EIGHT
The same process of population adjustment at work in frontier communities altered the composition of heavily male immigrant groups. The passage of time naturally restored the balance of men and women and young and old, reducing the rate of violent and disorderly behavior and diversifying social life. The process could, however, be disrupted and delayed by unwanted government interference. That was what happened to the Chinese immigrants during the last half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. As exceptions to the rule, their case is both instructive and disturbing. It shows how racial contempt magnified American violence not only by justifying riotous attacks but also and more subtly by blocking the balancing of the population and prolonging the tendency toward disorder inherent in male populations.
The Chinese in America
Nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants came from the area in and around Canton (Guangzhou), a chaotic region suffering from overpopulation, famine, warfare, and banditry. They were chiefly men between the ages of eighteen and thirty whose concern was earning money to support their impoverished families. The available evidence (much documentary material was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire) indicates that a majority were married, though for cultural and economic reasons they left their wives at home. In any case they were planning on returning, not on staying in the United States. A few did accumulate money, repatriate, purchase property, and retire to a life of wealth and respectability. However, for reasons that will become apparent, this was not the norm.1
The demand for labor generated by the California Gold Rush and rapid development of the Pacific states and territories made the United States a logical destination. Steady work at the Gum Sann (Gold Mountain) was a tantalizing prospect for peasants and laborers who earned the equivalent of ten or fifteen cents a day and who were worried about finding enough rice and firewood. But they had to borrow substantial sums from merchants to pay for their passage and to procure entry papers, an outlay of well over $200. The total debt, principal plus interest, represented more than ten years' wages at home. The willingness to assume such a burden was a sign of the immigrants' desperation and their optimism about prospects in the United States.2
In America their wages were garnished to repay these loans. Most also remitted a portion of their earnings to sustain their relatives in China. Both traits fueled anti-Chinese sentiment. The indebtedness of Chinese workers led to charges of unfair competition from "coolie" or "pauper labor," the practices of scrimping and sending money home to charges of "carrying away our treasure." The truth was that Chinese laborers in America were not virtual slaves, like their wretched counterparts who were worked to death in the guano pits of Peru. But neither were they entirely free. No Chinese laborer could book passage out of California until he had been cleared by the Zhonghua Huigan, the Chinese Six Companies. This powerful governing organization was dominated by merchant-creditors and saw to it that all debts were repaid before laborers returned home.'
At first Chinese immigration to California was small-scale and occasioned little opposition. From 1848 through 1851 merchants set themselves up in the retail trade and laborers took jobs mainly as cooks and launderers, conventionally female jobs that badly needed doing but posed no threat to American miners. This abruptly changed in 1852 when approximately 20,000 Chinese landed in California, all but 50 of them men. This wave, more than five times the size of all previous Chinese immigration, had come for gold. The placer mines were regarded as a white American preserve and were in any case beginning to play out, making foreign miners doubly unwelcome. Chinese competition brought racial hostility to the surface and aroused fears that California might not be a white man's land after all.4
Opposition to Chinese miners assumed the legal form of a discriminatory but lucrative miners' tax, which was collected with a vengeance in California and other western states and territories. Joseph Boyd, the deputy sheriff of Shoshone County, Idaho Territory, recalled that the tax on Chinese miners was $5 a head, of which he was allowed to keep 20 percent. "Often when the Orientals saw the collector coming they would run into the woods or other hiding places and I had to round them up and force them to pay their tax," he wrote. "Sometimes they would claim they did not have the money and I marched them in pig tail file down the trail to the store where they would borrow the required sum from the store keeper."5
Though forced deeper into debt, these men were lucky. In California the Foreign Miners' Tax collectors were notorious for their brutal tactics. "I was sorry to have to stab the poor creature," rationalized one collector, "but the law makes it necessary to collect the tax; and that's where I get my profit." By 1862 at least eleven Chinese miners in California had been murdered in this fashion.6
Other whites attacked, extorted, robbed, kidnapped, and killed Chinese miners without any pretext of law, committing violent crimes that drove the immigrants from rich mining areas and netted an estimated $1 million in gold dust. The robbers and killers knew they stood little risk of successful prosecution, as Chinese testimony against whites was not allowed in court. Of eighty-eight known murders of Chinese before 1862, just two resulted in conviction and execution.7
