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Book Review
| Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, New York: Random House, 2007. Pp. xxvii + 400. $27.95 (ISBN 978-1-4000-6134-1).
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| In February 1885, a vigilante mob swept through the Chinese quarter in Eureka, California, herded some three hundred Chinese residents down to the docks, and forced them to board two steamboats bound for San Francisco. Later in the year a crowd of armed whites, with the tacit support of the mayor, expelled the Chinese from Tacoma, in Washington territory. In December, a threatened boycott in Truckee, California, induced almost all the town's businesses to discharge their Chinese workers. Most seriously, in September, rioting in Rock Springs, Wyoming, had led to the deaths of twenty-eight Chinese. |
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1885 was an especially brutal year, but outbursts of anti-Chinese violence had punctuated the history of the American west, California in particular, almost from the beginning of Chinese immigration. (An 1871 Los Angeles riot killed nineteen Chinese.) Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans is Jean Pfaelzer's comprehensive, if somewhat disjointed, chronicle of these events. Professor Pfaelzer, a talented narrator, vividly conveys the scale and ferocity of the movement to expel the Chinese from western towns and cities. Drawing effectively on firsthand accounts, she also brings home to the reader the fear and the suffering experienced by its victims—though mere passive victims the Chinese were not. As she correctly stresses, they resisted anti-Chinese violence and bullying in many ways, from the bringing of legal actions, to organizing their own boycotts and even, in extremis, to arming themselves in self-defense. Driven Out is a work of considerable impact. It would have had more were it not marred by a distracting number of imprecise or inaccurate statements, broad claims offered without sufficient offers of proof, and a tendency to go off on detours. |
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Pfaelzer states that the 1875 Page Act, the federal law that forbade the importation of prostitutes and indentured laborers from Asian countries, "prohibited the immigration of any Chinese woman who was not a merchant's wife" (101, 104). There is no reference to merchants or spouses anywhere in the law. (A different question, debated by scholars, is whether the Act, as enforced, might have been a major factor accounting for the low immigration rates among Chinese women generally.) She also contends that the Page Act and "the Civil Rights Act" (which one she doesn't specify) "removed the right of Chinese immigrants to ever become American citizens" (61). Neither the Page Act nor any Civil Rights Act did that. Pfaelzer a number of times asserts that Chinese were denied the right to own land in California (and elsewhere), suggesting that the absence of this right contributed to Chinese vulnerability (91, 130). Chinese were not prohibited from owning land in nineteenth-century California. Chinese land holdings at the time were in fact substantial (Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, the Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910). Surprisingly, she repeats the old canard, a favorite of nineteenth-century Sinophobes, that the Chinese Six Companies, the coordinating council of the various Chinese place-of-origin associations and an organization that acted at several important junctures to defend Chinese civil rights, controlled Chinese prostitution in America (102, 112). |
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Pfaelzer badly misreads several court cases. According to her, the 1859 California Supreme Court case of People v. Elyea overturned the ban on Chinese testimony against whites (40). It, in fact, reaffirmed the ban but said it did not apply to Californians of Turkish ancestry. Her gloss on the 1862 California Supreme Court case of Lin Sing v. Washburn is also wide of the mark. The court there voided a state tax imposed on Chinese workers as an infringement on the exclusive federal power over foreign commerce. But according to Pfaelzer, the United States Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Taney, endorsed California's desire to rid itself of Chinese, ruling that the state could in fact "ban Chinese miners" (31). Her reference, however, is to language in a dissenting opinion by Taney in The Passenger Cases, decided thirteen years earlier. (The California Supreme Court had explicitly cited the majority opinion in support of its conclusion.) A dissent of course is no authority for anything. Furthermore, Taney, in his dissent, said nothing about California or Chinese miners. |
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Pfaelzer contends that the origins of California's anti-Chinese legislation are to be found in the American South. She claims that by the 1880s, Southern Democrats had taken over the state's governor's mansion, the legislature, and local governments, and had proceeded to implement their own versions of the Southern Black Codes, passed after the Civil War to control blacks—except now they were "targeting the Chinese" (xxi). She instances the Cubic Air law, limiting the number of tenants who could live in a lodging house, and discriminatory taxes. She provides no data tending to document this alleged takeover of government by southern Democrats. (As it happens, two Republicans and two Democrats sat in California's governor's mansion in the 1880s, all but one Northerners by birth, and that one was in office for only a few months.) Nor does she cite any evidence that Californians looked to the Black Codes for inspiration in fashioning anti-Chinese laws. There are, moreover, obvious problems with the chronology. The state Cubic Air Law was enacted in 1876. Discriminatory taxes date too from before the 1880s. |
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There is finally the matter of detours. Pfaelzer departs several times from her main story line to take up other topics: Native American removal, antiblack actions during Reconstruction, and Chinese prostitution, a subject to which she devotes many pages. She attempts to connect these discussions with the history of anti-Chinese violence and intimidation; but the effort seems forced and they strike this reviewer as digressions that do little to enhance understanding of the "war against Chinese Americans." |
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| Charles McClain
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| University of California, Berkeley |
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