American Experience (1988) s30e05 Episode Script

1
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] On June 30th, 1885,
as the fundraising campaign
for the pedestal of
the Statue of Liberty
finally began to pick up speed,
a letter appeared in the
pages of the New York Sun,
written by a young
Chinese immigrant
and recent college
graduate named Saum Song Bo
who had come to America
years earlier as a small boy
and who dreamed of
becoming a lawyer.
- [Saum Song Bo] Sir, a paper
was presented to me yesterday
for a subscription
among my countrymen
toward the pedestal fund
of the Statue of Liberty.
My countrymen and
myself are honored
in being thus appealed
to as citizens
in the cause of liberty.
But the word liberty
makes me think of the fact
that this country is
the land of liberty
for men of all nations
except the Chinese.
That statue represents
liberty holding a torch
which lights the passage
of those of all nations
who come into this country.
But are the Chinese
allowed to come?
Are the Chinese here
allowed to enjoy liberty
as men of all other
nationalities enjoy it?
Free from the insults,
abuse, assaults, wrongs,
and injuries form which men of
other nationalities are free?
By the law of this nation
a Chinaman cannot
become a citizen.
Whether this statute
against the Chinese
or the Statue of Liberty will
be the more lasting monument
to tell future ages of
the liberty and greatness
of this country, will be known
only to future generations.
Saum Song Bo.
(speaking in foreign language)
(dramatic music)
(horse whinnying)
- [Narrator] A solitary
arm of the unfinished
Statue of Liberty had
languished on Madison Square,
New York for more
than five years
when on May 6th, 1882, on
the eve of the greatest wave
of immigration in
American history,
President Chester A.
Arthur signed into a law
an extraordinary piece
of federal legislation.
It was called the
Chinese Exclusion Act
and it was unlike
any law enacted
since the founding
of the republic.
Singling out as never
before, a specific race
and nationality for exclusion,
it made it illegal for Chinese
workers to come to America
and for Chinese
nationals already here
ever to become citizens
of the United States.
Fueled by deep-seeded
tensions over race and class
and national identity
that had been festering
since the founding
of the republic.
It was the first in
a long line of acts
targeting the
Chinese for exclusion
and it would remain enforced
for more than 60 years.
It continues to shape the
debate about what it means
to be an American to this day.
- Chinese Americans always
have this identification
with the founding
principle of this country
so beautifully laid out
by the founding fathers
and is so eloquently
articulated in the
Declaration of Independence
and in American Constitution.
In trying to identify with
this fundamental principle
of liberty, equality,
and justice for all
and all men are created equal.
Now, how can you say that?
This is a group of a
people who are biologically
and culturally unfit to
live a civilized life,
to appreciate and
practice American culture,
political and religious ideals.
That's why I think a lot of
Americans had a hard time
to learn that The
Chinese Exclusion Act
really exist for 60 years.
They couldn't believe it,
the government did that.
- We have to remember that
for most of the 19th century,
immigration into the United
States was basically open.
You just showed up.
So The Chinese Exclusion
Law is one of the first
really comprehensively
restrictive laws.
And it's also the
first and only time
in the entire history
of the United States
that a group is
singled out by name,
Chinese by name, as
being undesirable.
So this is truly a
remarkable moment.
- There is a word that
defines the Chinese American
experience and Asian
American experience.
It's exclusion.
And not just because
of the 15 laws passed
by the United States
Congress specifically
against the Chinese but
also subsequent laws
in the various states,
especially here in California,
and in local jurisdictions
such as places
like San Francisco, Los
Angeles, all the major cities,
enact laws including laws
that actually expelled
and purged the Chinese
from its population.
- Starting in California,
the Chinese were marked
as different and I see
the 1882 bill as a link
in the chain of bills and
a chain of legislation
and race riots and
purges that are trying
to move the country
toward ethnic cleansing.
The 1882 bill was
not about labor.
I think it was
about white purity
and how do we get rid of
people who are different.
- We focused a lot
on the Exclusion Act
from the point of
view of racism.
We can't help but talk about
racism in the 19th century.
But again, we come
back to the fact
that we haven't
learned our lesson.
We talk about 19th
century and its racism
as if it's in the past,
it's all done with.
No, it isn't.
We have yet to resolve
this in our 21st century.
- I mean, history is complex,
it is a mixed burden.
We can talk about the
war against the Chinese
leveled by California.
But we can also say that
California was a laboratory
for the larger process
of adjustment that
There's very little
in California
that's exclusively Californian.
Most of what goes on
California is America.
Remember Wallace Stegner
said about California:
it's like the rest of the
country, only more so.
- Many people think
of this exclusion law
as being very
racist, very unfair.
But if you look at the
world at that time,
every country was like that
in almost every ethnicity.
Try to be a citizen of China
or try to be a citizen of Japan.
It's impossible unless
you're ethnically
Chinese or Japanese.
But this is a group of
people, Chinese American
the Chinese that were here,
who actually fought back
and made America
better than what it was
and helped make America
what it is today,
the values that we have,
including equal
protection under the law,
rights to education, what
it means to be American,
what makes you American,
to be born here.
All these weren't defined.
- The 1882 Exclusion
Law has been forgotten
but once we remember
it, it is outrageous.
And it's probably why
we've forgotten it
because it is so outrageous.
Many Americans today cannot
believe this happened.
We'd like to think that this
is not an American thing to do.
How could this country
in its culture,
in its politics,
in its economics
do what it did against
the whole class of people?
The exclusion law didn't
say oh if you happen
to be a Chinese citizen you
cannot come here anymore.
It said that race of people
are banned from this country.
So it was a racial
exclusion law.
So that banning of a
whole category of people
directly challenges
foundational questions
of what American freedom means,
and what American history means,
who we the people
can constitute.
- I think it's essential
that Americans know
about the exclusion of Chinese,
not because it's the Chinese
but because it reflects
how America has come
to develop, how America
saw itself at one time,
and how it continues
to see itself.
The Chinese were the
first to be excluded
but then all Asians were
excluded eventually.
So it sets the stage
for people to understand
that America is a
gate-keeping country,
we let some people
in at some times,
we don't let other
people in at other times.
It has much to do
with the character
of our national history
and that to me is the most
important thing in
understanding how we became
who we are today.
Some of it has to
do with the fact
that we excluded
Chinese for 60 years.
(wind rushing)
(dramatic music)
- When James Polk
was the President
he recruited a geographer
by the name of Aaron Palmer.
And asked him to make a survey
of the entire West Coast
from California all
the way to Alaska
and what potential there
was for the United States
future development.
He was also very interested
in finding a shorter route
for the China trade.
In 1848, Palmer filed a
report to President Polk
and in the report
he talked about
the amazing natural
resources and the importance
of finding a more direct
access to the West Coast
and recommended that we
establish Chinese colonies,
import Chinese laborer
to the West Coast
to help develop the west.
And this was all before gold
was discovered in California.
- [Narrator] Long before
the first Chinese immigrants
stepped ashore in California
in the mid-19th century,
the story of China and
America had been deeply
intertwined for
hundreds of years.
- Where did America come from?
America came from
European colonization,
from the fascination
that explorers
like Christopher
Columbus had with China.
With the inception
of the United States,
our birth as a republic, one
of the fascinating things
is how important
the China trade was
for the revolutionary
generation.
- [Wang] After
political independence,
one of the first thing
that the British did was to
cut off our ability to trade
within the British Commonwealth.
China was among the few
countries in the world
not yet colonized by anybody.
And so we saw our opportunity
to become economically
independent linked to
our trade with China.
- So one of the first things
the young United States does
after its independence
is that it sends a ship
to China to directly
participate in this trade.
- But the big problem from
the very beginning was
what does China want?
What can we keep on
giving China so that
we can get the things
that we want from China?
So that we can get the
teas and porcelains,
the lacquer ware, the silks.
- [Ngai] China didn't
really want to buy much
from the United States
or from England.
So in the early 19th century
they began to import opium
into China against
Chinese law as a way
of addressing their own
balance of trade deficits.
- At a certain
point, opium became
this amazing solution
to a problem.
- [Wang] And it was a very,
very profitable trade.
Millions of Chinese
were addicted to this.
Massive number of
Chinese around Canton,
the Pearl River Delta,
became addicted to opium.
- [Wong] And they saturate
the market with opium.
And it doesn't take long,
in a matter of years
the trade balance shifts
and it's mostly in opium.
- [Ngai] And finally
the Chinese said enough
and confiscated and burned
thousands of chests of opium
because they were breaking
Chinese law by importing it,
sneaking it into the country.
And that was the pretext
that Great Britain
needed to go to war.
- [Wong] Of course, this
provoked the British gunships
and the Americans
came in with them.
