Speech #780106822

You have got a long. tough job to bring them up. and you still have race riots and other racial problems confronting you. Mr. Chairman. it is not only a matter of bringing 105 Chinese into this country. that number would not do a great deal of harm. but you open the gates when you drive this entering wedge and then you make some changes in our immigration laws. You may have cause to regret the things that you are doing. the things that the people in California and the people of the west coast went through some 50 years ago. How many of you Members know anything of the devious ways of the "wily Chinese"? The younger people of the west coast have grown up since these problems have passed. Do you know that under the operations of the six companies -handling Chinese coolie labor. practically all of their focd was imported from China. and that the Chinese were not permitted to buy food supplies in our storesand if any of the gang who cooked and ate in common broke this rule and bought anything from an American store. that the Chinese company deducted the exact amount of that purchase from their pay at the end of the month? I know this to be a fact. because that rule was enforced on the Chinese gangs that worked in our community. Do you know that Chinese labor was contracted in gangs by the six companies who supplied an interpreter and a book man to direct their operations in our country. and the railroads paid the contractor $1.10 per daythe 10 cents went to the. six companies and $1 to the man with which to pay for his food and clothingand out of which he could save up to send money back to China. Most Chinese are inveterate gamblers and opium smokersthe fantan games were run by the company. and the coolie losses were taken out of their pay with the result that most of the coolies were never free of debt. Talk about peonage and American stbndards of living! I wish you could have gone with me as a boy into these Chinese hovels. built by digging a shallow pit in the forest. and. laid up with logs and a dirt roof. heated by a little funnel of a sheetiron stove. with its tiers of bunks around the side and across the end that had only a hard straw mat for a bedwith an opium can and the Inevitable opium pipe for the use of its occupants. The scene of these .coolies lying on their hard beds smoking opium through their waterfilled bamboo pipes. I will admit. was fascinating. Let me tell you the country along the lines of our early day transcontinental railroads are strewn with the relics of these old Chinese huts where Chinese coolies lived and smoked opium. and worked 10 and 12 hours for $1 per day. I have no animosity against the Chinese. We children loved the Chinese cooks and laundrymen who lavished Chinese "goodies" on us on Chinese New Yearsand even remembered our own Christmas.