The Senator Who Wanted to Cut Off Every Chinese Man's Queue — and Jail Him
After Chinese cooks boycotted his Tacoma spice business, a state senator proposed fining and jailing any Chinese man who wore a queue, with state agents sent out to shear them.
A bill has been introduced by Senator Campbell having for its object the fining of all Chinamen wearing a queue a sum from $100 to $500, or imprisonment ranging from ninety days to six months. Senator Campbell is a dealer in spices and resides in that town lying under the shadow of Mount Rainier, where Celestials are as unpopular as prohibition laws in Kentucky. The senator has suffered on account of this opposition of Tacoma towards Celestials. In fact, he has been boycotted, and in Olympia, Turnwater, South Bend and other places of more or less note, Chinamen are wont to preside over the destinies of the cook room; a Tacoma spice box or package of goods bearing the name of any Tacoma dealer is summarily thrown out into the street. Now Campbell proposes to get even. He will have great strong men employed by the state with awful snicker-snees to go about the state slashing off Chinamen's queues and laughing hoarsely at the almond-eyed sons of China as they languish in a county jail.
“Now Campbell proposes to get even. He will have great strong men employed by the state ... slashing off Chinamen's queues and laughing hoarsely at the almond-eyed sons of China as they languish in a county jail.”
Anti-Chinese politics were not a fringe sentiment in 1890s Washington — Tacoma had driven out its Chinese residents entirely in 1885, and lawmakers now competed to prove their hostility. Campbell's queue-cutting bill shows how a private grievance can be converted into racial policy at the stroke of a pen. The same scapegoating logic still surfaces whenever the city argues over who belongs here.
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