On November 3, 1885, five hundred white citizens of Tacoma answered the call of their political and labor leaders and marched through the city’s Chinatown, rounding up Chinese residents who they informed would be departing by train (on railroad tracks they had once built, to be sure) to Portland, Oregon. After their subsequent harassment and intimidation of white businessmen known to be supporters of the Chinese community, this white mob then burned Tacoma’s Chinatown to the ground. The mob was so methodical, newspapers reported, in its expulsion of the Chinese populace, that its approach to eliminating the Chinese from the city was hailed as the “Tacoma Method.” This 1885 removal was the culmination of national and regional anti-Chinese sentiment, numerous outbursts of anti-Chinese violence and repression near Tacoma, and a culture within the city that reinforced such xenophobia. National and international outcry eventually led to the indictment of twenty-seven men connected to the incident, yet none were ever convicted or punished. Many of “The 27,” as they were called, would go on to play leading roles in Tacoma politics for years to come.
Using this historical episode as both a window into the past and a mirror for the present, my conference paper seeks a clearer understanding of the role that anti-Chinese rhetoric played in propping up the “Tacoma Method” as a way to distance, dehumanize, and deport an immigrant population. Despite the fact that native Tacomans made death threats, engaged in looting and arson, and forcibly removed the entire Chinese community, newspapers throughout the Washington Territory, the Pacific Northwest, and the West Coast chalked up the episode as an orderly, nonviolent blueprint for Chinese expulsion. Thereafter, the “Tacoma Method” stimulated vigilante expulsions of Chinese communities in over 200 West Coast and Northwest towns and cities between 1885 and 1887.
