EDITOR’S NOTE: This story contains offensive language – generally accepted at the time – from an 1885 newspaper account. We’re including it to give readers an honest account of the period. Not all of the editorial stances taken by The News Tribune and its forebears over the years can be looked back at with pride.

Some now seem so misguided they’re painful to recall.

Among the most excruciating are the anti-Chinese rants of The Tacoma Ledger, one of three daily papers in Tacoma that eventually merged to become The News Tribune.

In the early 1880s, The Ledger conducted a savage racist campaign against the city’s Chinese, about 700 of whom lived on the waterfront near Old Town below what’s now Stadium Way.

The Ledger took an uncompromising anti-Chinese stance, criticizing their “cunning,” their “jabbering” language, and their alleged lack of morals and personal hygiene. Often, even advertisements in the paper were headlined with the battle cry: “The Chinese Must Go!”

The Ledger must be held at least partially responsible for what happened Nov. 3, 1885, when a mob of several hundred white men forced all of Tacoma’s Chinese residents to leave the city, driving them south like a herd of animals.

“Why permit an army of leprous, prosperity-sucking, progress blasting Asiatics to befoul our thoroughfares, degrade the city, repel immigration, drive out our people, break up our homes, take employment from our countrymen, corrupt the morals of our youth, establish opium joints, buy or steal the babe of poverty or slave, and taint with their brothels the lives of our young men?” fumed Editor Jack Comerford in one of many tirades in The Ledger.

Comerford advocated that the Chinese be forcibly removed, even going so far as to suggest the option of murder.

“If no other method of keeping them at a distance from our people can be found,” he railed, “let the citizens furnish them with lots on the waterfront, three fathoms below high tide.”

In the newspaper’s defense, it should be noted that, in the week before the mob action, Publisher R.F. Radebaugh ordered Comerford to curb his racism. Comerford resigned in protest.

It should also be noted that The Ledger’s prejudices were widely shared in the city and, in fact, up and down the West Coast. The mob that drove out Tacoma’s Chinese included some of the city’s most upstanding citizens – among them the mayor, the local judge, the fire chief and a city councilman.

Tacoma’s “Chinese problem” began with the construction of Western railroads in the 1870s. Labor contractors imported an estimated 17,000 young men from the area around Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China.

After the railroad construction was finished, the Chinese workers gravitated to cities – Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco – both for protection against growing racist violence and to find jobs.

The 1885 Census listed 3,276 Chinese in Washington Territory, where they did work that few white people were willing to do, at wages few white people were willing to accept. They worked in mines, sawmills, fish canneries and laundries, and as servants, garbage collectors and cooks.

Comerford warned that, if nothing were done, Tacoma would end up like San Francisco, where, he said, “the Chinamen swarmed in like rats, where the original rat had piloted the way and let them in.”

“Hundreds of these creatures were crowded into these filthy tenements; packed in their sleeping apartments and in their noisome dens of opium joints and pestilent prostitution, like decaying dog-salmon boxed up for shipment.”

The anti-Chinese sentiment was motivated to some extent by rising unemployment in the 1880s. Labor unions, including the Knights of Labor and the International Workingman’s Association, were at the head of the anti-Chinese movement, arguing that the immigrants were putting white men out of work.

Under the enthusiastic leadership of Mayor Jacob Robert Weisbach, a recent German immigrant, the Tacoma Anti-Chinese League set a deadline of Nov. 1, 1885, for all Chinese to be out of town.

Most left voluntarily before the deadline. But on Nov. 2, some 200 still remained, including families and businessmen with fully stocked stores and warehouses.

On Tuesday morning, Nov. 3, at 9:30, at the signal of factory whistles, an estimated 500 men gathered on Pacific Avenue and marched on Tacoma’s two Chinese districts. While the main group stayed in the street, clusters of five or six men approached Chinese homes and businesses and pounded on the doors.

“You had your warning,” they said. “Now get out!”

The mob worked its way under the bluff, then moved on to Old Town. According to affidavits filed later by Chinese victims, members of the mob drew pistols, smashed furniture and dragged people from houses.

The vigilantes herded the Chinese together and marched them under armed guard nine miles south to the railroad station at Lakeview. Those with money were forced to buy passenger tickets to Portland. The rest were loaded in southbound boxcars.

The next day, the largest concentration of Chinese dwellings mysteriously caught fire and burned to the ground. The Ledger blamed departing Chinese.

Tacoma wasn’t alone in attempting to get rid of the Chinese. In February 1886, a like-minded mob in Seattle tried the same thing but was stopped by more tolerant citizens, including Mayor Henry Yesler.

The day after Tacoma’s mob action, The Oregonian in Portland railed against the perpetrators.

“The Chinese have been driven out of Tacoma by methods that would disgrace barbarians,” the paper said.

“The act is a crime against civilization and mankind, on a level with the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain and the Huguenots from France. Such a thing would not be possible in any community governed by the principles of justice and civilization. It is characteristic of a mushroom railroad town.”

In Tacoma, though, the mob action was viewed much as a successful pest eradication program might have been.

After the leaders of the mob were given a symbolic scolding at the U.S. District Court in Vancouver, Wash. (charges were dropped), they were welcomed home as heroes. A parade was held in their honor, complete with marching bands and booming cannons.

The Ledger was pleased. On Nov. 4, 1885, it congratulated the participants on a job well done.

“The work had been conducted swiftly, surely and without any trouble,” it said. “No Chinese had been abused, and no violent deeds committed. The Chinese had been quietly requested to go, and they had peaceably and quietly complied.”

Rob Carson: 253-597-8693