Riding the Waves of Empire

Abstract

This chapter examines how the SUP and the ISU dealt with their failure to include U.S. flagged ships in the 1902 exclusion law by moving from aligning with empire to using U.S. imperial expansion as an alternative means of insulating the maritime labor market from foreign Chinese competition. Initially, the shift from aligning with empire to using empire meant capitalizing on the physical expansion of sovereign U.S. territory into the Pacific as a means of possibly extending the jurisdictional coverage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The ISU then embarked on a much more ambitious effort, in the form of the 1915 La Follette Seamen’s Act, to foist Chinese exclusion on the foreign merchant trade by riding the more abstract, economic forces of U.S. imperial expansion.