This
is an old article (from 1924) about the history of the Chinese in
California. It's somewhat racist (sometimes in a sympathetic way),
but if you can get past that, there's a wealth of knowledge about the
nativist movement of the late 1800s that seems to have been uncannily
reincarnted in the current anti-immigrant movement.
THE
CHINESE
by
Henry Kittredge Norton
Like
every other nation in the world, the Chinese Empire was represented
in the great rush for California which took place during the gold
excitement. At the beginning of the year 1849 there were in the state
only fifty-four Chinamen. At the news of the gold discovery a steady
immigration commenced which continued until 1876, at which time the
Chinese in the United States numbered 151,000 of whom 116,000 were in
the state of California. This increase in their numbers, rapid even
in comparison with the general increase in population, was largely
due to the fact that previous to the year 1869 China was nearer to
the shores of California than was the eastern portion of the United
States. Another circumstance which contributed to the heavy influx
of Chinese was the fact that news of the gold discovery found
southeastern China in poverty and ruin caused by the Taiping
rebellion. Masters of vessels made the most of this coincidence of
favorable circumstances. They distributed in all the Chinese
ports, placards, maps and pamphlets with highly colored accounts of
the golden hills of California. The fever spread among the yellow men
as it did among others, and the ship-men reaped a harvest from
passage money.
Probably
the most conspicuous characteristic of the Chinese is their passion
for work. The Chinaman seemingly must work. If he cannot secure work
at a high wage he will take it at a low wage, but he is a good
bargainer for his labor and only needs the opportunity to ask for
more pay. This is true of the whole nation, from the lowest to the
highest. They lack inventiveness and initiative but have an enormous
capacity for imitation. With proper instruction their industrial
adaptability is very great. They learn what they are shown with
almost incredible facility, and soon become adept.
If
the social conditions prevailing in California in the days of ’49
are recalled, it is not difficult to realize how welcome were the
Chinese who first came to the country. Here were men who would do the
drudgery of life at a reasonable wage when every other man had but
one idea—to work at the mines for gold. Here were cooks,
laundrymen, and servants ready and willing. Just what early
California civilization most wanted these men could and would supply.
The
result was that the Chinaman was welcomed; he was considered quite
indispensable. He was in demand as a laborer, as a carpenter, as a
cook; the restaurants which he established were well patronized; his
agricultural endeavors in draining and tilling the rich tule lands
were praised. Governor McDougal referred to him as “one of the most
worthy of our newly adopted citizens.” In public functions he was
given a place of honor, for the Californians of those days
appreciated the touch of color which he gave to the life of the
country. The Chinese took a prominent part in the parades in
celebration of the admission of the state to the Union. The Alta
California, a San Francisco newspaper, went so far as to say,
“The China Boys will yet vote at the same polls, study at the same
schools, and bow at the same altar as our countrymen.” Their
cleanliness, unobtrusiveness and industry were everywhere praised.
The
Chinese were surely in a land of milk and honey. They had left a land
of war and starvation where work could not be had and food must be
begged and here they found themselves in the midst of work and
plenty. They were everywhere welcomed and their wages were such that
they could save a substantial part to send back to the families they
had left at home in China; or, if they did not wish to labor for
masters, they could go to the mines. Here they could take an old
claim which had been abandoned by the white miner and dig from it
gold dust which to them represented wealth untold. They were careful
not to antagonise these whites by prospecting ahead of them, and in
return they received the same treatment in the mining districts that
they had met with in San Francisco.
The
Chinaman was welcomed as long as the surface gold was plentiful
enough to make rich all who came. But that happy situation was not
long to continue. Thousands of Americans came flocking in to the
mines. Rich surface claims soon became exhausted. These newcomers did
not find it so easy as their predecessors had done to amass large
fortunes in a few days. California did not fulfil the promise of the
golden tales that had been told of her. These gold-seekers were
disappointed. In the bitterness of their disappointment they
turned upon the men of other races who were working side by side with
them and accused them of stealing their wealth. They boldly asserted
that California’s gold belonged to them. The cry of “California
for the Americans” was raised and taken up on all sides.
Within
a short time the Frenchman, the Mexican and the Chileño had
been driven out and the full force of this anti-foreign persecution
fell upon the unfortunate Chinaman. From the beginning, though well
received, the Chinese had been a race apart. Their peculiar dress and
pigtail marked them off from the rest of the population. Their camps
at the mines were always apart from the main camps of white miners.
This made it the easier to turn upon them this hatred of outsiders.
With the great inrush of gold-seekers the abandoned claims which the
Chinese had been working, again became desirable to the whites and
the Chinese were driven from them with small concern. Where might
made right the peaceable Chinaman had little chance.
The
state legislature was wholly in sympathy with the anti-foreign
movement, and as early as 1850 passed the Foreign Miners’
License law. This imposed a tax of twenty dollars a month on all
foreign miners. Instead of bringing into the state treasury the
revenue promised by its framers, this law had the effect of
depopulating some camps and of seriously injuring all of them. San
Francisco became overrun with penniless foreigners and their care
became a serious problem. The law was conceded to be a failure and
was repealed the following year.
