A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  And there matters might have rested—with these new Pentecostalists no more than another small group of flamboyant Christian charismatics and evangelists tucked safely away among the cornfields of America’s southern plains and the bayous of the Gulf Coast. But in fact matters unrolled quite otherwise.

  A one-eyed black preacher named William Seymour, who had listened, enthralled, as Charles Parham spoke at one of his outreach missions in Houston, decided late in 1905 to take the Pentecostal Word to California—and, specifically, to bring it to the poor quarters of the fast-growing city of Los Angeles. Seymour, a short and stocky son of slaves, and who was by no means an arm-waving orator—some described him as meek and having “no more emotion than a post” when he gave his sermons—at first had a difficult time: The pastors of one church padlocked the doors to prevent him from spreading his exotic message there, and he had to resort to asking believers to join him for worship in the living room of his lodging house.

  But slowly, steadily, a congregation formed—made up at first mostly of black men and women, and then with a small number of white adherents, too. Everything changed when, on April 9, 1906, Seymour baptized a man named Owen Lee, who promptly began to speak in tongues, prompting the pastor’s supporters to declare a miracle. Seven others in the audience, duly amazed by Lee’s linguistic performance and gripped by religious ecstasy, started to speak and howl in tongues as well. A woman named Jennie Moore promptly began to play the piano and sing sweetly in Hebrew—even though she had never played a piano before, and knew not a single word of the language.* And then so many curious people thronged from the slums to the lodging house, and danced and shouted and sang on the porch, that the foundations gave way, the porch collapsed, and everyone was tipped out into the streets. No one was hurt—which was taken as a sign as well—and William Seymour (or Elder Seymour, as he now was known) had to go and find himself another church.

  Which is how he came to Azusa Street. In April 1906, number 312 was no more than a partially burned-out clapboard stable, marked for sale and half filled with debris (it had once been a church and a remaining window in the Perpendicular Style reflected this use). Seymour made a deal with the owner, moved in nail kegs for chairs and redwood planks for tables, and spread straw and sawdust on the floor. He then announced he would hold services there every following day from 10:00 A.M. until midnight. As word got around, the place became gripped by fervor, as the Los Angeles Times remarked in an article on the front page of Wednesday, April 18, 1906:

  The devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories and work themselves into a state of mad excitement in their peculiar zeal. Colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howling of the worshipers, who spend hours swaying back and forth in a nerve-racking attitude of prayer and supplication. They claim to have the “gift of tongues,” and to be able to understand the babel.

  The city officially frowned on the group, which grew steadily and frighteningly larger and larger. The police had to be called to break up the crowds that gathered outside the church. The Child Welfare Agency, such as it was, tried to close it down because unsupervised youngsters were attending meetings at all hours. The Fire Department had to be called because of unexplained red glows seen inside the building and the sounds of explosions disturbing the neighborhood. The City Health Department decided that too many were crammed into the building, that it was insanitary, and that it ought to be shut down.

  And then, on the very same day that the readers of the Times first read of these strange goings-on at 312 Azusa Street, San Francisco was hit by the earthquake. Frank Bartleman, a wandering preacher who had come to at Azusa Street and was helping Seymour deal with the throngs, knew immediately what the onset of seismic mayhem truly meant. The Book of Isaiah, chapter 26, verse 9, he declared, offered the reason: “When thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.” The earthquake convinced him of the wisdom and truth of the Pentecostal approach. “I seemed to feel the wrath of God against the people and to withstand it in prayer,” he wrote.

  He showed me he was terribly grieved at their obstinacy in the face of His judgment on sin. San Francisco was a terribly wicked city. He showed me all hell was being moved to drown out His voice in the earthquake. The message he had given me was to counteract this influence. Men had been denying His presence in the earthquake. Now He would speak. It was a terrific message He had given me. I was to argue the question with no man, but simply give them the message. They would answer to Him. I felt all hell against me in this, and so its proved. I went to bed at 4 o’clock, arose at 7, and hurried with the message to the printer.

  Thousands of copies of Frank Bartleman’s hastily written tract, in which he claimed excitedly but with impressive sincerity, that the earthquake was “the voice of God,” gave Seymour’s group an aura of respectability and of divine imprimatur. He was able to cite no fewer than eight earthquake-related passages in the Bible,* together with a seismically relevant jeremiad from John Wesley. All of a sudden this strange gathering of the gibbering and gesticulating faithful could not be so easily dismissed as merely a mob of hysterical fanatics. The new adherents who flocked to Azusa Street and to the dozens of sister churches set up to accommodate them became part of a true revival of sincere charismatic worship—and the Pentecostalists of America and the World Pentecostal Movement have never really looked back from that moment on.

