by Simon Schama
San Francisco—and almost every town of any size in California—wanted the “Chinee” out. The completion of the railway project meant that 25,000 from both companies were now out of work. Another economic downturn, which turned into a steep recession in 1873, only made the competition for work more brutal. The prejudices of the white working class, mostly Irish, now hardened into something like race war. The Chinese were said to be parasitically sucking wealth from the American economy to be shipped back home to Canton and Hong Kong and, by taking jobs as cigar rollers and industrial shoemakers for rates no white worker would accept, were artificially depressing the labor market. Their increased dispersion into the interior of the country through the Midwest and farther east meant, so their antagonists claimed, that before long American workingmen all over the country would have their living depressed to the level of these people who “lived like beasts.” Around these grievances arose a more general caricature of John Chinaman as a monster of sinister guile, addicted to whores and opium, “treacherous, sensual, cowardly and cruel” as Henry George put it in a classic statement of the anti-Chinese case in the New York Herald Tribune.
The festering of all this polemical poison was too good an opportunity for writers with an eye on the main chance to let slip. In 1870, Bret Harte was working for the United States Mint in San Francisco while editing the Overland Monthly and taking advantage of the appetite for tall western tales which, after the completion of the railroad, was raging through the East. He had just delivered to the publisher a collection of his western stories, The Luck of Roaring Camp, about which his sometime friend Mark Twain would roll his eyes. In September 1870, not long before he picked up and headed back to New York, Harte published in the pages of his own magazine some rhyming verses called “Plain Language from Truthful James,” which very rapidly became known as “The Heathen Chinee.” The eponymous James was the narrator of a poker game in which the rip-roaring miner Bill Nye is bested by the wily, card-concealing Ah Sin. The verses were accompanied by illustrations that played to every grotesque stereotype of the slant-eyed, cackling, pigtailed Asiatic.
Back east, Harte disingenuously distanced himself from the poem, “the worst I ever wrote,” and claimed it had been written to parody ignorant anti-Chinese bigotry. But he knew very well that it played perfectly to those prejudices, right down to the sing-song meter that was perfect for music hall and saloon recitation:
Which I wish to remark
And my language is plain
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain
The heathen Chinee is peculiar
Which the same I would rise to explain.
The Luck of Roaring Camp had already made him America’s western writer, but “The Heathen Chinee” was an even greater hit all over the country, for every bad reason. Harte made sure to include toward the end a verse that spoke to all the strong feeling concerning the harm that Chinese immigration had done to the lives of honest American workingmen:
I looked up at Nye
And he gazed upon me
And he rose with a sigh
And said “Can this be?
We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor”
And he went for that heathen Chinee.
The last of the illustrations has Ah Sin thrown to the floor, set upon and then booted out of the door. And these were the images in not only the Overland Monthly but also the pocket version printed up along with railroad timetables and brochures from New York and Chicago. Bret Harte had made the crudest animosity respectable as he had made physical assault on the Chinese a matter of rib-poking glee.
