A Super-Racist Report on Chinese Immigration from 1878

I have referenced this report once already in a reflection on the phrase “law and order” and quoted one of the more remarkable passages but here I attempt to summarize more of salient points of the report.

Of course, I do not expect to break any new ground. In fact, I expect my observations to be almost completely predictable. Not only in highlighting the racism of the period but also the specific form of its anti-Chinese language and ideas are well known both in the historical context and even in the current period as demonstrated by the xenophobic rhetoric surrounding the coronavirus pandemic. But, I want to write something about this report because it is good practice to write and I am working through my approach to incorporating Chinatown into my project (or not). 

To start with the obvious, nearly the entirety of this report (more than three hundred pages) was an anti-Chinese, anti-immigration “report” with the primary intention of convincing Congress to pass anti-Chinese immigration legislation. A feat they accomplished not long after it was published with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The report contains several essays from notable “experts” such as John H. Boalt explaining why Chinese immigration was an existential threat to the United States. The bulk of the report, however, were the proceedings, transcripts, of the testimony given by witnesses to the California Senate committee charged with investigating the issue.

The testimony from dozens of witnesses, primarly law enforcement and religious figures, running into hundreds of pages, was quite repetitive and, in the style of the day, the questions contained the gist of the answer (e.g., isn’t it true that the Chinese are the most degraded people on the planet?”) and the answers–when given by white witnesses–repeated common tropes and riffed at length on the terrible consequences of allowing the Chinese to immigrate or even reside in California. Five themes dominated the discourse: segregation, criminality, hygiene, wages, and women.

One of the main claims made to demonstrate the futility of allowing the Chinese to immigrate to the U.S. was their refusal to assimilate and habit of segregating in ethnic enclaves (i.e., Chinatowns). This supposedly self-imposed exile demonstrated their unwillingness to become American. It also prevented local law enforcement from exercising any authority over the residents, which was administered by a Chinese-only brand of governance. Several witnesses this connected segregation with criminal activity. (Crime was present in almost every angle covered by the investigators.) In his testimony, the committee asked San Francisco Chief of Police Ellis: “Q.–What is the greatest difficulty in the way of suppressing prostitution and gambling? A.—To suppress these vices would require a police force so great that the city could not stand the expense. It is difficult to administer justice, because we do not understand their language, and thus all combine to defeat the laws” (15). The irony of this statement was the extent of gambling and prostitution outside Chinatown that was vastly greater and which the police could not or would not suppress. The other humorous part here was that despite the repeated testimony that Chinatown was only 6-8 blocks in size, the police claimed they would need an army to control crime. 

When it was convenient, the exact opposite of this statement was entered into the record by police officers who claimed they could shut down Chinatown vice in a matter of hours. Officer George W. Duffield, who had been on the force for eleven years, nine of them in Chinatown, was asked how many houses of prostitution were in Chinatown. “A.—There may be in the neighborhood of forty or fifty. I don’t know that there are many now, because a great many have been broken up within the last five or six weeks.” And when asked how many gambling houses were there, he answered “Very few. There used to be a great many. I don’t think you can find one now. Q.–How many were there six weeks ago? A.–Forty, fifty, or sixty” (112). Officer Rogers, a police officer for six years, claimed “It don’t require a large force to close these houses. I can do it all in one night. Arrest the inmates of one, and it travels like electricity from one to another, and in ten minutes every one will be shut up, and the doors will be barricaded” (126). Both the committee and the witness failed to qualify that claim with the well-known fact that those barricaded doors would be quickly re-opened as early as the next day when the police threat left. No one offered much in the way of an explanation for why something so simple had not yet been achieved despite the terrible menace it supposedly presented to the good citizens of San Francisco.