As a rule Chinese were permitted to work only those sites abandoned by whites as unremunerative, a restriction that prevailed not only in California but in Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, and other western states and territories into which Chinese miners ventured. "You might fire a cannon ball down the main street without danger of hitting anyone unless some stray Chinaman should chance to get in the way," was how one correspondent described Coloma, site of the original gold strike, in 1870. "The Chinese slip into these towns as the white men leave, and in their contentment with small wages, not only exist, but appear to be exceedingly happy." They might have been a good deal happier if they had been permitted to work decent claims, but when they chanced to get one angry whites showed up and drove them away.8
One response to abuse and discrimination was to return home, which more than 50,000 Chinese did between 1851 and 1868. Another was to stay and seek other forms of employment. Chinese labored in vineyards and wheat fields, excavation and drainage projects, fisheries and canneries, cigar and shoe factories, in every case proving themselves steady and efficient workers. The accomplishment for which they are best remembered was their success in cutting the Central Pacific Railroad through the Sierra Nevada mountains. They froze in blizzards, perished in explosions, were buried by avalanches. One in ten died, but the survivors got the job done. "They prove nearly equal to white men, in the amount of labor they perform," their employer Charles Crocker wrote in 1865, "and are far more reliable. No danger of strikes among them."9
Chinese biddability seemed less of a virtue to competing laborers. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, Turner's labor safety-valve actualized in timber and steel, produced a stream of white workers in search of better jobs in the West. They did not take kindly to Chinese competition during the depression years of the 1870s. Attacks on the Chinese became increasingly politicized and systematic, culminating in a full-scale race riot in San Francisco in July 1877. Exclusion was by then a powerful political issue and the key to controlling the labor vote. It also touched a deep racial nerve, as revealed in this extraordinary exchange between two lawyers testifying before a special congressional committee in late 1876. Frank M. Pixley was representing the City of San Francisco, Benjamin Brooks the Chinese:
Mr. Pixley. . . In relation to [the Chinese] religion, it is not our religion. That is enough to say about it; because if ours is right theirs must necessarily be wrong.
Mr. Brooks. What is our religion?
Mr. Pixley. Ours is a belief in the existence of a Divine Providence that holds in its hands the destinies of nations. The Divine Wisdom has said that He would divide the country and the world as the heritage of five great families; that to the blacks He would give Africa; to the whites He would give Europe; to the red man He would give America, and Asia He would give to the yellow races. He inspires us with the determination not only to have preserved our own inheritance, but to have stolen from the red man America; and it is settled now that the Saxon, American or European group of families, the white race, is to have the inheritance of Europe and of America and that the yellow races of China are to be confined to what God Almighty originally gave them; and as they are not a favorite people they are not to be permitted to steal from us what we robbed the American savage of.10
Missionaries who testified before the committee had other ideas as to which of His peoples God might have favored, not to say different views on kleptotheology. They did their best to defend Chinese immigrants, as did wealthy capitalists who had profited from their industrious labor. But the business elite had not obtained its position by championing lost causes. By 1880, the year of a bloody anti-Chinese riot in Denver, it was plain that social and industrial peace could be purchased only at the price of an end to Chinese immigration. California senators introduced, Congress passed, and in 1882 President Chester Arthur signed legislation to exclude the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years, a ban that was to be subsequently tightened and extended. It was the first time in American history that a group had been barred on the basis of race.11
And class. Chinese merchants, diplomats, students, clergymen, and travelers were permitted to come to the United States and bring their wives with them, but the same spousal privileges were denied to laborers, including those long resident in the United States. Two 1884 federal court decisions ruled that laborers' wives in China were ineligible to immigrate. (Not that large numbers of Chinese workers, indebted and forced into marginal jobs in which they earned two-thirds of the average white wage, could afford to bring them over anyway.) Resident Chinese laborers could return to China to visit their wives and families and then come back to the United States, although further restrictions enacted in 1888 made even this arrangement practically impossible.12
The campaign to bar Chinese women had in fact begun well before the Exclusion Act and its amendments. A large majority, between 70 and 90 percent, of those who came prior to 1870 were prostitutes, mostly women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five who had been sold, tricked, or kidnapped into the trade. It was an ugly business. Women who resisted were tortured until they resumed performing sexual services. Almost all became diseased; few lasted in the brothels more than four or five years. Unlike those of dead Chinese laborers, whose bones were usually shipped back to China for burial, their remains were discarded in the streets of Chinatown.13
The moral and racial revulsion occasioned by Chinese prostitution led to the passage of the 1875 Page Law, a federal act that provided substantial penalties for the importation of women for purposes of prostitution. The effect of this legislation was to slow Chinese female immigration. There were, of course, Chinese prostitutes already active in the United States, but they did not survive for long. Their demise, together with the economic and legislative barriers to female entry and the sharp rise in male laborers' immigration in the early 1880s (in anticipation of exclusion), created a set of circumstances that kept the Chinese community lopsidedly male longer than any comparable group in American history.14
