The Filth of Progress by Dearinger Ryan;

Author:Dearinger, Ryan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

We have seen it urged against the Chinese that they are bound fast in the swaddling clothes of superstition, from which they show no disposition to emancipate themselves. But who can expect them to do otherwise under the treatment they receive? Cling to their Heathenism? They would be little less than idiots not to do so under the circumstances. Men may prate to them about American civilization, free and enlightened institutions, the spirit of progress and Christianity until doomsday, but they [the Chinese] will fail to respect or attach any value to these high-sounding phrases and professions while they are treated like wild beasts.111

In contrast, the Union Vedette, Utah’s first anti-Mormon newspaper, spoke admirably about Central Pacific officials who marshaled the “indomitable spirit of American enterprise” and heaped even more praise on its Chinese graders and tracklayers, whose “labor and determination” qualified them for the “herculean task” of building over the High Sierras.112

The Deseret News criticized California’s politicians and citizens for being “particularly hard” on the Chinese, who “are treated like dogs. They are chased, abused, robbed and abominably maltreated . . . and even the dogs are set upon them and taught to bite them.” What bothered the News reporter the most, however, was that the Californians who “torture this race call themselves Christians” while they “mock and denounce [the Chinese] as idolators [sic] and heathens.” Taking the high ground, the Mormon editor argued that the “true and only correct” solution to this dilemma was to treat the Chinese workers “as human beings” and “grant them the rights of citizenship” if they “can prove themselves capable.” He continued, “These Asiatics are willing to work, and work cheap at any kind of drudgery. If the Anglo-Saxon is the superior being which he affects to be, he can with safety assume the direction of this class of laborers. . . . If he treat them kindly, and pay them honestly, he will do more to convert them to his religion and ways than years of preaching with a contrary practice would do, and he need not be afraid that their degradation, vices, or barbarism will hurt him.”113

The Mormons, busy in building the “Kingdom,” did not engage in Chinese baiting. The Chinese posed no threat to the civic, political, and religious life of Utah’s Mormons, and church leaders often distanced themselves from the American majority on the Chinese “problem.”114 As such, a sympathetic stance is noticeable in the columns of the Deseret News. Californians, the editors argued, should not worry, for the “force of circumstances” would gradually “push” Chinese workers to distant frontiers of wage labor, so long as they remained content in “work[ing] for less than a dollar” per day in various industries. At the very least, Chinese immigrants were of great value to the country as a cheap source of labor. The presence of Chinese immigrants “in large numbers in the Western States and Territories,” argued the editors, “will inevitably work a great revolution in labor.” Unlike the “European laborer”

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