The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  This ruthlessness reflected an unusually modern mind. Like the Middle Americans of The Innocents Abroad, Bierce was a creature of the new industrialism. He had seen the fruits of Yankee ingenuity up close: guns that shot straighter and artillery that shot farther, built by the Northern factories that now powered the postwar economic boom. He understood that the technological revolution was also a moral one: that it rewrote the rules of what was permissible, whether on the battlefield or in the boardroom, whether in the “hard war” tactics of William Tecumseh Sherman or the robber-baron entrepreneurialism of Jay Gould. Bierce had seen a barbarism far, far bleaker than Stoddard’s romanticized savagery. It was the barbarism of the future, the mechanized cruelty of a civilization with more efficient ways to kill people and fewer scruples about doing so. “To the amiable maniac who believes in a tolerably rapid rate of human progress toward a tolerably stupid state of human imperfection through cumulative accretions of brotherly love,” he wrote in an article for the Overland, “the events of the past few years must seem singularly perverse, if not wildly wayward.”

  Bierce’s background made him uniquely skeptical of the promises of progress. This came in handy in California, as the optimism of the 1860s wilted in the harsher economic weather of the 1870s. He rose to prominence just as San Francisco’s literary scene was scattering, and the world that shaped Twain, Harte, Stoddard, and Coolbrith was disappearing. The years ahead would bring profound changes to California: not only to its economy and society but to its self-image.

  The gold rush had created the idea of California as a land of opportunity, and this persisted long after the original diggings ran dry. The Civil War kept the region broadly prosperous. Flush times kept people employed; a perennial labor shortage kept wages high. In the 1870s, however, a new reality set in. The remaining goldfields had become industrialized: complex, capital-intensive ventures that looked like eastern factories. Farms had become organized along similar lines. “Wheat barons” owned estates hundreds of square miles in size, using intensive, single-crop agriculture that depleted the soil and made harvests more vulnerable to drought. Heavy immigration from the East drove wages down. Frenzied speculation drove land prices up. The Jeffersonian fantasy of the West as a republic of independent freeholders was vanishing; in its place emerged monopoly, wage labor, and big business. A select few would make obscene amounts of money. The rest would endure a decade of disappointment.

  No single event marked the shift from the rich, hopeful 1860s to the stagnant, gloomy 1870s more than the transcontinental railroad. The messianic rhetoric that greeted its completion had begun to fray almost right away. In November 1869, six months after the rails met in Utah, the Suez Canal had opened in Egypt. Gone was the possibility of dominating the lucrative Asia trade—Europe now had a faster route to the Far East.

  There were bigger difficulties ahead. Before 1869, California’s relative isolation had sheltered its economy from eastern competition. San Francisco had enjoyed a profitable stranglehold on regional commerce: everything passed through its port. Now the interior, connected to the rest of the country by rail, could buy more cheaply from firms farther east. Local industries suffered, just as the thousands of laborers who built the railroad streamed into San Francisco looking for work. Wages fell; unemployment rose. By early 1870, San Francisco was in a slump. Seven thousand of its citizens were out of work, and that number would soon grow.

  The heads of the Central Pacific—Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker—fared better. In 1862, the federal government had awarded their company the contract for the western span of the transcontinental railroad. They used this commission to create the most powerful corporation on the Pacific coast. The Central Pacific snapped up smaller railroads, secured generous loans from the government, acquired large tracts of public land, extracted tribute from towns along its routes, and generally made its imperial presence felt in ways that couldn’t fail to recall Henry George’s prophetic warnings in the Overland Monthly. The “Big Four” flaunted their wealth, spending conspicuously. By the end of the decade, they would be building kingly mansions on San Francisco’s Nob Hill.

  Meanwhile, the slow death of the California dream made the rest of the city a depressing place. One observer noted the abundance of “social wrecks”; more dangerous were the hoodlums who prowled the streets looking for easy prey. The ugliest symptom of the economic malaise came in the form of attacks on the Chinese. These were nothing new, yet they grew more vicious in the 1870s. The Central Pacific had imported thousands of laborers from China to work for low wages. Many of them moved to San Francisco after the railroad was built, and clashed with the city’s largely Irish working class. Acts of racist violence ensued, which Bierce regularly spotlighted in his column for the News Letter. For all his antihumanitarian impulses, Bierce despised racial prejudice. When the body of a murdered Chinese woman appeared on the sidewalk one morning, he used it as ammunition against the cruel delusion of white supremacy. “The cause of her death could not be accurately ascertained,” he wrote, “but as her head was caved in it is thought by some physicians that she died of galloping Christianity of the malignant California type.”

  An illustration by Joseph Hull from the pirated Chicago edition of Harte’s The Heathen Chinee, published by the Western News Company in 1870.

  The rising tide of anti-Chinese rage also stirred the conscience of California’s leading writer. For years Harte had written eloquently against racism. In 1870, even as his thoughts increasingly turned away from the Pacific coast to the prospect of life in the East, he decided to deliver another withering satire on the subject. The result was a poem called “Plain Language from Truthful James.” According to Bierce, Harte first sent it to the News Letter—but Bierce insisted it belonged in the Overland, where more readers would see it. He was right. The poem appeared in the September 1870 issue and swiftly became the most popular thing Harte ever wrote.