You see, Americans were also
involved in the opium trade.
- [Ngai] They did it under
the banner of free trade.
Free trade as a core
expression of liberty.
And how dare the Chinese say
they can't trade
opium into China.
- [Wang] The first
opium war ended in 1842
with the Treaty of Nanking
which opened five ports
including Canton
to western trade.
- [Yu] In one stroke,
the Canton system used
to manage trade with
Europeans was destroyed.
China was forced into this
new international system
and gradually in the
Pearl River Delta
the foreign intrusion
really became disruptive
to the local economy.
- By the 1840s, what's
happening in China is dire.
It was a time of drought,
a time of poverty.
The Qing Dynasty, the Chinese
government is falling apart.
And then there's the
Taiping Rebellion
which was a political
religious utopian massacre.
- Taiping Rebellion
begins about 1850.
A man who is studying for
the Imperial Examination
has a nervous breakdown,
believes he is the
second son of God, he's
Jesus' younger brother
and he wants to
establish what he calls
the Heavenly Kingdom on Earth.
And there's a civil war
between his followers
and the Manchu government.
And this goes on for 15 years.
Approximately 30 million
people are slaughtered.
It's not just this
millenarian rebellion
that's the foreign intrusion,
it's this dissatisfaction
with the corruption
of the Manchu government,
the economy is faltering,
and the opium trade
is all part of this.
And this takes place
right above Southern China
so that all this
farmland is trampled.
So when the Chinese hear
of gold being discovered
in California, U.S. ships
are in Chinese ports,
and ready to take people to
California for the gold rush.
- The news that the gold
was discovered in California
become very, very
attractive to the Chinese.
(dramatic music)
- [Starr] The gold
rush was a global event
and for Anglo America,
an object lesson in the
fact that there were
other kinds of
people on the planet.
It brought obviously Anglo
Americans from the East Coast,
it brought Mexicans from
Senora, it brought French
mining groups, it brought
English mining groups.
But it also brought
Chinese to California.
- [Narrator] They arrived
in the midst of one
of the most dramatic
and tumultuous decades
of expansion and change
in American history.
- 1846, America went
to war with Mexico.
We took over Texas, New Mexico,
Arizona, and California.
July 1846, a ship called the
U.S.S. Portsmouth was sent
to take over the sleepy town
of Yerba Buena, San Francisco.
And maybe a hundred men
just walked up the hill
from Montgomery Street,
arrested the Mexican custom
officer, raised the
U.S. flag there,
and said this is America.
- California had a relatively
small population in 1846,
Americanized through
conquest in 1846,
occupied enemy territory
from 1846 to '48,
militarily administered
United States Territory
from 1848 to '50, and
then instant statehood
with full participation,
the admission of
California into the Union
in 1850 as a free state
dramatically destabilized
the relationship
between the South and the North,
the slave and the free, that
had been set up in 1820.
And soon, you're going
to begin to see virtual
civil wars in
Missouri and Kansas
as the republic
begins to come apart.
- Almost at the same
time really 1849,
you have the gold
rush in California
and you have the opening
of California to people
from not just the
eastern United States
but from all over the world.
The Chinese who came
in the early years
of the gold rush were
mostly rural people.
They're not the poorest
of the population.
The poorest don't migrate
because they can't afford to.
The wealthy don't migrate
because they don't need to.
And they've heard,
like everybody else
around the world,
of this opportunity.
- [Narrator] The first
named Chinese immigrant
to arrive in California was
an enterprising merchant
from the Pearl River
Delta named Yuen Sang
who years earlier
on a previous trip
to South Carolina had
acquired U.S. citizenship,
converted to Christianity,
and changed his name
to Norman Asing.
(ship bell tolling)
On July 13th, 1849, he
entered San Francisco harbor
on a ship called The
Swallow with two other
Chinese sojourners on board.
By the end of 1850,
more than 4,000 Chinese
immigrants had arrived
in San Francisco harbor.
Two years later, the number
had swelled to 20,000.
The vast majority from the
impoverished port cities
and ravished countryside
of the southern Chinese
province of Guangdong.
- [Lei] There was
imperial edict that
if you're Chinese
you can't leave
but they were near Guangzhou
from the Seyap area
near Hong Kong, near the coast,
Beijing is far up to the
north, so it was easy to leave.
- We know the Chinese coming
over for the gold rush
including someone like my
great, great, great grandfather,
they would've docked
into San Francisco
and they would've
just disembarked like
There is no inspector.
There's no customs official.
There's no medical examination.
There are no papers.
There are some state
controls over immigration.
But in terms of a federal
immigration bureaucracy,
it does not exist.
Now the California that
they came to was a rough
and tumble place.
It was multinational
and very unsettled
and most people were going
straight to the hills
to try to strike it
rich in the gold fields.
- And in their
wake, come merchants
who also smell opportunity,
not in the gold itself
but to sell things
to the miners.
So you begin to have the
emergence of communities.
San Francisco develops
a small Chinese quarter.
By 1852, there are some
20 Chinese shops operating
in San Francisco.
- [Narrator] Within
months of his arrival,
Norman Asing had
opened a restaurant
and helped found one of
the district associations
that soon sprang up to
help newcomers get a start.
- [Pfaelzer] These
organizations later became known
as the Chinese Six Companies.
They were called companies
but they weren't businesses,
they were mutual aid
associations based
on their native place.
And these were conduits for
sending money back home.
They were a place to get
contacts for work, for jobs.
A place where you
could lay your head
when you arrived in the city.
- [Narrator] In the
giddy months following
California's entrance
into the Union,
it seemed as if the Chinese
newcomers might find welcome
and make a place for
themselves in the New World.
Quite a large number of
the Celestials have arrived
among us of late, the Alta
California reported in 1851.
The China boys will yet
vote at the same polls,
study at the same schools,
and bow at the same altar
as our countrymen.
- [Pfaelzer] Initially the
Chinese were tolerated.
They were seen as a hardworking,
generous, energetic people
who had a very serious
set of moral codes
but the tide really turns
up in the gold field.
- [Narrator] Hatred of the
Chinese first took hold
in the brutally competitive
riverbeds of the Sierra.
Fueled by virulent
anti-foreign feeling
amongst Anglo American miners,
who themselves had
been foreigners
in California only
a few years earlier.
- By the time the Chinese come,
the gold fields
are very crowded.
We know that from
the very beginning,
there's racial strife, there's
miners fighting over claims.
- Many of the American
miners come from the south.
Many of them were poor,
they were unemployed.
Many of them were veterans
from the war against Mexico.
And the vets had
a victor mentality
that we had trumped
this country.
We had taken the top third of
Mexico into the United States.
- [Ngai] By 1852, the American
miners have pretty much
driven out most foreign miners.
White Americans think well
you know, it's our gold
so we want it all.
So the Chilean and
Sonorans are really run out
of the gold field very early.
French are attacked,
Australians are attacked.
So when the Chinese arrived
there really not that many
other foreigners around.
So the anti-foreign
sentiment now become
focused and the Chinese.
- [Pfaelzer] As soon as the
Chinese get to the gold field,
immediately there are purges.
And the miners hold
miners conventions
and they meet in the rough,
they meet in the field
and they very
deliberately talked about
how do we purge the Chinese.
- [Ngai] By 1852, the easy
pickings in the creeks are gone.
So it's harder to mine.
What happens is that
many gold mining camps
which made their own
laws, passed resolutions
of that no Chinese
could mine in their area
or that Chinese could not
be first owners of a claim.
- When the Chinese still managed
to find a little bit of gold
working over old claims,
claims that had been left,
and then people became jealous
of that and then they
began to be driven off
of those abandoned claims that
the Chinese had taken over.
- [Narrator] As the claims
dried up and the surface gold
and the river beds
became scarcer,
hydraulic mining run by
companies increasingly displaced
the lone prospector
panning for gold,
heightening discontent
in the camps,
and intensifying hostility
towards the Chinese
still further.
- 1852 was the turning point
from independent prospecting
to company mining.
A lot of white independent
prospectors went bankrupt,
became unemployed, but
instead of turning their anger
against the gold mining
company and the water company
for exploiting them, they
turned against the Chinese.
They said, "Oh, the
Chinese were here
"to take away our jobs,"
and the politicians decided
to exploit their frustrations
and their racist sentiment.
And so that, is really the
beginning of white working class
agitation for Chinese exclusion.
- [Narrator] That year,
as across the country
the bitter national debate
about race and slavery,
labor and freedom intensified,
a calculating 47 year old lawyer
named John Bigler was elected
governor of California
by what remains to this day,
the narrowest margin
in state history,
carried into office in
part by the rising tide
of anti-Chinese sentiment
amongst white Californians.