By
the time this was done, however, the Chinese had become the most
conspicuous body of foreigners in the country and therefore had to
bear the brunt of the attacks upon the foreign element. Governor
Bigler suddenly became inspired with the realization of the value of
an attack upon them as a political asset. He sent a special message
to the legislature in which he charged them with being contract
“coolie” laborers, avaricious, ignorant of moral obligations,
incapable of being assimilated, and dangerous to the public welfare.
The result was a renewal of the foreign miners’ tax, but in a
milder form than its predecessor.
This
did not satisfy the miners, who were at that time the strongest body,
in the community, and the next year the tax was again made
prohibitive.
But
it was not only the miners who hated the Chinese. The yield of the
placers began to decline in 1853-4, and the discovery of gold in
Australia brought on a financial panic in the latter year. Prices,
rents and values fell rapidly and many business houses failed. There
were strikes for higher wages among laborers and mechanics though the
prevalent rate for skilled labor was ten dollars per day and for
unskilled three dollars and a half. Investors became alarmed and,
withdrew their capital. Thousands of unsuccessful miners drifted
back into San Francisco and began to look for work at their old time
occupations. The labor market was glutted and an enormous number were
out of work.
To
these unemployed men the presence of thousands of Chinese, thrifty,
industrious, cheap, and above all, un-American, was obviously the
cause of their plight. The cry was raised that the large number of
Chinese in the country tended to injure the interests of the working
classes and to degrade labor. It was claimed that they, deprived
white men of positions by taking lower wages and that they sent their
savings back to China; that thus they were human leeches sucking the
very life-blood of this country. Whoever came to their defense was
immediately accused of having mercenary motives or of being
half-witted.
The
“coolie” fiction of Governor Bigler was seized upon. In the first
half of the nineteenth century a pseudo-slave trade had sprung up in
transporting Chinese laborers under contract to work at a certain
wage for a certain period to Cuba, and parts of South America. Such
laborers were ignorantly called “coolies” by those who were not
familiar with the Chinese language. The word itself comes from two
Chinese words, “koo” meaning to rent, and “lee” meaning
muscle. The coolies are those who rent out their muscles, that is,
unskilled laborers. In the four classes of China they rank with the
third, being considered a higher class than the merchants but below
the scholars and farmers. The word in no way signifies any sort of
bondage. The “coolies” are perfectly free just as our own
laborers are.
The
Chinese who came to California were largely of this class and so
described themselves on their arrival. It did not take long for
the anti-Chinese agitators to define a “coolie” as a contract
laborer and to describe how he was bound to a master in China to work
a certain number of years at a small wage and how this terrible
system was eating the very vitals out of American labor. This
American labor about which there was so much concern was almost
wholly composed of Irish and other European aliens who were no more
American than the Chinese. But they had a vote in prospect. The
Chinese did not.
While
the success of the coolie fiction was largely due to the fact that
there were so many who wanted to believe it, a number of
circumstances combined to give it greater vitality. Most of the
business transactions of the Chinese were done through their
benevolent organizations which came to be locally known as the “Six
Companies.” The Companies often contracted for large bodies of
laborers and this fact led the unthinking to conclude that these
laborers were under contract with the Six Companies to work for them
as they should direct. This was not the true situation. These
Companies simply acted as clearing-houses for all sorts of
transactions among the Chinese, as they had found that they could
handle things in a strange land more satisfactorily through such
associations than they could individually.
Another
thing which strengthened the coolie fiction was the manner in which
the Chinese were employed on the construction work. of the Central
Pacific Railroad. Because of the scarcity of labor the men in charge
of this construction work had sent an agent to China to secure
Chinese laborers. In order to get these men over to this country, it
was necessary to advance their passage-money and other expenses. To
cover this loan each Chinaman so employed signed a promissory note
for $75. This note provided for monthly instalment payments running
over a period of seven months and was endorsed by friends in China.
Each laborer was guaranteed a wage of $35 a month. This financial
arrangement was of course seized upon and made much of by the
anti-Chinese agitators as the final proof of “coolieism.”
The
belief that the Chinese were contract laborers was one of those
unfortunate errors which sometimes became current in our civic life,
and by frequent repetition receive almost universal acceptance. In
the present instance this phantom of Chinese slavery became so
thoroughly a part of the political life of the Pacific Coast that no
attempt was made to reach the truth of the matter. Every man in
public life was under so binding a necessity to accept the popular
belief in regard to the Chinese and to truckle to it at every turn,
that for one to seek the real truth of the matter was to end
forthwith his political career.
In
the years following 1854 this unthinking, prejudiced, anti-Chinese
movement ran riot. Various schemes were proposed for ridding the
country of the Chinese as if they were a pest. It was seriously
suggested that they be all returned to China, but as this would have
involved an expense of about seven millions of dollars and ten or a
dozen ships for every vessel that was available, it was reluctantly
laid aside. This scheme failing, it was asserted that they could at
least be driven from the mines. But as this would have deprived the
state of a large revenue from licenses and would have crowded the
outcasts in still greater numbers to the cities and agricultural
districts, this too was abandoned.