  “Plain Language from Truthful James”—or “The Heathen Chinee,” as it came to be known—tells the story of a card game between a Chinese man named Ah Sin and a pair of white men. Everyone is cheating, but Ah Sin cheats better, and wins. When his opponents discover his trickery, they are outraged. “We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,” one of them cries. This is the punch line, a delicious inversion of a phrase already popular among anti-Chinese agitators, appropriated by Harte to expose the hypocrisy of white racism. The Chinese “did as the Caucasian did in all respects, and, being more patient and frugal, did it a little better,” he later recalled. They weren’t any more or less deceitful, only smarter. They had learned the white man’s game, and beat him at it.

  “The Heathen Chinee” penetrated American culture with terrific speed. It caused “an explosion of delight whose reverberations reached the last confines of Christendom,” Twain remembered. Newspapers and magazines around the country republished it. Its lines were recited, quoted, parodied, set to music, reprinted and resold on city streets. John H. Carmany, the Overland’s publisher, claimed that his clients in the East “doubled their orders” of the magazine because of the poem. Fields, Osgood, and Company, the Atlantic’s publisher, had just released Harte’s The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches in April 1870. Now it rushed to produce a collection of Harte’s poetry for the Christmas market, with “The Heathen Chinee” as the centerpiece. The book sold out its first six editions within five days, and went on to be Harte’s biggest seller.

  Within months, Harte had become one of America’s most famous writers. “Harte does soar, & I am glad of it, notwithstanding he & I are ‘off’ these many months,” grumbled Twain in November 1870. His rival’s most recent triumph came at an inopportune moment, just as Twain was struggling with the manuscript for Roughing It. Once again, he felt he was falling behind. Harte had somehow conquered both sides of the cultural divide: admired by the highbrow elite, adored by the middlebrow masses.

 
Yet he didn’t seem especially happy. Harte “was no less chagrined than amazed” by the national frenzy set off by “The Heathen Chinee,” Coolbrith observed. He complained about it to her and Stoddard. He said he wanted to be known for his “finer, higher work,” not a crude bit of doggerel. But he had another reason to regret the poem. Many readers misinterpreted its message: ignoring the ironic tone, they read it as an endorsement of anti-Chinese racism. What Harte intended as satire, they took seriously. A pirated edition of the poem published in Chicago made this painfully clear. It featured drawings of a slant-eyed Ah Sin getting attacked by a mob of whites, without an ounce of irony.

  This was only the beginning. In the coming years, “The Heathen Chinee” would become a rallying cry and a recruiting tool for the crusade against Chinese immigration. When the poem appeared in 1870, the “Chinese question” was still more of a western issue than a national one. Harte helped make it real for the rest of the country. Easterners who had never seen a Chinese person before now carried Ah Sin around in their heads, and before long, this nasty caricature would pay disastrous political dividends. In 1875 Congress passed the Page Act, the first of many laws aimed at restricting Chinese immigration. The following year, both the Republicans and Democrats added “Heathen Chinee planks” to their party platforms, wooing voters with bigoted rhetoric.

  Harte had every reason to hate “The Heathen Chinee.” Later, he would call it the worst poem he ever wrote. On the other hand, he didn’t hesitate to take advantage of the huge benefits it conferred on his career. By the time the poem appeared, he was already being courted by several eastern periodicals eager to lure him away from California. He treated his suitors to the same petulant personality he had displayed the year before while renegotiating his Overland contract. When Putnam’s Magazine wanted him as its editor, he demanded $5,000 a year plus full creative control—refused. When the Galaxy wanted him as a contributor, he shamed it for submitting “the lowest and least advantageous offer which I have yet had the honor to receive from any one.” He could afford to be choosy. “I have propositions for more copy than I could possibly furnish.”

  The most intriguing offer came from Fields, Osgood, and Company: owner of the Atlantic and publisher of The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches and his forthcoming Poems. In June 1870, it invited Harte to become an exclusive contributor for its magazine group, at an annual salary of $5,000. This was the same sum he had just demanded from Putnam’s, but his price had already gone up. Powerful Californians, in a bid to keep Harte on the Pacific coast, wanted to make him a professor at the new University of California, temporarily in Oakland while its campus in Berkeley was being built. “It has long been tolerably well known in literary circles that Mr. Harte could not afford to remain in California—where there is a conspicuous lack of the sense necessary to the appreciation of genius—unless he were bribed with a lucrative sinecure,” Bierce cracked in his News Letter column. The position would bring Harte’s total income to $6,000 a year. What he wanted to know from the Atlantic camp was simple: “Can you do as well for me, and how?”

  The timing worked perfectly: the same month Harte sent his reply, “The Heathen Chinee” broke. Suddenly he had all the leverage he needed to extract whatever deal he wanted. Meanwhile, the university appointment was held up by one of the regents, who remembered Harte’s role in ridiculing the hushed-up coverage of the 1868 earthquake and still hadn’t forgiven him for it. No doubt this stung the author’s pride, because even after the regent was reconciled, Harte declined the post.

