The National Museum of American History holds a significant amount of objects that get at the American experience. Hidden in those objects are the voices and experiences of the many different groups and identities that make up the United States. With those voices, a darker side of American history emerges, demonstrating how voices and identities have been excluded from the American experience as well as demonstrate questions regarding justice and injustice, inclusion and exclusion, and migration and spaces. Groups coming from Asia felt these question especially and the National Museum of American History presents objects speaking to the exclusion of Asian immigration and anti-Asian sentiment throughout American History. For our curiation, we decided to examine how these objects are presented, what historical narrative is being presented, what the narrative says about how Americans are officially choosing to reconcile this past, and fit the objects and their related historical experiences and discourses into a larger historical context. We choose to examine the explicit moments of exclusion of Asian groups, looking at the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Japanese internment during World War II.

In the “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibit, there is a sculpture that illustrates the exclusion of Chinese immigrants stemming from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This object is part of a section called “Places of Negotiation” with this object specifically looking at the spaces surrounding inclusion and exclusion. In the context of the section, the museum argues that despite this extreme and explicit moment of exclusion this moment can be seen in a larger movement of progress and a constant debate over exclusion and inclusion where in the long-term inclusion prevails. However, the section also suggests that these negotiations are a continuous and ongoing process by using the active and present tense in the title “Negotiating Inclusion.” Being juxtaposed with the image the Statue of Liberty with its larger shadow looming over the statue itself, the objects demonstrate where groups like Chinese immigrants base their claims and policy while also internal policy and attitudes about race and ethnicity. Within the larger structure of the exhibit, the museum claims that these voices are integral part of American history, both the good and the bad. By also showing institutionalized discrimination and exclusion and getting at the attitudes and dominating voices of the Gilded Age, the museum succeeds in demonstrating how while these voices were and still important and matter to our present construction of American identity and its connection to immigration and diversity

The object and this specific section focuses heavily on the discourse surrounding Chinese exclusion and the larger sentiments felt and expressed by white Americans at the time. The object itself illustrates a sense of natural hierarchy that existed in the United States at the end of the 19th century. A white, male figure with a liberty cap is sitting on top of an African American in a bald eagle’s nest. Struggling to climb up and ultimately being pushed out of this nest that symbolizes America’s deliberate attempt to entirely remove Chinese immigrant the United States  and public places. Through the depiction of the Chinese immigrant in terms of their facial expression, the experience of the Chinese immigrants can be slightly obtained. However, further teasing out and research provides a voice for these Chinese immigrants who had a very mixed, fluid, and intentionally unclear status. Chinese immigrants petitioned the federal government for remedy to this act, making claims based on the ideology that surrounds the object in which the sculpture is juxtaposed with, the Statue of Liberty. These Chinese immigrants claimed that they were a part of American culture and deserved a place to be included in the conversation. They were American and what America represented and tried to portray to the world.

The object speaks primarily about white American attitudes towards Chinese immigrants; however, the object also raises questions of labor, race, and citizenship during the Gilded Age which can be teased out and further explored. Chinese immigrants moved to the West Coast being drawn in by the promise of the Gold Rush. After that, Chinese immigrants worked on the completion of the transcontinental railroad with powerful railroad companies exploiting for the the Chinese immigrants for sake of cheap labor. The immigration labor was only allowed in frontier spaces and even that allowance was temporary. Once the railroad was completed and these spaces developed into ‘American’ spaces with more people settling and moving into the West, the status of the Chinese changed from one of need for cheap economic labor to an immediate threat to the purity of an American identity (one very different from the American identity and experience in which the exhibit is trying to sell) and the labor that working class Americans deserve. The hierarchy in the sculpture illustrates the emerging interest and placement of race science into American culture where specific ethnicities and races are superior or inferior to others and purity must be supported and was an integral part of an American identity at the time. In this moment of exclusion, the federal government expanded into how it could and would protect Americans from these so-called invaders that were originally invited in to help lay the foundations for the continental United States and ward off against these fears and anxieties over the purity of the American identity.

— Chris Barry and Raven Baugh