So now it was just fine to lay hands on the “heathen Chinee” and to move from verbal to physical violence. After a white rancher was caught in the crossfire between two Chinese gangs in Los Angeles in 1871, the rest of the city of 5,000 went on a rampage, burning the Chinese district to the ground and killing sixteen. The next day bodies were still swinging from gateposts and crossbeams. This was just the beginning of one of the great American pogroms: an all-out ethnic cleansing of the towns of the West. It was of a piece, of course, with the assertion of racial supremacy in other sections of the nation’s life: the last acts in Native American genocide, the liquidation of Reconstruction in the South. The Democratic Party, which profited from the near-hung election of 1876 to end civil rights in the old Confederacy, also seized the opportunity to win working-class votes by posing as the champions of the anti-Chinese movement. In San Francisco, Dennis Kearney, a flamboyant Irish-born demagogue with the gift of the toxic gab, used the opportunity of state senate hearings at the Palace Hotel to stir up crowds—in their thousands—assembled within hearing at a nearby sandlot. Inside the hotel, Colonel Bee as the attorney for the Six Companies was defending the moral and social reputation of the Chinese, and Charlie Crocker and James Strobridge were testifying as to their probity, industry, and heroic sacrifice on the Central Pacific. Outside, Kearney was teaching the crowd to chant his slogan ‘The Chinese must go” and asking them if they were “ready to march down to the wharf and stop the leprous Chinese from landing.” “The law of Judge Lynch” was threatened on any white employer who did not fire Asian workers. It was the capitalists and monopolists who had thrust these subhuman curs on good white workers, Kearney raved, and they would pay for that crime. “The dignity of labor must be sustained even if we have to kill every wretch that opposes us.” Inside the hotel, pressed by Bee, Charlie Crocker was brave enough to claim that if the matter was put “calmly and deliberately” before the people of San Francisco, he believed 80 percent of them would want the Chinese to stay. Anyone, he said, could whip a storm of ugly fury. But Bee and Crocker were too generous about the sympathies of their fellow Californians. The reality was that 80 percent of the people of California were voting Democrat with exactly the opposite view in mind. When Crocker was asked by one of the senators whether he believed Chinese civilization was inferior to Western, he said he thought it was actually rather superior. Frank Pixley, a former state attorney general, was more representative of inflamed public opinion when he said that he could not wait for the day when he could stand on Telegraph Hill and see Chinese bodies hanging, with the rest leaving town.
As Jean Pfaelzer and Alexander Saxton have documented in moving detail, what then followed was an epidemic of American round-ups, mass expulsions, burnings, and murders, spreading from California to Denver in Colorado, Tacoma and Seattle in Washington, and Rock Springs, Wyoming. In most places an ultimatum would be issued to the Chinese communities to leave within a few hours or at most a day. To speed up the process, a few houses and stores would be torched, sometimes with people inside. Once the terrified population was on the march, the job would be finished by burning Chinatown down, top to bottom. In other places, like the town of Truckee, not far from Crocker’s ranch and Bee’s home in Placerville, the tactics, in response to the complaints of lawlessness, were slightly more subtle. There, Charles McGlashan organized a boycott of any employers hiring Chinese workers, which slowly threatened to strangle the entire economy of the town, forcing mass dismissals and evictions, but allowing McGlashan and the “Anti-Coolie” forces in Truckee to claim the Chinese had left of their own free will.
The response of local and federal authorities was mostly to turn a blind eye to all this, or worse, to ride the fury to power. In 1882, President Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was supposed to assuage the movement. Chinese immigration, other than for “merchants, diplomats, students and travellers,” was stopped for ten years, and the principle, already codified in the Naturalization Act of 1870, that no Chinese immigrant could ever be qualified for citizenship was reaffirmed. It would be renewed decade after decade and repealed only in 1943 after Pearl Harbor, when Kuomintang China suddenly became America’s ally against the Japanese.
In the climate of such panicky hatred and violence, the courageous decency of the few Americans who clung to an older, less paranoid sense of E plurib
us unum, and who even saw no reason why Asians should not one day be American, needs acknowledging. There was no reason why a respectable, late middle-aged Civil War veteran and businessman like Fred Bee should have undertaken to be the white knight of the Chinese community, much less their consul. He was paid for his services in court, but he was also guaranteed death threats. But Fred Bee went about it not just with more than the standard allotment of civic honor, but with the satisfaction an American citizen could get from making the law do what it was supposed to do: protect all those for whom it had responsibility. Bee targeted local mayors and governors whom he despised for betraying their public trust, and those much farther afield: the spineless politicians in Washington who were prepared to condone or even instigate mob rule the better to link their own fortunes to public rage, however ignorant and cruel. Bee took the opportunity of reminding Congress and the president that the United States government had been compensated with $700,000 for the burning of Christian missions in China. If local and state authorities continued to be indifferent to lawlessness, and the federal government refused to restrain them, the Chinese might well take it into their heads to inflict damage on Americans in their country, and it might not be so easy to seek redress. Some officers in the U.S. Attorney General’s office were paying attention, and in something of a pyrrhic victory, National Guardsmen were sent to Rock Springs to keep order and escort to the coal face any Chinese miners who wanted to work in the pits. Guardsmen and federal troops continued to be a presence in the town until 1898.