The Chinese community also became progressively smaller, at least until the 1920s. Although Chinese laborers continued to enter the United States illegally after 1882, they were too few to replace those who died or returned to China, driven out by violent intimidation. In 1885 alone there were large-scale riots against Chinese workers in Seattle, Tacoma, and Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory. The last was a massacre in which miners armed with revolvers and Winchester rifles shot down Chinese men "fleeing like a herd of hunted antelope." A total of twenty-eight Chinese died in the Rock Springs Massacre, which caused an international episode and eventually forced the United States government to pay more than $147,000 in damages. Sixteen white men were arrested for the murders, but the local grand jury returned no indictments and no one was ever convicted.15
As with the Indians, to whom whites often compared the Chinese, the way such killings were carried out revealed a deep, almost feral hatred. Chinese men were scalped, mutilated, burned, branded, decapitated, dismembered, and hanged from gutter spouts. One Chinese miner's penis and testicles were cut off and then toasted in a nearby saloon "as a trophy of the hunt." This was plainly racial terrorism, and it had its intended effect. Brutalized, discouraged, and relegated to low-paying jobs, many Chinese headed for the East Coast or, if they had paid off their debts, left the United States for good.16
Those who stayed faced the stark fact of female scarcity. In 1890 the Chinese gender ratio was 2,679, roughly 27 Chinese men for every woman. Three decades later the ratio was still a very high seven to one. Intermarriage was discouraged by white racism and, more concretely, by fifteen state anti-miscegenation laws, two of which carried penalties of up to ten years in prison. In places where the practice was not strictly forbidden some Chinese men defied custom and married or cohabited with white women—one New York City official estimated about 200 such arrangements in 1900—but they usually had to settle for the dregs of white society, alcoholic or addicted prostitutes. An alternative (and, in the larger context of American social history, highly unusual) sexual gambit for those who rejected white women was polyandry. One Chinese woman might live with as many as ten men.17
The extremity of the prejudice against Asian intermarriage in the United States is highlighted by the experience of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and former Spanish colonies. Like their American counterparts, the Chinese immigrants in these lands were almost all men, but they were not confronted with insuperable cultural or legal barriers to taking native wives. They solved the problem of gender balance by marrying Siamese and Malay women, Filipinas, Hawaiians, and Mexican mestizas. Not only were such marriages permitted, they were in many cases preferred by native women, who regarded Chinese men as hard workers and good providers. These marriage markets were free and meritocratic.18
Not so the American marriage market, at least as far as the Chinese were concerned. Most sojourners remained de facto bachelors until they left or died, often by taking their own lives when age or injury prevented them from supporting themselves. Those who did manage to reproduce themselves genetically and socially were the merchant "winners" who raised their American-born sons and daughters in a closely guarded bourgeois world. What finally and decisively changed this situation was the partial lifting of restrictions on Chinese immigration during and after World War II. The majority of the refugees and immigrants who legally entered the country between 1945 and 1965 were women. Their presence and childbearing rapidly balanced the Chinese-American population, which was nearly equally divided between males and females by 1980 and had a slight female surplus by 1990.19
Chinatown Vice
What most Chinese who lived in the United States before World War II had instead of resident families were the crowded ghettos known as Chinatowns. These were simultaneously places of physical and cultural refuge, bachelor dormitories, winter quarters, labor distribution centers, mercantile hubs, and vice districts. Men of every laboring status—employed, underemployed, unemployed, and between seasonal jobs—crammed into cheap hotels and apartments, as many as twenty to a room. They pooled their pennies to purchase food, played mah-jongg on packing-crate tables, slept in shifts in double or triple bunks.20
Chinese men who shuttled back and forth from Chinatowns to the migrant labor camps in the countryside fared little better. They worked all day picking apples or grapes and at night squeezed into dreary bunkhouses, ten to a room. "Saturday night's the only night you go out and do anything, if you do anything at all," recalled Kam Wai, a long-time farm worker. "Course, if you're married, it's a different thing altogether . . . You might go to a show or something like that." But for single men like himself Saturday night meant "time in a gambling joint, that's one thing. Or I could go around to the prostitution towns, making all the rounds ... At that time, life didn't mean too much to us."21
But emotional and sexual release did, and that was the point of the Chinatown vice spots. Certain districts, such as the section of San Francisco bound by Stockton, Pacific, DuPont, and Washington streets, were virtual vice bazaars. Gambling parlors, brothels, and opium dens were chockablock with barber and pawn shops, restaurants, and lodging houses. Although Chinese vice practices varied in their cultural details, the economic and social consequences were the same as those in white bachelor laborer communities: more debt, more disease, more death, and more disorder.
