Even the language has stayed the same. The same tape gets played over and over.
Consider the Chinese.
Those poor sods built the railroad, filling in the gaps of a massive labor shortage on the West Coast to dig tunnels through the Sierra Nevada mountains and across the dry flats of Nevada and Utah. They came here hoping to find work, a life.
And what sort of thanks do they get? The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, renewed a decade later and not finally repealed until 1943.
The act itself was pretty mean, but it reflected massive hatred and fear of an entire ethnic group. Chinese were viewed as (and this ought to sound familiar) bringers of disease, poverty, low wages and crime.
They were hounded out of the country, discriminated against, robbed by officials and, in more than one occasion, slaughtered.
The slaughter occurred right next door to Ogden, over in Rock Springs.
The Rock Springs Massacre, in 1885, started because the Union Pacific Railroad had hired a bunch of the Chinese at lower wages than they were paying white laborers. The whites resented losing their jobs, and resented the lower sages their jobs were paying, and attacked the Chinese. In the end 28 were killed and more than 70 of their homes burned. Federal troops had to come in to quiet things down.
(This sort of game playing by corporations is not at all unusual. In the book "Grapes of Wrath" John Steinbeck describes the tactic of California fruit growers who tell poor farmers in Oklahoma there's lots of work to be had in California. Driven by their homes by the Dust Bowl, those farmers -- the Oakies -- flood California, driving down wages and earning resentment by locals.
(It always interests me that people don't blame the corporations who are playing this game instead of the poor sods who are so desperate for work they take the lower wages. Anyway ...)
What got me thinking about this was wandering through some old Ogden Standards on microfilm this morning and I happened across a story about the Chinese Exclusion Act, defending it and making it clear why the act was needed.
As you might expect, the language is not legalese, or even diplomatic. To pass a bill that is blatantly racist and fear mongering, you have to use language that appeals to those instinct. The folks you are excluding have to be dehumanized, made evil, made undesirable.
And so it is.
This particular story, which ran in the Ogden Daily Standard on March 5, 1891, reports on debate in a Congressional hearing about the progress of the Act, and the question of whether to renew it. It was approved nine years earlier and was set to expire.
Numbers of Chinese are decreasing, the congressional committee is told by this report, but not as fast as they'd like "this being due to the difficulty in enforcing the law."
It seems Chinese are sneaking in across Puget Sound from Canada. Once here, they have the temerity to use the courts to get out, "dwelling particularly upon the practice by Chinamen of getting out on writs of habeas corpus and giving worthless bonds as security."
"The report expresses the opinion that if the present law was strictly enforced it would not be long before the Chinese race in the United States would be extinct. The Chinese quarter in San Francisco is spoken of as a pest breeder which should not be tolerated in any American community. Chinese are inveterate gamblers and their lotteries, the report says, flourish to such an extent that it seems impossible that such a state of affairs could exist except with connivance with the authorities.
"The Chinaman is described as having his good qualities and being industrious, but the committee is of the opinion that to rescind the Chinese act would surely result in the whole Pacific Coast being overrun with Chinese with resultant serious labor troubles."
The act stayed in force until 1943. It is interesting we were finally allowing Chinese to enter at the same time as the country was herding all its Japanese residents -- immigrant, citizen, or native born or whatever -- into concentration camps based solely on their race.