Bee knew the criminal courts were rigged against convictions of any of those who had actually committed murder. A judge of the California Supreme Court, Hugh Murray, had handed down an opinion that since the Chinese had ancestrally crossed the Bering Straits, and over the centuries had become, in effect, Indians, the constitutional provision that disbarred Native Americans from giving evidence against citizens applied to them too. But these Chinese/Indians were of course often the only firsthand witnesses. So Bee changed tactics and did something outrageous. On behalf of the Six Companies he sued entire cities for losses of property during the riots and forced marches. He called them reparations. Though Bee seldom won any substantial damages, his persistence rattled local authorities, who saw themselves having to impose taxes on their citizenry if the plaintiffs were successful. The spirited determination of Bee and his partner Benjamin Brooks to use the Burlingame Treaty and the Constitution to establish basic legal decencies emboldened the Chinese themselves to think one day they might be treated with a modicum of human respect. When in 1892 a Californian congressman, Thomas Geary, introduced an act of Congress requiring all Chinese to carry photo IDs and President Benjamin Harrison—too timid to defy public prejudice in an election year—signed it into law, the Six Companies ordered over 100,000 of their people to defy the law and refuse to carry the degrading cards. In their official statement, probably drafted by Fred Bee, they actually dared to presume that “as residents of the United States we claim a common manhood with all other nationalities.” Despite another economic panic in 1893 scapegoating them, the Chinese community asked for “an equal chance in the race of life, in this, our adopted home.”
There were many in positions of authority who thought “over our dead bodies.” One of them was Terence Powderly, who had led the Knights of Labor that had been in the forefront of the anti-Chinese movement in the 1870s and 1880s and who from 1897 to 1902 was commissioner general of immigration. Ensuring that Angel Island, the holding center in San Francisco Bay, was designed to keep out as many Chinese as possible, Powderly declared with a flourish that set the tone for generations of immigration officials to come, “I am no bigot but I am an American and believe that self-preservation is the first law of nations as well as nature.” Self-preservation decreed that almost no Chinese women be admitted since they either were prostitutes, or if apparently legally married, would seal the fate of the United States by breeding generation after generation of heathen Chinee.
But the history of just one of those young Chinese Americans born in the United States pointed the way to a less paranoid future. Wong Kim Ark, the twenty-three-year-old son of a San Francisco merchant family, had been visiting family in China in 1895. His papers were straightforward, but the famously prejudiced Collector of Customs John H. Wise, responsible for West Coast immigration, denied him entry on the grounds that he was not a citizen and thus was barred by the Exclusion Act. Wong had in fact been allowed back to California after an earlier trip in 1890, and when he was detained on board a ship in the bay hired an attorney to file a writ of habeas corpus. The Fourteenth Amendment, which specified that all those born in the United States were entitled to citizenship, held as much for the children of ineligibles like his parents as anyone else. The U.S. district attorney argued that for people of ethnic groups deemed unassimilable, birth was not enough to give rights of citizenship and painted a picture of national self-destruction should Wong’s claim be upheld: America at the mercy of “persons who must necessarily be a menace to the welfare of our Country.” Happily, as Erika Lee records in her fine account of the case, the presiding judge thought the matter much simpler: “It is enough that he is born here whatever the status of his parents.” Only criminal acts could waive this right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Wong was released, and when the case was heard on appeal by the Supreme Court of the United States, the California judge’s opinion was upheld. Though Chinese immigrants would be maltreated for many generations, the mere idea of an Asian American was no longer a contradiction in terms.