Chinese workers and peasants believed in a world governed by fortune. Gamblers in a land of gamblers, they were drawn to games of chance that held out the prospect of economic freedom. A winning lottery ticket or a lucky night at the fan-tan table might mean debts cleared; a big bet a trip back to China— or into penury. Some laborers lost years of savings in a single night at the Chinatown gaming tables. Others became so impoverished through gambling that they could not set aside money to have their remains returned to their native villages, a cultural and religious catastrophe akin to being left in limbo.22
The pleasure and release purchased in a brothel set workers back from twenty-five to fifty cents, more if they visited a higher-class prostitute who maintained an exclusively Chinese clientele. (For the immigrants, in their own way as ethnocentric as their persecutors, the most disgusting thing Chinese women could do was to have sexual relations with white men, an act that declassed the women and lowered their value.) Fifty cents was half or more of a day's wages, and there was always the chance that venereal disease would ruin health and diminish earnings.2'
Themes of regret and warning appear often in the Jinshan ge ji (Songs of Gold Mountain), a remarkable anthology of Cantonese vernacular poetry composed in San Francisco in the early 1910s:
My life's half gone, but I'm still unsettled;
I've erred, I'm an expert at whoring and gambling.
Syphilis almost ended my life.
I turned to friends for a loan, but no one took pity on me.
Ashamed, frightened—
Now, I must wake up after this long nightmare;
Leap out of this misery and find my paradise.
But others laugh that old habits die hard and I'll never change.24
The hardest habit to shake was opium smoking, to which perhaps as many as one in four Chinese laborers was addicted. Though the Chinese seldom drank to excess, opium smoking was an economically equivalent vice, an unfortunate piece of cultural baggage the immigrants brought to America. The practice had been encouraged in China by the British, who illegally imported large quantities of Indian opium to China in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ultimately forcing legalization of the trade through the Opium War of 1839-1842. Prior to 1842 the British had shipped their opium exclusively through the Canton area, the region from which most of the California-bound laborers were to come. Not all Cantonese immigrants were experienced opium smokers. But they certainly knew of the vice and had the opportunity to practice it when they came to America, away from restraining family influences. The Fook Hung Company of Hong Kong and other suppliers took advantage of the situation and shipped large quantities of the drug to the United States. Its importation was legal up to 1909, though subject to a sin tax in the form of a stiff customs duty.25
Weary Chinese laborers smoked opium in the evenings and on holidays to forget their troubles and lose themselves in pleasant reveries. But too many draws on the pipe could lead to addiction, and addiction cost fifty cents or more a day, fully half a laborer's earnings. An opium habit did not immediately destroy the ability and will to labor. Myths of stupefaction to the contrary, some addicts were able to keep working for years. "I'd smoke, go to work, come home, smoke again," one illegal Hong Kong immigrant told me, explaining how he juggled an opium habit and restaurant jobs in New York City in the 1920s. He smoked to work and worked to smoke, spending nearly all of his wages on the drug.26
Few could manage this trick indefinitely, however. Physicians and missionaries who worked with the Chinese observed that even moderate and self-disciplined smokers were on a slippery slope leading to compulsive use, anorexia, impotence, demoralization, idleness, poverty, and death. This was a common Chinese view as well:
Face haggard, turning yellow and puffy,
Waist, bent like a drawn bow.
Lying on his side next to a small lit lamp,
He holds the pipe as his family fortune goes down the hole.
Look at him:
Soon he will be six feet underground.
Lazy, remiss, he won't move even if you drag him.
He's about to meet King Yimlo at Hell's tenth palace.
