The American Future (39 page)

Bee knew the criminal courts were rigged against convictions of any of those who had actually committed murder. A judge of the California Supreme Court, Hugh Murray, had handed down an opinion that since the Chinese had ancestrally crossed the Bering Straits, and over the centuries had become, in effect, Indians, the constitutional provision that disbarred Native Americans from giving evidence against citizens applied to them too. But these Chinese/Indians were of course often the only firsthand witnesses. So Bee changed tactics and did something outrageous. On behalf of the Six Companies he sued entire cities for
losses of property during the riots and forced marches. He called them reparations. Though Bee seldom won any substantial damages, his persistence rattled local authorities, who saw themselves having to impose taxes on their citizenry if the plaintiffs were successful. The spirited determination of Bee and his partner Benjamin Brooks to use the Burlingame Treaty and the Constitution to establish basic legal decencies emboldened the Chinese themselves to think one day they might be treated with a modicum of human respect. When in 1892 a Californian congressman, Thomas Geary, introduced an act of Congress requiring all Chinese to carry photo IDs and President Benjamin Harrison—too timid to defy public prejudice in an election year—signed it into law, the Six Companies ordered over 100,000 of their people to defy the law and refuse to carry the degrading cards. In their official statement, probably drafted by Fred Bee, they actually dared to presume that “as residents of the United States we claim a common manhood with all other nationalities.” Despite another economic panic in 1893 scapegoating them, the Chinese community asked for “an equal chance in the race of life, in this, our adopted home.”

There were many in positions of authority who thought “over our dead bodies.” One of them was Terence Powderly, who had led the Knights of Labor that had been in the forefront of the anti-Chinese movement in the 1870s and 1880s and who from 1897 to 1902 was commissioner general of immigration. Ensuring that Angel Island, the holding center in San Francisco Bay, was designed to keep out as many Chinese as possible, Powderly declared with a flourish that set the tone for generations of immigration officials to come, “I am no bigot but I am an American and believe that self-preservation is the first law of nations as well as nature.” Self-preservation decreed that almost no Chinese women be admitted since they either were prostitutes, or if apparently legally married, would seal the fate of the United States by breeding generation after generation of heathen Chinee.

But the history of just one of those young Chinese Americans born in the United States pointed the way to a less paranoid future. Wong Kim Ark, the twenty-three-year-old son of a San Francisco merchant family, had been visiting family in China in 1895. His papers were straightforward, but the famously prejudiced Collector of Customs John H. Wise, responsible for West Coast immigration, denied him entry
on the grounds that he was not a citizen and thus was barred by the Exclusion Act. Wong had in fact been allowed back to California after an earlier trip in 1890, and when he was detained on board a ship in the bay hired an attorney to file a writ of habeas corpus. The Fourteenth Amendment, which specified that all those born in the United States were entitled to citizenship, held as much for the children of ineligibles like his parents as anyone else. The U.S. district attorney argued that for people of ethnic groups deemed unassimilable, birth was not enough to give rights of citizenship and painted a picture of national self-destruction should Wong's claim be upheld: America at the mercy of “persons who must necessarily be a menace to the welfare of our Country.” Happily, as Erika Lee records in her fine account of the case, the presiding judge thought the matter much simpler: “It is enough that he is born here whatever the status of his parents.” Only criminal acts could waive this right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Wong was released, and when the case was heard on appeal by the Supreme Court of the United States, the California judge's opinion was upheld. Though Chinese immigrants would be maltreated for many generations, the mere idea of an Asian American was no longer a contradiction in terms.