And for those who, unlike Wong Kim Ark, had not been born in the United States, there was another option in the decades after exclusion. They could pretend to be Mexicans. Because the Mexican government was more hospitable to Chinese immigration and because controls at the frontier were more lax, the need for temporary Mexican labor in the farms and orchards of Southern California being acute, the first generation of coyote smugglers could ship the Chinese, dressed in serapes and sombreros, queues cut off, over the frontier. Often they would arrive in San Francisco Bay, switch ships to steamers heading for Mexico, and then be taken in boxcars, or sometimes (if the disguise was good enough) by mule train or even foot, across the border between Sonora and Arizona, or between Baja California and San Diego. The routes were exactly what they are now; the business was as lucrative as now; the businessmen were sometimes Chinese-Mexican like Jose Chang; pure Chinese like Lee Quong “the Jew”; sometimes American operators like B. C. Springstein or Curly Edwards. And already, in the early decades of the twentieth century (especially during Prohibition) the profits of the human contraband were enriched by having the illegals take drugs and drink (opium and whiskey) with them. The border was 300 miles long; there were never enough patrolmen, or “in-line” riders on the freight trains, and the industry in Sonora forging residence certificates for the “Mexicans” was brilliantly professional. Besides, as one of the immigration inspectors said, it was hard telling Mexicans and Chinamen apart. At least 17,000 undocumented Chinese entered the United States this way between 1882 and 1920, a drop in the bucket of what was to come. But the peoples for whom the Crèvecoeur promise had been most bitterly betrayed were finding their own way to make it come true.
31. Grace under pressure
Peering out at the fog and rain, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi stood in the head he had designed: the head of Liberty Enlightening the World. The day, 28 October 1886, had gone well despite the weather. A million had watched the parade from City Hall Park down Broadway. The bands had been properly rehearsed; the flotilla of tugs and steamboats in the harbor, a happy cacophony of horns and whistles. Even the poem written by one Sidney Herbert Pierson had suited the occasion: “Today the slaves of ancient scorn and hate / Behold across the waters…/ Her blazing torch flame through ocean’s gate.” Around four o’clock with the light fading, Bartholdi listened intently for the end of Secretary Evarts’s speech, the signal for him to unveil the statue. A burst of applause
came from the 2,000 dignitaries seated before the pedestal. Bartholdi tugged at the ripcord, and, with the precision he had prayed for, the great tricolor veil fell from the face of the colossus. A roar went up from the audience and a mighty tooting from the tugboats. But then, when the sounds eventually died away, Secretary Evarts went on with his unfinished speech. Grover Cleveland’s face (which liked a good prank) was a mask of attentive self-control even though the temptation to chuckle must have been gut-busting. Instead, in turn he rose to his feet, sonorous and apt as usual, to accept the gift of the statue from the sister republic of France. “We are not here today to bow before the representation of a fierce warlike god filled with wrath and vengeance but we joyously contemplate instead our own deity keeping watch and ward over the open gates of America.”
They were indeed still open. In the next six months a quarter of a million immigrants saw the upraised copper arm with its beacon of liberty as their ships sailed into the harbor and onto processing sheds at Castle Gardens. On 11 May 1887, thirteen steamers, coming from Liverpool (the Wyoming, Helvetia, and Baltic), Antwerp, Glasgow, Bremen, Hamburg, Marseilles, Le Havre, and Bordeaux (the Chateau d’Yquem!), unloaded just short of 10,000 on a single day. And the New York Times had had enough of the spirit of hospitality. “Shall we take Europe’s paupers, her criminals, her lunatics, her crazy revolutionaries, her vagabonds?” the paper asked. These were laborers “who lived on garbage” and were a “standing menace to the city’s health.” Another editorial (for the Times sounded off regularly on the subject) opined that “in every Anarchist meeting, every official statement concerning the condition of labor or the inmates of our almshouses and asylums for the insane, every report relating to plague spots in the slums of our great cities may be felt something to remind the people of the United States that immigration under restrictions now provided is not a blessing.”