America's anti-Chinese laws: a forgotten history

Uncovering anti-Chinese laws in America

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1:34From the middle of the 19th century, Chinese people in the United States found themselves increasingly policed, as legislation was introduced that contained and controlled their economic and cultural lives. Historian Beth Lou Williams has spent countless hours in the archives, uncovering this wide-ranging set of laws for her book, John Doe Chinaman. Beth's book is among the finalists for this year's Cundall History Prize. And in this episode of the History Extra podcast, Eleanor Evans joined her to find out more.

2:05Just before we start today's conversation, you might be interested in joining us for a live episode of the History Extra podcast. We're going to be recording tomorrow, the 22nd of October, to mark the upcoming home release of Pressure, the gripping untold story of the efforts to chart the weather on D-Day. We've teamed up with Studio Canal for a special event at the Royal Society of Arts in London, featuring David Haig, the writer of Pressure, in conversation with Catherine Ross, Archive Manager at the Met Office. Tickets are free and are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

2:37For full details and to book your place now, check out the episode description. But for now, it's on to today's conversation.

The history and impact of a slur

2:44We're going to start with the title, John Doe Chinaman, because it's a very conscious choice to use this phrase, but it has a complicated history. Can we start there? Yeah, I think it is always important when I talk about my book to start with the word Chinaman, because, you know, it's an ugly word. And I think it's always been a bit of an ugly word. But in the 19th century, which is a time that I'm writing about, it was a word that was everywhere in the United States. It was the word that was used in newspapers and in court trials and in laws,

3:16you know, to regulate this group of people from China that were imagined to be racially inferior. I do think that over time, the word has become an even more aggressive racial slur. But I think that the history that I tell is one of the origin stories of that. So by using the term, I'm trying to bring attention to how powerful racial terms can be. And one of the ways in which it was really powerful is that it made the Chinese anonymous in the American archive.

3:48So I start in the 1850s. Often, Americans didn't even attempt to record Chinese names during this time. I look, for example, at the California census of 1852. And there's, you know, 2,500 Chinese in San Francisco at that time. But only about two dozen of them have names in the census. Instead, the rest of them are all John Chinaman or just Chinaman. And I think that this is a really powerful thing to take away people's individual identity, their individual name.

4:20And so I'm trying to call attention to that through the title of my book. Thank you for that context around the conscious use of the term. For listeners who are really new to this subject, can you give us a sense of the broader scope of Chinese migration to the U.S. in this period that you're looking at? Yeah. So Chinese started coming to the United States in large numbers with the gold rush in California. So they were 49ers, 1849, along with, you know, tens of thousands of other prospectors looking for gold. Their numbers continued to rise by 1870.

4:51There were about 70,000 Chinese in California. And it doesn't sound like that many people, but at the time that meant that they were about 10% of the population of California and about 20% of California's workforce because of the disproportionate number of Chinese men versus women who came over. And so they were a large presence on the West Coast. And they, by 1870, were the largest group of non-white people,

5:22people considered to be of color. And I think that that helps explain some of the things that I find, that they were very much seen as the racial problem on the West Coast. And this perceived problem leads to a vast number of laws and policies. But I think anyone who is new to the subject or relatively new to the idea of the knowledge of Chinese people in America at this time may be familiar, if anything, with exclusion. Your book and your research does so much more than look at this topic of exclusion.

5:53Can you take us into the scale of the legislation and policy that you found?

Categorizing thousands of discriminatory policies

5:57Yeah, let me just back up and say something about Chinese exclusions. And for those who might not know, a little refresher. Yes, please. Good thought. So the Chinese in America, I think that the reason that they've had a lot of attention has often been around them as immigrants. And especially since American border control was really built in the 19th century to try to keep out Chinese immigrants. And so there was a series of laws, you know, starting with a law targeting Chinese women in 1875,

6:29trying to prevent Chinese women from coming to the United States. And then a series of Chinese exclusion acts in the 1880s to keep out Chinese workers, Chinese men. So that's a really important story. It's actually what I write about in my first book, and lots of historians have written about it. But what I wanted to do with this book was to look away from the border for a minute and think about everyday lives. What did it mean to be a Chinese person living within the United States? Because even though these exclusion laws did keep people out,

7:00there still were many Chinese people living in the United States. And so I turned instead of to federal law, to local laws and state laws, instead of the border, I'm looking at the interior. And what I did was try to figure out what Chinese people were permitted to do in the United States, you know, sort of what constraints were there on their lives. And then to what extent were these constraints legislated? Were they in laws? So I went searching for local and state laws that were discriminatory towards the Chinese

7:32and constrained their behavior. And what I found was more than 5,000 laws that limited the ability of Chinese people to do all sorts of things, to work, to live in certain neighborhoods, to attend school, to own property, to marry who they want. You know, so there's just lots of laws that constrained their belonging in the United States. And in terms of these laws, in your book, you are able to categorize them. I should say, I'm not skipping over the vast research

8:03you did for this. I really want to hear about some of your methods in a minute because I think listeners will be quite astounded. But just to bring us closer to these laws first, there are categories of those that directly target Chinese people in this period and others that are more indirect. Can you talk about your categorization here? Yeah, it was a difficult question or problem to think about what constitutes an anti-Chinese law. And we tried really hard. I worked with a collaborator, Hannah Postel. The two of us, we thought a lot about how to categorize these laws.

