The Chinese in America (21 page)

On the morning of November 3, 1885, hundreds of white men held good on their promise in a giant raid against the Tacoma Chinatown. They kicked down doors, dragged the occupants outside, and herded six hundred Chinese to the Northern Pacific Railroad train station during a heavy rainstorm, where they kept them without shelter for the night. As a result, two men died from exposure and one merchant’s wife went insane; the rest were rescued by the railroad, which transported them safely to Portland.

The secretary of war dispatched troops to Seattle, preventing, temporarily at least, another anti-Chinese pogrom. But it is difficult to assess which posed the greater threat to the Chinese, the mob or the troops. Some soldiers decided to collect a “special tax” from the residents of Chinatown, seizing cash from the people they were sent to protect. Others joined in mob activities, beating up several Chinese, cutting off one man’s queue, pushing another down a flight of stairs, throwing still another into a bay.

The following February, months after the troops had left, white rioters in Seattle once again violently ousted the remaining Chinese from their homes. They dragged the Chinese from their beds, ordered them to pack, and marched them to a steamer bound for San Francisco. Even without an angry mob at their heels, most Chinese were anxious to leave town, but they lacked the funds to purchase steamship tickets. Some eighty Chinese who had the cash to pay for passage embarked immediately, while the rest, at least three hundred people, were left shivering on the docks, thronged by a crowd determined to prevent them from returning to their homes. The governor, Watson C. Squire, issued a proclamation ordering the mob to disperse, and volunteers were sworn in as policemen to protect the refugees from physical injury. When the Home Guard escorted the Chinese back to their old neighborhoods, a mob of two thousand rioters attacked them, resulting in gunfire that left one rioter dead and four wounded. After this fracas, President Grover Cleveland declared martial law and dispatched federal troops to Seattle.

In 1885, far worse occurred in a mining community in Rock Springs, Wyoming. The end of the silver boom had created a labor excess in the area, and white miners, unable to compete with the low wages the Chinese accepted, conspired to drive out their competition. Arming themselves with knives, clubs, hatchets, and guns, they headed for the local Chinatown, robbing and shooting the Chinese they met along the way. Once they reached Chinatown, they ordered the residents to leave within one hour. The Chinese quickly packed their belongings, but the white mob grew impatient and began torching shacks, shooting many of those who ran out to escape the fire and smoke. Some of the residents were forced back into the inferno, where they burned to death. Those who managed to escape hid in the mountains, where, exhausted from lack of sleep and food, some died from exposure or were eaten by wolves. Hundreds of stragglers were rescued by passing trains. In the end, the massacre claimed at least twenty-eight lives, and local authorities, unable to quell the riot, called in federal troops to protect the Chinese.

Outraged Chinese diplomats demanded proper action from the United States government, but Thomas Francis Bayard, the U.S. secretary of state, explained that Washington was not responsible for crimes committed in a territory. Later, the American government grudgingly paid $147,000 in indemnities to the Chinese for destroyed property, but failed to bring any of the murderers to justice. During this era, it should be noted, even Chinese diplomats were not safe from violence. In New York in 1880, Chen Lanbing, the Chinese minister to the United States (a position then equivalent to ambassador), was “pelted with stones and hooted at by young ruffians,” according to the
New York Times.
The police stood by and laughed.

Then, in the Snake River Massacre of 1887, which the historian David Stratton calls “one of the worst, yet least known, instances of violence against Chinese,” thirty-one Chinese miners in Hell’s Canyon, Oregon, were robbed, killed, and mutilated by a group of white ranchers and schoolboys intent on stealing their gold and cleansing the region of their presence. A federal official who investigated the crime called it “the most cold-blooded, cowardly treachery I have ever heard tell of on this coast, and I am a California 49er. Every one of them was shot, cut up, stripped, and thrown into the river.” Apparently some body parts were kept as souvenirs; according to Stratton, “a Chinese skull fashioned into a sugar bowl graced the kitchen table of one ranch home for many years.” After the state identified the murderers, only three were brought to trial—and all three were acquitted. A white rancher later commented, “I guess if they had killed thirty-one white men something would have been done about it, but none of the jury knew the Chinamen or knew much about it, so they turned the men loose.”

