The Unwelcome Tax Man
A Seattle poll tax assessor describes the frustration and absurdity of tracking down residents in a city where the transient population and the immigrant community resisted his rounds.
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.
I've struck a fine job, said assessor Mr. Quilter yesterday. I have just commenced collecting poll tax from the Chinese and I am having a perfect picnic. I have been out three or four hours this afternoon and have collected just $10. Whenever I drop into a party of Celestials and tell them my mission, they would scatter to all ways. One by one, I would be left alone. Then they are so fertile in excuses for not paying. A good many claim that they 'no savvy,' but the most of them who try to stand me off maintain that they have no work and no money. I talked to one fellow for about twenty minutes, but could not get him to open his mouth. He was evidently trying to give me the impression that he could not understand me, but thought I was a bad man, a bunko steerer or something, and that he did not want anything to do with me. The law makes it an assessor's imperative duty to collect the poll tax, but no way is provided for enforcing it except that the employers are responsible for the tax of their employes. I do not want to discriminate against the Chinese, but we make the white men pay and I cannot see why they should not.
“Whenever I drop into a party of Celestials and tell them my mission, they would scatter to all ways. One by one, I would be left alone.”
This 1888 account of a tax collector struggling to enforce levies on a wary, mobile, and often misunderstood immigrant workforce mirrors the persistent challenges of modern tax enforcement and the exclusionary history of Seattle’s local government. The assessor's frustrated, xenophobic tone captures the era’s aggressive bureaucratic pursuit of the Chinese community, a precursor to the systemic economic pressures that have shaped the city’s demographics for over a century.
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