A Tourist's Critique of Seattle's 'Suicidal' Anti-Chinese Policy
A visiting businessman from Pittsburg warns that Seattle's exclusion of Chinese laborers is an economically self-defeating folly that harms the city's trade potential.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
C. Fleming, of Pittsburg, is a guest at the Grand. He has been out here for a couple of months visiting his son, who has mining interests in the Okanogan and in British Columbia. 'The more I see of your wonderful country out here,' said he, 'the more I am convinced of the terrible mistake your people have made on the Chinese question. Why, the great facilities you have here for commerce and manufacturing, it seems that you have adopted a most suicidal policy. You have cut off a vast and growing market for your manufactures. Why, in iron alone you would have had a trade with China greater than we have in Pittsburg, not to mention the other products of our states which you could have manufactured here, and by a friendly policy toward the Chinese have sold to the people of that country. And again, in the development of your resources here, what do you want? Why, laborers, population. And where will you find a more docile, law-abiding, thrifty and industrious people than the Chinese? They are a hundred times better citizens than the Hungarians, and Slavs and Poles, who are the laborers of the East.'
“It seems absurd that the law will permit anarchists to come on the Atlantic side and prohibit the thriftiest class of people in the world on the Pacific coast.”
This reflects the volatile economic and racial politics of 1890s Seattle, where trade ambitions with Asia constantly collided with the virulent anti-Chinese exclusionary movement. It highlights how local business interests sometimes viewed migrant labor through the lens of cold-eyed pragmatism, standing in stark contrast to the dominant populist xenophobia of the era.
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