  With Azusa Street as its first spiritual headquarters, the church then spread like a forest fire in summer. Branches were opened in Tennessee, North Carolina, Norway, Oregon, South Africa, Brazil, Chicago, the Ukraine, Korea, Colorado … such that by the middle of the century there were branches and followers by the tens of millions almost everywhere. The names of the leading practitioners of this peculiar kind of Christian worship become ever more familiar—Aimee Semple McPherson in the early days, and more recently colorful figures like Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Dennis Bennett, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, Steve Hill. This exuberant evangelism became so powerful that politicians, particularly in America, and particularly conservatives, looked to this faith above all for support. The Pentecostal Movement is these days a thing of formidable power and wealth and influence and spiritual importance—a galvanizing force for America’s underprivileged like few other movements in the country’s history.

  It is risky to attempt to forge a direct link between any natural occurrence and the growth of any subsequent religious or political movement—the fundamentalist Islamic movement that some will argue was spawned by the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in 1883, for example, probably came about for a host of other reasons, too. Much the same can be said about the Pentecostal Movement in America, and the possible triggering effect that the San Francisco Earthquake had upon it, in its early days. The roots of the movement had, after all, already long been sown—by John Wesley in Britain, by Charles Parham in America, and by hundreds of other adherents who wished to break loose from the rigid practices of settled Episcopalianism. All these people needed was a sign, a catalyst that bore the signature of the Divine: What they got, in 1906, was the San Francisco Earthquake.

  THE COMING OF THE PAPER PEOPLE

  From all along the curving northern coastline of San Francisco—from most of the Embarcadero, from North Beach, from Fort Mason or the Marina or Crissy Field, from the Presidio or up by the tollgates at the Golden Gate Bridge—the hills of Marin County lie green and billowing beyond the choppy waters of the Bay. There are pale scatterings of houses and dark patches of forest, and the peninsulas and embayments and hills on which they stand distinguish themselves from one another only by a careful scrutiny of their geography. The view has all the appearance of a diorama, with pastels done on drop cloths, the fly curtain pulled aside. Mount Tamalpais looms tallest, to the left and in the far background; somewhere within its folds is Muir Woods, with its ancient tr
ees made memorial to the long-dead Scotsman who was the archdruid, so-called, of the Sierra Club; in front are Sausalito and Tiburon and the low hills of the Headlands, and beyond them all there is San Quentin and Bolinas and Corte Madera, and then the low hills and valleys of Napa and Sonoma, warm and sheltered places where wine is made.

  In front of this scene stand two islands—of which only one appears properly insular, since it is possible to see from all along the city shore the sea that entirely surrounds it. This is Alcatraz, the incorrigibles’ prison island, with its ever-flashing lighthouse and the sand-yellow fortress that stands on top, its giant water tower attendant, and all now for the tourists. The other island, however, is very much larger, with a grassy flattish-topped peak called Mount Ida* that looks quite similar to the Marin Hills that range beyond it. Since from the south—from San Francisco, in other words—it is impossible to glimpse the sea behind, it is easy to assume it is a part of the mainland only a little closer than the rest. But is in fact quite separate, has for the last two centuries been called Angel Island, and it is a place that enjoyed a short and poignant spell of importance as a direct result of the events of 1906.

  It was all to do with one peculiar coincidence of two of the episodes of ruin: The first, the utter destruction of almost all of Chinatown; and the second, the burning of all the records relating to the thousands of immigrant Chinese who lived there. From April 1906 onward no one in official San Francisco had any significant idea of who had lived in the city’s Chinese quarter—and this degree of ignorance had important implications for those back in China who wanted to emigrate, to join their relations already living in what was still known from its Forty-Niners-era reputation as Jin-shan—the “Gold Mountain City.”

  For them, everything depended on the precise wording and interpretation of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—its title and its intent so nakedly racist as to be barely credible today. It began:

  Whereas, in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof:

  Therefore,

  Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the expiration of ninety days next after the passage of this act, and until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is, hereby suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or, having so come after the expiration of said ninety days, to remain within the United States.

  Over the next two decades a number of amendments were added to the legislation: The most important, so far as it affected matters in 1906, was a liberalizing clause that allowed relatives of Chinese people who were already legally settled in America to go there to settle, too.

  Until the spring of 1906 all would-be Chinese immigrants had been processed and interviewed in a small two-story shed that belonged to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company on the San Francisco waterfront. It was there that immigration officials, armed with index cards giving the details of every Chinese-born American citizen legally in the country, conducted Exclusion Act interviews with the arrivals, and did so with clinical efficiency: If the arrival turned out to have a father or brother already rightfully in America, then the official stamped them in; if not, they were first put in the lockup, then marched down the docks and put in the hold of a China-bound ship without further ado.

