“Meat vs. Rice”: The Ideal of Manly Labor and Anti-Chinese Hysteria in Nineteenth-century America

1. For an alternate interpretation of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which emphasizes its roots in political concerns, see Gyory (1998).

2. Keyssar (1986) also gives unemployment statistics by states. In 1890, the highest unemployment rate for men was in Tennessee at 25 percent for 2.8 months and the lowest in Georgia at 8.9 percent for 2.8 months. Industrial states showed higher unemployment with longer duration. In 1890, Massachusetts suffered 19.0 percent unemployment for an average of 3.3 months, while Pennsylvania had an unemployment rate of 20.8 percent for an average of 3.6 months. In the manufacturing and mechanical industries ten years later, unemployment was even higher in these states (pp. 302-3). Massachusetts had 26.0 percent for 3.6 months, and Pennsylvania had 29.4 percent for 3.6 months. Ohio and Illinois had even higher rates (30.2 and 32.9 percent, respectively) for over 3.5 months each (pp. 340-41).

3. Mary Blewett (1990) describes, for example, how Lancashirian textile workers in Fall River felt themselves unmanned after losing a strike in 1875 and how women used this sense of emasculation as leverage to gain prominence in the labor force (pp. 175-76).

4. “John Chinaman,” National Review, Undated clipping, Scrapbooks on Chinese Immigration, BANC MSS 89/151, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

5. This certainly represents a drastic change from the Victorian emphasis on saving and delayed gratification. Kevin White (1993) argues that “such qualities [as temperance, self control, thrift, self-denial] were those appropriate for a production-oriented society. Gratification could be delayed because of the genuine possibility of material rewards down the line if thrift were practiced in the present” (pp. 2-3). Elliot Gorn (1986) argues that in fact, the new industrial and social order demanded more self-restraint on the parts of both workers and employers since the “heightened importance of profit and the fear of financial failure now elevated assertive individualism over communal welfare, giving the emergent capitalist ethos an unmistakable harshness” (p. 132). The self-restraint Gorn is discussing however is self-restraint at work, submission to in-dustrial discipline. Gompers is explicitly referring to life outside of work, to leisure and family time.

6. Gompers (1991) had prefaced this by saying, “It is an old complaint that most social reforms will not come to pass until we are all dead. We want to do something here and now. That something, to appeal very strongly, should take the form of an increase of wages. That is my philosophy for the present. Increase the workingman's purchasing power.”

7. Some historians have argued that new definitions of masculinity also centered on achieving higher production levels and performing more diligently in the industrial workplace, but in the anti-Chinese literature, work offers little reassurance of manhood (Baron 1990). Sharon Hartley's work on Afro-American women workers has strongly suggested that class identification need not be tied to work itself at all (Hartley 1991, 42-55).