The Chinese Question: Seattle’s Editorial War Over Labor and 'Vermin'
In October 1876, the *Seattle Daily Intelligencer* published a blistering editorial defending Chinese laborers while simultaneously dehumanizing them as carriers of disease, revealing the complex economic dependencies and racial tensions of early Washington Territory.
THE CHINESE QUESTION AGAIN
We state that we have no purpose of persecuting the Chinese or denying to him all his just rights the same as any other race. We mean simply to point out the danger of their presence and to assert that the prior rights of our own countrymen in all public works involving the expenditure of the people's money shall be recognized.
In certain kinds of work, as some about the mills and most kinds of menial service, it is undeniable that the Chinese are of a benefit. Their place can hardly be supplied. And then, the contact with a better civilization that is afforded them in this way is reciprocally of them, and this is well. Everything to their real good and nothing to their final harm should be the manner in all considerations regarding them.
We would not bar them out from any of the privileges of the country, so long as they do not outrage the rights and health of its citizens. The only way to prevent their overcrowding is to enforce specific sanitary laws. If they will not observe the sanitary laws, let them go out into the mountains and gather the muttering grains of gold; but if they must harbor in the midst of our cities they should be held amenable to the conventional health requirements of civilized society.
Every private citizen and private corporation has an unquestionable right to employ whomsoever they please to serve them... There are certain kinds of work where the help of these people can hardly be dispensed with. For example in the saving of the crops and similar exigencies; in certain employments about our numerous manufacturing establishments; also in the construction of our railroads to which latter cause their cheap labor renders them indispensable to the ultimate accomplishment of such important undertakings, and it is to the interest of laboring Americans to have that work done by them, when it can only be done at rates which they could not afford to accept themselves.
Nevertheless, we believe in the great mass of the American people, the industrious, frugal men and women who have made the nation's farms built its cities and maintained its commerce; and we support the true policy of the Government: steadfastly guard and foster the interests of this great laboring class against foreign cheap importation.
This 1876 editorial captures a pivotal moment in Pacific Northwest history where economic necessity clashed with racial prejudice. While today’s debates often focus on immigration status or wage suppression, this text reveals how early Seattleites rationalized the use of Chinese labor for essential infrastructure (railroads, mills) while simultaneously advocating for segregation and sanitary restrictions to keep them 'out of our cities.' It mirrors modern tensions between affordable housing/labor needs and NIMBYism.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.