What do you think?
Rate this book
The Road to Chinese Exclusion: The Denver Riot, 1880 Election, and Rise of the West
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rights and unfettered immigration by joining Democrats to pass the noxious 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act--which was not repealed until 1943 and only earned congressional apologies in 2011 and 2012.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.
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.
- GenresAmerican HistoryHistory
376 pages, Hardcover
First published October 15, 2013
About the author
Liping Zhu
8 books1 followerReceiving his PhD from the University of New Mexico, Liping Zhu is professor of history at Eastern Washington University. As a frontier historian, he is mainly interested in the topic of Chinese immigrants in nineteenth-century American West. He has published several well received books. His latest book "The Road to Chinese Exclusion" won the 2014 Caroline Bancroft History Prize in history of the American West. Currently, he is working on a biography of Anson Burlingame.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 12, 2024
3.5 rounded up. Very clear throughout the book and a great way to learn about a topic I didn't know much about before. My main complaint is I think he overstated the significance of the Denver riot, and I didn't buy that part of the argument.
September 10, 2017
The Road to Chinese Exclusion by Dr. Liping Zhu documents Chinese immigration to the United States in the 1800s and the increasingly hostile reaction it inspired. In a way that bears a striking similarity to our own time, the immigration debate of the 19th century came to dominate American politics more through emotion than logic and played a significant role in America’s evolution from Reconstruction to the Gilded Age. The climactic event of Dr. Zhu’s book is Denver’s anti-Chinese riot of October 31, 1880.
During the years leading up to the riot, Republicans had been in control of the U.S. Presidency since 1860, but that hold had become precarious to the point that they won the bitterly contested election of 1876 by a single electoral vote. The newly created state of Colorado had decided the outcome by giving its three electors to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes. By 1880, both parties had come to see the West as the tie-breaker between the Democrat dominated South and the Republican North. And in the West, no issue loomed larger than the issue of Chinese immigration. Lured by the labor needs of railroads and mining operations and driven out of their homeland by a terrible civil war, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Chinese had poured into the country to the point where by some estimates they may have made up a quarter of the West’s population. In California in particular, immigration had become a hot button issue with resentment running especially high among the immigrant Irish and freed blacks who competed for the same low-paying jobs as the Chinese. The Democratic candidate for President, Winfield Scott Hancock, embraced the anti-immigrant cause while the Republican, James A. Garfield, took a cautious approach, wary of a growing anti-immigrant wing in his own party. The issue took on an October surprise element right before the election as a letter was published by a Democratic newspaper, purportedly from Garfield to a mysterious Mr. Morey showing the candidate taking a pro-immigration stance.
Colorado in 1880 replicated the national political split with Denver being a Republican stronghold while the miner dominated population of the state’s second largest city, Leadville, ran heavily Democratic. And while Denver had been generally welcoming to its small Chinese population (just over 200 per the 1800 census), there had been trouble in Colorado’s mining towns to the point that “Celestials” had been chased completely out of several. In the lead up to election day, partisan papers on both sides fanned the flames and news of the Morey letter further raised tensions. On October 30th, Democrats staged a torchlight parade through the streets of Denver. The parade included many prospective voters from outside of the city (and outside of the state if very plausible Republican claims were to be believed). The next day, a minor scuffle in a Denver saloon between Chinese and Irish laborers caused a rumor to spread through the city that a white man had been shot by a Chinese. The ensuing riot lasted more than eight hours and has been estimated to have had between three and five thousand participants. One Chinese laundry worker was lynched, dozens of his countrymen seriously injured. Very nearly every Chinese business in the city was destroyed and the mob only dispersed once every Chinese resident had been transported to the county jail for safety. Just as the violence showed the worst in much of the citizenry, it brought out the best in unexpected quarters. Many Chinese fled to the bordellos and parlor houses of Holladay Street, where the madames and sporting ladies wielded champagne bottles, fireplace pokers and stiletto heels to stand off the mobs. In another well documented incident Jim Moon, one of the city’s most notorious gamblers and ruffians, protected a Chinese laundry, keeping the crowd at bay as much with his reputation as with the Colt .45 Peacemaker he waved in the air.
The riot made national news and along with the exposure of the Morey letter as a forgery (in which, if genuine, Garfield would have had to misspelled his own name) created an anti-Democratic backlash that possibly helped boost Garfield into the Presidency. Nevertheless, his party’s waffling on the immigration had led to its ceding of position as the party of emancipation and equal rights. In 1882, Chester Arthur (Garfield’s successor following the first presidential assassination in American history) would sign the first in a series of anti-Chinese immigration laws that would not be fully repealed until 1943. The two great American parties would enter the Gilded Age with little moral daylight between them. In 1884, Grover Cleveland would become the first Democrat elected to the White House since before the Civil War.
Dr. Zhu’s work is well researched and extremely informative on a poorly understood period of American politics. The work is quite readable, but is definitely more scholarly than narrative. By far the greater part of the book is devoted to the politics leading up to and following the riot. The violence of October 31st, 1880 takes up a portion of a single chapter. My one quibble with Dr. Zhu’s work would be that he at times seems to take first hand accounts at a little too much face value, even when there has obviously been some sensational embellishment. To be fair, separating urban legend from fact is a daunting task when it comes to this period of Denver history and Dr. Zhu is always clear when he is quoting an account as opposed to stating established fact. Nevertheless, I think a bit more skepticism might have been appropriate regarding some more sensational stories. As an example he quotes one account of the rescue of a houseful of naked Chinese prostitutes in “the Chinatown red-light district.” According to the census of 1880, there were only thirteen Chinese women in Denver at this time. While it seems likely that a few Chinese prostitutes worked in the cribs of Holladay Street, I seriously doubt there was an entire bordello of them in 1880 and feel quite certain there was no such thing as an entire Chinese red light district.