Various
local authorities passed legislation intended to harass them.
Most of the Chinese were in San Francisco, so the principal efforts
were made in that city, The famous “pig-tail ordinance” required
all convicted male prisoners to have their hair cut within one inch
of their heads. This particular piece of idiocy was vetoed by the
mayor but others almost as vicious were passed.
Many
of these were declared unconstitutional by the courts, but even the
courts were not at all times consistent friends of the Chinaman. The
worst blow which they received was embodied in a decision given by
the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court. There was a statute on
the books which prohibited “negroes and Indians” from testifying
against a white man in the courts of the state. The court held, in a
brilliantly logical opinion, that this included the Chinese for the
reason that in the days of Columbus all of the countries washed by
Chinese waters had been called “Indian.”
During
the Civil War other issues overshadowed the Chinese question and the
Orientals had a brief respite. But in 1868 the Burlingame treaty was
entered into between the United States and China. It provided for
reciprocal exemption from persecution on account of religious belief,
the privilege of schools and colleges, and in fact it agreed that
every Chinese citizen in the United States should have every
privilege which was expected by the American citizen in China. Though
naturalization was especially excepted, the provisions of this treaty
aroused a storm of antagonism on the Pacific Coast. The labor
agitators decried the treaty as a betrayal of the American
workingman, and the whole Chinese question was up again in more
violent form than ever before.
The
panic of 1873 and its ill effects brought the matter sharply before
the public and especially that portion of it that was out of work.
The crisis was averted for the time, however, by the opening of the
Consolidated Virginia
mines in Nevada and the local wave of prosperity which followed. But
in 1877 the bottom fell out of the whole western business world and
brought back the old agitation with tenfold violence. It was made
worse by the always apparent fact that the Chinese were the last to
join the unemployed. In fact they seldom joined at all. Gardening,
farming, laundering, cooking and housework were almost
monopolized by them. The railroads employed thousands of them and
they were engaged to some extent in manufacturing.
This
was more than could be borne by the much-oppressed laboring man, who
claimed that the Chinese, were robbing him of his bread and, which
was worse, the only one who benefitted by their labor was that other
arch-enemy of the laboring man, the capitalist. Something must be
done. The courts had annulled the efforts of their municipal
authorities and legislatures when these had tried to help them;
Congress had thrown them but a stone; the treaty-making power had
betrayed them; they must take matters into their own hands. And this
they proceeded to do.
Their
method of procedure was in most cases to sack and burn the Chinese
laundries and other commercial establishments operated by the
Orientals. It was left for Los Angeles to furnish the most
terrible example of all. Here nineteen Chinamen were hanged and shot
in one evening. The massacre was accompanied by the theft of over
$40,000 worth of their goods.
It
was in the south in fact that the violent opposition to the Chinese
had first found strong supporters. Here were many who were accustomed
to assert the “superiority” of their race and to attach the idea
of servitude to all inferior races. To work at all was well-nigh
intolerable, but to work beside a “pig-tail” upon whose wearer
even the wild Indian looked down, was to abasing to be borne. From
these southerners this feeling rapidly spread among the immigrants
from the poorer countries of Europe, who at home were in a position
almost of servitude. Arrived in this country and endowed with the
rights of citizenship, for which they are utterly unfitted, they
immediately seek to raise themselves higher in their own estimation
by trampling underfoot the rights of others.
But,
beside these prejudices due to race-feeling and ignorance, there were
real causes of discontent against the Chinese. They were not given to
sexual immorality themselves but some of them engaged in the business
of importing women whom they would prostitute to others for gain.
Gambling was an all-prevalent vice. These two features of the Chinese
situation received far more emphasis even among thoughtful people
than should have been given to them. This came about because of the
practice of “seeing Chinatown,” which like “seeing the world”
too often meant seeing the worst possible side of it. The proportion
of prostitutes among the Chinese was little if any higher than among
the other races in California at the time but much publicity spread
the idea of great numbers. Gambling, too, while very generally
indulged in by the Chinese, was never among themselves the vice which
was made of it by the Americans who frequented the Chinese houses.
The Chinaman gambled for small stakes as an amusement and never to
his own destruction. But while gambling and immorality have been
over-emphasized, one charge remains against them in all its original
strength. The Chinese quarter was very unclean. Their cleanly persons
and spotless linen were in strange contrast to their filthy homes,
overrun as they were with rats and other vermin.
Evil
as were these characteristics of the Chinese, they were never a
sufficient excuse for the outrages that were perpetrated upon them.
These bore no relation to the real grievances, but were in a large
measure the unreasoning acts of irresponsible men who were for the
most part aliens themselves. Calmly handled, the Chinese question
never would have caused a disturbance in California. In connection
with a violent race hatred, it kept the state in turmoil for the
first thirty years of its existence. Even today it occasionally
recurs to furnish capital for politicians who are unable to find any
other issue. Of late years, however, it has been very largely
superseded in this role by the
Japanese question.
In:
The Story of California From the Earliest Days to the Present,
by
Henry K. Norton. 7th ed. Chicago, A.C. McClurg & Co., 1924.
Chapter XXIV, pp. 283-296.