The new President, of course, renounced his predecessor’s policy upon the tariff, but continued it touching the navy. He advocated steamship subsidies, reform in electoral laws, and such amendment to the immigration laws as would effectively exclude undesirable foreigners.
A chief effect of the Kearney movement in California, culminating in the California constitution of 1879, was intense opposition throughout the Pacific States to any further admission of the Chinese. The constitution named forbade the employment of Chinese by the State or by any corporation doing business therein. This hostility spread eastward, and, in spite of interested capitalists and disinterested philanthropists, shaped all Subsequent Chinese legislation in Congress. The pacific spirit of the Burlingame treaty in 1868, shown also by President Hayes in vetoing the Anti-Chinese bill of 1878, died out more and more.
“The Chinese must go!”
Denis Kearney addressing the working-men on the night of October 29, on Nob Hill, San Francisco.
A law passed in 1881 provided that Chinese immigration might be regulated, limited, or suspended by the United States. A bill prohibiting such immigration for twenty years was vetoed by President Arthur, but another reducing the period to ten years became law in 1882. In 1888 this was amended to prohibit the return of Chinese laborers who had been in the United States but had left. In 1892 was passed the Geary law re-enacting for ten years more the prohibitions then in force, only making them more rigid. Substantially the same enactments were renewed in 1902.
Mr. Harrison wished this policy of a closed state put in force against Europe as well as against Asia. An act of Congress passed August 2, 1882, prohibited the landing from any country of any would-be immigrant who was a convict, lunatic, idiot, or unable to take care of himself. This law, like the supplementary one of March 3, 1887, proved inadequate. In 1888 American consuls represented that transatlantic steamship companies were employing unscrupulous brokers to procure emigrants for America, the brokerage being from three to five dollars per head, and that most emigrants were of a class utterly unfitted for citizenship.
Thomas B. Reed.
The President’s urgency in this matter had little effect, the attention of Congress being early diverted to other subjects. Three great measures mainly embodied the Republican policy—the Federal Elections Bill, the McKinley Tariff Bill, and the Dependent Pensions Bill.
As Speaker of the House, Hon. Thomas B. Reed, of Maine, put through certain parliamentary innovations necessary to enact the party’s will. He declined to entertain dilatory motions. More important, he ordered the clerk to register as “present and not voting,” those whom he saw endeavoring by stubborn silence to break a quorum. A majority being the constitutional quorum, theretofore, unless a majority answered to their names upon roll-call, no majority appeared of record, although the sergeant-at-arms was empowered to compel the presence of every member. As the traditional safeguard of minorities and as a compressed airbrake on majority action, silence became more powerful than words. Under the Reed theory, since adopted, that the House may, through its Speaker, determine in its own way the presence of a quorum, the Speaker’s or the clerk’s eye was substituted for the voice of any member in demonstrating such member’s presence.