8:34And we ended up categorizing them by their form, right? So some of the laws we called identity-based, they targeted the Chinese based on their racial identity or their identity as a non-citizen. Because at the time, Chinese could not naturalize, so their alienage was permanent. They were permanent aliens within the United States. And for that reason, a lot of laws targeted the Chinese by, you know, either naming Chinamen or naming aliens ineligible to citizenship

9:05or ineligible for the vote. So these laws, you know, target the Chinese based on their identity. There were also laws that targeted the Chinese more indirectly and targeted them, for example, based on their behaviors. So often these are sort of culturally associated things. So an example is, there was a law in San Francisco that banned the use of gongs in theaters. You know, so it's something that's very clearly directed at the Chinese community, but does not name the Chinese. Another example of this is laws barring people

9:37from carrying baskets on a pole slung over their shoulders. You know, this is another, you know, but clearly they're going after the Chinese, even though they're not naming them. And then there's a larger category, which we called general outcast laws. Some historians have called poor laws that just regulate a large number of, you know, so-called undesirable people of which the Chinese are a part, right? So these are laws like vagrancy laws that, you know, we might associate, for example, with Jim Crow laws,

10:08laws that regulated Black people in America. These laws don't have to name the Chinese or African-Americans in order to really impact their daily lives. You mentioned the scale then earlier on, 20%, was it, of California's population? So we've got a sense of the scale, but if you can take us a little bit closer to the prejudice and the fears, the othering of these Chinese immigrants that led to a lot of these policies, direct and indirect, what were the lawmakers scared of? Oh, I think they were scared of the Chinese

10:41as racially different. And they often articulate this through, you know, a particular stereotype. Now, the stereotype or the phrase they used was that these Chinese were heathens and that they were coolies. If we take this apart, the fear of the Chinese as heathens was very much a fear of the Chinese as singularly unable to Americanize, that they were religiously different, racially different, incapable of assimilating to American ways.

11:12And then the Cooley, it was an image of a worker who was sort of slavish, very industrious, but incapable of self-government. And that was an idea that, you know, sort of the Chinese were cheap labor and that therefore they could out-compete white workers. And these two ideas together, you know, what holds them together is really racial ideas that even as lawmakers and the American public, you know, claimed that they were

11:43particularly concerned about the Chinese because of economic reasons, the race sort of ran through the argument all of the way, right? The Chinese were taking our jobs, you know, so they're already sort of seen as distinct from other workers. They were barred from unions and really separated in that way. I think also something I never considered before is the nature of being able to profit from this difference as well. There's the mining tax. I wonder if you can take us into that example, which lined the pockets, obviously, of lawmakers at the expense of many of these Chinese workers.

The financial weight of the foreign miners tax

12:14Yeah, there were a series of laws, the foreign miners' taxes, you know, starting in 1852. California said that any foreign miner needed to pay $4 a month for the privilege to mine. For other immigrants, other foreigners, other than the Chinese, you could sort of dodge this tax by agreeing that you're going to naturalize, declaring that you're going to become a U.S. citizen. But since the Chinese were racially barred from naturalization, they had no way of dodging the tax. The other reason they had no way

12:44of dodging the tax is that it was just understood to be a Chinese tax. And so tax collectors would collect this tax by just roaming the hills looking for Chinese miners and then demanding $4 every time they encountered one. And this adds up $4 a month for all of these Chinese miners. Over a period of about 15, about 20 years, you know, the foreign miners tax netted almost $5 million. At points, this was, you know,

13:15a sizable amount of California's entire revenue. I think in one single year, it's about 20% of California's revenue. So it really is that the state is depending on this taxation of the Chinese. And so there are some people benefiting. The state and also employers are benefiting from the Chinese presence. But in particular, they're benefiting by the Chinese being kept as cheap labor, highly taxed labor. So the state is benefiting economically from these taxes levied

13:46and the work that is building the infrastructure of the state. And yet we also have, as you detailed at the top of the interview, this anonymization of people, of their experiences. So this brings us back to your research. And you've got so many miles under your belt on the trail of these laws. Can you take us a bit closer to how you began to unearth these 5,000 bits of legislature?

