The Tacoma Method: A Mayor Who Burned Chinatown

Tacoma's mayor in eighteen eighty-five was a man named Jacob Weisbach. On November third of that year, he led a coordinated action against the city's Chinese community that would be described in newspapers across the country not as a crime but as a civic achievement. The name it was given, the Tacoma Method, was used approvingly.

The Chinese community of Tacoma numbered approximately two hundred people. They lived in a neighborhood on the south end of downtown, established over the previous decade. On the morning of November third, Mayor Weisbach and an organized group of armed men went through the neighborhood house by house. Residents were ordered to leave. The group formed the Chinese residents into a column and marched them eight miles through rain and mud to a railroad junction outside the city. They were put on a train. They were given no destination. Most ended up in Portland.

When the column had gone, men returned to Chinatown and set it on fire. The buildings burned. No one was prosecuted. No charges were filed against Mayor Weisbach or any of the men who participated. That evening, prominent Tacoma citizens held a banquet to celebrate the action. Newspapers in San Francisco and New York ran approving accounts of what Tacoma had accomplished.

Seattle's messier and less complete expulsion three months later, in February of eighteen eighty-six, was described in some pro-exclusion publications as a failure to achieve the Tacoma Method's clean result. The comparison was meant as criticism of Seattle.

The City of Tacoma issued a formal apology for the expulsion in nineteen ninety-three, one hundred and eight years after the event. No property was returned. No compensation was paid. The apology was a statement of civic acknowledgment. The Chinese community that was expelled from Tacoma in November of eighteen eighty-five rebuilt elsewhere. No physical trace of the neighborhood they were marched out of remains in Tacoma today.