Godkin and Chinese Labor.

The article presents a discussion on the United States government policy towards Chinese laborers. In 1943, the U.S. Congress, sensitive to the needs of a war-time alliance, acted to right an old wrong; it set aside that part of the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924 which pertained to the Republic of China and placed Chinese on the regular immigration quota and admitted them to naturalization. Thus ended a controversial chapter in American economic and social history that had its beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century when several Western states erected discriminatory barriers around Chinese residing within their boundaries. The exclusion question officially mounted the national stage in 1882 when Congress enacted a law banning Chinese laborers from the country. A principal spur to the Act of 1882 had been the negotiation in 1868 of the convention with China commonly known as the Burlingame Treaty, or the Cheap Labor Treaty, for its clause enabling the wholesale importation of Chinese contract labor. This treaty, which followed more than a decade of comparative neglect of China by the U.S., was linked to the post Civil War expansionist policy of Secretary of State William H. Seward. Conceived as a commercial treaty but written with an eye to the labor needs of the Western railroads and of manufacturers, the treaty meant a setback for the organization of labor.