Mining archives and local court records

14:07My research really came in two very different forms. I think what you're referring to is just trying to find all these laws, like thousands of laws. That was actually a big data project. And that's where I collaborated with Hannah Postel, who's now an assistant professor of public policy at Duke and was here at Princeton as a student before. And the idea we had was, you know, how can we find every law that regulated Chinese people? And what we decided to do was to just try to collect every law that we could find,

14:38whether it regulated Chinese or not. So we found, you know, the complete run of every law passed in California, Oregon, and Washington at the state level. And then we also digitized 133 municipalities in these states. So we just found every law book we could. And sometimes these are already digital records that we just had to sort of make machine readable and segmented into individual laws. But other times these were, you know, archival records that had to be transcribed.

15:09And then once we had to complete a list as possible of laws, then we could start searching for the laws that named Chinese or Chinese associated behaviors or these other kinds of general outcast laws. So that was part of what we were doing. And we're continuing to sort through that data to this day because I think there's a lot to be learned from the way in which racial divisions are legislated. But in addition to that, what I really wanted was Chinese voices as much as I could to hear from the Chinese immigrants themselves

15:40what they were experiencing on the West Coast in the 19th century. And this is a really challenging thing because most of the Chinese were not literate, at least not literate in English. American archives and libraries weren't particularly interested in collecting the opinions or thoughts of Chinese immigrants. A lot of personal effects have since been destroyed. So there's just so little in terms of records from the Chinese. And so what I turned to were local legal records,

16:11trial transcripts, because the effect of these laws caused the Chinese to be dragged into court. And in court, they would sometimes testify, you know, to the particular accusation at hand. But they also talked about their everyday lives in the process. The trouble was that these local legal records are often still in the local communities. And so I found myself driving around California and Oregon and Washington to individual county archives, historical societies, and sometimes

16:42operating courthouses trying to find these dusty old records. It's a staggering amount of work that has gone into this book and I hope the listeners are beginning to appreciate just how many records and archives you had to look through. You mentioned that some Chinese voices do come out in those legal proceedings and that was some element of recourse they had to, I guess, fight or challenge these laws. Can we talk a little about that and what other ways perhaps that Chinese people had in this time

17:12to challenge or maybe circumnavigate some of these strictures? Yeah, we could use as an example the Foreign Miners Tax since we already talked about it. I think the Foreign Miners Tax gives us a sense of the range of things that Chinese immigrants did to sort of resist these laws or just to live with them. So there's really a range of how Chinese immigrants reacted to this law. The range goes as far as some Chinese immigrants entering, you know, a new county hoping to be allowed to mine not to face extra legal expulsion

17:43from these areas would actually, you know, walk into town and pay their tax in advance. That was a strategy of survival, right? It's not a direct form of resistance against law instead. It's like, okay, if you want us to pay a tax we're going to pay it in advance so you don't chase us down. Getting ahead of it. Right? And this was really a bid to try to be included within the community. But then there were also Chinese who simply refused to pay the tax and either physically resisted. There's some court cases about Chinese physically resisting

18:13the tax collector or just tried to dodge him, vote with their feet. They would move from county to county attempting to evade. And then there were a series of lawsuits where the Chinese sued tax collectors saying that they were not following the law or that the law was in violation of the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment says that laws should not discriminate on the basis of race. And eventually it's one of these cases that takes down

18:43this law, the foreign minors tax. running a growing business means doing all the things. Campaign things, pipeline things, support and follow-up things, and somehow keeping track of all of it. HubSpot self-updating CRM pulls in emails and meeting notes automatically, keeping your records current, and helping you see what to do next so you can focus on building demand, winning deals, and keeping customers coming back. You know, the things most worth doing.

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20:32So there are these moments of, I suppose, civil disobedience before we might think of movements towards that that would come later. There is evidence of that in the records that you found. Yes, very much so. I mean, I think the largest example of mass civil disobedience I always go to is around one of the Chinese exclusion laws. There was a Chinese exclusion law in 1892 that forced all Chinese people to register with the federal government, to be photographed, and then to carry papers around. And this is at a time before anyone was forced

21:02to carry around a passport. So it felt like a singular attempt to track and put the Chinese under surveillance. And so in response, some 90,000 Chinese refused to register. And, you know, in some ways, at least temporarily, they called the federal government's bluff because the federal government didn't have the money to deport 90,000 people that were in violation of this law. So there are examples of sort of this mass civil disobedience that really had power.

21:33So you explained to our listeners earlier on, obviously, the exclusion laws that loom large in this story of Chinese people in America in this period. But you also use a term in your book called conditional inclusion.