- Governor Bigler is brought
into office at a time
when the republic is first
beginning to show serious
signs of falling apart.
Out here on the West Coast,
you have deep divisions growing
between the pro-Southern,
pro-slavery Californians,
and those who are from
the Northern states
and are anti-slavery.
- California had come in
as a free-state to Missouri
as a slave state, and the
question automatically comes up
with the arrival of Chinese
immigrants in California.
Are they another race problem?
Can we afford to include
another race problem?
Could they even become American?
And the answer is no.
- And so, Bigler wants
certain legislation passed.
He wants a heavy
tax on the Chinese,
which he thinks will
drive them away.
And he begins to
articulate the idea
that will become the constant
in anti-Chinese politics
for years to come,
which is the idea
that Chinese are coolies,
or they are serfs or slaves,
that they come under bondage.
And he wants a law passed
that will prohibit anyone
from China, who comes under a
contract, to engage in mining.
Now, most of the Chinese
who came in the 1850s,
came on their own account,
they came as
independent prospectors.
But Bigler raises this kind
of specter of the coolie,
and he sites the figures
of, "There's 500 who came
"on this ship last week, there's
another 1,000 on the way.
"There's 20,000 lined up
in the ports to come."
So, he invokes this specter
of people who will
be paid $4 a month
and bring slavery
into California,
it's not a slave state,
and then he asks for these
measures to exclude the Chinese.
Bigler's message is
delivered to the assembly,
then printed up in leaflets
and distributed throughout
the gold mining districts,
so now everybody has a
kind of official license
to go attack Chinese.
- [Narrator] On May
5, 1852, Norman Asing,
now one of the leading figures
of San Francisco's
embattled Chinese community,
published a soaring reply
to Bigler's proclamation
in the Daily Alta California.
- [Norman] To his
excellency, Governor Bigler,
Sir,
I am a Chinaman, a Republican
and a lover of
free institutions,
and I'm much attached
to the principles
of the government of
the United States.
The effect of your
late message has been
to prejudice the public
mind against my people
and to enable those who
await the opportunity
to hunt them down and rob them
of the rewards of their toil.
I am not much acquainted
with your logic,
that by excluding
population from the state
you enhance its wealth.
Immigration has made
you what you are,
and your nation what it is,
but your further logic
is more reprehensible.
You argue that the Constitution
of the United States admits
of no asylum to any
other than the pale-face.
This proposition is false in
the extreme and you know it.
The declaration of
your independence,
and all the acts of your
government, your people
and your history
are all against you.
You have no right to propose
a measure for
checking immigration.
As regards the color and
complexion of our race,
we are perfectly aware
that our population are a
little more tan than yours.
Your very obedient
servant, Norman Asing.
- [Narrator] Bigler was unmoved,
and in the years to come,
made sure the Foreign Miner's
Tax was explicitly rewritten
to target the Chinese.
Year-by-year, California's
legal and legislative onslaught
against the Chinese and all
people of color intensified.
In 1854, after a white man
named George Hall was convicted
of murdering a Chinese
immigrant named Ling Sing,
based primarily on the testimony
of Chinese eyewitnesses.
The state Supreme Court
overturned the conviction,
applying to the
Chinese Estate Statute
that already barred Blacks,
Mulattoes and Indians
from testifying against Whites.
George Hall went free.
- You know there's an
expression in the 19th century,
very popular, "Not a
Chinaman's chance."
In those days, it represented
the fact that the Chinese,
if you go to court you
haven't got a chance.
In fact, in 1854, in a case
the Supreme Court of California
ruled that because Chinese
were not Christians,
and they are
sub-human, therefore,
their testimony were
inadmissible in court of law.
- [Narrator] But
try as he might,
Governor Bigler could never
realize his ultimate ambition,
outright legal exclusion of
the Chinese from California.
- Governor Bigler does
pass a law in 1855
to try to prohibit
Chinese immigration
to the state of California,
by taxing and
penalizing ship masters
who knowingly bring Chinese
immigrants to the shores.
The U.S. Government declares
that this is not a state matter
but that is a Federal matter
and that the U.S. Federal
Government should have,
and does have, jurisdiction
over international migrations.
- [Narrator] Two years
later, an even larger issue
pitting federal authority
and state's rights
over the volatile issue
of citizenship and
race would rise up.
When, in 1857, the Chief Justice
of the Supreme Court ruled
that African Americans, as
members of an inferior race,
had no rights a white
man was bound to respect,
and that no person of African
decent, whether slave or free,
could ever be a citizen
of the United States,
setting the nation on a
collision course with disaster.
On April 24, 1861, word
reached San Francisco
by Pony Express that the
Confederates had fired
on Fort Sumter
two weeks earlier.
The news sent a
thrill of excitement
through the deeply divided
city, and in the weeks to come,
crowds of pro-Union supporters
thronged into the streets
to express solidarity with
the embattled U.S. Government
on the far side
of the continent.
For the 35,000
Chinese immigrants,
who by 1861 were struggling
to make a life for themselves
in California, the war
would bring new challenges,
new dangers and
new opportunities.
Over the next four
years, wartime
by the Federal Government
would strengthen ties
between China and
America, encourage the
and things between the two
nations and increase the influx
of Chinese immigrants to the
dismay of the exclusionists.
- In the 1860s, Californians,
they're still agitating
for national legislation
to exclude Chinese.
But, in Washington, this is
seen as kind of a West Coast,
local political question,
and in Washington, they're
more concerned with trade
with China, that's
the national interest.
- [Narrator] In June
1861, Abraham Lincoln sent
a one-time Massachusetts
Congressman named
to Beijing to improve
relations with China,
promote friendship and commerce,
and to repair diplomatic ties
damaged by the opium wars.
In July 1862, at the
darkest point of the war,
Lincoln signed into law
the Pacific Railway act,
clearing the way
for construction
of a vast transcontinental
railroad that, when complete,
would finally connect the
Atlantic world to the Pacific
and revolutionize
trade with China.
- The Transcontinental
Railroad, called by some,
"The Iron Road to China," is
not just establishing the links
between the West Coast
and the East Coast,
but is also to get
us to the Pacific
and to establish
American businesses
so that they can do
business with Asia.
- You need a very
large labor force
to build a railroad operation
across the entire nation.
The Central Pacific on
the West Coast looked
at the Union Pacific,
building from the East,
and saw that it was employing
recent Irish immigrants
in large numbers
and there wasn't
that kind of population
in California.
- [Historian] There were a lot
of unemployed Chinese miners
out there, and there's
a great demand for labor
for the western section,
so the Central Pacific has
this idea to use Chinese.
- [Historian] The
Central Pacific said,
"We're not going to be able
to cross the Sierra Nevada
"with Transcontinental Railroad
"unless we have
Chinese workers."
- They found out very quickly
that Chinese are very
diligent, they're reliable,
they're hard-working
and so, immediately,
decided to massively
recruit Chinese,
including going all
the way to China
to encourage more of
them to come here.
- [Narrator] Between
1860 and 1870,
nearly 30,000 Chinese
immigrants would come
to the United States,
nearly doubling the Chinese
population to 63,000.
Between 10 and 15,000
of them would find work
on the Central Pacific Railroad.
- [Historian] Eventually,
they would make up four-fifths
of the workforce for
the Central Pacific.
And they have the hardest jobs,
they go through the Sierras,
over the Sierras, they work
under the snow in the winter,
they build vast tunnel systems
in which they keep
chipping away at the rock.
- They organized themselves,
they were capable of hard work,
they took great chances and
they were physically strong,
they could do the labor.
You could see that from
what they accomplished,
the triumph of taking on the
Sierra Nevada the same way
that 2,000 years earlier we
took on the great mountains
of China and built
the Great Wall.
- The Chinese could not
have been able to come
to the United
States to help build
the Transcontinental
Railroad had it not been
for Anson Burlingame, the first
American Ambassador to China
because China prohibited Chinese
people from going abroad.
And so, what Burlingame did is
commit the Chinese Government
to allow free immigration
between China and
the United States.
- [Narrator] Less than a
year before the railroad
itself was completed,
Anson Burlingame concluded
a historic treaty between
the United States and China,
explicitly guaranteeing the
free-flow of people and trade
between the two nations.
- [Historian] Anson Burlingame
resigned from his position
as American Ambassador to
China and turned around
and presented himself
as Chinese Ambassador
to the United States,
and he negotiated the
Burlingame Treaty on behalf
of the Chinese Government.
And so, the treaty
essentially legitimized
Chinese citizens' ability to
immigrate to the United States.