  But after the earthquake and fire there was no more two-story hut—and there was a sudden rise in immigration from Canton and Shanghai and the so-called coolie ports on the coast of Fukien, all of it brought about specifically by the rumor that it was suddenly going to be very much easier to get into America. Word went around that all would-be immigrants had to do was invent their own family trees—to become what were known as “paper sons” and “paper brothers,” or, for those young women claiming that fiancés were waiting on the California harbor fronts, “paper brides.” What began after 1906 was, then, the invasion of the “paper people.” Official America’s job was now to identify any fictions and to prevent their authors from coming, settling, and establishing a beachhead in San Francisco—hence the elaborate game, serious and bizarre by turns, that was to go on for the next three and a half decades.

  Maxine Hong Kingston summed it up impeccably in her celebrated book China Men, published in 1980. “Every paper a China Man wanted for citizenship and legality burned in that fire,” she wrote. “An authentic citizen, then, had no more papers than an alien. Any paper a China Man could not produce had been ‘burned up in the Fire of 1906.’ Every China Man was reborn out of that fire a citizen.” It was swiftly realized that everyone wanting to come into America from China could quite easily invent his own history. He could give himself a brand-new genealogy, in which he could claim a relationship with someone who was already settled in San Francisco. Since there was now in the City Hall files no evidence to the contrary, how could any immigration official properly deny the immigrant’s stated story as the unvarnished truth?

  It was on Angel Island that the confrontations caused by this dilemma took place—with the stakes being both simple and life-changing. Those who convinced the skeptical authorities won the right to remain in America, and those who did not were told to leave. The end results of the confrontation games were sometimes tragic, sometimes inexplicable, sometimes prosaic and unexceptional: In all cases they left an indelible imprint on the face of Chinese-American society.

  The Bureau of Immigration had always planned to create an Ellis Island West, as it were, on the hitherto almost deserted thousand acres of Angel Island.* The initial decision had nothing to do with China. Rather, it was assumed that once the Panama Canal was opened, Europeans who had an eye on living in the western states would buy their sea passages to California rather than to New York, and would undergo the immigration process in San Francisco, conveniently close to their expected front doorstep, as it were. The idea was thus to create on the Pacific Coast as welcoming an environment for Europe’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” as already existed on the Atlantic seaboard.

  The earthquake, however, changed all that. The buildings that had been begun in 1905 would now be pressed into service not to welcome Europeans but to prevent tale-telling Chinese from getting in. Precisely because of the Exclusion Act, and because of the new suspicion that untold numbers of Chinese immigrants might now try to outwit the system, Angel Island fast became notorious as the place where the American government tried hard to identify them, exclude them, and not welcome them at all. (Besides, as it turned out, barely any European immigrants-to-be ever used the Panama Canal. But for the Chinese and a smattering of other arriving Asians, the Angel Island Processing Center might never have been used at all. As it happened, from 1910 onward they had the island almost all to themselves.)

  Central to the technique employed by American officials to trip up each would-be immigrant was a lengthy and detailed interrogation. Back on Ellis Island the typical immigrant was asked around 30 questions, and all of them fairly perfunctory. But most Chinese arriving at Angel Island were often asked as many as a thousand questions—certainly 200 at the very least, and all of the answers to be corroborated by those on the mainland to whom they were supposedly related. Each experience was miserable in the extreme—with Angel Island now mythologized among most of today’s Chinese as a place of “great sadness and pain.”

  Once they had landed and passed through the undignified rigors of deratting and delousing—Angel Island was also a quarantine station, with body searches and lice dustings—the Chinese were separated from any other Asians, such as any Punjabis or Siamese, who had been on the voyage,* and then divided by sex: Generally speaking there were, at any one time, as many as 300 Chinese men in one barrack block and 50 Chinese women held separately in another, behind doors four inches thick. They were told that it
would be folly to try to escape: The currents around the island were fierce and the waters unusually cold. Just as with Alcatraz, few tried to leave.

  Each day they were called in, alone, for questioning—usually by a pair of white officials helped by an interpreter and a shorthand reporter. The questions to each applicant invariably related to the supposed relative who was already living in America. Exactly where in China did that relative come from? How big was the family house? How many steps do you think it took to go from the front door to the rice bin? What was the eldest brother’s favorite breakfast? Who sat where in the mah-jongg games? The answers, laboriously written down, were taken back on that evening’s ferryboat and given to officials, who took them on to the target relative—who may well have lived in New York or Dallas or Kansas City. They then tried to see if the answers were right.

  It often took months for inquiries to be completed. Several detainees were held for years, always under lock and key, in their barracks. Coaching was forbidden; visits were banned; all kinds of efforts were made by officials to ensure that the applicants were surprised by the questions, and by the applicants and their friends to ensure that they were not. One woman who was prepared for the interrogations while still in China made copious notes, turned them all into a lengthy song and—during the weeks that her ship was sailing to America by way of Manila, Honolulu, Yokohama, Shanghai, and Hong Kong—learned the song by heart. And the kitchen staff who prepared the (reportedly virtually inedible) food that was served to detainees could be bribed to pass messages back and forth between the Chinese in the city and those waiting on the island.