Leaky Borders: Smuggling Opium and Chinese Labor in Progressive‐Era Motion Pictures

Abstract

In 1915, O. A. C. Lund directed his first Universal release, Just Jim (1915), thrilling four reeler with Harry Carey in title role. After serving a prison term for smuggling, Jim goes to a hop joint where a rich mandarin offers him a chance to make big money smuggling in Chinese. Jim refuses, declaring that he has gone straight, but returns to old game after he is shanghaied by smugglers. Ultimately, Jim circumvents smuggling ring (Moving Picture World, 14 August 1915, 1227). By linking opium dens with cross-border flows of laborers, whose entry into United States had been prohibited by Exclusion Acts, film encouraged a racialized perception of communities as both vice-ridden and detrimental to interests of white working class. More importantly, by spanning Pacific Northwest down to southwest borderlands, production indicated to filmgoers that so-called Chinese Problem and opium scourge was a continental phenomenon linked to what Erika Lee refers to as global flows of Asian migration and exclusion in (The Yellow Peril 537).Just Jim was not unique in using border zones as a narrative setting to dramatize perceived nexus between diaspora and opium epidemic to highlight alleged threat of Asian peoples on a transnational scale. In early twentieth century, US film industry produced a cycle of films set in North American border regions, which were symptomatic of widespread fears surrounding addiction to smoking opium and perception of as an incursion. As Erica Lee argues, although the U.S., Canada, and Mexico were structured by their own unique systems of race relations and hierarchies as well as colonial legacies, three nations as a threatening invasion, and categorized immigrants as dangerous, immoral, and unassimilable (Orientalisms in Americas 238-389).Indeed, rise and subsequent fall of a particular film cycle depend upon its ability to exploit audience's perceived desires by drawing from current events, trends, and financial and/or critical viability of similar film productions. As such, study of a particular film cycle can help shed light on social anxieties and contemporary politics within a discreet time frame (Kleine 5). Motion pictures that tackled such hard-hitting social issues as drug addiction and smuggling demonstrated cinema's active engagement with broad goals of Progressive Era, which roughly spanned 1890s through end of First World War. Although progressivism was a movement marked by tremendous diversity, spirit of reform and perceived need to impose order for betterment of United States and its citizens generally defined this period (Diner; Flanagan; Wiebe).In keeping with this objective, reformers clamored for eradication of both opiate usage and of opium trading networks that appeared to facilitate clandestine entry of excluded laborers via Canada and Mexico. Given topicality of immigrant and opium smuggling, film industry produced motion pictures dealing with these interrelated subjects. Specifically, filmic borderland settings, as spaces of intercultural contact and collision, offer a unique representational framework to comprehend contiguous patterns of racial exclusion toward immigrant communities in early twentieth century. This film cycle underscored perceived anxieties about porosity of borderlands, thereby accelerating desire for stricter enforcement along perimeters that surround United States. The ongoing practice of smuggling in excluded workers, as well as unlawful entry of other unsanctioned migrants, via leaky borders that United States shares with both Canada and Mexico would eventually culminate with establishment of US border patrol in 1924. …