The American Future (38 page)

Was this a Chinese or an American microworld? The workers spoke Cantonese and were supplied with their own kind of food: abalone, dried mushrooms, cuttlefish and oysters, salt cabbage and pork, and plenty of rice. In spring and summer, if they were at all near any of the little market-garden villages that settled along the route, there were fresh vegetables, beans, and onions. Their standard beverage was green tea, brewed with snowmelt or scrupulously boiled river water, served from an iron pot beside which stood the huge whiskey casks demanded by the Cornish and the Irish. “I never saw a Chinaman drunk,” said Strobridge in a later testimony to the California Senate on the moral effects of Asian immigration. China tea saved lives, since those who gulped down water straight from the polluted streams paid heavily with violent and sometimes fatal dysentery. The Chinese were also fastidious about their hygiene. The cooks assigned to each crew of a dozen or so workers boiled water in the emptied black powder kegs that were used for daily sitz baths after the last shift. For a dawn-to-dusk day, six days a week, they were paid around thirty to thirty-five dollars a month (in gold), which went directly to the crew boss responsible for buying provisions. (The Irish and Cornish got room and board free.) Those expenses left the workers with a bare twenty dollars. By 1867, they had become American enough to decide this wasn't enough. Two
thousand of them struck for a ten-hour day, a forty-dollar monthly wage, and the elimination of the degrading power to be whipped or confined to prevent them walking off the job. Crocker tried to break the strike by putting out a call for ex-slave labor, but few of the African Americans responded to the invitation. So Crocker, whose benevolence to the Chinese made the Irish call them “Crocker's pets,” turned tough, blocking food supplies and starving them back to the job.

On 10 May, at Promontory, near Ogden, Utah, the last “golden spike” joining the two lines was driven home. The Central Pacific gangs took it as a point of honor to beat the record of their rivals on the Union Pacific, laying down the last ten miles of track in just twelve hours. For showtime, those who performed the finishing touch were Irish, a crew of about a thousand Chinese arriving by train from Victory to Promontory, an hour or so before the ceremonies. But they were needed all the same, for the dignitaries like Leland Stanford had so much trouble getting in the last spikes that Chinese workers in blue cotton duck coats and trousers helped them by starting the hammering, leaving the management to apply the last dainty taps before they lit the cigars. Strobridge, who had been so reluctant to hire the Chinese and was now their great champion, invited them to his railway car, laid out for a banquet, and made a great fuss of the Chinese crew bosses, while acknowledging that the transcontinental American railroad would never have been built without Chinese toil and sacrifice.

The number of those who perished along the way can never be known. Officially, Central Pacific reported 137 deaths during the four years of construction. But on 30 June 1870, a journalist for the
Sacramento Reporter
saw a train loaded with the bones of Chinese bodies that he estimated to be at least 1,200 and commented on the discrepancy between the official statistics and the wagonload of remains. The bones were being carried west to San Francisco along the track the Chinese had laid, to be shipped home to rest among their ancestors.

 

Coast to coast, the railroad unification of North America was greeted as a second revolution; the necessary completion of the first, almost a century later. When the news was relayed, fireworks burst in the sky above Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park, the Liberty Bell was
rung in Philadelphia, and in San Francisco people started drinking. When the city sobered up, it lost no time in passing anti-Chinese legislation, just in case the Asiatics were deluded enough to expect a vote of thanks. Life in Chinatown was made as miserable as possible. The wide basket-carrying shoulder yokes used to carry vegetables or laundry were banned from the streets as a hazard. A “cubic air” regulation was enacted requiring 500 cubic feet for every inhabitant, giving the police the right to enter any household to detect infractions. Anyone arrested for that or any other misdemeanor was now liable to have their queue cut off and head shaved, in a gesture of gratuitously aggressive humiliation. Most emblematic of all, a Chinatown fire gave the city a pretext to ban wooden laundries (in a city where almost everything was timber-framed and fires happened every day).

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:

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:

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 pluribus 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.