Conditional inclusion and women's experiences

21:47Can you break down this term for us now? What do you mean by this and some examples of how it policed people's behavior and status in society? By moving from the border to the interior and from the story of Chinese immigration helping to inspire U.S. border control to this regulation, policing, and social control that I was talking about, I really wanted to highlight the ways in which I'm making a distinct argument that although many Chinese were excluded from the United States,

22:17the ones that lived in the United States were permitted to do so and were included in American society under certain conditions. It's a tricky word or phrase because I'm trying to capture some subtlety here. The Chinese were included in society but at the time society was incredibly hierarchical, right? So the Chinese are being included on the bottom rungs of the American Western society and that their inclusion is only conditional. So for example,

22:47one of the conditions is that they pay these taxes that are discriminatory or that they live in particular areas of town or that they attend certain schools or that they, you know, don't marry white women. And so what I argue in the book is that these conditions, some of which were articulated through law and others that were articulated through, you know, discretionary policing or racial norms, regulated Chinese people's political lives, right? They could not vote, their economic lives

23:18like the taxes or property laws, their cultural lives like gongs and theatres, and also their spatial lives where they could live and work and attend school. So you've explained this conditional inclusion and largely so far we've talked about it as it pertains to men and male life because of the demographic makeup that you've already explained of the pattern of migration. But there are Chinese female voices that you have been able to look at in your research as well. Though there are obviously fewer numbers

23:49in this story, what can you tell me about how you were able to find their voices and did you find anything particularly distinct in terms of the way they were targeted or experienced this? Yeah, Chinese women faced particular laws that regulated them mostly around the stereotype that they were prostitutes, that they were sex workers. So for example, you know, at the federal level there was the Page Act that prohibited Chinese lewd women from immigrating to the United States. But we see this at the state

24:20and local level as well with specific Chinese prostitution laws that would bar Chinese prostitutes in general. And that provided an excuse, right, for police officers to round up Chinese women and sometimes put them in jail but more often sort of deliver them to missionary societies for reform. But I tried very hard to get the voices of Chinese women. They are even harder to find in the archival record. But I found a few.

24:51One in particular, I write about a young woman named Ruby Sang. She grew up in San Francisco in one of these mission houses. And actually, she toured the United States singing for one of these mission houses to help fundraise for it. So she was actually quite well-traveled. She went to the White House. She came to Philadelphia. And then when she reached her majority, she moved to Reno, Nevada. And perhaps she continued to be interested in the theater. She went to try to see a show at the theater in Reno, Nevada

25:21and walked in with her friends and sat down in the theater and was told that she couldn't sit there. She had to move to the sort of colored section of the theater, the segregated section. And this was deeply upsetting to her. And I think it's interesting it was upsetting to her because actually in San Francisco, you know, she had lived in this ethnic enclave, the segregated Chinatown of San Francisco. She had attended a segregated school in California. But then when she walked into this theater and wasn't allowed to sit down, she was fed up.

25:52And so she sued. She sued the theater and alleged that they were discriminating against her and her equal protection rights. She didn't win that lawsuit. In fact, the legislature threatened to pass a law to make it legal to segregate in Nevada theaters. And so she sort of dropped it. But I think that still that story gives us a sense of both the way that Chinese immigrants are being regulated, the way that this is touching so many aspects

26:22of their lives, but also, you know, the impulse even on behalf of the Chinese women to fight back. So a point that you've already made and that has come out throughout this episode is that the American West was built on this labor and that it's a much bigger story than just, you know, a few decades in the 19th century. And I wonder, is there anything you'd like our listeners to bear in mind as we finish up this conversation about echoes from these policies and laws that you think are still being felt or are resonant today? When I tell this history to a Chinese-American audience,

26:54they feel resonance with it. They feel that some of the same prejudices exist against Chinese immigrants to this day and they are concerned with policies that single out Chinese international students, for example, or Chinese scientists in the United States. But I really think that the resonances are broader beyond the Chinese community. This affects immigrants in general. One of the things I was trying to do in this book is to emphasize

27:25how important it is to look, you know, beyond just federal law. Federal law in the United States is strongly policing immigrants to this day, but we also need to think about the role of local actors. My story very much highlights the role of policing and local police aiding immigration officials in some ways. And we continue to see, in fact, it's been ramped up in between the criminalization

27:56of immigration law, the coordination between policing and immigration agents. So the history I look at, we're seeing just the very early origins of what unfortunately has become a much more broad practice today. That was Professor Beth Lou Williams speaking to Eleanor Evans. Beth's book on this subject is John Doe Chinaman, A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law. The book is one of the finalists for this year's Kundal History Prize. Your business is growing

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