- [Historian] The Burlingame
Treaty had a structure
of reciprocity, Americans
can freely enter China,
and Chinese can freely
enter the United States.
Trade goes both ways,
people can go both ways.
And usually when you have trade,
you have people who
go back and forth,
businessmen obviously, but
also, immigrants will follow.
And so, this treaty is a huge
obstacle, a huge set-back
to the exclusionists.
- The other thing
that Burlingame was
that people here in California
were passing all these local
and state laws
against the Chinese,
which he thought was
totally unconstitutional
and that would affect America's
relationship with China.
So, by this law, this treaty,
Burlingame was able to extend
federal protection of Chinese
against all these,
what he called,
"Obnoxious, local ordinances
"and state laws
against the Chinese."
- And finally, the
railroads meet in Utah
at Promontory Point.
And that famous picture of
the two iron horses there,
but the Chinese are not
allowed to be in the picture,
they're somewhere off to the
side, they're out of the frame.
They're there, but they're not.
And so, they're erased
from that history.
And then, once that
railroad's done,
then what happens
to these Chinese?
- The paychecks end,
they have to come down
from the mountains, there's
nothing else up there
for them to do.
And, most of them go
west, toward the coast,
toward Chinatowns across
the state of California.
And suddenly, there's a
big influx along the coast
of Chinese people
from the railroads.
So, it's unemployed men coming
down from the mountains,
forging all-male
Chinatowns, boarding houses,
hotels, tent-cities,
living rough,
who have to create a new life
outside of the railroads.
- They're not able to marry
because of the
anti-miscegenation
so it becomes harder
and harder for them
to maintain what we would
now consider a normal life.
So, Chinese are often on the
move throughout the West,
trying to find stability,
trying to find a way to fit in.
- [Narrator] The treaty on
the railroad were triumphs
of connection in an
increasingly global world.
Tying American, itself,
more closely together
and accelerating
trade with China
by bringing more Chinese
immigrants to American shores.
In the long run, however,
the impact of both would be
to nationalize what had
previously been a remote,
West Coast issue, propelling
to national attention a fraught
and volatile issue
of Chinese labor,
which, by 1869, was
increasingly being called,
"The Chinese Question."
- This is the era when
all of the promises
of the Civil War are going
to start falling apart.
After the Civil War we had
13th, 14th and 15th Amendments,
and those are all civil
rights amendments.
The 13th abolishes slavery,
the 15th gives black
men the right to vote,
but the 14th Amendment
grants all civil rights
to all persons.
- [Narrator] On July 9,
1868, just three weeks
before the Burlingame
Treaty was concluded,
the 14th Amendment to the
United States' Constitution
was formally adopted.
The second of three signed
into law during Reconstruction
despite bitter opposition
from most states
of the fallen Confederacy,
which were forced to ratify it
to regain representation
in Congress.
Overruling the Supreme Court's
decision in Dred-Scott,
which had denied citizenship
and all civil rights
to black Americans, the 14th
Amendment Citizenship Clause
declared that all persons,
born and naturalized
in the United States, are
citizens of the United States
who cannot be deprived of
life, liberty, due process,
civil rights or equal
protection under the law.
In the decades to come, the
spare, 80-word text would form
the last slender line of defense
for the Chinese in America
as the country began a long,
slow decent into an abyss
of hatred and violence directed
against all people of color.
- [Writer] February
6, 1869, Chicago.
We warn working men that a
new and dangerous foe looms
up in the far west,
already our brothers at the
Pacific have to meet it.
And just as soon as the
Pacific Railroad is completed,
these Chinamen
will begin to swarm
for the Rocky Mountains
like devouring locusts,
and spread out over
the country this side.
Men who can work for a dollar
a day are a dangerous element
in our country.
We must not sleep until
the foe is upon us,
but commence to fight him now.
In the name of the workingmen
of our common country,
we demand that our government
forbid another Chinaman
to set foot upon our shores.
The Workingman's Advocate.
- [Narrator] The
first flashpoint came
even before the railroad was
completed in the Deep South,
more than 1,000 miles
from the gold fields
of Northern California,
in the troubled
post-war cotton fields
of the Mississippi Delta.
- After the Civil War, one
of the first developments is
that with the emancipation
of African slaves
and their descendants,
you get the demise
of the plantation
system in the South.
The plantation owners in
places like Mississippi
and Louisiana still need work.
- [Narrator] In 1869, faced
with a severe labor shortage
and rising costs,
plantation owners
from across the South
gathered in Memphis
to find a solution
to the problem.
- At the Memphis Convention,
growers are coming together
and they're talking
about bringing Chinese
to replace freedmen.
They've heard these stories
about the Chinese laborers
miraculously building
the toughest part of the
Transcontinental Railroad,
under very difficult
circumstances,
and they're hoping this
may be the magic bullet,
the cure for their
labor problems.
- [Narrator] "China has
the labor that we need,"
the report of the Memphis
Convention concluded,
"and it can be procured
to an unlimited extent,
"far below the cost of
our present labor system."
"Wildly circulated in
the national press,"
one man later said, "the
report sparked a chain reaction
"of interest amongst
businessmen across the country
"in importing Chinese workers."
By the Summer of 1869,
as newspapers across the
country reported plans
to import Chinese laborers
to work on plantations,
railroads, factories and
homes, alarms began to go out
along with howls of protests
from workingmen's groups
and trade unions
across the East,
denouncing the scheme
as unfair competition
and accusing malevolent
capitalists of trafficking
in a new form of slave
labor, the coolie trade.
- [Abolitionist] We have
abolished the slavery
of the black man,
but these capitalists are
endeavoring to resurrect it.
The workingmen throughout
the country should rise
in the body and
raise such a shout
that its echo will
reach Washington.
- And then, in Massachusetts,
a little town of North Adams,
Massachusetts, in 1870,
there's a shoe strike.
And the owner of the
shoe factory sends one
of his job recruiters
out to California,
says, "See if the
Chinese will come."
So he brings in about
75 Chinese workers,
mostly teenagers and young men,
to North Adams, Massachusetts
to break this strike.
And they actually ride the
Transcontinental Railroad,
and various other connections,
and get off the train
in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Then, for this brief
moment of time,
there are more Chinese
in North Adams,
then anywhere east
of the Mississippi.
And most of them work
a three-year contract,
they're not always
welcomed by the townsfolk,
they live in the shoe factory.
But, once that happens,
once you get Chinese
in North Adams, then
you begin to see Chinese
in Pennsylvania working
in various factories,
and then you get the burgeoning
of New York Chinatown,
Boston Chinatown, Philadelphia
Chinatown, Baltimore.
- In Belleville, New Jersey,
a group of Chinese
laborers are brought over
to work as replacement workers,
strike breakers to
the industrial laundry
that is on strike
by Irish women.
So, not just the
plantations in the South,
but the Northeast,
with their factories,
are actually also
experiencing this,
in all cases we're talking
about small numbers,
but, it's so blown out of
proportion in the press.
This becomes huge news.
- [Narrator] The Chinese
in America numbered fewer
than 64,000 in 1870, and were
never paid anything close
to the starvation wages they
were accused of settling for.
But the facts didn't matter,
and they would soon find
themselves at the center
of a rising tide of
anti-Chinese sentiment
across the country.
Feared and vilified by
white workers as scab labor
and pawns of the monopolists,
and viciously caricatured
in the national press
as servile automatons.
- If you look at the
political cartoons
in something like
Harper's Weekly,
you suddenly see these concerns
about Chinese coolie
laborers who are gonna march
across the nation and take
over every single job,
that this is gonna be a threat
to every white workingman
in the nation, whether
you are a boot-maker
or a cigar-maker.
And the stereotypes
of the Chinese coolie,
the Chinese opium smoker are
what's played in the media,
over, and over, and over again.
- So, the Chinese are
understood to be un-assimilable,
they can never become Americans,
because they're heathen,
they're not Christian, you know.
African Americans
are Christians,
they went through that crucible
hundreds of years earlier,
the Chinese, they have no
individual personality,
they're just robots,
they're just slaves.
But, we've gotten
rid of slavery,
so therefore, they're
un-assimilable,
and this becomes the
core understanding
of racial difference.
- So what happens is that class
and racialization converged,
get confused.
And the coolie question and
the Chinese question really
become the big
question, nationally,
of labor and class.
Can the American man compete
with this degraded,
Asian male form of labor?
They don't eat as much, maybe
their nerves are further away
from the surface of the skin
so they don't feel as much,
they eat rats, all this gets
played out even more and more
around not just class
lines and racialization,
but also around gender.
The Chinese male is inferior,
is not the same as white man.
So, we have that famous
cover, "Meat vs. Rice,
"American Manhood against
Asiatic Coolieism."