With that small criticism aside I heartily recommend this book to those looking for a unique look at the history of Chinese in America, the history of Denver and the politics of the late 1800s. It’s very much a niche work, but quite readable and authoritative. I give it four stars.
During the years leading up to the riot, Republicans had been in control of the U.S. Presidency since 1860, but that hold had become precarious to the point that they won the bitterly contested election of 1876 by a single electoral vote. The newly created state of Colorado had decided the outcome by giving its three electors to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes. By 1880, both parties had come to see the West as the tie-breaker between the Democrat dominated South and the Republican North. And in the West, no issue loomed larger than the issue of Chinese immigration. Lured by the labor needs of railroads and mining operations and driven out of their homeland by a terrible civil war, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Chinese had poured into the country to the point where by some estimates they may have made up a quarter of the West’s population. In California in particular, immigration had become a hot button issue with resentment running especially high among the immigrant Irish and freed blacks who competed for the same low-paying jobs as the Chinese. The Democratic candidate for President, Winfield Scott Hancock, embraced the anti-immigrant cause while the Republican, James A. Garfield, took a cautious approach, wary of a growing anti-immigrant wing in his own party. The issue took on an October surprise element right before the election as a letter was published by a Democratic newspaper, purportedly from Garfield to a mysterious Mr. Morey showing the candidate taking a pro-immigration stance.
Colorado in 1880 replicated the national political split with Denver being a Republican stronghold while the miner dominated population of the state’s second largest city, Leadville, ran heavily Democratic. And while Denver had been generally welcoming to its small Chinese population (just over 200 per the 1800 census), there had been trouble in Colorado’s mining towns to the point that “Celestials” had been chased completely out of several. In the lead up to election day, partisan papers on both sides fanned the flames and news of the Morey letter further raised tensions. On October 30th, Democrats staged a torchlight parade through the streets of Denver. The parade included many prospective voters from outside of the city (and outside of the state if very plausible Republican claims were to be believed). The next day, a minor scuffle in a Denver saloon between Chinese and Irish laborers caused a rumor to spread through the city that a white man had been shot by a Chinese. The ensuing riot lasted more than eight hours and has been estimated to have had between three and five thousand participants. One Chinese laundry worker was lynched, dozens of his countrymen seriously injured. Very nearly every Chinese business in the city was destroyed and the mob only dispersed once every Chinese resident had been transported to the county jail for safety. Just as the violence showed the worst in much of the citizenry, it brought out the best in unexpected quarters. Many Chinese fled to the bordellos and parlor houses of Holladay Street, where the madames and sporting ladies wielded champagne bottles, fireplace pokers and stiletto heels to stand off the mobs. In another well documented incident Jim Moon, one of the city’s most notorious gamblers and ruffians, protected a Chinese laundry, keeping the crowd at bay as much with his reputation as with the Colt .45 Peacemaker he waved in the air.
The riot made national news and along with the exposure of the Morey letter as a forgery (in which, if genuine, Garfield would have had to misspelled his own name) created an anti-Democratic backlash that possibly helped boost Garfield into the Presidency. Nevertheless, his party’s waffling on the immigration had led to its ceding of position as the party of emancipation and equal rights. In 1882, Chester Arthur (Garfield’s successor following the first presidential assassination in American history) would sign the first in a series of anti-Chinese immigration laws that would not be fully repealed until 1943. The two great American parties would enter the Gilded Age with little moral daylight between them. In 1884, Grover Cleveland would become the first Democrat elected to the White House since before the Civil War.
Dr. Zhu’s work is well researched and extremely informative on a poorly understood period of American politics. The work is quite readable, but is definitely more scholarly than narrative. By far the greater part of the book is devoted to the politics leading up to and following the riot. The violence of October 31st, 1880 takes up a portion of a single chapter. My one quibble with Dr. Zhu’s work would be that he at times seems to take first hand accounts at a little too much face value, even when there has obviously been some sensational embellishment. To be fair, separating urban legend from fact is a daunting task when it comes to this period of Denver history and Dr. Zhu is always clear when he is quoting an account as opposed to stating established fact. Nevertheless, I think a bit more skepticism might have been appropriate regarding some more sensational stories. As an example he quotes one account of the rescue of a houseful of naked Chinese prostitutes in “the Chinatown red-light district.” According to the census of 1880, there were only thirteen Chinese women in Denver at this time. While it seems likely that a few Chinese prostitutes worked in the cribs of Holladay Street, I seriously doubt there was an entire bordello of them in 1880 and feel quite certain there was no such thing as an entire Chinese red light district.
With that small criticism aside I heartily recommend this book to those looking for a unique look at the history of Chinese in America, the history of Denver and the politics of the late 1800s. It’s very much a niche work, but quite readable and authoritative. I give it four stars.
November 18, 2024
4.5 Stars
February 21, 2026
Read a free copy through the NYPL and project muse. Excellent, rarely told history.
October 25, 2016
Very good.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews