by Iris Chang
Another discriminatory measure was the 1870 “sidewalk ordinance,” which made it a crime for anyone to walk through the city carrying over his shoulder a pole with baskets at each end. Of course this order was aimed at the Chinese, who were seen throughout the city delivering clean laundry in this manner. The city also required all laundries with a horse-drawn vehicle to pay a license fee of two dollars a quarter, those with two such vehicles four dollars a quarter, and those with no vehicles at all—as was the case with virtually all Chinese laundrymen, who delivered on foot—fifteen dollars a quarter. The clear intent of these laws was to damage, if not destroy, the Chinese laundry industry.
Chinese immigrants were especially vulnerable during this time because they could not vote. Although the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” in 1870, the year the amendment was ratified, Congress deliberately withheld the right of the Chinese to naturalize, a necessary step to participation in elections, declaring that Asians were “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” The American-born male children of Chinese immigrants could one day vote, because their birth on U.S. soil conferred automatic citizenship, but most were too young to cast the ballot, and there were too few of them to make a difference even if they could. Thus the adult Chinese population was locked out of the entire political process—taxed, but unable to elect those who passed laws governing their lives. White politicians had little incentive to address the needs and interests of the Chinese, because the Chinese could not express their gratitude or displeasure at the polls. And as anti-Chinese clubs appeared among white workers and grew in number and influence, no Californian could hope to be elected to office unless he shared, or pretended to share, anti-Chinese sentiments. Inevitably, such feelings, blatantly pandered to by political leaders, would flare into open violence, especially since the Chinese in California were barred not only from the ballot box, but from court witness stands as well.
On October 24, 1871, the Chinese in Los Angeles fell victim to mob violence following an episode of gang warfare. It was believed that the incident, known as the Chinese Massacre, started when two Chinese tongs battled over a beautiful Chinese woman. A white police officer, hearing gunfire in Chinatown, in a neighborhood known as Nigger Alley, approached the scene to investigate. Someone fired a shot at him, and the officer, wounded and bleeding, called out for help. Despite warnings from onlookers that “the Chinks are shootin’,” a white man rushed out to assist him, and he was promptly killed in the crossfire. By this time a furious mob of several hundred men had gathered, eager to take revenge on the entire Chinese community. “American blood had been shed,” one member later recalled in a letter. “There was, too, that sense of shock that Chinese had dared fire on whites, and kill with recklessness outside their own color set. We all moved in, shouting in anger and as some noticed, in delight at all the excitement.”
With howls of “Hang them! Hang them!” the mob dragged innocent Chinese residents from their houses, gunned them down, lynched them in the streets. They looted houses in search of gold, cut holes in buildings at random and fired their pistols inside. As many as two dozen Chinese may have been murdered. A highly respected Chinese doctor, who begged in both English and Spanish for his life, ended up dangling from a noose, his money stolen and one of his fingers cut off by a mob impatient to steal the rings he wore. The rioters also seized a young boy, whose fate was described by journalist P. S. Dorney: “The little fellow was not above twelve years of age. He had been a month in the country and knew not a word of English. He seemed paralyzed by fear—his eyes were fixed and staring, his face blue, blanched and idiotic. He was hanged.”
Public hatred for the Chinese, exposed in fits of blood lust and glee, intensified as the economy worsened from overspeculation. The failure of a major eastern banking house led to the Panic of 1873, which ignited the first great industrial depression in the United States. Factories on the East Coast and in the Midwest shut down, pushing more Americans westward in search of work.
To escape the bleak job prospects of the cities, some whites retreated to the countryside, hoping to work as small farmers, but there, too, they encountered Chinese competition, which, given the social and financial disruption of the time, was contorted to feed the notion that the Chinese were the tools of a giant conspiracy. During the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the U.S. government had granted the project some ten million acres, with the stipulation that the property later be sold to the people. Yet when the time came, individual tracts were offered only at outrageous prices far beyond the reach of the typical American family farmer. Instead, railroad moguls kept the land for speculation, selling plots to the wealthy, many of whom used teams of Chinese labor to develop them into arable land.
