In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. for decades. Some white Americans worried that Chinese laborers would steal their jobs and hijack their opportunity.
And this xenophobic fear carried over to the restaurant industry. Chinese restaurants — known by some at the time as "chop suey houses" — were understood to be a good value, offering inexpensive meals in an exotic setting.
"The economic menace [of Chinese restaurants] was twofold," says Chin. "First, if Chinese people had the opportunity to earn a living, then they might stay. And their communities would continue to exist, and the Chinese presence, which many objected to, would continue."
The second thing, says Chin, is that "if Chinese restaurants made Chinese food available at a relatively low price and then American restaurants wouldn't be able to compete, either the wage scales for American restaurants would have to go down or they would close."
And then, there was the pervasive idea that Chinese men were lecherous threats to white women. Chinese restaurants were considered "dens of vice," Chin says, where white women were at risk of moral corruption by way of sex, opium and alcohol.
I talked with Chin about his research and how anti-immigrant sentiment can manifest itself in even the most "creative" of methods. He told me about six different ways that Chinese restaurants were targeted:
1. Race riots
There were Chinese communities expelled from Western and Mountain States through race riots, Chin says, where Chinese restaurateurs or miners were beaten or quite literally burned from their homes.
2. Boycotts
Unions representing cooks, waiters and bartenders organized largely unsuccessful boycotts against Chinese restaurants in many places, including Massachusetts, Arizona, California, Montana, Minnesota and Ohio. The unions imposed fines on union members who ate at Chinese restaurants, Chin says, but couldn't keep their members from eating there: "Individual members of the public had incentives to cheat because the food was understood to be a good value at the time."
And, Chin points out, for the most part, these unions weren't trying to enlist Chinese restaurant workers to join their ranks. Instead, they were vying for Chinese employees to be replaced by white workers.
3. A peculiar law
When boycotts were largely unsuccessful, the unions turned to the legal system. At the American Federation of Labor's 1913 convention, organizers proposed that all states should pass laws that barred white women from working or patronizing Chinese or Japanese restaurants for both moral and economic reasons, Chin says. (A similar law had been enacted in Saskatchewan, Canada, and upheld by Canada's Supreme Court.)