The Tightening Grip of Exclusion
A new federal bill further complicates the lives of Chinese residents by redefining 'merchant' status and enforcing strict registration requirements.
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 McCreary bill passed by the house is more strictly drawn than the Geary act. The new bill carefully defines a merchant as a person who buys and sells in his own name, at a fixed place of business, and performs no other manual labor than is incident to his business as a merchant. It declares that the term laborers is meant to include those engaged in skilled labor as well as those engaged in unskilled labor, and specifically mentions mining, fishing, huckstering, peddling, laundering and curing fish as forms of labor covered by the law. Fitting up a little annex to the laundry, in which various goods are offered for sale, will not relieve the laundryman of his status as a laborer. Also, a Chinese merchant who returns from a visit to China, must prove, in order to secure readmission, that he had been a merchant here, in the statute sense, for at least a year before he went away. The new bill exacts a photograph to be filed for registry. The new bill includes also the prohibition of bail for Chinese whose deportation has been ordered, and the directions to send away those who are now subject to deportation.
“Fitting up a little annex to the laundry, in which various goods are offered for sale, will not relieve the laundryman of his status as a laborer.”
This article documents the institutionalized racism of the Chinese Exclusion era. It serves as a reminder of how federal policy was used to dismantle the economic and social lives of Chinese immigrants in Seattle and across the Pacific Northwest.
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