The Chinese Must Go
Page 5
of wars with Native American tribes— and a period of reconstruction—as
the federal government remade the South and West in the years that fol-
lowed.44 During these battles and attempts at peace, the United States saw
western expansion, a crisis over black slavery, and the ascent of racial sci-
ence. Beneath this turmoil lay central questions for American democracy:
Who could claim U.S. citizenship? What power came with that privilege?
The U.S. constitution offered no definitive answers. Since the found ers
had not created a singular form of national citizenship, the states reserved
the rights to grant citizenship and its privileges in the antebellum period.
This resulted in the fragmentation of citizenship, as states granted disparate
civil rights based on distinct criteria. Though natural- born citizens fell under
the purview of the states, the federal government handled the naturaliza-
tion of the foreign- born. In 1790, Congress reserved the privilege of natu-
ralization for “ free white person(s)” “of good moral character.” Whether
granted by the state or the federal government, citizenship status still car-
ried only limited social and formal meaning. Other forms of social mem-
bership, including sex, race, freedom, property, and marital status, were more
likely to determine an individual’s status and rights. Aliens could not vote
in many states, for example, but neither could women or free blacks. And in
New York and Mas sa chu setts, where state- based immigration control tar-
geted Irish paupers, U.S. citizenship was not enough to shield against de-
portation. At a time rife with social divisions, the line between citizen and
alien was not particularly salient.45
It was not until after the Civil War that the federal government created a
singular form of national citizenship. Through the 1866 Civil Rights
Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress began to enumerate the rights
and privileges of citizenry, extending its ranks to include African Ameri-
cans and many Native Americans. Congress foresaw a future in which
these new citizens would become incorporated into the nation through
Christianization, economic integration, and education.46 This vision arose
THE CHINESE QUESTION
31
in part from radical ideas of racial inclusion, but also rested on more prag-
matic grounds. The pro cess of assimilation would help dismantle the Con-
federacy, guarantee the availability of black labor, and facilitate the acquisition
of Indian land. In this arrangement, blacks and Native Americans never
achieved the full benefits of citizenship, since discriminatory laws and prac-
tices guaranteed that race would continue to determine an individual’s
power. Still, in the postwar era African Americans and many assimilated
Native Americans found a place within the citizenry, albeit a subjugated
and often compulsory one. In contrast, the status of the Chinese in Amer-
i ca remained unclear.
During the racial and legal transformation of U.S. citizenship, rapid
industrialization and incorporation also gave rise to new concepts of eco-
nomic citizenship. Amer ica’s found ers envisioned the ideal citizen as a prop-
ertied producer. Through financial in de pen dence, the property- owning
man could claim the moral self- sufficiency required to sustain a participa-
tory democracy. But by the end of the Civil War, wageworkers outnumbered
self- employed men by 2.5 to 1, as in de pen dent producers found it difficult to
compete with corporations producing cheap goods. Late nineteenth- century
Amer i ca faced repeated recessions, a growing income gap, and expanding
rolls of wage laborers. This new financial real ity challenged old notions of
the ideal citizen and raised pressing questions. How could white wageworkers
maintain their freedom while under the thumb of their employer? And, if a
white wageworker could be a self- governing citizen, then what about the
Chinese?47
Anti- Chinese advocates like Dooner sought to draw a hard line between
white citizens and Chinese aliens. Though anti- Chinese forces lodged many
complaints against the Chinese, their two- pronged trope of the “heathen
coolie” became the primary rationale for exclusion. The term “heathen” was
both a racial and religious marker, connoting the pagan, wild, uncivilized,
and savage. Similarly, “coolie” was both a racial and economic formation,
signifying cheap, slavish, and alien laborers.48 Together, these repre sen ta tions
provided the scaffolding on which the anti- Chinese movement would be
built.49
Fears of the “coolie” arose in the context of a regime of racial slavery in
the U.S. South, and only grew in the wake of black emancipation. Starting
in the 1840s, plantation owners in Cuba began importing Chinese indentured
32 RESTRICTION
laborers to supplement enslaved Africans. The American public, reading
frightening accounts of trafficked Chinese and indentured labor, began to
imagine Chinese mi grants as unfree workers. (In his novel, Dooner states
this as simple fact: “Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery.”) As Union
armies fought to end black slavery during the Civil War, Congress also passed
its first law to regulate the “coolie trade” in the Ca rib bean. The 1862 law
expressly allowed Chinese “voluntary emigration,” but suggested that the
trafficking of Chinese workers in Cuba was anything but. As Chinese mi-
grants arrived in California, so did their reputations as unfree laborers.50
In the minds of anti- Chinese advocates, the end of the Civil War and
the beginning of black emancipation added urgency to the coolie threat in
the U.S. West. The anti- Chinese movement, like the fight for abolition
in the South, was based on the premise that racial slavery threatened white
freedom. The meaning of freedom shifted considerably during the nineteenth
century. In the antebellum period, Americans needed to be self- employed
to prove their freedom and economic citizenship, but after the Civil War
Americans simply needed to contract their own labor and demonstrate their
financial in de pen dence through consumption.51 Chinese workers threatened
white freedom by undercutting these tenets of economic citizenship. Ac-
cording to their detractors, the Chinese drove down white wages through
labor competition while refusing to consume American products.
