The Shadow Over Seattle's Early Growth
A vitriolic 1881 congressional speech from Thomas H. Brents reveals the dark, exclusionary labor politics that defined the foundations of the Pacific Northwest.
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.
In the House of Representatives, on the 24th of March, while considering the bill to restrict Chinese immigration, Mr. Brents, of Washington Territory, said: 'No more important measure has received or is likely to receive the attention of this Congress... The citizens of the Pacific coast, of all classes and parties... are beseeching you, in the name of free government and free labor, to stay the on-coming tide. They [the Chinese] come with no intention of becoming citizens... Most of them are criminals or prostitutes... many infected with loathsome or dangerous diseases—the very scum and dregs of the most degraded part of humanity—who bring with them all their barbaric and vicious manners, customs, habits and practices. That they may the more successfully compete with our most economic, industrious and frugal American laborers, they reduce wages, their wages even below starvation-rates, drive them out of employment and so be enabled to supply the entire demand for labor. They huddle together by hundreds in their dens of vice, filth and pestilence. No laboring freeman who has the least regard for health, cleanliness, comfort, or even decency... stands any show to labor in competition with these brutish Mongolian slaves.'
“They huddle together by hundreds in their dens of vice, filth and pestilence.”
This 1881 speech by Thomas H. Brents documents the institutionalized xenophobia that fueled the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It serves as a stark reminder that Seattle’s early labor identity was built not just on industry, but on the systematic displacement and dehumanization of the immigrant populations that helped build the city's infrastructure.
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