After the war, the industrial strength of America and its resources were increasingly controlled by monopolies, or trusts, managed by financiers who understood that reducing competition meant greater profits. Lacking the resources to fight the railroad monopolies, the land speculators, and other industrial giants, white Americans felt backed into a corner and lashed out at the Chinese. In San Francisco, white workers began to hold anti-Chinese demonstrations. Marchers carried placards with slogans like “WE WANT NO SLAVES OR ARISTOCRATS” and “THE COOLIE LABOR SYSTEM LEAVES US NO ALTERNATIVES STARVATION OR DISGRACE” and “MARK THE MAN WHO WOULD PUSH US TO THE LEVEL OF THE MONGOLIAN SLAVE WE ALL VOTE.” San Francisco businessmen who hired Chinese employees soon faced boycotts, arson, and physical intimidation.
In such emotionally driven conflicts, reason is often an early casualty. Some whites tried to blame a myriad of social problems on the Chinese, arguing that they filled American prisons, almshouses, and hospitals. The statistical reality was precisely the opposite: the Chinese, so often singled out for discriminatory taxes, shouldered more than their share of the total tax burden, yet they were regularly turned away from hospitals and most other public institutions in San Francisco. According to Otis Gibson, a missionary in the city, in 1875 Chinese represented less than 2 percent of the patients at the San Francisco city and county hospital, while more than 35 percent of the patients had been born in Ireland. More significant, he wrote that in a single year, the number of European immigrants to the United States was than twice the number of Chinese who had entered the country in the previous twenty-five years. The United States also harbored more Europeans at public expense in hospitals, asylums, prisons, and other reform institutions than the average number of immigrants from China within a whole year. The anti-Chinese activists, he argued, were “chasing a phantom.”
But none of this stopped the opponents of the Chinese from making outrageous claims. Some white doctors lent credibility to the anti-Chinese movement by suggesting that the Chinese brought inexplicable diseases to the United States. Back in 1862, Dr. Arthur Stout had published Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of the Nation, arguing that the Chinese posed a serious health hazard. In 1875, the American Medical Association even supported a study that attempted to measure the role of Chinese prostitutes in spreading syphilis in the United States—an investigation that turned up nothing unusual. The absence of hard facts, however, did not deter the president of the AMA from charging that “even boys eight and ten years old have been syphilized by these degraded wretches,” or prevent a medical journal from publishing an editorial under the title “How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison in the Anglo-Saxon Blood.” If data could not be found to substantiate certain claims, doctors enthralled and inflamed by racial hostility heightened the public’s terror by resorting to nonscientific, mythic images of the Chinese. As one historian observed, many experts from that era considered Chinese disease as “the result of thousands of years of beastly vices, resistant to all efforts of modern medicine.”
Engulfed by such a tide of white hostility,
some Chinese expressed regret at emigrating in the first place, but admitted that they lacked the resources to return to their homeland. Sensing a future bloodbath in their communities, they began to stockpile weapons, as if preparing for war. Pawnbrokers in San Francisco reported selling huge quantities of bowie knives and revolvers to Chinese customers. In 1876, one dealer in the city supplied sixty pistols to the Chinese community in a single day. Chinese businessmen, anxious for tensions to cool off for a while, began to warn their countrymen to stay away from the United States. On April 1, 1876, the Chinese Six Companies issued a manifesto:
[The Chinese] expected to come here for one or two years and make a little fortune and return. Who among them ever thought of all these difficulties,—expensive rents, expensive living? A day without work means a day without food. For this reason, though wages are low, yet they are compelled to labor and live in daily poverty, quite unable to return to their native land... It is said that the six companies buy and import Chinamen into this country. How can such things be said? Our six companies have, year after year, sent letters discouraging our people from coming into this country, but the people have not believed us, and have continued to come.
