The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

News of Rock Springs triggered violence elsewhere. By the spring of 1886, 150 western communities had expelled, or attempted to expel, the Chinese. In Washington Territory Daniel Cronin, an organizer for the Knights, made anti-Chinese agitation a tool for a wider attack on corporations and monopolies in order “to free the laboring man from the shackles that he now bears.” The expulsions amounted to a kind of ethnic cleansing, designed to drive people out rather than to kill them. Sinophobes initially relied on boycotts and threats rather than the violence, but they escalated into vigilante actions, which often had the acquiescence of local authorities.