Venit-Shelton on Pfaelzer, 'Driven Out: the Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans'

H-California Venit-Shelton on Pfaelzer, 'Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans'

Review published on Monday, February 1, 2010

Jean Pfaelzer. Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xxix + 400 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-25694-1.

Reviewed by Tamara Venit-Shelton Published on H-California (February, 2010) Commissioned by Eileen V. Wallis

A History of Violence

Many histories of the Chinese in America start and end in San Francisco's Chinatown. One of the largest and most iconic of immigrant enclaves in the United States, San Francisco's Chinatown has provided Asian American historians with ample sources on Chinese migration, settlement, and exclusion from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Within the last two decades, however, there has been a proliferation of scholarship on the Chinese immigrant communities outside of San Francisco. Such historians as Sucheng Chan, Mary Ting Yi Lui, Marie Rose Wong, Erika Lee, and the late Ronald Takaki have introduced readers to Chinese American men's and women's varied experiences in urban and rural environments; in agriculture and industry; and in the West, East, and across borders. Jean Pfaelzer's Driven Out adds to this body of work, broadening our geographic perspective on the Chinese in nineteenth-century America.

Driven Out is the history of what Pfaelzer alternately calls "pogroms" and "purges" of Chinese immigrants in California and the Pacific Northwest in the late nineteenth century. Beginning with the California Gold Rush and the discriminatory laws that targeted Chinese miners, Driven Out recounts the violent grassroots movements that sought to eliminate the presence of Chinese laborers along the United States' Pacific Coast. Pfaelzer follows the escalation of anti-Chinese racism into mob violence, led by working-class white Americans and often sanctioned by local, state, and federal authorities. At the same time, she details the creative and courageous attempts by Chinese immigrants to protect their bodies, their livelihood, and their property. Pfaelzer's narrative moves seamlessly between vivid anecdotes of racist violence to accounts of more and less famous courtroom battles. She outlines the major benchmarks in immigration law, such as the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Geary Act of 1892, and provides a lengthy discussion of the "Dog Tag Law," the Geary Act's much disputed provision that required Chinese immigrants to carry photo identification or risk deportation. Characters and organizations familiar to histories of the Chinese in America--Denis Kearney, Grover Cleveland, Leland Stanford, and the Chinese Six Companies--mingle with lesser- known actors and activists, such as Chinese Consul Frederick Bee and the Chinese Equal Rights League.

Approximately half of Driven Out is devoted to exposing the crimes perpetrated against Chinese immigrants in California and the Pacific Northwest; the other half of the book describes how the Chinese retaliated through legal and extralegal means. Pfaelzer explains how the Chinese, driven out of Chico, Eureka, and Tacoma, sought reparations for their lost property, and she examines the mass

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Venit-Shelton on Pfaelzer, 'Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans'. H-California. 02-18-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/9249/reviews/10769/venit-shelton-pfaelzer-driven-out-forgotten-war-against-chinese Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-California protest of the "Dog Tag Law" that spread among the Chinese from San Francisco to Los Angeles and ultimately inspired federal and international intervention. These examples construct a portrait of a people who were not simply victims of racist persecution and discriminatory laws. The Chinese in Driven Out fought back and, at least occasionally, won.

Driven Out's expressed purpose is to shed light on a "forgotten war" against the Chinese in America. Indeed, many of the events Pfaelzer covers, especially those in rural towns in California, will likely be new to most readers. Pfaelzer provides a seemingly exhaustive list of violent acts committed by white communities against Chinese immigrants. "It is impossible to represent the totality of the rage and brutality, and no words can fully capture the atrocity," Pfaelzer writes in one chapter, "but perhaps in the aggregate, in the naming, in the listing, we can witness how widespread and fluid was the movement to purge the Chinese" (p. 254). Primarily relying on newspaper articles from rural and urban communities, Pfaelzer painstakingly reconstructs the understudied histories of Chinese expulsion from Chico, Eureka, Truckee, and Tacoma. She interweaves these "forgotten wars" with better-known examples of anti-Chinese violence in Los Angeles, San Jose, and Rock Springs, Wyoming, and she makes passing reference to many other similar incidents in small towns across California, Oregon, and Washington. Driven Out spares no detail in recounting these bloody events. In a chapter on the mass lynching of Chinese men in Los Angeles in 1871, Pfaelzer describes exactly how the bodies were mutilated and arranged (p. 47). In her account of the massacre at Chico in 1877, she quotes one witness as noting how the brains of a murdered Chinese farmhand "oozed" out of his head (p. 70). Chapter 7, "A Litany of Hate," chronologically lists anti-Chinese "murder and mayhem" between 1880 and 1890. Audiences steeped in the genre of CSI and Law and Order procedurals will undoubtedly appreciate Pfaelzer's attention to each and every gory detail.