King Yimlo was the mythological ruler of the eighteen palaces of the underworld and judge of mortal deeds. Chinese addicts who had the misfortune to be arrested and thrown into California jails must have thought themselves already in his domain. Their screams made the nights hideous with pleas for opium.27 The puking addicts, ruined gamblers, and diseased prodigals who could not return home represented more than lost lives and personal tragedies. Chinatown vice was systemic and so were its consequences. It would not be going too far to say that it was a form of organized parasitism. The professional gamblers and criminal societies that controlled the vice industry profited directly. Government officials collected fines and taxes on imported opium and took bribes. And the merchant-creditors and labor contractors prolonged their control over immigrants, who were bound to work until their debts were repaid. Chinese laborers slipped into the cycle of work and spree as easily as their white counterparts, but in their case the vicious circle was even harder to escape because of the added burden of debt.
Crime and Demography
Chinese made up a disproportionate number of those who were arrested and convicted of misdemeanors and felony crimes in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was partly a matter of harassment, transparently so in the case of ordinances against such activities as "carrying baskets with shoulder poles." Prejudice and selective prosecution inflated the number of Chinese arrests for gambling, prostitution, and drug-law offenses, though it should be kept in mind that the violations were not simply fabrications and there is no reason to doubt that Chinese were in fact heavily involved with these vices. And prejudice alone cannot explain the disproportionate arrests of Chinese men for serious personal and property crimes. In Portland, Oregon, for example, the Chinese made up 8 percent of the city's population from 1871 to 1885 but accounted for 31 percent of arrests for homicide, 21 for aggravated assault, 14 for robbery, 30 for burglary, and 19 for larceny. As might be expected from these figures, Chinese made up more than their share of prison inmates. In 1890 the national rate of imprisonment for "Mongolians" (Chinese plus the much less numerous Japanese) was 3.8 times that of whites.28
Walter F. Willcox, the statistician who took note of these prison figures, offered a simple explanation. "The Chinese and Japanese in the United States are nearly all men," he wrote, applying Ockham's Razor, "from which class prisoners mainly come." Others have subsequently confirmed and elaborated this judgment, arguing that the lawbreaking and widespread vice in the early Chinese immigrant communities were rooted in their demographic structure, which was partly (after 1882 largely) a product of institutionalized racism. Prejudice and fear of labor competition led to exclusionary and anti-miscegenation laws, which prolonged gender imbalance, which increased crime and fed the vice industry, which produced reams of lurid newspaper publicity ("Heathen Life in Chinatown," "Slaves to Opium," "Her Back Was Burnt with Irons," and so on), which reinforced prejudice and steeled the determination to maintain barriers against entry and intermarriage, which further prolonged gender imbalance.29
The circularity of the problem was obvious to sympathetic religious and reform figures. The Presbyterian women who established and presided over the Chinese Home Mission, a San Francisco refuge for women trying to escape the brutal world of the alley brothels, were opposed to exclusion, regarding open immigration as a lesser evil than forced prostitution. The crusading journalist Jacob Riis made a similar point about opium smoking in New York's Chinatown. Riis, like many of his contemporaries, was disgusted by the presence of young white women in Chinese opium dives. The practice, though exaggerated, was not wholly illusory. During the 1870s opium smoking had spread from the Chinese to the American underworld and had become an increasingly common vice of white prostitutes and demimondaines. The specter of white women smoking opium with supposedly scheming, lecherous Chinese men gave more ammunition to the exclusionists and prompted a crackdown on opium dens, particularly those frequented by white patrons. But Riis drew a very different conclusion in How the Other Half Lives, his 1890 expose of life in the slums. "Rather than banish the Chinaman I would have the door opened wider—for his wife; make it a condition of his coming or staying that he bring his wife with him. Then, at least, he might not be what he now is and remains, a homeless stranger among us."30
The experience of the Japanese in America underscores Riis's point and confirms, by way of contrast, the role of exclusion and gender imbalance in explaining Chinese crime and vice. Male Japanese laborers first entered the country in substantial numbers during the 1890s and continued to do so until the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907-1908, an exchange of diplomatic notes through which the Japanese government agreed to issue no further passports to laborers bound for America. Although the Japanese already in the United States experienced racial discrimination, they did not initially face the same severe legal barriers against family formation and reunification that confronted the Chinese. They were permitted to summon their wives, to return to Japan to marry and then come back to the United States, or, if sufficiently prosperous, to resort to shashin kekkon, "photo marriage." This was a mail-order-bride system in which photographs, letters, and intermediaries were used to arrange long-distance marriages. Once an agreement had been reached the "picture brides" could legally join their husbands in the United States. Although there were occasional complaints about retouched photographs, shashin kekkon worked quite well—so well, in fact, that the overall Japanese gender ratio in the United States fell precipitously. In California, where the majority of Japanese lived, it dropped from 563 in 1910 to 172 just ten years later.31
