Exclusions from the National Body
by Feather Crawford Freed
The American West was incorporated into the nation of the United Sates though a complex and uneven process that this paper organizes into three distinct, but often overlapping and interrelated phases. First, the United States government conquered and claimed the western land and the resources therein. Next, Americans subdued and exploited western lands, as individuals and then, increasingly, as corporations employing a growing labor force. Finally, the Protestant Anglo-Saxon cultural ideal became the dominant standard against which potential members of the national body were measured, while nonwhite people and nonconforming cultures were contained, excluded, or suppressed. Each of these phases of incorporation can be illustrated through an analysis of the experiences and responses of groups of people living within the American West, but outside the national body: Nuevomexicanos in the Southwest; Chinese-Americans in California and the Boise Basin; and Mormons in Utah.
Before the West could be incorporated, it had to be won, and after it was won, it had to be owned. During second half of the nineteenth century, Indian wars and the Mexican-American War had given the United States government sovereignty over western lands, yet the ownership of the land and resources needed to be established. The post-conquest decades of the New Mexico territory exemplifies this first phase of incorporation. After the Civil War and the introduction of railroads to the Southwest, Anglo-American demand for land sped up the transfer of land from Hispanic villages to white Americans. In New Mexico, Nuevomexicanos owned much of their land in common as ejido. These common lands were seized through public domain laws and added to the land holdings of railroad companies and sheep owners, and Anglo homesteaders. The federal government supported the seizure of land from the villages, in 1891 the Forest Reserve Act turned thousands of acres, “much of which was village commons,” into national forests, shutting villagers out of traditional grazing land. (65) That same year, the Court of Private Land Claims decided years of conflicting land claims to the detriment of Nuevomexicano claimants, rejecting many Hispanic land claims unfairly. Hispanic legal victors also lost land – to their lawyers; men that were part of an Anglo-dominated legal system where “these court-appointed commissioners, the new claimants, the judges, and the lawyers of both sides were often friends, if not partners.” (75) In 1897, United States v. Sandoval, the Court decided against villager claims to ejidos, ending questions of their legal legitimacy in the United States territories.
The Nuevomexicano villagers, or old claimants, responded to the seizure of their lands through lawsuits and land claims with limited success, but also engaged in other forms of negotiation with the dominate Anglo culture. Groups like the Gorras Blancas practiced violent resistance, they sabotaged railroads and white homesteads, burning barns and cutting Railroad ties. Individuals like Joaquin Murrieta became remembered as folk heroes who resisted white encroachment through social banditry. Other Nuevomexicanos withdrew into enclaves, close-knit, “self-protective” communities that supported their Hispanic culture. (84) Cultural exchange and consumerism drew many Nuevomexicanos toward the Anglo-dominated economy, yet they generally lacked the capital necessary to compete with Anglo businessmen, or succeed at homesteading. Some ricos continued to profit, but most villagers became entangled in debt and impoverished, no longer able to survive in their diminished villages, and were forced into migratory, wage labor in the railroad, sugar-beet, and mining industries. The conquest was thus completed; the former inhabitants were denied their claims to the land and ultimately turned into an isolated, insecure source of “reserve labor.” (83)
The next phase of incorporation, subduing western lands, required a lot of work, and subsequently, a lot of workers. In order to bring the conquered western lands and their resources into the national body, railroads needed to be built, mines needed to be worked, and the land needed to produce profit. Yet the relationship between the dominant Anglo culture and the labor forces enabling its dominance was problematic- particularly since cheap labor and industrial accumulation of capital best supported efficient exploitation of resources. This relationship was further complicated when members of the workforce were not welcome as members of the national body. This was illustrated when Chinese immigrants came to California and other areas seeking gold in the 1850s and 1860s. Chinese immigrants worked in mines, on railroads and in farms, and in other service industrial capacities. They helped tame the West and access its mineral wealth, yet were rejected as acceptable Americans. Chinese were ridiculed and racialized in the public discourse, and men like Horace Greeley spoke against Chinese membership in the nation. Others engaged in the “negroization” of the Chinese, pejoratively comparing their physical and cultural characteristics to Blacks and their labor practices to slaves.(46) The racialization process that assigned Chinese immigrants negative group characteristics was similar to that experiences by Hispanic-Americans in the southwest, who’s culture was seen as a “blot and an anomaly in the Anglo vision.” (84) The Courts formally denied Chinese immigrants entrance into the national body in the case People v. Hall in 1854, deciding Chinese were officially “nonwhite and therefore ineligible for citizenship rights.” (48)
Once pushed off their own mining claims in California through measures such as the foreign miners’ tax in 1852, the hostility of white miners, and their own lack of legal recourse as noncitizens, Chinese men became part of the “new capitalist labor market.” (50) While white labor tended to organize and demand improved conditions and compensation, exemplified by the growth of groups like the Workingman’s Party and the Knights of Labor, Chinese workers were inexpensive and tractable. Like the dual system in the Southwest that paid Hispanic workers less than their white counterparts, Chinese immigrants also worked for less then white men. (52, 67) This, along with nativism and racism, divided laborers along racial lines in many mining communities. Many Chinese were persecuted by their white competitors for their willingness to work for lower wages and break strikes.
