The Politics of Exclusion: A Night at the Bijou
In 1886, a raucous meeting at Seattle’s Bijou theater formalized the 'Committee of Fifteen,' marking a volatile era of organized expulsion and nativist labor politics.
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.
A crowd gathered at the Bijou last evening to participate in the anti-Chinese exercises either as speakers or spectators. The theater was clean and well lighted and the stage decorated with bright tapestry. The bar at the entrance was covered over so that it could not be seen. The audience was large, numbering about six hundred persons. Mr. McMillan was chosen chairman and Mr. J. J. Knoff, a member of the Knights of Labor, was chosen secretary. The meeting adopted a resolution to form a 'Committee of Fifteen' to ascertain the number of Chinese remaining in the city and to identify those who continued to employ or patronize them. The committee, which included Chief of Police Murphy and other prominent citizens, resolved that those who persisted in such patronage should be held up to public scorn as enemies of good order, society, and free American citizenship.
“We shall regard them so far the enemies of good order, of society and free American citizenship as to be unworthy of recognition, or of any social or business intercourse.”
This meeting reflects the intense anti-immigrant nativism that defined 1880s Seattle, a dark chapter in the city's labor history. Today, Seattle grapples with the legacy of this exclusion while facing new, complex pressures regarding housing and the displacement of marginalized communities, proving that the 'politics of belonging' remains a central, unresolved struggle.
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