The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) marked both a pivot in U.S. history and a continuation. It was pivotal in that it ended the traditional U.S. policy of open immigration and began an era of restrictions that culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which imposed strict quotas based on racial and ethnic criteria. It was also a continuation of a U.S. tradition of intolerance, an intolerance explicitly grounded in racism and in ethnic and religious bigotry. As both pivot and continuation, Chinese exclusion lays bare many of the most crucial fault lines of post–Civil War America.

Chinese migration to California began at the same time and for the same reason as that of white Americans, with the discovery of gold. Anti-Chinese sentiment began at that same time as well. White prospectors drove Chinese miners off their claims, often violently. Not only did the newly formed state of California do nothing to protect the Chinese, but its Supreme Court decided in People v. Hall (1854) that their inherent inferiority made it appropriate to restrict their state constitutional rights to those given to “blacks” and “Indians.” The Hall decision opened the way for a variety of state and local discriminatory measures.

Nonetheless Chinese continued to come to the land they referred to as the “Golden Mountain,” driven by the lure of higher wages and the destruction occasioned by the Taiping Rebellion in China (1850–1864) in which an estimated twenty million died. The “Six Companies” in San Francisco helped to organize this migration and acted as go-betweens for the railroad companies that sought Chinese laborers. The Companies arranged for the migrants’ fare, provided jobs with American employers, functioned as banks in which the migrants could send money back to China, and provided a host of other services, all at a substantial profit.

The completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869 meant fewer jobs for Chinese laborers. Many of the newly unemployed returned to San Francisco to find work. Unemployment became far worse with the onset of the depression triggered by the Panic of 1873. Anti-Chinese sentiment, already intense, strengthened still further as white workers blamed their problems on “cheap Chinese labor.”

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 served as a trigger. Beginning with a wage strike at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the strike soon spread, leading to violent clashes between strikers and state militia forces, and a nearly complete shutdown of railroad commerce nationwide.

On July 23, 1877, white workers gathered in a San Francisco sandlot out of sympathy for the strikers. The crowd soon became a mob and set off to destroy Chinatown and kill the Chinese. After three days, the violence was contained. In its wake, the Workingmen’s Party of California under the leadership of Denis Kearney, an immigrant from Ireland whose politics combined Marxism and nativism, organized an anti-Chinese movement based on racist and nativist beliefs. This anti-Chinese fury would ultimately culminate in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which not only foreshadowed future restrictions on immigration based on racist and nativist beliefs but also signaled the Republican Party’s gradual abandonment of support for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as a majority of its leaders joined Democrats in seeking to make the United States a “white man’s country.”