The Seattle Press Defends its Role During the Anti-Chinese Riots
An editorial response to outside critics claiming local newspapers incited the February 7th expulsion violence.
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 disparaging idea has been revealed in certain quarters to be the press of Seattle responsible, at least in part, for the riots in this city on February 7th. It is, in every case, those who know nothing of the conditions or the state of public opinion on the Pacific Coast. An argument in favor of the exclusion of Chinese, they call seditious; and a statement of the evils resulting from the presence of Chinese in a community is to them an appeal to the passions of the mob. It is useless to deny a charge of inciting the people to riot when made by those who have so poor an understanding of the problem. If the Seattle press is responsible for what has taken place here, one may ask who is responsible for the condition of affairs in Portland? According to the Oregonian, Portland narrowly escaped a riot compared with which that in Seattle would be insignificant. If the rioters of Portland had been as bold as the would-be rioters, the authorities would have been equally well prepared, and there would have been no riot here. So far as the Post-Intelligencer is concerned, it has nothing to unsay and nothing to take back. It believed that direct competition between white and Chinese labor could not fail to be disastrous to the former, and it said so. It is absurd to claim that public opinion on the coast is favorable to the Chinese, for it is not, and the Post-Intelligencer would have been untrue to the community in which it lives had it failed to properly represent the views of its constituents. On the other hand, the Post-Intelligencer has never favored violence in dealing with the Chinese question. It believed the question was settled, as far as Seattle was concerned, many weeks before the riot of February 7th. Under such circumstances, the attempted forcible expulsion came as a total surprise.
“It is useless to deny a charge of inciting the people to riot when made by those who have so poor an understanding of the problem.”
In early 1886, Seattle's anti-Chinese riots led to the forced expulsion of the city's Chinese population. The Post-Intelligencer's editorial attempt to justify its role in the anti-Chinese movement—while simultaneously distancing itself from the resulting violence—highlights the complex and often contradictory nature of local press accountability during eras of state-sanctioned bigotry.
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