by H. W. Brands
The Riis tour continued to “the Bend” of Mulberry Street, the most noisome of New York’s slums. Here reformers had been at work for decades, trying to enforce the housing laws; here they had consistently discovered that the laws of supply and demand trumped the statutes of mere legislators. Landlords resisted the changes, claiming the right of property to a profit. Tenants resisted, for fear of displacement by the higher rents the changes would produce. Nature, it seemed, or at any rate capitalism, conspired to populate every nook and cranny of the Bend. “Incessant raids cannot keep down the crowds that make them their home. In the scores of back alleys, of stable lanes and hidden byways, of which the rent collector alone can keep track, they share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash-barrels of the city.”
Capitalism had created the Bend, and it thrived within the Bend. Stalls and makeshift shops lined the alleys; a building called Bandit’s Roost sheltered a veritable immigrants’ exchange. The emporia were tiny—three feet by four, each scarcely large enough to hold the proprietor, with stock in a bucket or box or hanging from a board. One sold tobacco, another fish (“fish that never swam in American waters, or if they did, were never seen on an American fish-stand,” Riis said), still another sausages of some sort (“what they are I never had the courage to ask”). The basic rule of American capitalism, of buyer beware, applied here no less than on Wall Street.
The men sit or stand in the streets, on trucks, or in the open doors of the saloons smoking black clay pipes, talking and gesticulating as if forever on the point of coming to blows. Near a particularly boisterous group, a really pretty girl with a string of amber beads twisted artlessly in the knot of her raven hair has been bargaining long and earnestly with an old granny, who presides over a wheel-barrow load of secondhand stockings and faded cotton yarn, industriously darning the biggest holes while she extols the virtues of her stock. One of the rude swains, with patched overalls tucked into his boots, to whom the girl’s eyes have strayed more than once, steps up and gallantly offers to pick her out the handsomest pair, whereat she laughs and pushes him away with a gesture which he interprets as an invitation to stay; and he does, evidently to the satisfaction of the beldame, who forthwith raises her prices fifty per cent without being detected by the girl.8
IN NEW YORK and in every other American city, residents were sorted by various criteria. Wealth was an obvious one. The tenement districts Riis described on the Lower East Side were distinct from, and distinctly poorer than, the apartment-house neighborhoods uptown, which were themselves separate from, and markedly less luxurious than, the mansion enclave that grew up about the Vanderbilt palace. Boston’s Beacon Hill and Back Bay housed the gentry of the old Puritan capital; Chicago’s Gold Coast drew the merchants and industrialists of the inland entrepôt. In San Francisco the Stanfords and Huntingtons crowded Nob Hill, leaving the lowlands to the lesser classes.
This geographic segregation reflected, among other things, the state of transportation technology. When muscle power moved people, the wealthy tended to live within walking distance—measured by their own feet or their horses’—of their offices and mills. But as steam speeded traffic across the urban landscape, the wealthy typically preferred to separate work from residence, leaving the downtown districts to the tenements and their dwellers. In time many rich would move clear out of the cities, to the suburbs that sprang up along the train lines.
The urban sorting reflected other considerations as well. Immigrants clustered like with like. Every city developed ethnic neighborhoods: Irishtown, Kleindeutschland, Jewtown, Poletown, Little Italy, Chinatown. Much of this was voluntary: the mutual affinity of linguistic and cultural kin, the familial appeal of actual kin. Some was enforced: the refusal of landlords to rent to particular groups outside particular neighborhoods, violence perpetrated against group members who crossed understood boundaries.