And, of course, the
Asian male is inferior,
but tenacious because
there are a lot of them.
So, they're dangerous because
there are so many of them,
not because they
really rival the,
actually superior, white male.
- [Narrator] By 1871, with
unemployment on the rise,
the national economy
faltering and the shadow
of the worst depression of
the 19th century looming
across the country, the
vitriol and hostility directed
against the Chinese
reached a tipping point.
Starting first, almost
inevitably, in California.
- When California's connected
to the rest of the country,
it doesn't have the effects
that people thought
it would have.
It connects California as
part of a national market,
but that also means that
cheap, manufactured goods
from the East now flood
the Western market,
prices and wages are depressed,
there's actually
more unemployment
than there was
previously in California,
and in fact, the
depression of the 1870s
in the East will be
brought by the railroad
to the West a few years later.
So, now you have a large
unemployed population,
and in the cities, then, you
have a much more explosive kind
of racial dynamic, where the
ideas that targeted Chinese
in the gold fields
are refashioned for
and they get a
new lease on life.
And this is really where
it becomes incendiary,
where there are race
riots in the streets.
- [Narrator] It was
only a matter of time
before the anti-Chinese
feelings erupted into violence.
- [Historian] The
first lynchings of
in Los Angeles in 1871.
- [Narrator] On the night
of October 24, 1871,
hundreds of enraged white and
Mexican Angelinos descended
on Chinatown in Los Angeles,
allegedly in response to the
killing of a white man caught
in the crossfire when
a gun fight broke out
between two Chinese immigrants.
- [Historian] The
population of Los Angeles,
which is small at the time,
includes this broad
cross-section of people
who now have engaged
in collective violence
against the Chinese community.
- Chinatown was called
Calle de los Negros,
or as it was known at
the time, Nigger Alley.
And, the population
of Los Angeles rushes in
for this really
brutal race riot,
and one of the Chinese
rushes out to find the police
and says, "There's
a riot coming down
"on my people in Chinatown."
And there's six police
officers in L.A.,
and they stay in the bar
and they drink their way
through the race riot.
- [Woman] White people
and Mexicans flocked down
to Chinatown and as they
captured Chinese people,
they lynched them.
They hanged them from
a church steeple.
They hanged them from the
top of a covered wagon,
from a gate post.
They cut off the finger
of one of the Chinese men.
One of those lynched is a child,
and two Chinese
women are lynched.
And then they torch Chinatown.
The Chinese people fight back.
One Chinese woman
picks up a rifle
that one of the vigilantes drops
and starts shooting at the mob,
but the mob cuts
holes in the roofs
of the houses in Chinatown
and drops flaming torches
into these holes on the
roof, and Chinatown burns.
(railroad bell clanging)
- [Man] 18 Chinamen
were buried yesterday.
They presented a most
ghastly and horrible sight.
Witnesses are very careful
in giving their testimony,
fearing to name
individuals whom they know
to have taken an active
part in the lynching,
lest they be similarly
dealt with themselves.
There seems to be but
one sentiment expressed
by the better class
of our citizens,
that a great wrong has been
done which years may not efface,
that the scenes of Tuesday night
are a disgrace to our city.
Daly Alta, California.
- It's still one of the
largest mass lynchings
in U.S. history.
We often think that
this must have happened
in the South somewhere, but
it actually happened in L.A.,
and not with African Americans
but with Chinese-Americans.
- [Woman] The Chinese sue.
They bring both civil
and criminal actions
against the leaders of the riot.
They demand a grand
jury investigation.
They're gonna charge 37 people
for being leaders in the riot
but the list of the grand
jury minutes disappears
and so, in the end, they
only charge 10 people,
eight of whom actually
do briefly go to jail
and then the civic
leaders get them out.
- That lynching was a
horrible overture to a decade
of projecting the difficulties
of the 1870s onto the Chinese,
suggesting a deep sub-evil,
looking for a victim
in the California psyche.
By the early '70s,
the failure of banks,
the great depression
that hit California,
had filled San Francisco
with unemployed,
single, white males,
looking for work
and not being able to find it.
So you begin to get
harassment of the Chinese,
closing down their laundries,
outlawing various things
that they're doing,
other kinds of mistreatment
of the Chinese.
(bell ringing)
- [Narrator] Exclusionists
in San Francisco,
thwarted from barring
the Chinese outright
by the terms of the
Burlingame Treaty,
urged the city's
board of supervisors
to find other ways to
drive the Chinese out.
- The city passed numerous
ordinances to harass
the Chinese,
thinking that if you made life
miserable enough for people,
they would leave.
So there was an ordinance
that you couldn't walk
on a sidewalk with a
pole on your shoulder.
This is how Chinese
vegetable peddlers
and other businesses
carried their wares.
We would be fined for that.
There was the Cubic
Air Ordinance,
that every dwelling had
to have so much
cubic air per person.
Now, this should've been
targeted against the landlords
but it was targeted
against the inhabitants,
because Chinatown
was a crowded area.
There was an ordinance that said
that any Chinese who
was arrested would
have his hair shorn
to within an inch of his scalp.
Now, this was really obnoxious
because it meant cutting
the queue, or the pigtail,
which was a required form
of dress for Chinese men.
That was so obnoxious that it
was overturned by the courts.
- I think the anti-Chinese
codes in some ways are copied
from the black
codes in the South,
and all of them have a function,
which is to purge the Chinese
and make it impossible
for them to work here.
The Chinese were well organized,
especially at the local level,
and they were very effective.
For example, when vegetable
dealers weren't allowed
to deliver food with
the pole ordinance,
they just boycotted
and went out on strike,
and stopped
delivering vegetables
to the hotels and
to the households,
and that ended the law,
because the Chinese
were the gardeners.
And so each of these
codes is resisted,
every single time it comes up,
and many times they prevail.
- [Man] So all these
obnoxious local ordinances
and state laws,
against the Chinese,
every one of them eventually
got challenged in court
and ruled in violation
of the Burlingame Treaty.
- So, in California, they're
trying to think of all kinds
of ways to get
rid of the Chinese
without passing
an exclusion law,
but they're also
lobbying in Congress
to get an exclusion law passed.
- [Narrator] Lawmakers in
Congress, for their part,
still led by
radical Republicans,
whose principals had been forged
in the fight against slavery,
continued to resist all efforts
to get them to legislate
against the Chinese
on the basis of their race.
(gentle music)
But by 1875,
the political dynamic in
America had begun to shift,
as Democrats in Washington
began to understand
that the Chinese issue
could be indispensable
to the post-Civil
War rehabilitation
of the Democratic Party.
That year, with
anti-Chinese sentiment
at the state and local
level on the rise,
and a presidential
election looming,
California lawmakers
redoubled their efforts
to put pressure on Congress,
shifting the debate
from the issue of race
to the issue of contract labor
by leasing across the country
as another form of slavery.
- The issue of Chinese labor
becomes a very easy one
to galvanize the constituents
of the Democratic Party,
working men in particular,
many of whom come from
European immigrant backgrounds,
would've been working-class,
would've been concerned
about what appeared
to be the flooding of Chinese
workers into the nation.
And the Democratic Party
is seen as a protector
of working men's rights
and a guarantor of
their opportunities,
and that's where we don't have
just simply a local story,
but one that then has
large national resonance.
- The Democrats suggest that
Chinese labor will actually
be equivalent to black slaves
and really got the liberals
in a new thing that puts
them against a wall.
Look at all the slaves
that they have here
in the west coast.
So on the one hand, you
have this political pressure
against the Republicans
because they were advocating
for Chinese coolies.
And on the other hand, the
Chinese suddenly become a threat
in some of the east
coast factories,
they were using Chinese
as strike-breakers.
And so that made it possible
for the exclusion movement
to get the support from
the east coast politicians.
- [Narrator] For the first time,
a pathway to Chinese exclusion,
stymied at the national
level for 20 years,
now began to open.
- In 1875, Congress
passes the Page Act,
which is an effort to speak
to the demands of
the Californians
without circumventing
the Burlingame Treaty.
The Page Act prohibits the
immigration of people coming
under contracts to
work and prostitutes.
Now, Chinese have been
stereotyped already.
All the men are coolies, all
the women are prostitutes,
so they think this is the way
they're gonna stop the
Chinese immigration.
And because contract workers
and prostitutes are not defined
as free immigrants,
but as enslaved,
they're not
contradicting the terms
of the Burlingame Treaty.
(somber music)
- There developed this sexist,
racist, misogynist attitude
among Americans that Chinese
women were naturally prone
to become prostitutes, and
therefore, the Chinese women,
who wanted to come to
the U.S., had to prove
that they were
never prostitutes,
that they weren't
prostitutes then,
nor would they ever
become prostitutes.