For many Chinese, there was little they could do except hang tight and wait for things to get better. Instead, matters grew worse—much worse. In 1877, two unexpected events caused the stock market to plummet. The first was a severe drought that destroyed fruit, wheat, and cattle farms in the American West; the second was the sudden decline of Nevada’s Comstock Lode, where the silver output was reduced to a third of its former level. San Franciscans, whom gold rush history had selected for their recklessness, were among the most aggressive stock speculators. When the financial markets crashed, many lost their entire life savings. Members of all classes—railroad tycoons, professionals, shopkeepers, clerks, domestics—were left heavily in debt or impoverished. During the winter of 1876, there were already some ten thousand unemployed men in the city; now more people roamed the streets, competing for what little work existed. As always in dire times, newcomers—bankrupt miners, former farm laborers, immigrants from Europe—drifted into the cities, desperate for a little income, angry and bewildered by the turn of events.
Against this backdrop of despair, an immigrant Irishman named Denis Kearney rose to power. Kearney, a young sailor, had invested heavily in mining stocks and lost everything in the crash. Bankrupt and embittered, he started haranguing whoever would listen in a huge vacant lot, known to locals as “the sandlots,” near San Francisco’s city hall. At first his audience consisted of a few vagabonds and stragglers, but when disgruntled workers took to gathering routinely at the sandlots at night, the crowds swelled to thousands. By the glow of bonfires and torches, sandlot orators stoked the anger of the crowds by showing just how, and by whom, their lives had been stolen from them. The method was conspiracy, and the thieves were the railroads, the corporate monopolies, and the Chinese.
A gifted demagogue, the thirty-one-year-old Kearney soon became a crowd favorite, prescribing violent solutions for those with the courage to take matters into their own hands. “Before I starve in a country like this, I will cut a man’s throat and take whatever he has got,” he announced. He urged workers to “tear the masks from off these tyrants, these lecherous bondholders, these political thieves and railroad robbers, when they do that they will find that they are swine, hogs possessed of devils, and then we will drive them into the sea.” While making threats, he would strip off his coat, as if preparing for physical combat. He advocated the overthrow of the government and promised to lead a mob into city hall, where they would eliminate the police, hang the prosecuting attorney, burn the law books, write new laws for workingmen. He talked about lynching railway moguls and suggested exterminating the Chinese population by dropping balloons filled with dynamite over Chinatown. He apparently knew his psychology, ending his speeches with the rallying cry of “The Chinese must go!”
Social commentators found it ironic that the most visible spokesman of the anti-Chinese lobby was an Irishman, for only a generation earlier, in the 1840s and 1850s, Irish émigrés had faced the hysteria of the Know-Nothing movement. Help Wanted signs often carried the postscript “NINA,” for “No Irish Need Apply.” “A while ago it was the Irish,” Robert Louis Stevenson observed in The Amateur Emigrant. “Now it is the Chinese who must go.” Nonetheless, Kearney’s antics turned him into an overnight celebrity. His fiery rhetoric and street theater were cathartic for thousands of frustrated laborers in California, many of them Irish, and in 1877 they formed the Workingmen’s Party of California and elected Denis Kearney president.
Some Chinese immigrants had the misfortunate to arrive in San Francisco at the very peak of this hysteria. In an 1877 account, one observer painted a vivid picture of what the Chinese newcomers faced as they stepped off the docks. On their way to Chinatown, he said, the harassment they endured from whites was like “running the gauntlet among the savages of the wilderness”: “They follow the Chinaman through the streets, howling and screaming after him to frighten him. They catch hold of his cue [sic] and pull him from the wagon. They throw brickbats and missiles at him, and so, often these poor heathen, coming to this Christian land under sacred treaty stipulations, reach their quarter of this Christian city covered with wounds and bruises and blood.” During that dark era, Andrew Kan recalled, “When I first came, Chinese treated worse than dog. Oh, it was terrible, terrible... The hoodlums, roughnecks and young boys pull your queue, slap your face, throw all kind of old vegetables and rotten eggs at you.”