Of the various immigrant neighborhoods, the Chinese districts were the most clearly—and rigidly—circumscribed. The formal effect of the Chinese Exclusion Act was to bar most new immigration from China, but its informal effect was to declare open season on Chinese already in America. Within months of the act’s passage, what the Chinese called the “driving out” began. White hooligans waged racial war against Chinese across much of the West, killing twenty-eight in Rock Springs, Wyoming, thirty-one on the Snake River in eastern Washington, and smaller numbers elsewhere. Occasionally whites stuck up for their Chinese neighbors, if sometimes from selfish motives. A white gambler in Denver pulled six-guns on an anti-Chinese mob and told them to desist. “If you kill Wong, who in the hell will do my laundry?” he demanded. But in most places the mobs had their way. Rural communities of Chinese largely disappeared, their inhabitants driven off, their homes burned, their property seized by those doing the driving. Chinese in the cities were safer but not always safe: the entire Chinese community of Tacoma, Washington, was forcibly driven from that lumber port overnight. “They call it exclusion,” one Chinese immigrant declared. “But it is not exclusion; it is extermination.”9
Some of those who survived the violence returned to China, as their persecutors intended. Others went east, hoping for refuge in the cities there. Lee Chew, the boy who had discovered the promise of America at the feast his neighbor gave for his whole South China village, had emigrated to California, where he worked in mining and railroad construction before opening a laundry, a trade that attracted many Chinese on account of its minimal capital requirements and the comparative unimportance of fluency in English. Lee’s business, based in a mining camp and shared with a partner, thrived until the anti-Chinese violence began. “All the miners came and broke up our laundry, chasing us out of town,” he remembered. “They were going to hang us. We lost all our property and $365 in money, which members of the mob must have found.” Lee had had the foresight to send most of his money to Chinese bankers in San Francisco; he now withdrew $500 and abandoned the West. He opened a laundry in Chicago, where he stayed for three years and increased his capital to $2,500. For reasons unclear he moved on to Detroit and then Buffalo. His laundry business eventually declined, the victim, ironically, of “American cheap labor,” as he put it, and steam presses. So he moved again, to New York, and opened a shop in the Chinatown there.
He eventually returned to China, with thoughts of repatriating, but found he had grown too American to stay. He crossed the Pacific yet again. His emotions on approaching the Gold Mountain this time, though, were decidedly mixed. America afforded opportunity but withheld equality. Lee never got over his bitterness at the mistreatment he experienced in the wake of the Exclusion Act. “It was the jealousy of laboring men of other nationalities—especially the Irish—that raised all the outcry against the Chinese,” he said. “No one would hire an Irishman, German, Englishman, or Italian when he could get a Chinese, because our countrymen are so much more honest, industrious, steady, sober and painstaking.… Irish fill the almshouses and prisons and orphan asylums; Italians are among the most dangerous of men; Jews are unclean and ignorant. Yet they are all let in, while Chinese, who are sober, or duly law abiding, clean, educated, and industrious, are shut out. There are few Chinamen in jails and none in the poor houses. There are no Chinese tramps or drunkards.” Lee didn’t blame all Americans, but he did blame their materialistic culture. “Americans make a mere practice of loving justice. They are all for money making, and they want to be on the strongest side always. They treat you as a friend while you are prosperous, but if you have a misfortune they don’t know you.”10
Of the urban refuges for the Chinese, San Francisco’s Chinatown was the most prominent. Centered on Dupont Street (Grant Avenue after 1908) and running from California Street to Broadway, the seven-block district was home to between thirty and forty thousand Chinese in the 1880s. Few ghettos in Russia were more rigidly circumscribed. “In those days, the boundaries were from Kearny to Powell, and from California to Broadway,” Wei Bat
Liu, a longtime resident, recalled. “If you ever passed them and went out there, the white kids would throw stones at you. One time I remember going out and one boy started running after me, then a whole gang of others rushed out, too. We were afraid of them, and there were more of them than of us, so we would come right back.” Living outside the district was nearly impossible. “I had trouble finding a good place in Chinatown,” Wei Bat Liu continued. “It was so crowded; everyone was sleeping in double-decker beds and all that. So I went up just one block to Powell Street and asked in three places there. They told me no; no one had ever heard of Chinese living on Powell Street before. So we went back down to Chinatown, where all my cousins lived in one room. No bathroom, no kitchen.”11
