"White Labor" vs. "Coolie Labor": The "Chinese Question" in Pennsylvania in the 1870s

EDWARD J. M. RHOADS

THE "CHINESE QUESTION," as it was debated in the 1860s and 1870s, was what to do about the immigrants from China, most of them workers, who had been coming in large and growing numbers to the United States since the Gold Rush. Prior to 1869, the issue had been of interest only in the frontier states and territories along the Pacific coast and in the Rocky Mountains, where practically all of the 60,000 Chinese then in the country were confined. However, with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in May 1869, the Chinese began coming east, and as they did so the Chinese question was transformed from a regional to a national issue. Hardly more than a dozen years later, in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which put a nearly total stop to the allegedly threatening flow of immigration.