And for those who, unlike Wong Kim Ark, had not been born in the United States, there was another option in the decades after exclusion. They could pretend to be Mexicans. Because the Mexican government was more hospitable to Chinese immigration and because controls at the frontier were more lax, the need for temporary Mexican labor in the farms and orchards of Southern California being acute, the first generation of
coyote
smugglers could ship the Chinese, dressed in serapes and sombreros, queues cut off, over the frontier. Often they would arrive in San Francisco Bay, switch ships to steamers heading for Mexico, and then be taken in boxcars, or sometimes (if the disguise was good enough) by mule train or even foot, across the border between Sonora and Arizona, or between Baja California and San Diego. The routes were exactly what they are now; the business was as lucrative as now; the businessmen were sometimes Chinese-Mexican like Jose Chang; pure Chinese like Lee Quong “the Jew”; sometimes American operators like B. C. Springstein or Curly Edwards. And already, in the early decades of the twentieth century (especially during Prohibition) the profits of the human contraband were enriched by having the ille
gals take drugs and drink (opium and whiskey) with them. The border was 300 miles long; there were never enough patrolmen, or “in-line” riders on the freight trains, and the industry in Sonora forging residence certificates for the “Mexicans” was brilliantly professional. Besides, as one of the immigration inspectors said, it was hard telling Mexicans and Chinamen apart. At least 17,000 undocumented Chinese entered the United States this way between 1882 and 1920, a drop in the bucket of what was to come. But the peoples for whom the Crèvecoeur promise had been most bitterly betrayed were finding their own way to make it come true.

Peering out at the fog and rain, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi stood in the head he had designed: the head of Liberty Enlightening the World. The day, 28 October 1886, had gone well despite the weather. A million had watched the parade from City Hall Park down Broadway. The bands had been properly rehearsed; the flotilla of tugs and steamboats in the harbor, a happy cacophony of horns and whistles. Even the poem written by one Sidney Herbert Pierson had suited the occasion: “Today the slaves of ancient scorn and hate / Behold across the waters…/ Her blazing torch flame through ocean's gate.” Around four o'clock with the light fading, Bartholdi listened intently for the end of Secretary Evarts's speech, the signal for him to unveil the statue. A burst of applause came from the 2,000 dignitaries seated before the pedestal. Bartholdi tugged at the ripcord, and, with the precision he had prayed for, the great tricolor veil fell from the face of the colossus. A roar went up from the audience and a mighty tooting from the tugboats. But then, when the sounds eventually died away, Secretary Evarts went on with his unfinished speech. Grover Cleveland's face (which liked a good prank) was a mask of attentive self-control even though the temptation to chuckle must have been gut-busting. Instead, in turn he rose to his feet, sonorous and apt as usual, to accept the gift of the statue from the sister republic of France. “We are not here today to bow before the representation of a fierce warlike god filled with wrath and vengeance but we joyously contemplate instead our own deity keeping watch and ward over the open gates of America.”

They were indeed still open. In the next six months a quarter of a million immigrants saw the upraised copper arm with its beacon of liberty as their ships sailed into the harbor and onto processing sheds at Castle Gardens. On 11 May 1887, thirteen steamers, coming from Liverpool (the
Wyoming
,
Helvetia
, and
Baltic
), Antwerp, Glasgow, Bremen, Hamburg, Marseilles, Le Havre, and Bordeaux (the
Chateau d'Yquem
!), unloaded just short of 10,000 on a single day. And the
New York Times
had had enough of the spirit of hospitality. “Shall we take Europe's paupers, her criminals, her lunatics, her crazy revolutionaries, her vagabonds?” the paper asked. These were laborers “who lived on garbage” and were a “standing menace to the city's health.” Another editorial (for the
Times
sounded off regularly on the subject) opined that “in every Anarchist meeting, every official statement concerning the condition of labor or the inmates of our almshouses and asylums for the insane, every report relating to plague spots in the slums of our great cities may be felt something to remind the people of the United States that immigration under restrictions now provided is not a blessing.”

Seven years later, in 1894, the Immigration Restriction League was duly founded to combat the irresponsible, sentimental universalism (as it saw it) of those who looked upon the torch of Liberty in New York Harbor and wiped a tear from their eye. The men who created the league were dry-eyed when it came to the fate of the tempest-tost. If they were not sentimentalists, they were also not street shouters like Dennis Kearney, or labor tub-thumpers like Terence Powderly. They were from the cream of the eastern patriciate; those who flattered themselves as belonging to its intellectual as well as social aristocracy, and a disgraceful number of them were professors. Not any professors either, but the founding fathers of the social sciences in the United States: statisticians, eugenicists, biologists, economists, and ecologists. Sometimes, like Madison Grant, the author of
The Passing of the Great Race
(1916), they were a combination of all those scientific endeavors, for Grant published his apprehensions about the vanishing moose and caribou before declaring that white America was committing “race suicide” by allowing the biologically degraded to take so many jobs that those in a more exalted tier had no option but to limit the size of their families.

