Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in American Texts

7. Smallpox, Opium, and Invasion: Chines Invasion, White Guilt, and Native American Displacement in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction

7 Smallpox. Opium. and Invasion Chinese Invasion, White Guilt, and Native American Displacement in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction EDWIN J. MCALLISTER THE COVER ILLUSTRATION ON A FEBRUARY r879 Harper's Weekly shows awell-dressed Chinese man and a Native American man looking over aposter featuring IrishAmericanlaborleader Dennis Kearney's anti-immigration slogan : "The Chinese Must Go!" The Native American observes to the Chinese man, "Paleface 'fraid you crowdhim out, as he did me" (Tchen 205) (fig. 7.r). The poster's immediate political frame of reference was the public debate surrounding Chinese immigration that ultimately resulted in the passage ofthe 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. However, in its juxtaposition of Native American as past victim and Chinese immigrantas potentialfuture victimizerofwhite Americans, thecartoonpoints towardamoretenacious representational traditionconnecting theseethnic groups, a connection arising from the historical process through which white Europeans displaced Native Americans in the American West, a process nearly complete by 1879. The ethnic connections suggested by the cartoon are, I will argue, borne out by a surprising numberofnovels and magazine short stories published at the tum of the century. In these works, the Chinese are figured as the potential agents of a terrible reversal ofwhite America's Fig. 7.1. Cover of Harper's Weekly (February 1879). I44 EOWIN J. MCALLISTER displacementofNative American tribes intheWest. This fiction exposes anxieties among white middle-class Americans that a new wave of soldiers and settlers would come, not west to east in the classic American pattern ofsettlement. butfrom east to westin adisruption ofthe mythic narrative of America's westward expansion (Lee 9), pouring across the Pacificfrom Chinainto California, overthe Rockies, intotheGreatPlains, and finally into the American heartland. These Chinese invaders bring with them diseases and drugs to wipe out whatever Anglos the armies do notkinfirst, leaving theentire continentunderChinese control. This fiction thus expresses a deep-seated white fear that the Chinese would actas the agentsofaprovidentialvengeance on Euro-Americans for their displacement of the Native Americans; the connections of this fear to white guiltregardingthedisplacementofNative Americans are clarified by the fact that the invaders in these works of fiction accomplish their nefariousdesigns using thesamemeans through whichwhite Europeans haddecimated Native Americanpopulations: ahuge, unstoppablemigration , military superiority, drugs. and disease. That such a deeply ingrained sense of white guilt even existed by the late nineteenth century is a matter of some scholarly debate. For example, in Hard Fact: Setting and Form in the American Novel (1985), Philip Fisher suggests that by the time American realist and naturalist fiction became popular, historical novels like James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales had already made "morally tolerable the ethical complexities of settlement and the superseding of the Indians" (6). Yet a substantial body of American realist fiction produced long after Cooper's novels suggests thatwhiteguiltoverthesettlementoftheWest had not been as smoothly managed out ofexistence as Fisher suggests. Iwill argue herethatthis guiltevidences itselfin latenineteenth-century American fiction via aprocess ofdisplacementwhereby the destructive energies and practicesofwhitesettlementare projectedontoaconvenient set of outsiders-Chinese immigrants. Americanrealistfiction from the latenineteenth century makes visiblethis process ofdisplacement; the guilt Americans mighthaveexperienced for their complicity in the destruction of Native Americans is shiftedontotheChinese,whointhisfiction occupythe positionofaggressors with white Europeans as their innocent victims. And the "tools" of these aggressors sound all too familiar against the backdrop of Euro145 SMAllPOX, OPIUM, AND INVASION American displacement of Native Americans: smallpox-tainted handkerchiefs spreadingdiseasefrom mainlandChina to thewestern United States, whites addicted to opium and enslavedto those who canprovide it, massheathen migrations displacingEuropean Christiansettlers, huge armies of Chinese soldiers invading the United States or taking it over from within, were all seen as potential threats ofChinese immigration. Fears like these, often spelled out prior to the appearance ofthis fiction in anti-immigrant propaganda and sensationalist journalism, resulted in the passage of a series of "Exclusion Acts," beginning in 1882, that singled out Chineseimmigrants as unassimilable. Thus, the use ofthis fiction, in its historical context, was both to manage white guilt over the genocidal destruction ofNative Americans and to galvanizepublic opinion against Chinese immigration. Western fear ofChinese invasionhas alonghistorical pedigree, datingtothethirteenthcenturywhenGenghis Khan's Mongolarmies swept across easternEurope,defeatingevery Europeanarmythatopposedthem. Their advance finally halted when the tribesmen were forced to return to Mongolia to take part in a succession squabble after Genghis Khan died. The Europeans did not know what had saved them, but the fear ofasecond Mongol onslaughtremainedfor centuries and mayhavecontributedto the paranoiaregardingChinese invasionthatmanifesteditself in America during the late nineteenth century. The west coast of the United States was, afterall, thefirst...