Nearly every witness that supported restricting immigration made racist statements about the Chinese. This is the part that is the least surprising but I still feel it is worth reiterating and quoting. The extent of racism in American culture and the positions of power held by those who espoused racist sentiments must be all brought to light if we are going to seriously understand how it continues to influence our laws and institutions. One witness in particular provided a fairly succinct and comprehensive assessment of the Chinese shared by most witnesses. Davis Louderbeck, a police court judge in the city was asked: “Q.–What do you know about the habits, customs, and social and moral status of the Chinese population of this city? A.—I think they are a very immoral, mean, mendacious, dishonest, thieving people, as a general thing” (15). Despite the “advances” in science and social science, it was still deeply ingrained in American minds that there were races and race was biological and hierarchical. The inherent criminality wove through nearly every line of questioning put to the witnesses: what proportion of the population are criminal: “A.–About the whole of them” (145); “A.–I should think seven-tenths or eight-tenths” (148); “Q.–So the great mass of the Chinese population is a criminal one, living in open violation of laws and ordinances? A.–A great many” (155). And so on and so forth.

The topic that initially brought me to this report was prostitution among Chinese women. Again, it is well known (it was also well known then, too) that a great many Chinese women in San Francisco were forcibly brought to the U.S. as sex slaves. “Q.—Is it not a notorious fact that these Chinese prostitutes are held as slaves, subject to the pleasure of their owners? A.—Yes, sir” (154). Two points struck me as I read various witnesses discuss the issue. First, most of the medical “experts” agreed that the prostitutes were universally infected with a venereal disease and thus largely responsible for their spread in the community. This is the same rhetoric of blame that officials used decades later at the outset of World War I to justify imprisoning prostitutes and promiscuous women. The accusation that prostitutes were the primarily vectors of venereal diseases proved effective in the debate over eliminating red light districts and cracking down on promiscuous women when the U.S. joined the Great War in 1918. I am a little surprised to see the argument made so clearly here a generation earlier. The other remarkable theme of the testimony was not just a complete lack of empathy for these women, who by almost all contemporary accounts were quite literally slaves, but that these women deserved all the scorn that could be heaped upon them. Again, Judge Louderbeck, when asked about the desire of Chinese women to escape, testified “They very seldom desire to escape, they are so inured to prostitution and lewdness. Occasionally one of them gets married, but they know nothing of domestic life as we understand it. All these women here are prostitutes, or have been prostitutes. I have not met with single decent Chinawoman” (158). The Chinese women were both the victims of Chinese cruelty and evidence of their lack of sexual morality. 

One final brief point that I was less surprised to read but also surprised that it was not made more frequently was the argument for restricting immigration based on concerns of national security. As part of their “Address to the People of the United States Upon the Evils of Chinese Immigration,” the authors concluded by noting that “to the minds of many, this immigration begins to assume the nature and proportions of a dangers unarmed invasion of our soil” (55). But it seems they did not anticipate or overemphasize the grounds on which the Supreme Court would uphold the power of Congress to restrict immigration.⁠[1]

What this report made perfectly clear to me with respect to how I might incorporate it into my larger project is how difficult this will be. Chinatown was a significant site of vice and resistance. However, the extent of anti-Chinese sentiment makes using this type of source almost totally unreliable.⁠[2] I can pick it apart to describe the perspectives of the white population but for accurate information about the practice or extent of vice among San Francisco’s Chinese neighborhood, I will almost certainly need Chinese-language sources, which I am not able to read. This puts me in a bit of a pickle. I have no answers but I guess at least I know this is a problem I need to confront. 

Image: Theodore C. Marceau, “Chinese bagnio, Chinatown, San Francisco, Calif.,” c.1890s, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb038n96ss.

1 For a more complete discussion of national security as the legal basis for limiting immigration see Raquel Aldana and Thomas O’Donnell, “A Look Back at the Warren Court’s Due Process Revolution Through the Lens of Immigrants,” University of the Pacific Law Review 51 (May, 2020).

2 I am reminded of one of the first readings Alan Taylor assigned for his “Comparative Cultural Encounters in North America” graduate seminar my first year of graduate school (at UC Davis), Stephen Greenblatt’s, ”Marvelous Possessions," and "Kidnapping Language," in Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), that roughly speaking, made the argument that sources such as this are practically worthless for the historian studying the supposed subject of the sources.