Within a racially divided labor pool such as this, workers had difficulties achieving the “group solidarity” that strengthened homogenously white sources of labor in other mining communities. (92) This dynamic furthered rather than hindered the process of incorporation however, as a it provided labor needed to bring the west into the nation, while it excluded nonwhite workers from national membership, and also weakened the position of organized labor. The Workingman’s Party wasted energy on anti-Chinese activity, while remaining vulnerable to strike breakers and underpaid nonwhite labor. While Cornish, Irish and other white laborers in the Rockies threatened the profit potential of their employers through their solidarity, workforces divided along racial lines weakened themselves, facilitating the accumulation of capital, enabling the growth of large-scale exploitive enterprises, and hastening the subjugation of the American West. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned further immigration of Chinese laborers into the United States for ten years, illustrating the declining need for foreign labor and the dedication to the exclusion of Chinese from the national body.
Chinese immigrants responded to the hostile and racialized conditions they encountered living and working in the United States in a variety of ways, ranging from assimilation to resistance. Many Chinese-Americans sought prosperity through hard work, and comfort through the creation of enclaves. Some Chinese-Americans living in Idaho were able to buy mines cooperatively, and as individuals on installment plans, others worked in factories, mills and kitchens, and as prostitutes and servants. Chinese communities maintained many ethnic customs and social hierarchies within their enclaves, and continued to express their Chinese culture through food, religion, celebrations, clothing and hair-style. Some tried to change or subvert the conditions they faced. For example, Chinese-Americans used the courts to challenge their exclusion from the national body. In 1866, the Chinese in Idaho claimed rights as citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, and “soon won the right to testify in Idaho courts.” (119) While many Chinese-Americans worked within the American economic and legal systems to improve their position, others engaged in organized crime and vigilante justice in order to compensate for their second-class status, and resist the hegemony of the dominant culture. .
Military victory, legal ownership, and wage-labor were necessary to incorporate the vast lands of the American West into the United States, but another critical aspect was the construction of cultural legitimacy. Anglo-Americans worked to establish the supremacy of their Protestant, Anglo-Saxon culture through the racialization, disfranchisement and impoverishment of nonwhite groups, like the Hispanic residents of the Southwest and the Chinese Americans in mining towns. The incorporation of white groups, like the Mormons of Utah, shows how religious unorthodoxy and social nonconformity were also unwelcome in the national body.
Anti-Mormon rhetoric increased after the Civil War. Although “Lincoln did not wish to destroy the Mormon people, only to prevent their practice of polygamy,” the rejection of Mormon nonconformity became a national concern. (128) Politicians called polygamy a “crying evil,” and in 1861 the New Orleans Academy of Sciences attributed specific inherited physical characteristics to the children of polygamists, calling them “a new race.” (127-128) The Morril Act of 1862 enabled the government to “punish and prevent the practice of polygamy in the Territories of the United States,” and was upheld in 1879 by Reynolds v The United States. The Edmunds Act of 1882 invalidated the voter registration of polygamists, and federal agents searched the Utah territory for “cohab huts,” and arrested and imprisoned men with multiple wives. (136)
Mormons responded to this process of incorporation by both defying anti-polygamy laws and trying to change them, while also developing underground and prison enclave communities, and a folk culture that celebrated polygamous outlaws and convicts. The negotiation between the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture and the dedicated group of polygamists was finally resolved when the Mormon Church renounced polygamy. Unlike Chinese immigrants who were denied entry into the national body because of their perceived racial differences, Mormons were able to claim their citizenship and their whiteness through acquiescence to the dominant cultural ideal. Similarities in then treatment of white and nonwhite objects of incorporation expose the power and flexibility of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture. The laws and court cases that marginalized Nuevomexicanos, Chinese-Americans, and Mormons illustrate the kinds of federal support such exclusionary measures enjoyed. The widespread, popular rejection of Hispanic, Chinese, and Mormon culture was manifested through newspaper editorials, political rhetoric, legal and economic mistreatment, and violent attacks. Yet the legitimacy of the dominant culture was also reinforced through its suppleness, its ability to adapt to traditional Hispanic land claims, industrial labor demands, and legal challenges. Group strategies, such as the creation of enclaves or resistance through criminal activity, tended to affirm the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon culture and the legitimacy of the incorporation process.
Citations to HST 560 Course Packet,
History of the American West
University of Oregon
Filed under: history, immigration history, western history | Tagged: American west, Chinese immigration, expansion, immigration, Manifest Destiny, southwest, Utah