Then the window of marital opportunity was slammed shut. In December 1919 the Japanese government decided to cease issuing passports to picture brides, largely to placate American exclusionists. In 1924 Congress effectively cut off Japanese immigration altogether. But by virtue of the influx of wives and brides in the first two decades of the century the Japanese had, relative to the Chinese, a head start on achieving a normal population distribution. The Japanese women who came to America were young and had a very high birth rate, three times that of white Americans. The Japanese population in the United States nearly doubled in twenty years, from 72,000 in 1910 to 139,000 in 1930, by which time fully half of the Japanese were native-born Americans.32
These demographic differences showed up in numbers of arrests. In 1928 the family-centered Japanese community of Stockton, California, which made up about 5.5 percent of the local population, accounted for only 0.4 percent of all arrests and no serious crimes. The pattern was reversed for the Chinese in San Francisco in fiscal year 1929: their share of arrests was more than three times their share of the urban population. Of course San Francisco's Chinatown was still a vice center and home to a large number of single laborers, aging yet more likely than married men or women and children to get caught in gambling and drug raids.33
Vice, Violence, and Organized Crime
The thriving Chinatown vice industry also gave rise to violence, although in not quite the same way it did in white mining camps and cattle towns. Opium, the Chinese intoxicant of choice, was a powerful tranquilizer. Those who were under its influence seldom exhibited the irritable aggressiveness of men drinking liquor in saloons, nor did they beat women and children. But opium smoking did lead to theft by impoverished addicts, especially after prohibititory federal legislation drove up the price of the drug. The opium traffic was also an indirect cause of criminal violence in the form of rivalry among the tongs, secret Chinese organizations that fought for control of the vice industry.34
The tongs' oath-bound members employed systematic bribery, intimidation, and violence to keep people in line and illicit revenues flowing. In this they closely resembled the Mafia families, their later and more famous counterparts. Tong members made money by extorting protection money from Chinese businessmen, but the key to their success was steady profit from what were essentially male vices. The tongs smuggled opium to avoid the high duty and legal restrictions against Chinese importers. They supplied the opium dens, which were outlawed in most cities. They ran gambling houses and earned income from brothels, either through direct ownership or through the collection of an extortionate tax on prostitutes. When someone tried to muscle in or refused to pay a debt, "highbinders" (a word that originally referred to Irish toughs but was extended to Chinese enforcers) were dispatched to settle accounts. The highbinders also pursued men who ran off with their prostitutes, a common though not surprising occurrence, given the shortage of women.35
If the culprit was a member of another tong, the result could be warfare. "You want to know how a lot of tong wars started?" asked Big Pete, a seventy-two-year-old gambler and member of the Suey Sing Tong, interviewed in the early 1970s. "Say, I own a girl and somebody tries to take her away from me and he succeeds. If he happens to belong to a different tong or a different family, that's it. He pays the damage." The damage might amount to $5,000, the cost of purchasing and smuggling the girl into the country. "He can have her," Big Pete continued, "but he gotta pay that five thousand dollars or he'll never see those lights again!" Lew Wah Get, an eighty-four-year-old officer of the same tong, remembered the last big fight in 1921. It erupted when the rival Hop Sing Tong took over a prostitute and refused to reimburse the expense of her illegal importation. "Not only that, but while they were doing business with us, they shot and killed one of our members . . . We decided to take revenge and fight back." The ensuing war lasted ten months and required an outside mediating committee to settle matters.36
Tong warfare had a cultural as well as an economic dimension. The Cantonese were, in the words of Chinese Imperial Commissioner Ji Ying, a violent and obstinate people who were "fond of brawls and made light of their lives." Known for their clannishness, physical courage, and alertness, the Cantonese immigrants in some ways resembled the rugged backwoodsmen from the fringes of northern and western Europe, with the important difference that their ideas of prestige and retaliation were centered on the group instead of the individual. When challenged tongs were capable of extremely violent and seemingly irrational responses, fighting pitched battles over unpaid debts as small as $15 "with every conceivable weapon." In the early days the weapons often included small axes, hence the term "hatchet men," a synonym for highbinders and a colorful addition to the American language. But the hatchets were quickly supplanted by revolvers concealed in the billowing sleeves of the highbinders' outer garments. In the twentieth century machine guns briefly came into fashion."
