Excerpt from Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism Which Shall Survive?

Background: In the decades after the Civil War, representatives of organized labor generally opposed the immigration of Chinese workers to the United States. In 1902, Samuel Gompers, the founder and long-time president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and Herman Gutstadt, president of the Trades Union Mutual Alliance, published this pamphlet, making a case for extending the Chinese Exclusion Act. Along with believing that all immigrants threatened organized labor’s successful efforts to improve working conditions, they perceived Chinese immigrants to be outsiders who would never adopt American values. To make their case, they quoted a speech that Senator James G. Blaine of Maine had delivered in support of the original amendment. The pamphlet, and the speech quoted here, used stereotypes and offensive language to malign the character of Asian immigrants and defend restrictive immigration.

As a fitting close to this document we submit the remarks made by one of the greatest of American statesmen, Hon. James G. Blaine, February 14, 1879, when a bill for restriction of Chinese immigration was before the United States Senate. Mr. Blaine said:

“Either the Anglo-Saxon race will possess the Pacific slope or the Mongolians will possess it. You give them the start today, with the keen thrust of necessity behind them, and the inducement to come, while we are filling up the other portions of the Continent, and it is inevitable, if not demonstrable, that they will occupy that space of the country between the Sierras and the Pacific. . . .

I am opposed to the Chinese coming here. I am opposed to making them citizens. I am unalterably opposed to making them voters. There is not a peasant cottage inhabited by a Chinaman. There is not a hearthstone, in the sense we understand it, of an American home, or an English home, or an Irish, or German, or French home. There is not a domestic fireside in that sense; and yet you say it is entirely safe to sit down and permit them to fill up our country, or any part of it.

Treat them like Christians, say those who favor their immigration; yet I believe that Christian testimony is that the conversion of Chinese on that basis is a fearful failure; and that the demoralization of the white race is much more rapid by reason of the contact than is the salvation of the Chinese race. You cannot work a man who must have beef and bread alongside of a man who can live on rice. In all such conflicts, and all such struggles, the result is not to bring up the man who lives on rice to the beef-and-bread standard, but to bring down the beef-and-bread man to the rice standard.”

Source: Meat vs. Rice; American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism (American Federation of Labor, 1902, repr. San Francisco: Asiatic Exclusion League, 1908), p. 22, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.32106007093054?urlappend=%3Bseq=26%3Bownerid=9007199272226838-30.