Yet perhaps the most hurtful cut was still to come. These episodes of physical violence by local citizenry were followed by federal legislation that further restricted the lives of the Chinese.

Initially, the Exclusion Act had restricted only new Chinese immigration. But two years later, in 1884, Congress amended the act, now permitting only those Chinese laborers who had lived in the United States before November 1880—the date of the last treaty signed with China—the right to travel freely between the two countries. A special certificate was issued promising the émigré that should he leave, he would be guaranteed the right to return. So for those laborers who had arrived before this date, travel out of the country was still an option. But then in 1888, only a few years after amending the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress broke the promise the United States had made to the earlier-arriving group by passing the Scott Act, which canceled all certificates granting Chinese laborers their right of reentry. Twenty thousand Chinese who had the misfortune to be out of the country when the legislation was enacted were unable to return, despite the previous guarantee from the United States government and the fact that many owned property and businesses here and had families here as well. At the very moment the law went into effect, some six hundred Chinese were on their way back to the United States with government-issued certificates granting them the right of reentry, yet they were not allowed to disembark.

The Chinese minister in Washington strongly protested the Scott Act with the U.S. State Department, which ignored him. As for the discriminatory intent of the act, President Cleveland made it clear that this was its purpose: the experiment of mixing the Chinese with American society had, he noted, proved “unwise, impolitic, and injurious.” If the Chinese had any money owed to them in the United States, he added, they could collect it in the American courts, where “it could not be alleged that there exists the slightest discrimination against Chinese subjects.”

Was Cleveland being disingenuous? Chinese émigrés immediately challenged the Scott Act in federal court. In
Chae Chan Ping
v.
United States,
a laborer (Chae Chan Ping) who had lived in San Francisco since 1875 and had obtained a legitimate return certificate before departing for China in 1887, was denied permission to disembark upon his return to California on October 7,1888. His case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which upheld the Scott Act, ruling that as the United States “considers the presence of foreigners of a different race in this country, who will not assimilate with us, to be dangerous to its peace and security, their exclusion is not to be stayed.” Continuing in this vein, the highest court in the land labeled Chinese immigrants a people “residing apart by themselves, and adhering to the customs and usages of their own country.” As such, the Chinese in America, the Court decided, were “strangers in the land.”

Four years later, in 1892, the Exclusion Act expired, but if anyone had hopes that it would be allowed to die a quiet death, they were disillusioned. Under the Geary Act, which replaced it, Chinese immigration was suspended for another ten years and all Chinese laborers in the United States were now required to register with the government within one year, in order to obtain certificates of lawful residence. Any Chinese caught without this residence certificate would be subject to immediate deportation, with the law placing the burden of proof on the Chinese. The Geary Act also deprived Chinese immigrants of protection in the courts, denying them bail in habeas corpus cases.

Insulted, many Chinese residents refused to comply with the new law. A Chinese consul urged his countrymen not to register, and in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco the Chinese community ripped up official registration notices. Three Chinese facing deportation under Geary took their case to the Supreme Court. In
Fong Yue Ting
v.
United States,
the Court decided that just as a nation had the right to determine its own immigration policy, it also possessed the right to force all foreign nationals to register. In 1895 the Supreme Court ruled in
Lem Moon Sing
v.
United States
that district courts could no longer review Chinese habeas corpus petitions, a decision that opened the door to all kinds of corruption and abuse by immigration authorities who assumed the unchecked power to bar or deport Chinese immigrants without fear of opposition from the courts.
¹¹

In this era of unchecked anti-Chinese passion, even Americans of Chinese descent found themselves subject to extralegal attempts to strip them of their rights—and their citizenship. John Wise, the collector of customs in San Francisco, would accept testimonials only from Caucasians to verify the U.S. citizenship of Chinese Americans. In an 1893 letter to a California lawyer, Wise boasted that his policy made it “almost next to impossible to prove the birth of a Chinese in this country as they never call in a white physician, and twenty years ago, no record of these births were
[sic]
kept.”