By then, however, organized violence was subsiding. Gauging the extent of tong membership and conflict is difficult, as these were things the Chinese concealed. At their peak in 1882-1906 the tongs employed perhaps three thousand fighting men, or roughly 3 percent of the total Chinese population. Five hundred to a thousand of these were active in San Francisco's Chinatown, the largest in the United States. The highbinders' depredations finally became so disruptive and scandalous that Chinese consular officials threatened to imprison tong members' relatives in China for crimes committed in the United States, a drastic form of legal blackmail that appears to have had some deterrent effect. The 1906 earthquake and fire also hurt the San Francisco tongs by destroying their accustomed headquarters, hideouts, and flow of income from vice dens.38
Even without the fire and the official threats the tongs could not have prospered indefinitely. Chinese gangsterism in America was the criminal epiphenomenon of an artificial bachelor society. When the sojourners returned to China or died and the American-born population finally began to increase rapidly, involvement in gambling, prostitution, and narcotics sharply declined and with it illicit revenue that sustained and gave purpose to the tongs. By the 1940s and 1950s, if not before, they and their sworn members had become aging anachronisms, widely ignored by the growing, family-centered, middle-class ChineseAmerican community to which the future belonged.39
Other Lower-Class Immigrant Groups
The historical experience of the Chinese laborers in America was unique in that they were the only major lower-class male immigrant group deliberately denied access to spouses and families for such a long period. In this regard paupers and slaves were treated with more consideration than the Chinese. James Oglethorpe, who in 1732 founded Georgia as a refuge for debtors and as a buffer against Spanish Florida, soon learned that it was essential to send women to join his male colonists. This was true, he wrote, for reasons of both social order ("from single men there are great Inconveniences") and population growth, natural increase being "much the cheapest way of peopling the Country."40
The male slaves who made up a large and growing percentage of the population in eighteenth-century southern colonies were likewise provided with women, and for reasons equally as calculated. Explaining in 1769 why he ordered young African women sent to his Mount Royal and Amelia Island plantations in British East Florida, John Perceval, Earl of Egmont, wrote that he wished to render his male slaves "happy and contented, which I know they cannot be without having each a Wife." Imported wives, he reasoned, "will greatly tend to keep them at home and to make them Regular and tho the Women will not work all together so well as ye Men, Yet Amends will be sufficiently made in a very few years by the Great Encrease of Children who may easily [be trained] and become faithfully attached to the Glebe and their Master." Slave children represented both a natural dividend and an emotional lever. Their fathers might be induced to work harder to earn extra rations for them or to prevent them from being sold. The one drawback was absenteeism occasioned by visiting "broad wives," spouses who lived away from ("abroad" of) the home plantation. A stock piece of slaveowners' advice was to minimize this problem by forbidding unions elsewhere and encouraging them, if at all possible, within their own quarters.41
Such was not the case with Chinese laborers. If they and their children had been enslaved in the same way that black Africans were, or if they had been objects of humanitarian sympathy and military design, like Georgia's white debtors, no objection would have been raised to the immigration of wives or marriageable Chinese women. They were instead despised and unwanted and hence subject to more than half a century of exclusionary legislation and court rulings, perhaps the greatest injustice in the history of federal immigration policy.
Chinese exclusion was also arguably the most counterproductive policy, illustrating how racial (and, secondarily, class) prejudice undermined the social order. The role of racial hatred was crudely obvious when a riot erupted or a Chinese man's genitals were hacked off, but its most powerful and long-term consequences were indirect, the result of forcing large numbers of men to live as de facto bachelors. In this regard the unwillingness of Anglo frontiersmen in the West to take Indian or Hispanic wives and their determination to block Chinese marriage or family reunification were deeply parallel. Both prejudices were grounded in a sense of contemptuous superiority and the belief that the new land and its future belonged to the white race. Both had the result of frustrating marriage and family formation. And both had the predictable and unhappy consequences of more vice, more violence, and more disorder.