They were not, then, xenophobic crackpots, the restrictionists.
Princeton and Yale were prominent among their alma maters. Their most strenuous mind, arguably, was Francis A. Walker, the dean of American statisticians and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And the league was itself born upstream on the Charles in the sacred halls of Harvard by three graduates whose names are purest Brahmin: Prescott Farnsworth Hall (who would serve as secretary of a national organization of immigration restriction societies into the 1920s when their policy had become law), Robert DeCourcy Ward (the first professor of meteorology at Harvard), and Charles Warren, whose name still adorns the graduate center for American history at that university. The aim stated in their constitution was “to arouse public opinion to the necessity of a further exclusion of elements undesirable for citizenship or injurious to our national character.” They used the already formidable network of Harvard alumni to spread the word; to reach powerful politicians like the Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge and his close friend and fellow alumnus Theodore Roosevelt. With over five million immigrants arriving between 1880 and 1890, they believed the American future at stake. The nation's virtues had been inherited from “sturdy” (a word they liked to repeat) stock of the English, Scots, and (even) Irish along with a decent Nordic smattering of Scandinavians and Germans. That inbred pedigree of resolute will, toughness, and beauty, the product of generations of trial, was now under siege from the polluting under-races pouring through New York from southern and eastern Europe: Italians, “Slavs” (Poles, Ruthenians, Lithuanians), Hungarians and Rumanians, Armenians and Syrians and most abominable of all, “the Hebrews.”

From their faculty houses and gentleman's clubs (no Hebrews need apply), the professors and the patricians could smell the reek of cooking onions and grimy underthings; they could see the dirt-clogged nails of the sweat workers in the tenement garment shops, and they trembled for America as they pressed their lawn handkerchiefs to their noses. They were all well traveled. They all adored Europe; but it was the Europe of Michelangelo, of countless Hotel Bristols, not the chicken-gizzard slums and the greasy brothels. Now the very worst of Europe was invading the American shore, dispatching its diseased madmen, tubercular paupers, and sinister agitators. Only they who understood, as they kept on saying, the
scientific
basis of the threat stood between America and death by subhuman infestation.

Eighteen ninety-three was the perfect year to begin the campaign that would culminate in the establishment of the Immigration Restriction League. The country was in the midst of another of its economic meltdowns: failing banks; massive unemployment. In an attempt at rallying the national spirit, the Columbian Exposition had opened in Chicago, and had proven an electric-lit wonder. But even there the lecture delivered by the Wisconsin professor of history Frederick Jackson Turner, attributing the triumphant expansion of democracy to the moving continental frontier, had a valedictory ring to it when Turner declared that frontier closed. Ideological claustrophobia bred paranoia. Now that the invasion of the Inferior Races had penetrated the interior of the United States, there was nowhere to flee (except to their elegant summer homes in Maine and Long Island). Had they managed to shut the door on the Chinese in the West only to succumb to what the
Times
called “the Chinese of the eastern cities”? Lengthening unemployment lines and a fierce scramble for jobs recruited the forces of organized labor to the cause of restriction. In the rural South and parts of the Midwest, the sense of a capitalist plot to swamp America with what the populist politician Tom Watson called “the scum of creation,” at the same time as they upheld the gold standard to make credit harder for regular folks, aggravated the resentment. It was, after all, the United States Chamber of Commerce and manufacturers' associations who were resisting immigration restrictions in the name of cheaper labor costs. In the meantime honest white workers were left to cope as best they could.