Now, of course, one can't
prove what will not happen
or happen in the future,
so many women chose not to even
go through that humiliation.
So we had that first
act that's passed,
that is very racial
and gender-specific.
- [Woman] The Page Act is
spectacularly successful
at keeping women out.
Not because all women
coming were prostitutes,
although some were, but
because the interrogation
of the female arrivals
was so horrific
that once you hear about
this, you don't wanna try it.
So female immigration plummets.
- [Narrator] The impact of
the Page Act was immediate
and dramatic.
In 1870, there were only
78 Chinese women in America
for every 1,000 Chinese men.
By the end of the decade,
there were just 47.
(somber music)
- When the United States
Congress passes the Page Act
in 1875, and it bans most
women, except merchants' wives,
from entering the country,
that's ethnic cleansing.
Without women there
won't be family,
progeny, lineage, children,
and so the population
will just die off,
and it was intended to die off.
(gavel banging)
- [Narrator] By 1876, a
starkly reconsolidated,
white racial calculus was
on the rise across America,
from the streets
of San Francisco
to the halls of Congress.
That year, Reconstruction
would collapse entirely
in the bitterly-contested
presidential election of 1876,
when Republicans in Congress,
choosing self-interest
over justice and equal rights,
agreed to withdraw federal
troops from the South
in a backroom deal that
sent their party's nominee,
Rutherford B. Hayes,
to the White House,
even though he had
lost the popular vote
to his Democratic
rival, Samuel Tilden.
During the campaign itself,
platforms of both major
parties openly called
for excluding Chinese.
- It came at a time when
American politics were sort
of balanced on a knife's edge,
between Republicans
and Democrats.
If you look at the period
between 1876 and 1896,
you have five presidential
elections in that period,
they were all very close.
The 1876 election,
in which the winner
of the electoral
college and the winner
of the popular vote
were different,
the difference in the
electoral college was one vote.
Now, California had
six electoral votes.
Maybe they're decisive.
Oregon had three, Nevada had
three, maybe they're decisive.
So the pandering for
political support,
for the Pacific Coast votes,
converts what would have been
a local issue, with
local agitation,
into a national political issue.
- [Narrator] Legitimized by
recent federal legislation,
and the stunning outcome
of the 1876 election,
a rising tide of political
reaction now washed back
across the country
to California.
- The minute the northern
troops are withdrawn
from the South, and
Reconstruction falls apart,
and the South is voting
again in Congress,
and can take apart the
civil rights victories
of the Civil War, it becomes
an invitation to race wars.
- [Woman] So you
have in California,
a political movement
for exclusion.
You have all this
legislation going on.
You have violence,
you had gangs of kids
that would throw rocks at the
wagons of Chinese arriving
from the docks on
their way to Chinatown.
They'd stand on the bridge
and throw rocks at people,
or spit upon them.
It was horrific.
And then Chinese
become the target
of a so-called
Workingmen's Party
and a Workingmen's movement.
Denis Kearney, a
recently-naturalized Irishman,
emerges as a leader of
the Workingmen's Party
in San Francisco.
- [Woman] He was very
effective in pointing
to Chinese immigrant
men, male laborers,
as being the source of
the white workers' trouble
because the Chinese
immigrant was the tool.
He was the slave of the
fat-cat, industrialist boss,
who was exploiting workers,
not paying a living wage,
and out to prevent white workers
from gaining their fair share.
- [Man] As the
Workingmen's Party movement
and kind of class
hostility builds,
the first demand is down
with the monopolies,
because the monopolies
are the ones seen
as increasingly
hiring the Chinese,
and gaining their
power from the Chinese.
And the second demand
is the Chinese must go.
(crowd yelling)
- And they have sandlot rallies,
with incendiary speeches
and their slogan is
The Chinese must go!
And Kearney would
rile up these crowds.
Then after the rallies,
people would fan
out into the streets
and they would burn
down Chinese wash-houses
and attack any poor soul
that would happen
to be on the street.
And mobs of hundreds of
people would roam the city
of San Francisco.
They tried to burn down the
Pacific Mail Steamship docks,
which is where most of
the Chinese arrived.
They couldn't get
into the shipyard,
so they burned down the
lumber yard next to it,
hoping that they would burn
down the shipyard as well.
It was just utter chaos
and the city of San
Francisco actually had
to dispatch police
and citizens' groups
to hold back these mobs.
- [Narrator] And now in
Congress, the firewall
of Republican opposition
itself began to crumble.
- So finally, the
issue had been agitated
for such a long time
and the political impact
of the issue had taken root
in the Congress,
that you got the 1879
Fifteen Passenger Bill.
That was a bill that said
that there could not be more
than 15 passengers
of Chinese background
on any ship entering
the United States.
Otherwise, the ship
would be turned back
and the captain would be
fined and so on and so forth.
In the first major
debate in the Congress,
on the 1879 Fifteen
Passenger Bill,
Senator James G.
Blaine of Maine,
broke from the
northeastern Republicans,
who basically opposed
Chinese exclusion,
to support exclusion.
His theory was if you had
people who could not assimilate
and become part of
the body politic,
and therefore should not
become American citizens,
then you also should not
permit them to immigrate,
because if you allow
them to immigrate,
you would always have
a political underclass,
seething with resentment,
unable to enjoy the full
fruits of the American dream.
That, he said, would create
social problems for the country,
so better not to let
them come at all.
Senator Blaine makes
this statement,
"We have today to decide
whether we shall have
"on the Pacific coast
of the United States,
"the kingdom of Christ or
the kingdom of Confucius."
So a choice had to be made.
Restrict immigration and
restrict citizenship rights
or give the Pacific coast
over to an alien culture
and an unassimilable population,
unfit for citizenship.
Now, the Fifteen Passenger
Bill ultimately got vetoed
because President
Rutherford Hayes,
on the advice of his
Secretary of State, said,
"We have treaties with China,
"the Burlingame
Treaty specifically,
"that appears to allow for
the free movement of peoples
"between China and
the United States,
"and the 1879 legislation
violates the treaty."
People in the Congress knew
it violated the treaty.
At the same time, however,
President Hayes then sent
a delegation to China
to renegotiate the
Burlingame Treaty,
so that some kind of
legislation could pass.
And that negotiation gave
the United States the right
to restrict or to suspend
immigration of Chinese labor.
Chinese government really
didn't want that treaty.
America pushed it on them.
China objected but
America assured them
that the treaty would be
administered in a fair way.
So in April of 1882,
when they passed a
20-year exclusion act,
which essentially barred
an entire generation
of Chinese labor from coming
into the United States,
that evoked a veto from
President Chester Arthur
and then Congress came back
very shortly thereafter
with a 10-year bill,
and at that point,
President Arthur said, "Look,
this is apparently the will
"of the Congress.
"10 years is not as
offensive as 20 years."
And he didn't exercise
the veto pen again
and May 6th, 1882, the
legislation becomes law.
(crowd murmuring)
I daresay that people
who voted for the
Chinese exclusion laws,
who came from Ohio, or
Michigan, or Minnesota,
probably never saw
a Chinese person
at the time they
voted for those laws,
and certainly the southern
states were full of people
who had never seen
Chinese people either.
Southern senators
and congressmen voted
for Chinese exclusion, not
because they had a Chinese issue
within their own constituency,
but because they felt if
they attuned themselves
to the political
exclusionary interests
on the Pacific coast,
they would gain sympathy
for what they wanted
to do in their own
region of the country
to voters of African background,
which is disenfranchise them.
(soft music)
The fundamental point
is you have your problem
and we have our problem.
We'll support you,
you support us.
It was an argument
against civil rights.
It was an argument
against immigration.
But there was still lots of
dissension in the Congress
against barring immigration,
and there was
absolutely dissension
against barring naturalization.
Hannibal Hamlin of Maine,
Abraham Lincoln's
first Vice President,
Chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee,
was very opposed to it,
and on the floor of the
Senate, he denounced it,
and he said, "I'm
opposed to this.
"It violates fundamental
American principles."
And he says, "I leave my vote,
"the last legacy to my children,
"that they may esteem it the
brightest act of my life."
This is a person with
enormous moral authority.
So as the Congress acted,
the voices of dissent
were not muted.
They were, in fact, active,
eloquent, prominent,
and ultimately insufficient.
So, anything that the
Congress did, in these years,
was not by accident.
(somber music)
It really did two things.
One is an exclusion
from immigration
and the other thing was an
exclusion from citizenship.
(somber music)
There were Chinese that were
legally in the United States,
coming from the time of
the California gold rush
and then in much greater
numbers in connection
with the construction of the
Transcontinental Railway.