In 1894, Wong Kim Ark, a twenty-one-year-old Chinese American born in San Francisco, visited his parents in China. Returning the following year, he was denied permission to reenter the country. Once again, despite two setbacks, the Chinese took their case to the courts. Filing a writ of habeas corpus, Wong Kim Ark argued that his native birth entitled him to the privileges of American citizenship. His case would also eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

At stake was the very definition U.S. citizenship. Would the Supreme Court embrace the judicial principle of
jus soli
(“law of the soil”), whereby a person obtained citizenship simply by virtue of being born in America? Or would it turn to the racial principle of
jus sanguinis
(“law of blood”), by which the citizenship of a child would be determined by the citizenship of his or her parents? In theory, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the United States had embraced the right of birthright citizenship, but in practice, the government had failed to protect the full privileges of citizenship of blacks and Native Americans. Legally, the Wong Kim Ark affair forced the Court to determine whether nonwhites born in the United States would be entitled to U.S. citizenship on the same basis as that applied to whites or be relegated to a permanent foreign underclass.

To the credit of the Supreme Court, the majority opinion ruled on March 28, 1898, in Wong Kim Ark’s favor, declaring that all children born in the United States are American citizens, even if their parents are ineligible for naturalization. In his dissent, Chief Justice Melville Fuller insisted that all Chinese, native or foreign born, should be ineligible for citizenship, because he believed that no matter where they lived, they owed their allegiance to the emperor of China. But Justice Horace Gray, speaking for the majority, declared, “The fact ... that acts of Congress or treaties have not permitted Chinese persons born out of this country to become citizens by naturalization cannot exclude Chinese persons born in this country from the operation of the broad and clear words of the Constitution: ‘All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.’ ”
¹²

Although the Chinese community was relieved by this Supreme Court decision, victory in the courts did not always translate into a new respect for the Chinese community or for the Chinese in America as a people. To the contrary, by the turn of the century, a shameful series of local and federal acts reminded the Chinese that any court ruling, to have meaning, must have the support of local officials prepared to carry out its provisions.

In 1899, U.S. officials in Hawaii learned that a few people had died of plague in Hong Kong. Fearful that the disease had spread to Honolulu, they forbade the local Chinese from boarding ships headed for the continental United States. In addition, the board of health burned down a section of the city’s Chinatown. Health officials in San Francisco followed their example, shutting down all Chinese-owned businesses and ordering all Chinese who wished to leave the city to submit to inoculation first. The illegality of these measures prompted a Mr. Wong Wai to sue the department of public health, a lawsuit he won in both the local district court and the court of appeals. In May 1900, the court ordered the San Francisco public health department to cease and desist, but officials persisted in their campaign by enlisting the support of the board of supervisors. Soon, in contravention of the legal order, Chinatown was cordoned off by the police, barricaded, and completely quarantined, while city officials talked about burning and razing it to the ground. It took the combined efforts of the Chinese Six Companies, their attorneys, the Chinese ethnic media, the local Chinese consul, and China’s minister (ambassador) to the United States to break the quarantine and save the San Francisco Chinatown from total destruction.

It didn’t help the Chinese cause that, just at this time, the Boxer Rebellion was developing in China. Calling themselves “The Boxers United in Righteousness,” gangs of impoverished Chinese peasants, blaming foreigners for China’s economic ills, besieged and slaughtered white Christians and Chinese converts in northern China as well as white missionaries and diplomats in Beijing. While China’s ills were by no means solely attributable to the influence of foreign powers, the Opium Wars early in the nineteenth century had certainly disrupted the country’s economy and led to the granting of special economic rights to Great Britain and broad concessions to various other foreign powers in China. It took a combined military force of several Western nations to crush the rebellion, and afterward the Qing government agreed to pay massive indemnities in gold. Even though the Chinese émigrés in the United States had nothing to do with the rebellion, the strain on Chinese-American relations was bound to hurt them. Before the Boxers, the Chinese ambassador could be counted on to argue the case of the Chinese community with Washington. Now, with a weakened China—in effect, a nation that had become almost a subject nation—there was no one with any clout to plead for them.