In the West, anti- Chinese agitators argued that coolies were the new
slaves, while monopolists were the new slaveholders. Monopolists could
use pliable Chinese coolies to deny white workers their freedom and man-
hood, that is, their ability to negotiate a living wage and provide for depen-
dents. The growing antimonopolist movement adopted the anti- Chinese
cause as their own, describing the coolie threat in terms that intertwined ra-
cial and economic logic. Chinese coolies would always be cheap and pliable
labor, they maintained, because the Chinese possessed an inherently servile
nature. The Chinese could not be proletarian allies in the fight against cap-
ital; instead, they were destined to be tools in the hands of monopolists
.
Furthermore, they demonstrated an uncanny ability to survive without
consumption, for they lacked an innate desire for the trappings of civiliza-
tion. According to prevailing ste reo types, coolies did not eat red meat, buy
books or nice clothes, engage in leisure, or provide for women and children.
In other words, they showed no evidence of the financial in de pen dence nec-
THE CHINESE QUESTION
33
essary for economic citizenship. Instead, they remained an alien presence
in Amer ica.52
If the image of the “coolie” stoked fears of slavery reborn, that of the “hea-
then” fueled nightmares of the American republic undone. Whereas most
Americans assumed that Eu ro pean mi grants would permanently settle in
Amer i ca, learn its ways, and become its citizens, they believed that Chi-
nese mi grants could never be enfolded into the nation. Not only did the
Chinese heathen worship idolatrous gods, eat rats, and tell lies under oath,
but white Americans feared that these pagan beliefs, uncivilized ways, and
immoral conduct could never be reformed. These notions of the Chinese
heathen were at once ancient and new. Their genealogy could be traced back
through centuries of orientalism, which positioned the barbaric East as the
foil to the civilized West, but the prevailing ste reo type owed a great deal to
advances in racial science, which confirmed that the Chinese were innately
inferior to Anglo- Saxons. In the mid- nineteenth century, it was common
sense to most Americans that Chinese mi grants would always be queer,
barbarous, and inassimilable strangers. While an authoritarian state might
be able to subjugate an “indigestible” minority race, a republic, it was believed,
required a homogenous citizenry to survive.53 How would a government of
the people and by the people endure if those people were incapable of as-
similation and self- government? If the Chinese became U.S. citizens,
Dooner’s dystopia would be close at hand.
In the U.S. West, Amer ica’s nascent settler colonial proj ect added incen-
tive for recently arrived Eu ro pean mi grants to rally against the “heathen
Chinee.” When the United States claimed the lands of northern Mexico in
1848, U.S. colonial settlers traveled west to plant the seeds of American “civi-
lization.” The United States claimed this new territory using white settle-
ment, white reproduction, and elimination or assimilation of the land’s
previous Native American and Mexican occupants.54 Eager to establish a
white American society in the imagined wilderness, West Coast settlers de-
veloped a more inclusive definition of whiteness in hopes of expanding their
own ranks. Based on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexicans were
granted formal citizenship and legal whiteness, although they continued to
be treated as racially ambiguous. Whereas East Coast Americans portrayed
Irish and Eastern Eu ro pe ans as probationary members of the white race, West
Coast settlers saw more potential for assimilation in Eu ro pean mi grants.55
34 RESTRICTION
White ethnics would simply “mingle their blood” to “become perfectly as-
similated with the country,” maintained American citizens. But “the idea of
thus assimilating the Chinaman is of course repugnant and not to be toler-
ated.”56 By rallying around the anti- Chinese cause in the U.S. West, white
ethnics could downplay their own cultural diversity and seize a rare oppor-
tunity for racial upward mobility.57
So power ful was the image of the heathen coolie that the anti- Chinese
movement united white colonial settlers in the U.S. West across traditional
divisions of class, politics, and ethnicity. But did white Americans’ fear of
the “heathen coolie” have any basis in economic and social real ity? Were the
Chinese unfree workers who were uninterested in assimilating into Amer-
ican society in the nineteenth century? The simple answer to these problem-
atic questions is no.58 These repre sen ta tions of the Chinese, widely accepted at
the time and repeated too often ever since, do not stand. Even the most ada-
mant anti- Chinese agitators at the time recognized the disjuncture between
ideology and real ity. In many ways, it was the Chinese mi grants’ violations
of the heathen coolie ste reo type that made them such a menace.