Not long after the Exclusion Act took effect, a special public school—the Oriental School—was established in Chinatown. By practice rather than by law, this became the required school for Chinese children (as well as Japanese and Korean). “I went there for two years,” John Jeong remembered. “Then I wanted to change over to the American school on Geary Street, but after I was there for a week someone told me it was not for Chinese. We were only supposed to go to the Oriental School. So after that I just studied at home and worked in my brother’s store.”12
A 1790 federal law governing naturalization barred Asians—as not being “free white persons”—from eligibility for citizenship. Subsequent judicial decisions confirmed the ban, as did the 1868 Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China. California law and San Francisco practice largely excluded Chinese from participation in local politics. Consequently the Chinese developed a governance of their own. From the earliest days of the gold rush, Chinese immigrants had grouped themselves into clan and district associations. The associations afforded a measure of protection against the violence that characterized San Francisco’s early days; they also provided social services to Chinese immigrants: job placement, medical care, language instruction. Allied together as the Chinese Six Companies (and eventually incorporated formally as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association), the associations brought legal challenges against the various forms of anti-Chinese discrimination. The Six Companies arbitrated disputes among Chinese; the group was called the “supreme court of the Chinese in California.” It even had a foreign policy: until the Chinese imperial government established a consulate in San Francisco in the late 1870s, the Six Companies filled the role.13
Operating beside the benevolent associations were the tongs. Modeled on the antigovernment secret societies that had taken root in China in the eighteenth century, the tongs emerged as working-class alternatives to the associations, which were dominated by the Chinese merchants. As challengers to the status quo, the tongs gravitated toward the less respectable kinds of business: gambling, prostitution, the sale of opium. The tongs had many white customers and so required the cooperation, or at least the acquiescence, of the white power structure; this they obtained by sharing their profits with police and elected officials. Crime being a business, the tongs struggled for market share. Sometimes the struggle involved competitive bribery, after the fashion of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould. Sometimes it entailed efforts to take over the benevolent associations. The failure of the Six Companies to prevent passage of the 1882 Exclusion Act seriously diminished the prestige of that organization; in the wake of the failure the tongs seized control of the Six Companies. Often the competition gave rise to racketeering and extortion. Not infrequently it erupted in “tong wars” among the highbinders, or hatchet men, of the competing firms.14
The extent of the power of the tongs and the prevalence of vice in China town were matters of constant dispute. Persons and parties antipathetic to the Chinese naturally emphasized the crime and violence, conflating the associations with the tongs and linking both to the infamous Triad gangs of China. Many Chinese themselves lamented the power of the tongs, although, for reasons of self-preservation, they rarely spoke out publicly.
Yet for Chinese struggling to get ahead the tongs serve a vital purpose. Lew Wah Get wasn’t unbiased in the matter, having been an officer in one of the tongs. But he explained the basic operation:
If you wanted to join a tong, you had to have a friend who was already a member sponsor you. He had to swear to your good character, and even then the tong would investigate your name for one month before they let you in. This was the rule for everybody. You could be a cook, a waiter, work in a gambling house or do any kind of work, but you had to have a friend to sponsor you. And once you were a member, you were on your honor to follow all the rules. If you did, then the tong would protect you. If anyone threatened you, or interfered with your business, the tong would help you out. Or if you couldn’t find a job, the tong would send you someplace, or introduce you to someone who could give you work. This was why so many people wanted to join.