So at the time,
there were approximately
105,000 Chinese in America.
Now they were 2/10 of 1% of the
overall American population.
So what happens to the
people who are already here,
people legally in
the United States?
And what that law said was
these people cannot assimilate.
They are too different,
in terms of their culture,
in terms of their appearance,
in terms of their language,
the clothes that they wear
and the food that they eat and
the gods that they worship.
They cannot assimilate into
the American population
and in that sense,
they are different from
European immigrants.
So we're going to make,
as a Congress, a judgment.
We're going to say that,
because they are an
unassimilable population,
they cannot come to
the United States,
and those who are here, cannot
become American citizens.
(bell ringing)
- [Narrator] In 1864, a
12-year-old boy from Guangdong,
named Ju Di, arrived
in San Francisco,
hoping to make a new
life for himself.
- He went to work
as a house servant
for a dairy farmer out on Van
Ness Avenue in San Francisco
and he drove the milk
wagon for this dairy farmer
and that's how he met
his future wife, Mary,
who was the only Chinese
child being raised
in the home of the Ladies
Protection and Relief Society.
She was brought there by
a Protestant missionary,
who had rescued
her in Chinatown.
She was brought as a girl
servant at the age of 11,
probably intended for
prostitution when she got older,
and somehow she escaped
from her keepers.
So she's the first
so-called slave girl rescued
by the missionaries.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] The boy from
Guangdong would succeed
against the odds,
working his way up from
the most menial labor,
to owning his own business,
changing his name
to Joseph Tape,
and marrying a
castoff Chinese girl,
a (speaking foreign language),
whose background was even
more precarious than his own.
Her Chinese name
was never recorded.
After her rescue, she was
given the name Mary McGladery,
after an assistant matron
at the Relief Society.
- So she's from
someplace near Shanghai,
he's from Guangdong.
They don't speak
the same dialect,
so he courts her in English
and they get married in 1875,
and by this time he
has his own wagon
and he's building a business,
hauling goods from the docks
to Chinatown for the merchants
and then he gets
the baggage monopoly
for the steamship company,
and he becomes quite wealthy
as the transportation
and passenger agent
for the Southern Pacific.
As a Chinese-American
family in San Francisco,
in the 19th century, the
Tapes were quite unusual,
although not unique.
They were assimilated Chinese.
They adopted an Anglicized name.
Tape is not a Chinese name,
and they were very
committed to being American
and being part of
American society.
Mary is a photographer,
she's a painter,
and they're raising
their children in a home
which is kind of
hybrid culturally.
They eat Chinese food but
they also speak English,
and I think, in a way, this
is how they found their way
into the middle class.
- [Narrator] In
the difficult years
that followed the passage
of the act in 1882,
Mary and Joseph Tape,
like tens of thousands
of Chinese-Americans
across the country,
who had come so far
and worked so hard and pledged
themselves so unstintingly
to the American dream, would
do everything they could
to resist and refuse
to countenance the
invidious new world
they found themselves in
as the reality of
exclusion set in.
(soft music)
- [Woman] When the
exclusion laws first passed,
it's a 10-year suspension and
then they renew it in 10 years
and then a whole slew of
ancillary laws get passed
to control or to prohibit
the entry of people.
- The first Chinese
Exclusion Act
of 1882 really sets the
parameters of which Chinese can
and cannot be in this country.
It says no Chinese
laborers may enter
for a period of 10 years.
It also says they
can't become citizens.
They cannot bring their wives,
and they can't have
families, at least laborers.
Now merchants were
allowed to enter,
they could bring their families.
Students were allowed to enter.
But as the years passed,
the definition of a merchant
became narrower and narrower,
as well as students,
but the definition of
laborers became broader.
- So immigration
drops tremendously.
The number of Chinese
who come over gets
smaller and smaller.
But what about the people
who are already here?
It doesn't say
they have to leave.
They get grandfathered in,
so then it gets
really complicated,
because what if you
wanna leave for a visit?
Well, how do you
know who's been here
and who's just come?
So anytime you have
a restrictive law,
you have an enforcement
question, right?
And this becomes a nightmare
that unfolds for decades.
- The challenge for
Chinese immigrants living
under the exclusion
era was multiple
because the exclusion
laws were so restrictive.
There's the whole ordeal
about entering the country
under the exclusion
laws, and then,
there's the similarly
difficult ordeal of living
under the shadow of exclusion
and trying to
reunite with family.
- [Mary] And Chinese
American families have to
really make some hard
decisions about what
to do with their children,
what to do with their families.
Where should they really
think about their future?
Is it gonna be in
the United States
or will it have to
be back in China
with political conditions
there being so uncertain
in this period?
- At the same time,
Chinatowns themselves become
much more insular and
segregated in a way
because it was dangerous
to live outside
of the community.
You could be much
more easily attacked.
- So you see Chinese
predominantly
living in Chinatown,
ethnic enclaves,
for two reasons.
One, self-protection.
And two, because they're
not allowed to move out.
It's hard for them to find
property or businesses
that will take them
outside of Chinatown.
I think to a great
extent it keeps Chinese
right where many
Euro-Americans wanted them.
And the borders are permeable
only to a certain extent.
And they're more
permeable for non-Chinese.
So Chinatowns do
become walled off.
- As we look at
this dark period,
I think it's important to
think about Chinese people
in the context of Jim Crow,
of what was happening to
African American people,
of putting Native
Americans on reservations.
In California, what that
started as a population
of 200,000 Native Americans.
By the time of the
Chinese Exclusion Act,
there were 16,000 Native
Americans in California.
- So the effectiveness of racism
and the presumptions
of what we now call
whiteness ran very deep.
- [Narrator] The passage of
the Chinese Exclusion Act
in 1882 opened the
floodgates to an era
of violence and brutality
toward Chinese Americans
and all people of color,
almost without precedence
in American history.
- The Chinese
Exclusion Act codified
a lot of energies that were
happening at the local level.
Up to that time, for
people at the local level,
it's been more
vigilante kind of law,
we will take this
into our own hands.
And in fact Congress
codified it for them.
At this point the Chinese
people weren't just
on the Pacific West Coast.
And all through the
1880s there was horrific
violence going on against
the Chinese people
and brutality that
never found justice.
- There was widespread
violence throughout
the West against Chinese.
They're driven out of towns.
They're driven
off of small farms
that they might
have homesteaded.
- [Narrator] On the night
of February 6, 1885,
a mob of 600 angry
white Californians
in the north coast
lumber town of Eureka,
enraged by the killing of a
member of the town council,
descended on
Chinatown, screaming,
"Murder the Chinese
and burn Chinatown."
Then drove every Chinese
immigrant in Eureka
out of town and onto ships
bound for San Francisco.
After the purge, the
town council passed
an ordinance excluding Chinese
that remained in
force until 1950.
In September 1885, at
a coal mine owned by
the Union Pacific Railroad
in Rock Springs, Wyoming,
angry, white coal miners,
many of them
immigrants themselves,
attacked a group
of Chinese miners
following a labor dispute,
and burned their
homes to the ground.
(flames crackling)
- [Man] The Chinese,
now to save their lives,
fled in confusion
in every direction.
Some of the rioters
who took no part
either in beating or
robbing the Chinese,
stood by, shouting loudly
and laughing and
clapping their hands.
(flames crackling)
Some of the Chinese were
burned alive in their houses.
The whole number of
Chinese killed was 28,
and those wounded, 15.
(flames crackling)
- [Woman] The examples
are too numerous to say.
And again, they happen in
small towns that are isolated,
but in huge cities like
Tacoma and Seattle.
The example of Tacoma is
striking in and of itself.
The entire Chinese
population is expelled
from Tacoma in 1885.
It's 800 to 900 people.
- [Man] They went to
all the Chinese houses
and establishments and
notified the Chinese to leave.
When the doors were locked,
they broke forcibly
into their houses,
smashing in doors and
breaking in windows.
My wife refused to go,
and some of the white
persons dragged her
out of the house.
From the loses we
sustained through the riot,
she lost her reason
and has ever since
been hopelessly insane.
Lun May.
- [Jean] They're marched nine
miles up into the mountains
to a railroad crossing
they had themselves built.
And there they wait all
night for the trains to come.
And they're cold and they're wet
and they've lost everything.
And many of the Chinese
jump into the empty cars,
while the rest march
over a hundred miles,
following the
tracks to Portland.
- [Narrator] In early June 1887,
along the remote stretch
of the Snake River,
separating Idaho and Oregon,
a settler 30 miles south
of Lewistown caught sight
of the first of many
badly decomposed bodies
washed loose by the
heavy spring rains
and floating downstream.