Beyond this full cost accounting, Pfaelzer seeks to situate nineteenth-century anti-Chinese racism in a national and global context of "ethnic cleansing." She connects anti-Chinese violence in the American West to the forcible removal of Indian communities, the dispossession of Mexican landholders, and the civil rights violations of free African Americans. Readers acquainted with the (no longer so new) New Western History and works by such historians as Patricia Nelson Limerick and Reginald Horsman will not find such comparisons surprising. The nexus between American expansionism and white racial supremacy has been well documented and explored.

What may surprise and perhaps trouble readers is Pfaelzer's attempt to connect anti-Chinese violence in the nineteenth century to acts of genocide in the twentieth century. In her introduction, Pfaelzer explains: "The purges of the Chinese in the American West bring to my mind Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Nazi Germany violently exposed its intention to remove the Jews.... The expulsions of the Chinese from California towns in the nineteenth century anticipated the history of Poland and Greece in the 1930s and 1940s and, more recently, of Rwanda, Indonesia, and Bosnia" (pp. xxviii- xxix). The justification for the comparison is asserted more than it is substantiated. Throughout the book, Pfaelzer describes the expulsion of Chinese immigrants as "purges," "pogroms," and a "reign of terror," terms that closely align her history with ethnic cleansing in Europe and Russia. In chapter 3, "The Woman's Tale," Pfaelzer details the experiences of Chinese women, many of whom were forced to immigrate as prostitutes, indentured to pimps for four or more years. Persecuted by racist moral crusaders who sought to expel them and ignored by racist legislators who sought to exclude them, Chinese women in America often died during their indenture: "This system of enslaved prostitution in itself constituted a form of genocide" (p. 118). Pfaelzer argues that the persecution of women

Such assertions raise two questions: First, is it reasonable to compare anti-Chinese violence in the nineteenth-century United States to the genocidal campaigns of the twentieth century? Second, and more important, what is the utility of such a comparison? In many ways, the violent expulsion of Chinese immigrants and wanton destruction of their property conformed to the United Nations' 1948 definitions of "genocide," which have in many ways become the standard for subsequent scholarship and analysis. Perpetrators of anti-Chinese violence intended to destroy a specific national and racial group. But the incidents described inDriven Out also differed from the international examples Pfaelzer enumerates in at least two critical ways. First, Driven Out portrays anti-Chinese violence as a popular movement, largely emerging from disaffected working-class whites with the vocal or tacit support of local officers. State and national authorities appear as neglectful and negligent, but not instrumental in designing or carrying out the "ethnic cleansing" campaigns. Second, while Pfaelzer does not tally up the Chinese fatalities in Driven Out, they clearly did not approach the devastation wrought by the examples she references in her introduction. A hundred thousand or more men and women died in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; millions died in Nazi Germany and in Stalinistic purges. While neither of these differences would render the label "genocide" inaccurate in the case of the Chinese in America, they do merit more consideration and discussion so that the global context might be useful as a conceptual framework. As it is, readers of Driven Out will be left to wonder and draw their own conclusions as to how the comparison to twentieth-century genocidal campaigns deepens or changes their understanding of anti-Chinese violence in nineteenth-century America.

Perhaps more problematic than the underdeveloped comparison to twentieth-century genocide is Pfaelzer's tendency to sidestep or overlook white-Chinese relations that were not inherently violent. As a result, there is a sameness to all of the examples that Pfaelzer details. The history of the "forgotten war" is reduced to white aggression and Chinese flight or fight. Yet there is ample evidence that violence was not always the dominant characteristic of white-Chinese relations in the nineteenth century, that there was more nuance and variation than Pfaelzer's approach acknowledges. Some westerners actively courted and welcomed Chinese immigrants; chronic labor shortages in the American West made their presence valuable to industrial and agricultural employers. Other westerners opposed anti-Chinese violence on moral grounds. These individuals and examples appear at points throughout Driven Out and hint at a more complicated but unexamined set of interracial relations that coexisted with the "purges." Congregationalist women in Chico opposed Chinese expulsion; attorney and Chinese Consul Bee represented Chinese seeking reparations; employers in Truckee and Humboldt County "were reluctant" to drive out their Chinese employees; and the United States government paid reparations to displaced Tacoma Chinese in an effort to maintain a diplomatic relationship with China (pp. 68, 179, 338, 229). The fragile and complex alliances that formed between whites and Chinese in the late nineteenth century have been better explored and analyzed in other scholarship: Susan Lee Johnson's Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (2000), Peggy Pascoe's Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (1990), Sucheng Chan's This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture (1860-1910), and Cecilia Tsu's forthcoming book on Asian immigrants in California's Santa Clara County, to name a few. Ultimately, these histories develop a fuller and more interesting portrait of the Chinese immigrant experience than a history of violence can provide.

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Citation: Tamara Venit-Shelton. Review of Pfaelzer, Jean, Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans. H-California, H-Net Reviews. February, 2010.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29335

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.