Unbroken Chains by Melissa Ditmore

Author:Melissa Ditmore [Hope Ditmore, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE EMERGENCE OF THE RACIST NATIVIST MOVEMENT

The railroad barons’ insistence on using cheap labor, despite having accumulated vast wealth, enough to be able to fully endow universities, is a practice older than the United States itself. Leland Stanford, head of the Central Pacific Railroad and founder of the eponymous university, became committed to hiring Chinese railway workers because they were “contented with less wages.”37 These cost reductions came at the expense of living wages, safe working conditions, and social stability. The fact that people who were exploited this way were Black and Asian helped confirm the white supremacist beliefs of many Americans and inspired their promotion of a racist and nativist platform.

This racist platform culminated in the passage of laws that constrained the immigration of people who would undercut the wages of white workers. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was one such law; it intended to eliminate the importation of laborers who would undercut the wages of white laborers. At the time, there was no legal path for Chinese people to become citizens, in contrast to the indentured Europeans who had been able to claim citizenship.38 Few Chinese women lived in the US, because they were excluded from entering if they were presumed to be prostitutes or likely to become public charges. (Chapter 12 has more information about the Page Act, which prohibited the entry of Chinese women to the United States.) The scarcity of Chinese women and widespread laws against interracial marriage severely restricted opportunities for Chinese to marry and have children. However, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, with its birthright citizenship clause, in 1868 established that the children of Chinese immigrant workers were American citizens, with all the rights that that carried. Neither the employers of Chinese workers nor workers of European descent were eager to see that happen.39

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