Though Chinese men in the United States encountered many forms of
economic exploitation, they were not bound or indentured laborers. Women
and girls sometimes experienced human trafficking, but Chinese men were
compensated for their work, albeit scantly, and were free to leave their place
of employment if they could find a better one.59 That said, free and un-
free labor were never dichotomous categories, and at times, circumstance
could push individual Chinese workers toward the unfree end of the
spectrum. Some arrived in the country heavi ly indebted to those who had
paid their passage, others were coerced into gang labor, and all encoun-
tered a dual wage system based on race. Still, Chinese workers never fully
embodied the coolie trope.60 It is impor tant to recognize the discrepancy
between racial repre sen ta tions and the actual social relations of production,
not only to disprove old- time slurs, but also to understand the multidimen-
sional nature of the Chinese threat. As free labor, the Chinese held a certain
degree of economic power and with it the dangerous potential for upward
mobility.
While the Chinese constituted less than 10 percent of the population of
California in 1870, they accounted for approximately 25 percent of the work-
THE CHINESE QUESTION
35
force. During the rapid development of the U.S. West at mid- century, Chi-
nese workers, who were invariably relegated to unskilled and low- paid posi-
tions, upgraded the status of white workers who claimed more coveted oc cu
pations.61 But once the Central Pacific Railroad was completed in May 1869,
and goods from the U.S. East began to flood western markets, the economy
was no longer so elastic. After the panic of 1873, Chinese workers, who had
acquired technical skills during their de cade in the West, began to move into
jobs considered desirable by skilled white workers. As racially based job divi-
sions began to break down, the Chinese entered a wide range of industries.62
In 1882, a Trades Assembly investigation reported this with great alarm:
We find [the Chinese] employed in the manufacture of boots and shoes, bar-
rels, boxes, brushes, brooms, blankets, bricks, blinds, clothing, canned goods,
cigars and cigar boxes, cloth, cordage, furniture, flannels, gloves, harness, jute
bagging, knitted goods, leather, matches, paper, ropes, soap, straw boards,
sashes, saddles, shirts and underclothing of all kinds, slippers, twine, tinware,
willow- ware, wine and whips; also employed as cooks, carpenters, domestic
servants, expressmen, farm laborers, fishermen, firemen on steamers, laun-
drymen, locksmiths, miners, paint ers, peddlers, sign- writers, waiters, and at
repairing clocks and watches. We find them employed in breweries, chem-
ical works, flou
rmills, lumber and planning mills, distilleries, smelting works,
powder factories, vineyards, woolen mills, tanneries, on railroads, and as
laborers in almost every department of industry.63
The same could be said, of course, of many Irish, German, or Italian mi-
grants in the U.S. West, but assumptions about racial difference made the
Chinese foreign competitors instead of future compatriots. While Chinese
workers found broader employment, Chinese entrepreneurs grew in ranks,
partially through migration of the merchant class, but also through local
socioeconomic mobility, against all odds. The encroachment of Chinese
small businesses began to disquiet white employers as well as their white em-
ployees, widening the class base of the anti- Chinese movement.64
Soon it was Chinese economic success, and not just their slavish reputa-
tion, that fed fears of the “yellow peril.” As anti- Chinese advocates strug-
gled to reconcile assumptions about Chinese inferiority with obvious signs
of their success, they produced a contradictory racial formation. Dooner
36 RESTRICTION
portrays the coolie as “servile to the last degree,” but he also allows that the
Chinese were capable of “incredible cunning,” “remarkable . . . industry
and indomitable perseverance.” “Their capacity for business, like their au-
thority, seems illimitable,” he writes. “They have invariably vanquished op-
position in every department of trade or manufacture in which they have
succeeded in educating their people; and no sooner has this success been
achieved in one department than their energies are directed to new fields.” 65
This danger was visualized in an 1882 po liti cal cartoon titled “What Shall
We Do with Our Boys?” In the workingman’s newspaper The Wasp,
George Frederick Keller depicts the Chinese coolie as a simian beast, who,
with the help of a dozen arms, si mul ta neously performs numerous trades
and sends his earnings back to China. The Chinese represented a perver-
sion of economic citizenship: endless and industrious wage labor without
becoming free, civilized, and investing in Amer ica. The result of the coolie’s
industry, the title of the cartoon makes clear, is unemployment for white
young men, who now have little hope of escaping delinquency. At once, the