Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans

by Jean Pfaelzer

Book Overview

Driven Out exposes a shocking story of ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest when the first Chinese Americans were rounded up and purged from more than three hundred communities by lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians. From 1848 into the twentieth century, Chinatowns burned across the West as Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and fieldworkers, prostitutes and merchants' wives were violently loaded onto railroad...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520256948
• ISBN13: 9780520256941
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

I bury my heart in Gold Mountain

This is a well research documentary to chronicle the atrocity against Chinese in America in 19th Century. Chinese came to America in the hope of a better life. Unable to know and understand them in language and culture, main stream Whites looked at them from welcoming to killing them despite their contributions in building America. They were a little better than their red skin cousins born and lived in Turtle Island for a long long time. The harsh law of 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in Congress and similar laws in cities, counties and states along the Pacific Coast made their life miserable. Only when Madam Soong Mei Ling spoke at Congress with an Southern accent got this Act repealed Only the Senate Resolution 201 in 2011 did the Congress express the regret of passing discriminatory laws against the Chinese in America. It is better late than never. The long Resolution brings a close to such sad chapter of Chinese-American history. This is an important book in history for all Americans.

Revealing a little known part of American history

Big thanks to Professor Pfaelzer for her original research about this little known topic. I am a member of the Chinese Reconciliation Project Foundation in Tacoma and her book begins with the 1885 expulsion of the Chinese from Tacoma, gleaned from first-hand accounts in the Library of Congress. More than that, she provides the context of the expulsions and worse anti-Chinese violence up and down the West coast. She also adds the perspective of Chinese women, a viewpoint that has gotten almost no attention from scholars. This book is not only an important contribution to American studies, and Chinese-American history, is is also very readable and full of all the contemporaneous photos she could find. In the middle of the book there is a very useful section listing events by year. Tacoma's Chinese Reconciliation Park will open in September and this book, which coincidentally is published this same year, is the best source to explain why these events must not be forgotten.

Well-written and relevant

Let me start out by praising this author. I normally start a review by listing mistakes. As you read my kudos, you will see why I made that exception for this book. Kudos Today, it is nearly unheard of to write a nonfiction book and stay on topic. Nearly all allegedly nonfiction authors contaminate their work with large doses of their personal political opinions. Most of those opinions reveal a myopic understanding of the topic on which the author is opinionating. Pfaelzer's editorial integrity is especially noteworthy because this book is directly relevant to the hot button political (non)issue of immigration, but the author doesn't impose her political view. I enjoyed reading a book that breaks the current trend of writing in Pidgin English. Whether such writing is done to obfuscate or done out of ignorance, I don't know. Either way, this common practice of saddling the text with confusing errors in grammar, composition, and word choices is annoying. Pfaelzer is a professor of English (and of East Asian History and of American Studies), so perhaps she felt obligated to break from the herd on this issue. If this book had errors of fact, I didn't catch them. I'm not sure that this characteristic (free of errors of fact) is normal, either. What it's about Driven Out addresses the atrocities committed against Chinese people who were living and working on the American west coast (mostly California) at a particular time. That time was the half-century or so between the post-Civil War reconstruction era and the first part of the Twentieth Century. The same psychodrama plays out today as then, except today "we" hate Mexicans instead of the Chinese. The hatred for (and fear of) the Chinese was predicated on a zero sum game mentality and an ignorance of economic realities. The time, energy, and money spent trying to eradicate the "threat" of peaceful and productive Chinese-Americans would have solved existing problems if applied to those problems rather than diverted to such irrational purposes. Bigotry is a delusion-inducing poison, so in that sense we are reading a story that constantly repeats itself. The richness of detail in Driven Out allows us to see the particular ways in which bigotry played out in this particular time and place. Pfaelzer took great pains to thoroughly research events, sort through the facts, and reconstruct what happened. Her method is one of first providing a macro view and then providing a detailed accounting of the subsequent events. For example, she talks about the Eureka method (named after the town of Eureka) in Chapter 4 and explains what it was about. Then, she goes into specific events that occurred as part of putting the Eureka method into practice. Pfaelzer shows the rationalizations that people used to justify their reprehensible behavior. Eureka was just one of many towns that embarked on a vicious and insane program of forcing the Chinese to leave. In Chapter 5, Pfaelzer uses the same approach to revea

Very interesting and important

The Chinese have gotten the bad end of the stick in U.S history as a minority group. They have not been celebrated and largely they have been forgotten. Any idea that they make up an important contribution to the 'melting pot' of American life has been pushed aside. This book begins to correct that problem. It tells the incredibly true story of the attempted ethnic-cleansing of Chinese workers and merchants from the American west. In the period 1850-1910 many towns had proud 'anti-chinese leagues' and race riots took place. The Chinese had been brought to the U.S to build the railroads, just as Indians had been brought to Africa by the British. But the Chinese stayed on and they formed large immagrant communities. As one of the only non-white racial groups in many towns of the American west they were the 'other' and subject to harrasment. This remarkable tale takes us back to the period through newspapers and interveiws and also examines the ways that the Chinese tried to obtain their rights before the law. This is a good book, well written and a major contribution to the history of the American west and race relations in the U.S Seth J. Frantzman

A Valuable Contribution for the Student of American History

"Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans" is the first book I have ever read to address this particular issue, the "brutal and systematic" treatment accorded the Chinese immigrants to America during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. Oh, yes, I knew that some Chinese laborers came to the American West to work on the railroads during the heydays of their construction. But that is about all I knew. This, of course, is somewhat shameful for me to admit now because one of my majors during my undergraduate days was history (with a specialty in American history to boot!), and I taught American history to junior high school students for seven years early in my teaching career. Moreover, as a requirement for a teaching certificate I had to take a course specifically in Pacific Northwest history (the area where most of the anti-Chinese incidents took place) and at no time was this matter discussed in the textbooks or in class. Whether this unexplored chapter in American history was deliberately overlooked or ignored, I cannot say. But I can say that it was, in my opinion, a disgrace that it was not presented and discussed. Jean Pfaelzer, who is a professor of English and American studies at the University of Delaware, has written a comprehensive and gripping account of the "ethic cleansing" of the Chinese residing in California and the Pacific Northwest. Since I was born and still live in the Pacific Northwest, this detailed narrative about the barbaric treatment of a group of fellow human beings who either came here voluntarily or were forced to come here to work on the railroads, in the mines, in the fields, and elsewhere, is especially disturbing. Indeed, the little town where I currently reside along the Oregon coast is mentioned in Pfaelzer's book, although no mention is made of any specific anti-Chinese incidents occurring here. That point aside, it is certainly about time for this story to be told in depth and Pfaelzer does just that extremely well. The story begins in the 1840s and continues into the early twentieth century. Thousands of Chinese laborers and merchants, prostitutes and merchants' wives, were rounded up at gunpoint and marched out of towns and other locations all over the Pacific coastal areas of California, Oregon, and Washington, from Seattle to Los Angeles and even beyond. The Chinese were subjected to many cruelties: most were banished outright from their homes; young Chinese prostitutes were unjustly accused of spreading syphilis among the "fine" young White men of the community; the government tried to force the Chinese to wear photo-ID cards. Some were forced onto ships to be delivered elsewhere, including back to China; some were thrown into railroad cars to be transported anywhere; some did not go willingly and were killed or were burned to death in the fires, mostly set by local Whites, which destroyed the Chinatowns which had sprung up in many places. But t