Lew Wah Get didn’t deny that the tongs played rough. “Fighting was a very frequent issue. If members of our tong had been threatened or their businesses tampered with, naturally we had to take steps to protect them. Or suppose another party owed us money and refused to pay; we might decide to bear a grudge and force retribution.” But the Chinese in America didn’t have many alternatives. “Society at that time was very dangerous, you know.”15
A PROVERB FROM medieval Europe held that “city air makes a man free.” So it seemed to one group in particular in Gilded Age America. Among the residents of New York’s Lower East Side were an indeterminate number of individuals who did not fit easily into any of the communities recognized by respectable society. How these persons identified themselves varied from one to the next. Some called themselves “queers,” others “fairies” or “faggots.” The terms had different meanings, connoting both more and less than the later terms “homosexual” and “gay.” But they all signified persons who refused to honor majority notions of proper gender behavior.16
Gay men found life in New York more tolerable than life in many other communities. The large number of effectively single men, including immigrants whose wives hadn’t yet joined them in the new country, provided a population into which gay men might easily blend. And that large population of single men supported a sex and entertainment industry whose general transgression of moral norms afforded a cover to the particular transgressions of gay men. Dance halls and saloons catering to gay customers flourished among the many “resorts” in the Bowery district; Paresis Hall, at Fifth Street, was well known both to those who sought it out as a place where gay men might comfortably congregate and to those who wished to avoid it for the same reason. The police monitored the clubs and occasionally raided them, partly in response to pressure from such moral reformers as Charles Parkhurst, the Presbyterian minister who headed the City Vigilance League, but partly as a reminder to the club operators to keep up with the payments that normally kept the cops away.
For many gay persons the Bowery, the Tenderloin, the Rialto, and a few other neighborhoods served as essential gathering grounds. Wealthy men and women might find privacy in their homes or exclusive clubs, but the crowded conditions of working-class life forced the poor and even those of moderate means onto the street and into the dance halls. Public parks, too, served as places where gay men could meet other gay men. What a slightly later generation (of the 1920s) would call “cruising” could be done in relative anonymity, which was the closest many gay men could come to privacy. In some respects the situation of gay people wasn’t much different from that of non-wealthy heterosexual couples, who likewise found privacy scarce in a crowded city. One vice squad agent said of Central Park, “We didn’t see anything else but couples laying on grass, or sitting on benches, kissing and hugging each other … especially in the dark sections which are poorly lighted.” Gay couples had to compete for the darkest corners and most sheltered alcoves. And they did so knowing that the price they would pay upon being discovered might be greater than that paid by heterosexuals, for whom illegally indecent behavior was defined more narrowly than it was for gay
couples.17
Gay people came to New York for the same reasons straight people did, but for another reason as well. Not all knew before coming that the city offered an active, if partially covert, life for gay people, but most knew that the places they were leaving did not. Small towns in America were generally hostile to homosexual behavior; many foreign countries were equally so. A German gay man explained that he had been arrested in his homeland for sodomy. “I was condemned to imprisonment. My social position was totally destroyed, my family brought to sorrow and shame.” Upon release he discerned no alternative to emigration. “In consequence of the disgrace which came upon me in my fatherland I am obliged to reside in America.” And once in America he discovered that New York offered better refuge than almost anywhere else.18
Gay culture was considerably less well defined than the various ethnic cultures of New York, partly because the gay community crossed ethnic (and racial) lines but also because homosexual behavior connoted homosexual identity less clearly than it would at a later time. Even so, the gay experience mirrored the ethnic experience in certain ways. The gay neighborhoods, like the ethnic neighborhoods, were recognized as distinctive places, and they were treated with the same mixture of fascination and repugnance that often characterized attitudes of non-members toward the ethnic cultures. Straight men and women seeking an evening’s thrill would visit the gay saloons and clubs to be shocked and titillated. And the gay community provided some of the same newcomer-assistance services for which the ethnic communities were famous. One German Jew, a gay man, didn’t reach New York till the twentieth century, but his experience was certainly shared by earlier arrivals. He recalled not knowing anyone or having any idea how to get started in his new home. Someone told him that gay men gathered at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Riverside Drive. “I met a man there and we started talking. He was a Harvard man and taught ethical culture.” The two commenced an affair, which lasted two years and introduced the new man to all aspects of American life. “That was the best contact I made.”19
