Two periodicals:
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Ng Poon Chew, “Treatment of the Exempt Classes of Chinese in the United States / A Statement from the Chinese in America”, in West Coast Magazine, May 1912, Pp. 171-176. Original wrappers. First public printing after its appearance in a self-published pamphlet of 1908.
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Hinton, Arthur Richard “The Outrageous Anti-Chinese Laws” in West Coast Magazine, April 1912, Pp. 87-89. Original wrappers.
Chew was an immigrant from Canton who became the leading journalist of San Francisco Chinatown, founding editor of Chung Sai Yat Po (Chinese West Daily) newspaper, voice of the city’s affluent Chinese merchant elite. West Coast Magazine, published monthly in Los Angeles from 1908 to 1914, was unabashedly pro-Chinese, as evidenced by the article written by Hinton, an LA oil company executive, expressing Sinophile views which were still uncommon in California at the turn of the century.
Earlier this year, we sold in these Galleries a copy of Chew's 1905 self-published “Statement for Non-Exclusion”, the first comprehensive argument against exclusion of Chinese immigrants by a Chinese-American. He followed that in 1908 with a 12 page pamphlet, also self-published in San Francisco, which did not find wide public distribution until this magazine reprint three years later. It contains the full text of the pamphlet, with a few corrections to bring it up to date – noting, for example, that Secretary of War William Howard Taft, quoted in conclusion, had since become President of the United States. Long before, Taft had said:“Is it not the duty of members of Congress and of the Executive to disregard the unreasonable demand of a portion of the community, deeply prejudiced upon the subject, in the Far West, and insist on extending justice and courtesy to a people form whom we are deriving and are likely to derive such immense benefit in the way of international trade..."
