Charles J. McClain

Chinese immigration: A comment on cloud and galenson

Abstract In a recent article (1987, Explorations in Economic History 24, 22–42) on Chinese immigration Patricia Cloud and David Galenson seek to document the mechanisms that made the 19th-century Chinese immigration into the United States possible. They claim that most Chinese immigrants came, in effect, as indentured servants, bound to and under the control of the Chinese district or place associations—the so-called six Chinese companies. This paper takes issue with those conclusions.

The Chinese Struggle for Civil Rights in 19th-Century America: The Unusual Case of Baldwin v. Franks

In its October term 1882, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision which aborted federal efforts to deal with anti-black violence in the states of the old Confederacy. At issue in the case of United States v. Harris was the constitutionality of a federal statute, Section 5519 of the Revised Statutes of the United States of 1874, which made it a crime for private persons to conspire to deprive other individuals of the equal protection of the laws. A group of white Tennesseeans had been convicted under the statute for assaulting and badly beating a group of black criminal defendants in the custody of local authorities. The court held that there was no foundation in the Constitution for the federal law and voided it, thus overturning the convictions. The 14th Amendment, the purported basis for the statute, was aimed, according to the court, at state action and did not empower Congress to legislate against purely private conduct. It was the same line of reasoning that would lead the court in its following term, in the celebrated Civil Rights Cases , to declare unconstitutional Section 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which established civil and criminal penalties for racially motivated interference with anyones full and equal enjoyment of public accommodations and conveyances.

Tortuous Path, Elusive Goal: The Asian Quest for American Citizenship

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American citizenship was not available to many Asians who immigrated to this country. However, many of these immigrants actively sought American citizenship and judicially challenged a number of laws and court decisions which prevented them from becoming American citizens. In this Article, the author traces this historical quest for citizenship by members of various Asian ethnic groups. The author describes the landmark cases brought by Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Filipino, and Korean immigrants as they sought to establish citizenship by birth and by naturalization. These cases reveal an Asian immigrant population that was not afraid to stand up to state and federal discrimination. This Article points to the importance of citizenship in an immigrant communitys search for full membership in the American political community.

From Ideology to Utopia: Ernst Fischer in Retrospect

When Ernst Fischer died of a heart attack on 1 August 1972, while on holiday in the Styrian village of Deutsch-Feistritz, there came to a close one of the most interesting careers in the history of postwar European communism. (Le Monde 3 August 1972, in its obituary, ranked Fischer close behind the great Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukacs, for richness and originality of thought). Originally a Social Democrat, Fischer joined the diminutive Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei Osterreichs, KPO) in 1934 and rose rapidly to become a member of the partys central committee and one of its leading theoreticians. He served this party and the international communist movement in zealous and unquestioning fashion until Khrushchevs revelations at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 caused his comfortably Manichaen view of the world to crumble. Rather than abandoning the movement, however, he laboured over the course of the following decade and a half both to probe the causes of the disease of Stalinism and to evolve a new Marxist-Leninist vision.