anti-Chinese organizing tactics of the West and argues that in considering the nation as a whole, the white supremacy of unions did not cause Chinese exclusion. It is a perspective contrary to not only Saxton's interpretation, but also those of important studies by David Roediger, Gwendolyn Mink, and Ronald Takaki.	1
Unfortunately, the fine empirical work Gyory has done in tracing the rising importance of anti-Chinese agitation in the federal politics of the 1880s has been undermined by some questionable assumptions about the relationship of intentionality and action. While accepting that workers, like almost everybody in the nation as a whole, believed in explicitly racial definitions of white supremacy, Gyory argues that "white workers could be deeply racist, but that does not mean they necessarily acted on this racist ideology or pursued or supported racist policies" (13). Gyory's assertion that thought did not equal action is illustrated by the example that eastern U.S. workers could be racist yet still speak against Chinese immigrant exclusion, either on the pragmatic grounds that it might lead to anti-Irish legislation or on a more idealistic tolerance of the Chinese. If Gyory had stuck throughout his study to a theory of politics that distinguished between beliefs and formal political action, his argument would have been considerably more sound, if limited. However, Gyory also wants to argue that workers held an idealism that was superior to national politicians, who picked up anti-Chinese platforms in the belief that it would help swing crucial California voters in the 1880 election. In particular, Gyory makes the point that workers east of the Rockies took pains to distinguish between the danger of imported "foreign" workers, which they opposed, and foreign immigration in general, which they supported. Although they could have combined the two issues into a generic nativism, they kept them distinct. Pointedly taking on Roediger's arguments that an ideology of whiteness led to parallel anti-black and anti-Chinese thoughts and acts among workers in the North and in the West, Gyory asserts that: "Historians should at last accept [workers] at their word" (70). The flaw in Gyory's otherwise correct tracing of the rhetoric of labor organizers is that he believes them at their word, a benefit he denies most anybody else in the study. At one point, Gyory attacks the empty intellectualism of concentrating on what workers in the West said, instead of discovering how little they did in terms of the formal political process of creating anti-Chinese legislation. But then at another point, in describing the truly non-racist character of eastern workers' anti-Chinese stand, Gyory argues that: "Words matter, and workers chose them carefully" (66).	2
Gyory's apology for American workers is founded upon, and in the end founders on, statements such as this: "Racist as white workers may have been in this era, they were neither much more nor much less racist than other segments of American society" (14). For Gyory, this is an opening to examining how racist intentions among workers did not directly lead to racist legislation. Unfortunately, this belies the question of how the context of widespread vigilante violence and anti-Chinese agitation in the 1870s allowed for the very definitions of "foreign" and "American" that swung on whiteness. Workers built upon a notion of national belonging centered on whiteness that allowed Irish immigrants to become fellow white Americans while demonizing Chinese as "imported" foreigners. This was not just a racist thought, but also enacted the national and racial categories that allowed for the rhetorical appeals of politicans to work. In this sense, even if another study were to be done examining the voting patterns of white workers, whether they showed majority support for or against Chinese exclusion, the racial ideology of whiteness would still have done considerable political work already.	3
Gyory's concentration on national politics and upon workers east of the Rockies is welcome. His careful attention to the rhetorical language contained in historical texts is also to be lauded. However, his methodological approach to what constitutes politics denies the insights of three decades of work by social and cultural historians. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, examined only through the lens of the formal political process of American government, does look very much like the story of ambitious politicians manipulating gullible and sometimes unwilling voters into supporting a racist act of legislation. White American workers did little within this formal process in 1880 because they still lacked the powerful voice that they would eventually achieve. But the strengthening of a racial ideology that pitted some foreign immigrants who could become white against other immigrants who could not was an essential step in a long-term process of nationalizing worker unrest through the equation of "American" with "whiteness." It was not merely a politically benign form of racist thought among workers that, in Gyory's words, was "not much ahead but not much behind the rest of society" (89). White supremacy throughout U.S. history has been achieved through legal acts such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, but it has also been politically powerful because of the beliefs and actions of a myriad of people, including workers, who used whiteness as a means of achieving acceptance as Americans worthy of inclusion within the political life of the nation. It was no coincidence that politicians did not appeal to non-whites in their demagoguery. The very exclusion of non-whites from formal politics is the larger untold story within which Gyory's careful research is embedded, and for that historial narrative, the work of Saxton, Roediger, and others remains important.	4
Henry Yu University of California, Los Angeles

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