  By late 1870, he had made up his mind. This would be his last year as Overland editor. He didn’t know where exactly he would end up, only that he would leave San Francisco. The Far West had created him. But its time had passed. In a letter to an eastern editor, Harte declared the region “played out.” “The tourists have already exhausted superficial California and what is below is hard, dry and repulsive,” he said.

  Harte urged his friends to follow him across the continent. “[H]e was constantly formulating plans whereby Charlie [Stoddard] and I might join him in the East,” Coolbrith remembered. “What kind of an instrument would a triangle be with only one angle?” she recalled him saying. “When I would speak of the impossibility of my leaving my invalid mother, ‘Bring her with you,’ he would answer; and then when assured that she would not leave her boys, he would conclude, ‘Well then, I see no other way than to marry the whole family!’” Coolbrith couldn’t go East: she had domestic duties, relatives to support. She gave Harte a portfolio of her poems, in the hopes that he might show them around, and possibly even land her a book deal with a big house in Boston or New York. She would need his help: despite publishing dozens of poems in the Overland, her national career had gone nowhere. Harte and Twain had taken off. Stoddard had won new attention from the eastern press for his Pacific prose sketches. But she had languished, still largely a local phenomenon after all these years. Her verse didn’t distinguish itself strongly enough to find a wider readership. Ultimately, her contribution to the Bohemian scene had been less literary than personal: a backstage role that earned her less recognition than the rest. When a Cincinnati paper reported on a new issue of the Overland, it misspelled her name as “John D. Coolbrith.”

  Someday, perhaps, she might get famous enough to escape California. Until then, she would fondly remember “that dear old circle” shattered by Harte’s departure: the hours spent in her parlor poring over page proofs or swapping limericks or that one time in the Overland office when Stoddard spontaneously broke into song—a dreadful sound, full of “unprecedented sharps and flats” and “sudden soaring into the upper impossibles”—until Harte entered with a horrified look on his face and all three of them died laughing. The Overland Trinity had been her other family, the one that made her feel free instead of trapped, and its dissolution left a permanent pain in her heart.

  Unlike Coolbrith, Stoddard could leave San Francisco anytime he liked. He, too, hoped Harte would help him in the East. Yet he also felt drawn in another direction: toward the Pacific. “I know there is but one hope for me,” he wrote Whitman in the spring of 1870. “I must get in amongst people who are not afraid of instincts and who scorn hypocrisy.” In July he decamped for Tahiti for three months. He ran out of money and ended up sleeping in a chicken coop until the American consul put him on a ship home—but not before he gathered more material for his future book of South Seas sketches. His taste for travel grew as San Francisco’s appeal faded. The city had been “‘railroaded’ to the depths of the commonplace,” he later wrote, deprived of the special privileges that made it rich and the frontier isolation that made it distinctive. He couldn’t blame the Overland editor for clearing out. “No one who knows Mr. Harte,” he said, “and knew the California of his day, wonders that he left it as he did.”

  On February 2, 1871, Harte boarded a parlor car of the Overland Express with his wife and two sons. It had been eleven years since he first climbed to the top of Telegraph Hill and saw Bohemia laid out below, back when he was an eccentric newspaperman barely off the typesetter’s bench, taking lonely walks through a city marvelously remote from the rest of the country, possessed of its own peculiar culture, accessible only to those young or fit or foolish enough to endure the long journey by steamer or stage. Now he departed in a blaze of glory, carried by the locomotive that made San Francisco seven days from New York. He hadn’t been East since 1854, and would be seeing the new America for the first time: a steam-fed leviathan of cities, slums, mansions, machines, monopolies, and a media-hungry middle class eager for the next offering from the author of “The Heathen Chinee.” Expectations were high. Twain would be watching.

  III

  EXILE

  Portrait of Harte published on the cover of Every Saturday , January 14, 1871.

  SEVEN

  America greeted the news of Bret Harte’s departure from California in 1871 with an enthusiasm verging on the hysterical. Th
e nation had an endless appetite for novelty. The roaring capitalism of the postwar era was demolishing the old and making a religion of the new, and now a writer from the younger half of the Union arrived to give fresh life to American letters.

  Mark Twain felt his mercury rising. The spotlight properly belonged to him, and he knew it. He was the true westerner, not this foppish city slicker who looked like he just stepped off Savile Row—a dandy with little direct knowledge of the mining camps, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a flannel shirt and a slouch hat. Twain had plenty to be pleased about—The Innocents Abroad was selling well—but his star shone nowhere near as brightly as Harte’s. Harte didn’t capture just the middle-class demographic that loved Twain, but also those vicarish high-culture types who tended to be stingier with their praise. “Do you know who is the most celebrated man in America to-day?” Twain fumed to a friend, “—the man whose name is on every single tongue from one end of the continent to the other? It is Bret Harte . . . All the cities are fussing about which shall secure him for a citizen.”

  He was right: every city wanted Harte. From the moment the former Overland Monthly editor boarded the train in San Francisco in February 1871, the country breathlessly beheld his transit. The telegraph tracked his every move. Newspapers from Idaho to Ohio chattered about where he might choose to live.