ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1860s, politicians and labor leaders in California and other western states sounded the alarm at the prospect of thousands of Chinese male laborers descending like a plague, a “yellow peril,” upon the United States. The image of the Chinese female prostitute proved a key rhetorical device not only in Booth's poem, but also in western states' efforts to restrict the immigration of Chinese male laborers through federal legislation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 denied entry to Chinese laborers for ten years. The first enacted piece of federal legislation to restrict immigration to the United States explicitly based on nationality, Chinese exclusion was symptomatic of heightened sensitivity to issues of race and citizenship as well as a depressed economy and labor conflicts after the Civil War. Depictions of Chinese prostitutes and the illicit sexuality associated with Chinese laborers implicated the Chinese male as immoral, uncivilized, and fundamentally unfit for American citizenship. The architects of the anti-Chinese movement and subsequent exclusion laws expanded this theme into a broad-ranging, gendered argument against the Chinese as a race. Proponents of Chinese exclusion would measure Chinese men against normative standards of Anglo-American masculinity and find them wanting.
