SOURCE: Takaki, Ronald T. “The ‘Heathen Chinee’ and American Technology.” In Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, pp. 215-40. New York: Knopf, 1979.

In the following excerpt, Takaki discusses the manner in which literature depicting stereotypical Chinese laborers influenced American attitudes towards them.

A surplus labouring population … forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. … [I]t creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation. … The industrial reserve army, during periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check.

—Karl Marx

In 1851, six years before Hinton Helper would issue his inflammatory appeal for the overthrow of the planter class and the forced removal of all blacks...