Denver in the Gilded Age may have been an economic boomtown, but it
was also a powder keg waiting to explode. When that inevitable
eruption occurred--in the Anti-Chinese Riot of 1880--it was sparked
by white resentment at the growing encroachment of Chinese
immigrants who had crossed the Pacific Ocean and journeyed overland
in response to an expanding labor market. Liping Zhu's book
provides the first detailed account of this momentous conflagration
and carefully delineates the story of how anti-Chinese nativism in
the nineteenth century grew from a regional political concern to a
full-fledged national issue.
Zhu tells a complex tale about race, class, and politics. He
reconstructs the drama of the riot--with Denver's "Rocky Mountain
News" fanning the flames by labeling the Chinese "the pest of the
Pacific"--and relates how white mobs ransacked Chinatown while
other citizens took pains to protect their Asian neighbors.
Occurring two days before the national election, it had a decisive
impact on sectional political alignments that would undercut the
nation's promise of equal rights for all peoples made after the
Civil War and would have repercussions lasting well into the next
century.
By examining the relationship between the anti-Chinese movement
and the rise of the West, this work sheds new light on our
understanding of racial politics and sectionalism in the
post-Reconstruction era. As the West's newfound political muscle
threatened Republican hegemony in national politics, many
Republican legislators compromised their commitment to equal rights
and unfettered immigration by joining Democrats to pass the noxious
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act--which was not repealed until 1943 and
only earned congressional apologies in 2011 and 2012.
The Denver Anti-Chinese Riot strikes at the core of the national
debate over race and region in the late nineteenth century as it
demonstrates a correlation between the national retreat from the
campaign for racial equality and the rise of the American West to
national political prominence. Thanks to Zhu's powerful narrative,
this once overlooked event now has a place in the saga of American
history--and serves as a potent reminder that in the real world of
bare-knuckle politics, competing for votes often trumps fidelity to
principle.
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