The Boss’s View on Coal, Labor, and Anti-Chinese Agitation
A rare 1885 look into the mind of the Oregon Improvement Company’s representative during a volatile era of Seattle’s labor history.
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 order to give all sides a hearing, a reporter called on Mr. Howard, of the Oregon Improvement Company, with the expectation of getting an expression of views from him as the representative of the corporation that employs more men than any other firm on Puget Sound. Regarding the anti-Chinese movement, Mr. Howard stated: 'So long as railroad construction and the development of the other multifarious resources of the coast demanded this labor, it was for the interest of the coast to permit the incoming of the Chinese; but as soon as that necessity passed away, the importation should cease. However, those that are here are in every proper view of the case entitled to the protection of the laws of our country.' When asked about his laborers, he noted: 'We had at the Newcastle mine about thirty Chinese, employed chiefly in picking rock. We have had on the whole better results from them as rock pickers than we had from the white labor; they seem quite adapted for that monotonous, unskilled class of work. There never was a time when there was such a necessity for low mining expenses as during the past season.' Regarding the Knights of Labor, Howard dismissed the agitators: 'In a public hall in the middle of your city, a Secretary of a Lodge of the Knights of Labor uttered words that made him a self-confessed incendiary by either participating in or abetting the destruction of the Chinese quarters at Coal Creek. The principles of the order are unquestionably above this, but they must disassociate their order from this work.'
“I dare say that no employer of my acquaintance cares particularly for them as Chinamen, but at the mines they have been worked where they could be used to advantage to cheapen the cost of mining coal.”
This 1885 interview highlights the corporate cost-cutting logic and anti-immigrant scapegoating that defined the late 19th-century Pacific Northwest labor market. Today, the tensions between corporate labor practices, the demand for cheap labor, and the political weaponization of immigrant status remain central, if evolved, themes in Washington's economic discourse.
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