The Chinese in America (19 page)

For struggling Irish workers engaged in a strike to secure decent wages for themselves, it must have been galling to witness the sheer number of Chinese willing to serve as scabs. Of course, most Chinese were likely unfamiliar with the concept “scab,” and in addition owed no allegiance or support to a union that would not have them as members. Nevertheless, the tensions between the two immigrant groups rose. In September 1870, the
Overland Monthly
published a humorous poem by the famous newspaperman, writer, and poet Bret Harte that depicted the growing animosity between the Irish and the Chinese. The verse was originally titled “Plain Language from Truthful James,” but eventually came to be known almost exclusively as “The Heathen Chinee.” It recounts a card game between two fictional characters: Ah Sin, a Chinese man, and William Nye, an Irishman. Even though Nye blatantly cheats with cards stuffed up his sleeves, he keeps losing to Ah Sin. Finally Nye, losing patience, shouts, “We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!” and then assaults Ah Sin, knocking hidden cards out of the Chinese man’s sleeves.

Which group did Harte intended to ridicule more, the Chinese or the Irish? If his poem depicted the former as crafty cheaters, it mocked the Irish as inept ones, forced to resort to violence after losing to the Chinese, even after excessive cheating. Whatever Harte’s intention, “The Heathen Chinee” struck a chord deep within the American psyche and became the country’s most popular poem in the 1870s. It was set to music and reprinted in virtually every newspaper in the county. Newsstands sold illustrated copies of the poem as pamphlets. The
New York Globe
published it twice, and in January 1871 the paper reported that hundreds of people had gathered to see a version of “The Heathen Chinee” displayed in a shop window: “In all our knowledge of New York nothing like this has ever been seen on Broadway.” Bret Harte and Mark Twain even collaborated to bring “The Heathen Chinee” to the stage, under the title
Ah Sin.

But underneath the laughter provoked by the poem was tremendous fear of the Chinese, especially in California. Everything about the Chinese—their physiognomy, their language, their food, their queues—struck many whites as bizarre, making it easy to demonize them. Large numbers of whites, seeing their livelihoods threatened by Chinese competition, began to feel as if the Chinese were somehow part of a giant, secret conspiracy to undercut the American working man. They complained, with some basis in fact, that the Chinese worked for less money, rarely spent what they had, and tended to keep their capital within the community, shopping at Chinese groceries and importing their food from China. They also believed that the Chinese who sent part of their money home to China were draining the country of its currency, its very lifeblood, while they ignored the larger contributions made by these Chinese in America. Anti-Chinese clubs soon flourished throughout California, pressuring officials in San Francisco to pass a series of municipal ordinances against Chinese residents, designed to drive them out of the city.

One was the 1870 Cubic Air law, which required lodging houses to provide at least five hundred cubic feet of open space for each adult occupant. On its face the law was not discriminatory, but it was flouted in poor white neighborhoods across the city while rigorously enforced in the Chinese section of San Francisco. City officials routinely arrested Chinese in the middle of the night, dragging them from bed and driving them “like brutes” into prison. Ironically, the local government violated its own cubic-air ordinance when it herded the Chinese into jail, where, as one newspaper noted, each Chinese enjoyed only twenty cubic feet of space. As an act of passive resistance, many refused to pay the fine, in essence staging jailhouse sit-ins. The San Francisco board of supervisors retaliated with the infamous “queue ordinance”: each male prisoner who did not pay his fine would have his hair shaved within an inch of his scalp. This ordinance devastated the morale of the Chinese, for a shorn head in their homeland was a mark of treason and occasioned a complete loss of caste.

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:

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.