A TALE OF TWO CULTURES:

The Expulsion of the Chinese from Tacoma in 1885

Emma Grunberg

Junior Division

Historical Paper

PROCESS PAPER

　　　

When I started my History Day project, I decided I wanted to research a topic related to local history so I could access primary sources and learn about events close to home. When I started my preliminary research into Tacoma’s history, one event stood out in my mind: the expulsion of the Chinese in 1885. I researched the topic more deeply, starting with Herbert Hunt, Murray Morgan, and the archives of the Tacoma Daily Ledger at the Northwest Room in the Tacoma Public Library. I also read about Chinese culture and the wider historical context of the expulsion, such as the state of the American frontier and the history of the Chinese in America. I read books by Roger Daniels, Sucheng Chan, and other prominent historians of Asian Americans. There were many different aspects of the expulsion that interested me at this early point: the role of the press in promoting anti-Chinese action and why there were not more pro-Chinese voices. But the main theme I was interested in, which would develop into my original thesis, was that in frontier situations, clashes between two groups can result in violence more often than in established societies. Soon I realized that this idea was wrong: there have been disastrous acts of violence in situations other than the frontier.

Historians start with the evidence and “make the thesis fit the evidence, not the evidence fit the thesis.” Determined to find all the primary sources I could, I went to the Washington State Historical Society, where I examined their archives. I read the Sentiments of the Ministerial Union of Tacoma, which describes the clergy’s reaction to the “Chinese Question,” and an interestingly anti-Chinese senate speech by Watson C. Squire, Washington’s Territorial Governor.

            Next I went to the University of Washington where I went through mounds of documents in the Watson C. Squire papers. I used their extensive catalog to find articles in periodicals and local and national newspapers to see their feeling toward the expulsion.

            Lorraine Hildebrand, author of Straw Hats, Sandals and Steel: The Chinese in Washington State, compiled a collection of sources at the Tacoma Community College. I looked through these and found exciting primary documents described in my bibliography.

            I read the trial of the perpetrators of the expulsion which I found at the Bellevue Community College. Simultaneously, I was reading secondary sources and trying to develop a thesis. I became intrigued by the apparent contradiction between a frontier as a place of freedom and, in Tacoma, as a place of stereotyping and exclusion.

            Thus, I arrived at my thesis by using a new definition of frontier: frontiers are the lines of contact and struggle between cultures. I borrowed the idea of the “other” from sociological texts and related it to the story of the Chinese. My topic relates to the theme by tracing the frontier between cultures—the first meeting of Chinese and Americans—instead of the frontier between countries, although Tacoma in 1885 was a geographical frontier also.