I chose cartoon B from Harper’s Weekly, February 8th, 1879. The cartoon depicts a Native American and a Chinese man looking a wall covered in anti-immigration, nativist, and racist posters. The Native American comments to the Chinese man, “Pale face ’fraid you crowd him out, as he did me.” In the back, an African American waits and comments, “My day is coming.” A caption at the bottom reads, “Every dog” (no distinction of color) “has his day.”[1]
In my opinion, the cartoon is meant to illustrate Americans’ nativist tendencies, specifically toward immigrants but also ironically against people who arrived around the same time (African Americans) and people who preceded them (Native Americans). At the time this cartoon was published, America was experiencing its second wave of immigration (1820-1890). Immigrants were “heavily male, mostly young” from Ireland, Germany, and China (to name a few prominent places of origin) who came to work, save up money, and return home.[2] Since immigrants were driven by the desire to accumulate savings, they took any job that could be secured quickly and could earn them a paycheck quickly, and working American men feared losing their jobs to these immigrants, who would work longer for less and break strikes.[3] For example, many Chinese immigrants arrived on the West coast and sought work on the railroads, shown in the cartoon as a Chinese man chasing a train east, the opposite way Americans pushed the Native Americans when trying to fulfill manifest destiny earlier that century.
The posters in the cartoon help articulate these nativist sentiments. To discuss a few of them briefly, one poster reads, “The Chinese Problem: Prohibit Chinese Immigration”, along with another that reads “The Chinese must go!”, which foreshadows the attitude that pushed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act through, which prohibited all Chinese laborers from entering the country.[4] A poster about Knownothingism reads, “Down with the Irish, down with the Dutch”, which refers to the secret nativist American party, or the Know-Nothings, who fought for “laws requiring immigrants to wait longer before they could become citizens”.[5] Another poster reads, “Down with the nigger”, from the Ku Klux Klan. Besides being blatantly racist, I think the poster is meant to imply that since Americans had chased out the Native Americans and were trying to chase out immigrants, African Americans could be next (as the African American in the background comments, “My day is coming.”). In sum, the cartoon illustrates the social injustice nativism had caused, was causing, and might cause in the future. “Every dog”, or any group Americans perceived as foreign, “has his day” to be oppressed in America.
[1] Module 5 Blog Prompt (Arizona State Online, 2012); from HST 300 Historical Inquiry, ecollege. asu.edu (accessed February 14, 2012).
[2] Wyman, Mark. Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 16 & 42.
[3] Ibid, 42.
[4] Andrew Cayton and others, eds., America: Pathways to the Present. Upper Saddle River (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000), 470.
[5] Ibid, 324.
Emily, I really enjoyed your post on the political cartoon you chose. I did not choose the same cartoon as you for my post, but I did use the theme of Chinese immigrants for my written assignment. I also find it interesting how Americans seemed welcoming to newcomers, such as in Nast's "Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner" where all nationalities are symbolically welcome to the table of plenty in America. Yet, as this cartoon points out, the groups that challenge the American creed for land, power and/or industry are not just denied rights, but are treated with great hostility.
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