The Tacoma Method: November Third, Eighteen Eighty-Five
Near Tacoma, Washington
In the autumn of eighteen eighty-five, anti-Chinese sentiment was spreading through the American West. In Seattle, a mob would eventually force Chinese residents to the docks at gunpoint. Tacoma took what its organizers described, with a kind of civic pride, as the more orderly approach.
They called it the Tacoma Method. On the morning of November third, eighteen eighty-five, several hundred men led by Mayor Jacob Weisbach and other city officials moved through Tacoma's Chinese quarter. They went door to door.
They told the residents, several hundred people who had been living in the city peacefully, working in laundries, restaurants, and as laborers, to gather their belongings. Then they marched them south through the streets to a railway station at Lakeview and forced them aboard the morning train to Portland, Oregon. The next day, the homes and buildings of the Chinese quarter were burned to the ground.
The Tacoma Method was not a riot. It was organized, it was led by elected officials, and it was carried out in daylight. The mayor was present.
The result was the total removal of Tacoma's Chinese community, their property destroyed, their livelihoods ended, their right to remain in a city they had helped build simply canceled. The expelled residents had no recourse under federal law; the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two had already stripped Chinese immigrants of the right to naturalization. Tacoma's boosters held a self-congratulatory banquet to celebrate the expulsion and sent a circular to other Western cities describing the method as a model worth emulating.
Seattle's approach, which had involved mob violence and was eventually suppressed by federal troops, was held up by comparison as messy and embarrassing. The Tacoma City Council formally apologized to the Chinese community in nineteen ninety-three, more than a century after the expulsion. In two thousand and nineteen, the city dedicated the Chinese Reconciliation Project Foundation, including a traditional Chinese pavilion on the Thea Foss Waterway.