The Chinese lived in fear, knowing they could be killed at any moment, quite likely with no punishment for the assailants. “We were simply terrified,” Huie Kin recalled of San Francisco in the 1870s. “We kept indoors after dark for fear of being shot in the back. Children spit upon us as we passed by and called us rats.” Just to walk outdoors was to risk assault. J. S. Look had similar recollections. “I remember as we walked along the street of San Francisco often the small American boys would throw rocks at us,” he said. In the evenings, “all the windows in the Chinese stores had to be covered at night with thick wooden doors or else the boys would break in the glass with rocks.”
The small towns of California were getting to be as dangerous as the cities—perhaps even more so, because of their isolation. Threatened by the inexpensive labor provided by the Chinese, white workers began to burn down Chinese homes in central California and to torch the barns and fields of landowners who refused to discharge their Chinese field hands. On March 13,1877, a group of armed white men broke into a cabin in Chico, California, where they shot to death five Chinese farm workers, then poured oil over the bodies and set them ablaze. One of the killers later confessed that he had acted under orders from the Workingmen’s Party.
In July 1877, the mounting tension exploded into a full-fledged pogrom, perhaps the worst disturbance in the history of San Francisco. Ten thousand agitators gathered in the city to voice their support for an eastern railway strike that had spilled over into a nationwide labor rebellion. The meeting deteriorated into anarchy when an anti-Chinese club took center stage and whipped the audience into a frenzy of rage. With cries of “On to Chinatown!” they rampaged through the city, wrecking Chinese laundries, setting fire to Chinese buildings, and shooting Chinese bystanders in the streets. By morning, the National Guard had been summoned, backed by a militia of several hundred volunteers, but they could not stop the violence. The mob tried to burn the docks and the ships of the Pacific Mail Steamship company (for transporting thousands of Chinese immigrants to California), and even assaulted firemen attempting to extinguish the flames. Finally, with help from the United States Navy, four thousand volunteers fought the arsonists through a third day of riots, which left four dead and fourteen wounded.
Anti-Chinese feeling may have been the most evident in California, but it also swelled along the East Coast. During an 1877 strike of cigar makers in New York City, manufacturers exploited
ethnic antagonism to keep their workers in line. Although the striking cigar makers included Chinese (“Even CHINAMEN,” the New York Labor Standard declaimed, “have asserted their manhood in this strike and have risen to the dignity of the American trade unionists”), the manufacturers tried to destroy union solidarity by spreading rumors that they would import Chinese scabs. To that end, one employer hired a Chinese man just to walk in and out of his factory, the goal being to have picketers believe that Chinese strikebreakers had already arrived from San Francisco. Another manufacturer hired white men to masquerade as Chinese workers by wearing Chinese clothing and fake queues. Eventually, these ploys succeeded in pitting the strikers against each other. White laborers began to equate scabs with the Chinese: when a white family capitulated and returned to a tenement house to roll cigars, it was greeted with cries of “Chinamen!” The strikers also hanged a scab in effigy with the warning, “So we will serve every Chinaman.”
Soon, laws were passed to make it difficult for the Chinese to find any work at all. They could still work for themselves, or for individually owned companies, but not, according to a new law passed after the second California constitution was ratified in 1879, for a corporation: “Any officer, director, manager, member, stockholder, clerk, agent, servant, attorney, employee, assignee, or contractor of any corporation... who shall employ in any manner or capacity... any Chinese or Mongolian is guilty of a misdemeanor....” As a result of this hostility, many Chinese left the state in a mass exodus in 1880. Some who could afford the passage went back home to China; others traveled across the United States, migrating east over the Rockies by rail, headed for cities in Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. These departures would continue for the next few decades.