Atlas Tian Xu, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South Global South Research Fellowship

Atlas Tian Xu

Global South Fellowship 2019
Catholic University of America

Biography

Born and raised in northeastern China, where immigrants from neighboring countries shaped its local culture, Atlas Xu develops an academic interest in immigrant societies and the institutionalization of race. He is currently a PhD candidate in U.S. History at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., where he studies the comparative history of Chinese immigrant elites and African American Civil War pensioners in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His research focuses on interracial dialogues, especially how these two racial minorities negotiated with the expanding administrative state, and how, on the local level, small groups of white attorneys played a role in this negotiation.

Research

My research examines the role of immigration and pension attorneys who chose to help certain minorities in turn-of-the-century America. Back then, many branches in the federal administrative state were expanding and seeking to develop their own version of rule of law outside judicial review. The racialized decisions of two such agencies, the Immigration Service and the Pension Bureau, directly affected two minority groups, Chinese immigrants and African American Civil War veterans. This research investigates how white lawyers acted as vital intermediaries in certain key localities, such as the ethnically diverse society in the Gulf South, and how they negotiated the meaning of race with the administrative state, while shaping American administrative law along the way.

Atlas Tian Xu Global South Research Project at Tulane University
This 1898 portrait of Josiah Gross, then a young New Orleans attorney and pension agent for prominent pension law firms in Washington, D.C., was discovered during my research of the Pension Bureau’s administrative files in the National Archives. Gross supported hundreds of African American pensioners but was accused of fraud by the bureau’s special examiners. In a letter to Henry Clay Evans, then the Commissioner of Pensions, he claimed that “I want to wash my hand of [sic] the pension business, but I cannot quit under a cloud.” He attached his portrait to this letter and wrote on the margin: “do I look like a bad man?” A class of attorneys in New Orleans shared Gross’s anxiety. His story was part of a broader narrative that illustrates the struggle for “worthiness” in earning a federal military pension, an endeavor that brought attorneys and their black clients together.

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