Bosses and Workers > Chinese Exclusion
At the Chamber’s 101st annual meeting, held on May 6, 1869, the members reached out to their colleagues across the continent, resolving:
That a Committee of Three be appointed to transmit, on Monday next, at 12 o’clock, to the Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco a message, inviting them to unite with this Chamber in grateful thanksgiving to Almighty God, for the completion of the Pacific Railway.
The Atlantic Cable – finally completed three years earlier – had connected the information networks of the new and old worlds; now an overland route to California would do the same for passengers and freight. The world was shrinking.
Bringing distant areas of the globe into closer proximity brought problems, too, however. The Pacific Railroad, for instance, had been constructed by Chinese immigrants, leading to strident racism and xenophobia. In western states, working people believed that immigrant competition was driving down wages and causing unemployment. Their efforts to bar further immigration soon commanded the attention of the Chamber.
On July 7, 1870, the members took up the question:
Whereas, the immigration of the Chinese, and more especially their recent employment in our workshops and factories, is eliciting a widespread and excited interest, and Whereas, there are questions involved, of which it is peculiarly fitting that this Chamber should take cognizance: Therefore, be it Resolved, that this subject be referred to Committee No. 4, and that they be instructed to report thereon to this Chamber, at the earliest practicable moment.
The next month, the committee demurred to rule, reasoning “that the question would, no doubt, receive the early attention of the General Government and that action by the Chamber of Commerce, at the present time, might be deemed premature.”
As employers, the members of the Chamber were committed to protecting their access to inexpensive workers. Increased immigration, in the late nineteenth century, was the obvious solution. In 1873, the body sent a memorandum to Congress stressing “the momentous national importance of immigration” and warning against “the danger of interfering with it by hasty or inconsiderate legislation.”
Chinese immigration was especially controversial, fracturing national politics for a generation. But, the Chamber consistently supported the right of these laborers to work in the United States. In 1879, the members opposed exclusion “as establishing a bad precedent … tending to degrade the National character in the sight of all other nations,” even going so far as to say that “the hasty action of our Congressional Body [makes a] sorry contrast with the more cautious and dignified wisdom of the Heathen Empire.”
While labor unions and western politicians clamored to bar further entrants, merchants and industrialists took the cosmopolitan side. Collis P. Huntington, Chamber of Commerce member and chief of the Southern Pacific railroad, was especially active in his desire to welcome more Asian laborers. In 1888, six years after the ratification of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Huntington wrote to A.A. Low about the negative effects of the law. Americans had “injured ourselves in a twofold way,” he argued, “by excluding a tractable and cheap labor which we very much need to build up our desolate places; and by the loss of a valuable trade which we might have kept to the exclusion of our rivals.”
In a lengthy document issued the following year, the Chamber’s committee suggested a memorial to the President objecting to further discrimination. The report quoted appreciatively the words of a dissenting Senator. “If the Chinese in California were white people,” he had said, “being in all other respects what they are, I do not believe that the complaints and warfare against them would have existed to any considerable extent … Their difference in color, dress, manners and religion have, in my judgment, more to do with this hostility than their alleged vices, or any actual injury to the white people of California."
This acceptance of ethnic difference, even in the service of self-interested businessmen, did not survive long into the twentieth century. During the 1920s, the Chamber succumbed to the nationalist Americanism that led to that decade’s severe immigration restrictions. By the 1930s, the previously deplored passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act was being valorized as the nation’s “undoubted sovereign right … which caught the oriental problem before it had reached proportions which would have rendered it insoluble.”
The new principles scorned self-interest for the higher goals of ethnic purity; “regardless of the need for cheap labor,” a speaker told the approving members, “immigration should, in the interest of race integrity and race improvement, be cut down to the vanishing point.”