The Chinese in America (20 page)

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.

Even this exodus, however, did not satisfy western politicians bent on purging the region of all Chinese presence. Some were determined to pass federal legislation prohibiting the Chinese from entering the United States at all. The anti-Chinese movement achieved a major victory when the Grant administration, under pressure from California politicians, modified the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, which had ensured open emigration from China. In 1879, during his highly publicized world tour, former president Ulysses S. Grant met with Chinese officials in Tientsin to discuss a possible three- to five-year ban on Chinese immigration to the United States. The Qing regime, at the time fearing a military attack from Russia and war with Japan, acquiesced to American demands for a new treaty. Signed the following year, it gave the United States the right to limit, regulate, and suspend Chinese immigration, though not to prohibit it absolutely. The door was now open for passage of a new law, one that would haunt the Chinese American community for generations—the Chinese Exclusion Act.

I
n February 1881, a furious debate raged in the United States Congress when California senator John F. Miller, known for anti-Chinese sentiments, introduced a bill to bar Chinese immigration for the next twenty years. His arguments, intended to damn the Chinese with scorn and disgust, today read like a reluctant paean to the Chinese work ethic, conceding the substantial contributions the Chinese had already made to the building of the American West. Comparing the Chinese immigrants to “inhabitants of another planet,” Miller argued that they were “machine-like ... of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron; they are automatic engines of flesh and blood; they are patient, stolid, unemotional ... [and] herd together like beasts.”

According to Miller, America belonged to white people and white people only. His vision of America was a land “resonant with the sweet voices of flaxen-haired children.” Pleading with his colleagues to preserve “American Anglo-Saxon civilization without contamination or adulteration ... [from] the gangrene of oriental civilization,” Miller asserted that group discrimination on the basis of ancestry was natural and sensible. “Why not discriminate? Why aid in the increase and distribution over ... our domain of a degraded and inferior race, and the progenitors of an inferior sort of men?”

Many of Miller’s colleagues wholeheartedly agreed with him, but one senator from Massachusetts rose above the passion of the moment and tried to remind his colleagues of the larger issues involved. George Frisbie Hoar, a progressive-minded leader who had opposed slavery and championed the civil rights of workers, believed that excluding people on the basis of race rather than conduct made a mockery of the high ideals set forth in our own Declaration of Independence. Denouncing racism as “the last of human delusions to be overcome,” a force that “left its hideous and ineradicable stains in our history,” Hoar blasted the hypocrisy of America’s race-baiting politicians: “We go boasting of our democracy, and our superiority, and our strength,” he said. “The flag bears the stars of hope to all nations. A hundred thousand Chinese land in California and everything is changed ... The self-evident truth becomes a self-evident lie.”

Few agreed with Hoar, either in Congress or across the nation. His speech provoked condemnation from both the press and the political establishment. “It is idle to reason with stupidity like this,” the
New York Times
proclaimed. The
New York Tribune
put Hoar in the class of “humanitarian half thinkers.” Legislators from western states pointed out that many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had owned slaves, and one Colorado lawmaker insisted that the Caucasian race “has a right, considering its superiority of intellectual force and mental vigor, to look down upon every other branch of the human family.”

Despite popular support for the bill, President Chester Arthur vetoed it. He claimed the twenty-year ban was too long, but it seems clear that he feared the Qing government might respond to such a law by shutting Chinese ports to American trade. In a speech no doubt intended to fortify diplomatic relations with China, Arthur praised the contributions of the Chinese émigré workers in building the transcontinental railroad as well as in developing industry and agriculture, and he argued the bill’s potentially adverse economic consequences. “Experience has shown that the trade of the East is the key to national wealth and influence,” he said. “It needs no argument to show that the policy which we now propose to adopt must have a direct tendency to repel oriental nations from us and to drive their trade and commerce into more friendly lands.”

The public swiftly retaliated against Arthur. Across the West the president was hanged in effigy, his image burned by furious mobs. Representative Horace Page, another Republican from California known for his anti-Chinese attitudes, immediately introduced a compromise bill that shortened the ban from twenty to ten years. In addition, under Page’s bill Chinese laborers would be barred, but select groups of Chinese—merchants, teachers, students, and their household servants—would be permitted to enter the country.

Page’s bill passed both houses of Congress. This time, President Arthur, doubtless fully sensitive to the response after his previous veto, did not oppose it. On May 6, 1882, he signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act. Thus was enacted, as one scholar has put it, “one of the most infamous and tragic statutes in American history,” one that would “frame the immigration debate in the years that followed and [result in] greater and greater restrictions on foreigners seeking refuge and freedom in the United States.”

Far from appeasing the fanatics, the new restrictions inflamed them. Having succeeded in barring the majority of new Chinese immigrants from American shores, the anti-Chinese bloc began a campaign to expel the remaining Chinese from the United States. During a period of terror now known as “the Driving Out,” several Chinese communities in the West were subjected to a level of violence that approached genocide.

For example, on September 28, 1885, delegates at a mass anti-Chinese rally in Seattle issued a manifesto to force all Chinese out of the Washington Territory by November 1. To warn the Chinese of the impending deadline, they formed two committees to deliver the message from house to house in the cities of Tacoma and Seattle. By the end of October, most Chinese laborers had left town, but many merchants, unwilling to abandon their goods, remained.