In June 1896, MIT's Francis Walker published his own arguments for restriction in the
Atlantic Monthly.
The fact that he had earned respect as Civil War soldier, commissioner of Indian affairs (presiding of course over the golden age of their liquidation in the 1870s), and as the founder of national associations of both economists and statisticians, meant that Walker's adherence to the restrictionist cause gave it priceless intellectual respectability. In the article he acknowledged that America had been built on the open hospitality of the Founding Fathers, but that did not necessarily mean their word should be law forever. They had cleared forests with abandon; now it was thought prudent to conserve them. So while our “fathers were right…yet the patriotic American may properly shrink in terror in contemplation of the vast hordes of ignorant and brutalised peasants who throng to
our shores.” Immigration had once been a test of will and fiber; now it was “pipeline immigration” run by unscrupulous agents in central and eastern Europe who locked their victims in boxcars, disgorged them on Ellis Island, and then drove them to the coal face in Pennsylvania and the Appalachians. To those who said “they do the jobs we do not wish to perform,” Walker wondered whether that was a good thing seeing as there had been no jobs the generation of Andrew Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson had thought beneath them. If the Irish now liked Italians doing the menial work once allotted to them, perhaps if Baron Hirsch sent two million Jews (the fear of Jews was always counted in millions), Italians could stand aside from work they judged demeaning, but at what cost to the republic? Walker, who when he chose to turn it on could wax Gothic in his lurid, comic-book horrors, summoned up what America would become if nothing was done: a nocturnal vision of “police driving from the garbage dumps the miserable beings who try to burrow in those unutterable depths of filth and slime in order that they sleep there. Was it in cement like this that the foundations of our republic were laid?”

The restrictionists knew how to seem reasonable, demanding at the beginning a literacy test. Was it not common sense to require immigrants to be able to read fifty or so words
in any language
? (This usually meant the official language of their nation of origin, which would have barred the Jews of the Pale of Settlement who for the most part knew only Hebrew and Yiddish; or Czechs of the Habsburg Empire who didn't care to speak German.) But pressure mounted on Congress, which heard Henry Cabot Lodge's speeches on the subject, and a law went through both houses only for President Cleveland (in his second term) to veto it and to do so with an eloquent restatement of the classic Crèvecoeur–Paine case for the uniqueness of the American experiment. Perhaps he remembered that rainy day in October 1886. Such a law, the president said, would be “a radical departure from our national policy relating to immigrants. Heretofore we have welcomed all who come here from other lands except those whose moral or physical condition…threatened danger to our national welfare and safety. We have encouraged those coming from foreign countries to cast their lot with us and join in the development of our vast domain, securing in return a share in the blessings of citizenship.” In repudiation of the restrictionist case that immigration meant economic
damage, Cleveland went on, “This country's stupendous growth, largely due to the assimilation of millions of sturdy adopted patriotic citizens, attests the success of this generous and free-handed policy.” Similar proposals would be brought to the desks of Presidents Taft and Wilson, and each would apply the veto once more.

A war was looming, in the ranks of social scientists as well as in Serbia and Belgium. In 1914 Edward Alsworth Ross, another of social science's most revered patriarchs, fired from Stanford in 1900 by Leland's widow for injudicious remarks about silver-backed currency and support for Asian exclusion, published
The Old World in the New
. Ross's book, the most influential in the whole debate before Madison Grant's racist bible, is the familiar litany of evils said to have been brought by the “inferior races” of the new immigration. And like many in the genre, under the guise of science it actually drove home its fears in deranged hyperbole. With Polish women producing seven children in fourteen years, “the Middle Ages” had been brought to America. The Hebrew mind was calculating and “combinative,” fit for anticipating stock prices, in contrast to “the free poetic fancy of the Celts.” The most eugenically minded chapter spoke of how the “blood now being injected into the veins of our people is sub-common.” Look at the crowd coming down the gangplank, Ross wrote, and you will see “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality [who] clearly belong in skins in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.” (Many of the restrictionists were associated with the natural history and zoological societies and designed their displays.) “Ugliness,” Ross goes on, is both symptom and eugenic threat for “in every face there was something wrong: lips thick, mouths coarse, upper lip too long, chin poorly formed, bridge of nose hollowed…there were sugarloaf heads; moon faces, slit mouths, lantern jaws, goose bills that one might imagine a malicious djinn amused himself by casting human beings from a set of skew molds discarded by the Creator.” This was the sort of stuff that would get a hearty roar of approval from Nazis like Alfred Rosenberg, not to mention his Leader.

But the dominant social-science paradigm did not go completely uncontested. The great Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas, the grandchild of Orthodox Jews as both his admirers and demonizers like to recall, devoted a life to attacking the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer; the pseudo-biology of racial norms. Cultures, Boas argued,
were certainly different but not to be arranged in some sort of hierarchy of mental and physical capacity. At the end of his
The Mind of Primitive Man
, Boas hoped that his work might “teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilizations different from our own and that we should learn to look on foreign races with greater sympathy.”