Seattle Paper Warns Chinese Money Could 'Cede the Pacific Coast to China'
An 1880 editorial attacks Chinese campaign contributions to Garfield, casting the Pacific coast as a racial prize.
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.
The six Chinese companies of California are putting up large amounts of money to help carry on the Garfield campaign. Garfield was their main spokesman in their defense when the law was passed in Congress restricting Chinese immigration, which afterwards Garfield and his friends induced President Hayes to veto. It is said that plenty of Chinese money was used in Chicago during the Convention. If this Chinese candidate is elected, we might as well cede the Pacific coast to China and be done with it.
“If this Chinese candidate is elected, we might as well cede the Pacific coast to China and be done with it.”
This editorial, printed in a Seattle paper five years before the city's anti-Chinese expulsion of 1885-86, shows how nativist paranoia framed Chinese immigrants as a foreign takeover. The language of 'ceding the coast' is a reminder that the violent exclusion of Chinese residents was not sudden — it was cultivated in print for years.
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