Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (review)

Well-researched and well-written, Pfaelzer’s Driven Out represents an important contribution to Chinese American history. Based on a wide range of primary sources, including census materials, municipal and legal records, and newspaper accounts, it is the first comprehensive study to chronicle in detail the brutality of the racist movement that attempted to eradicate the presence of the Chinese throughout the Pacific Northwest from 1850 to 1906. By the end of the 1880s, “close to two hundred towns . . . had driven out their Chinese residents” (253). Pfaelzer’s in-depth discussion of anti-Chinese activities in various towns sheds light on the popular support that the anti-Chinese movement enjoyed, and provides convincing evidence that the government was involved as well: “The forces for driving out the Chinese had spread—through arms, through the laws, through the courts” (335). Insightfully placing the ethnic cleansing of the late nineteenth-century American West into a broader context, Pfaelzer notes “two other paths toward racial purity converging in the West,” one targeting Native Americans and the other, African Americans (xxi). What happened to the Chinese, the author points out, brings to mind “Kristallnacht, the night in 1939 when Nazi Germany violently exposed its intention to remove the Jews,” and it anticipated the history of Poland and Greece in the 1930s and 1940s and, more recently, of Rwanda, Indonesia, and Bosnia” (xxviii–xxiv).

Pfaelzer does not represent Chinese Americans merely as victims; she fully recognizes their historical agency, documenting their strenuous efforts in resisting the politically powerful and physically violent anti-Chinese movement. In spite of its bloody nature as the “largest single mass lynching in California,” the massacre of the Chinese in Los Angeles in 1871, for instance, failed to remove their community (54). Just in the first decade after the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the Chinese filed more than 7,000 court cases to fight for their rights.

Driven Out is a well-organized book; its themes and arguments are easy to follow. Chapter 1 deals with the purges of the Chinese in the mining areas during the 1850s and 1860s. It offers evidence that the attempt to expel the Chinese started upon their arrival, countering the long-standing popular belief that white Californians initially welcomed the Chinese. Chapter two covers anti-Chinese violence during the 1870s. Chapter 3 focuses on the experiences of women in such cities as Antioch and San Francisco. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the expulsion in Eureka and Truckee, respectively—Eureka driving out the Chinese with swift pogroms and Truckee starving them out. Chapter 6 examines the legal challenges to ethnic cleansing, taking advantage of the loopholes in American laws. Chapter 7 is a “litany of hate,” namely, a chronological register of anti-Chinese ethnic cleansings in the 1880s. Chapter 8 discusses the requirement that all Chinese had to carry an identification card under the Geary Act and Chinese response to it.

One of the weaknesses of Driven Out is the lack of a coherently convincing explanation of what motivated the expulsions. Pfaelzer’s argument that “whites violently expelled the Chinese in part because they looked so familiar” ignores the fact that anti-Chinese sentiments ran across racial as well as socioeconomic boundaries (166). All in all, however, this thoughtful book is a welcome addition to the list of fine studies of anti-Chinese racism by Sandmeyer, Alexander, McClain, and Lee.¹