The mutilated corpses,
riddled with gunshot wounds
and partially dismembered,
were all that remained
of 34 Chinese gold miners
who in late May
investigations revealed
had been ambushed,
savagely tortured,
and systematically
executed by a gang
of horse thieves and schoolboys
from Wallowa County, Oregon,
65 miles upstream.
Everyone was shot and cut up,
then stripped and
thrown in the river,
an investigator reported.
Six white men were
eventually indicted
by a grand jury.
Three escaped, and the
remaining three found innocent
by a jury of their peers.
"I guess if they had
killed 31 white men,"
one man said, "something
would've been done about it."
But none of the jury
knew the Chinamen
or knew much about it, so
they turned the men loose.
- [Jean] There are 300
purges across California,
Oregon, up to Seattle
in Washington,
as far east as Rock
Springs in Wyoming.
So they're all over the West.
After the Chinese were
driven out of Eureka,
the Chinese filed the first
lawsuit for reparations
that I'm aware of
in American history.
And they demand a
$133,000 in reparations.
But very quickly it
becomes clear they're gonna
lose the lawsuit
because the judge holds
that everything they had,
because it was Chinese,
was valueless, and on those
terms he throws out the lawsuit.
- [Narrator] After the
massacre at Rock Springs,
the Chinese government demanded
justice for the slaughter.
The Secretary of
State in Washington
countered that the violence
had been perpetrated
by the Irish non-citizens,
but in the end, fearful of
damaging trade relations,
agreed to pay
reparations of a $147,000
to the Chinese government.
- I don't know.
I think that the racism of
the era was so ingrained,
and the creative ways
people were coming up with
to tag and mark
people as different
were invoked as ways
of making it impossible
for them to survive.
I truly can only intellectually
argue that in some ways
I can't wrap my mind
around the quantity of
violence and hatred.
(boat horns whistling)
(crowd cheering)
- [Narrator] The wave
of anti-Chinese violence
was just reaching its peak
when on October 28, 1886,
the monument that
more than any other
would come to symbolize
the American embrace
of peoples from around the world
was officially opened
in New York harbor.
(crowd applauding)
The celebration started
complex feelings
amongst Chinese Americans
attempting to get by
in the harsh world of exclusion,
including Saum Song Bo,
whose dreams of
practicing law in America
had now vanished permanently.
(fireworks popping)
- [Man] If there be a Chinaman
who came to this
country when a lad,
who has passed through
an American institution
of learning of
the highest grade,
who has so fallen in
love with American
manners and ideas that
he desires to make
his home in this land,
and to study law,
by the law of this nation,
he being a Chinaman
cannot become a citizen,
and consequently
cannot be a lawyer.
Liberty, we Chinese do
love and adore thee.
But let not those
who deny thee to us
make of thee a graven image
and invite us to bow down to it.
Saum Song Bo.
- Once exclusion was
the law of the land,
then Chinese
immigrants turned to
trying to figure out
how to open up avenues
within the laws.
We know how active
Chinese immigrants were
in resisting, protesting,
challenging these laws
by every means possible.
By writing to presidents,
talking about the injustice
in the newspapers,
and taking cases to court.
- You see people immediately
taking up the pen
and writing essays.
You have Chinese
intellectuals who are here
in the United States
during this period,
like Wong Chin Foo for example,
who writes and decries
the Chinese Exclusion Act
as anathema to American values,
and says why are
you particularly
persecuting the Chinese?
- Wong Chin Foo,
on the East Coast,
organized the first
Chinese American
civil rights organization
to advocate for the Chinese.
If there's a hero for me in
Chinese American history,
he would be the
first one on my list
because he was totally
fearless and very articulate,
and he used American
rhetoric and ideas
to challenge the exclusion law.
- [David] He started
a newspaper called
the Chinese American,
the first time that
term was ever used.
And he thought the Chinese
would become American
and they should vote,
and this is a country
that Chinese should settle.
- What made the Chinese survive
the most difficult
conditions in this country
is mainly their
identification with American
founding principles.
And also their
faith in themselves.
And that they refused
to be excluded.
- [Man] No nation can afford
to let go its high ideals.
The founders of the
American republic
asserted the principle that
all men are created equal,
and made this fair land a
refuge for the whole world.
Its manifest destiny, therefore,
is to be the teacher and
leader of nations and liberty.
Its supremacy should be
maintained by good faith
and righteous dealing,
and not by the display
of selfishness and greed.
But now, looking at
the actions of this
generation of Americans and
their treatment of other races,
who can get rid of the
idea that that nation,
which Abraham Lincoln said
was conceived in liberty,
waxed great through oppression
and was really dedicated
to the proposition
that all men are created
to prey on one another.
How far this republic has
departed from its high ideals
and reversed its
traditionary policy
may be seen in the laws
passed against the Chinese.
Yan Phou Lee.
The Chinese must stay.
A North American review.
- This is the basic theme
in Chinese American history.
The Chinese Americans
always challenge
the anti-Chinese act
and the policies.
They always appeal to the
American judiciary system
to protect their rights.
Under the most
difficult conditions
these people like Cho, they
did not give up their faith.
They fought.
They fought for decades.
It is a remarkable resilience.
- They looked to the law
to protect themselves
because they could not
look to the political
institutions to protect them.
Their only recourse
was the courts.
Sometimes they won.
Often they didn't.
- This is where the 14th
Amendment becomes critical.
The Chinese can't
become citizens.
There are a series
of laws which say
they can't be naturalized.
But the 14th Amendment
really grants
all civil rights to persons.
And it's Chinese
litigants who are going to
discover in the 14th
Amendment that it applies
to persons, not to citizens.
- [Narrator] In September 1884,
Joseph and Mary Tape,
who now lived with their
three children in a
largely white neighborhood
west of Russian Hill,
tried to enroll their
eight-year-old daughter Mamie
in the local public school,
but were stopped at the
door by the principal,
Jennie Hurley, who
refused to admit her
because she was Chinese.
- Mary and Joseph Tape
thought their daughter
should go to Spring Valley
School where I attended.
That was the first public
school in California,
and they thought their daughter
should go to that school.
But Mrs. Hurley, the principal,
says, "Oh, no, you're Orientals.
"We don't let Orientals
into our schools."
So they sue, and it went
to the state supreme court.
- [Narrator] On January 9, 1885,
Justice James McGwire ruled
in favor or the Tapes,
in the decision upheld on appeal
to the state supreme court.
"To deny a child born
of Chinese parents
"entrance to the public
schools," he wrote,
"would be a violation
of the law of the state
"and of the Constitution
of the United States."
- And so they challenged
this exclusion policy.
They win that case,
and that argument is based
on the 14th Amendment.
- A century ahead of Brown
versus the Board of Education,
Mamie Tape forces San
Francisco to open up
its schools to Chinese
American children.
- [Narrator] But the victory
in the end was short lived.
Three months later
the Board of Education
opened a separate public school
for Chinese students only
and insisted Mamie go there.
- Mary Tape is incensed by this.
She writes this
really angry letter
to the school board which is
printed in the newspapers.
And she says how dare you
call yourselves Christian men
to make this school
just for my children
because you don't want
them to go to school
with white children.
And then she says my
children will never
go to that school that
you made for them.
Never, never, never.
But when the Chinese
school opens,
her kids are the
first ones there
because the Tapes
have to come to terms
with the fact that if they
want them to be educated,
they've gotta go to that school.
- Between the exclusion
law, 1882 and 1905,
there were more
than 10,000 lawsuits
the Chinese filed with
the federal courts.
And about 20 of these
went to the Supreme Court,
and the population
of Chinese in America
was about 110,000 at the time.
This is eight, 9%
of the people sued
the federal government
to change this.
- Chinese used the
courts in large part
because they didn't have
access to the ballot box.
They didn't have the vote.
But they knew they
could use the courts,
so this becomes their
principal strategy
for legal change.
And from the 1880s
through the end of
the 19th century,
there are a slew of
constitutional cases.
One type has to do
with immigration
and the other type has
to do with civil rights.
They mostly lose the
immigration cases,
but in the question
of civil rights,
it's a little more mixed.
The most famous
civil rights case is
Yick Wo v. Hawkins in 1886.
That's the laundry case
where San Francisco
had passed an ordinance
that said nobody could
have a wooden structure
for laundry, but if it had
been built before that time,
you could still operate
it if you had a permit.
And they just refused to
give permits to Chinese,
but they gave permits to whites.
- Right away 280
laundries apply,
and 80 got their
permit, 200 did not.
The problem was
all 80 were white
and all 200 were Chinese.
Now there was this
guy named Song Lee.
He had his laundry
called Yick Wo,
and he stood up and
said I'm gonna operate
without this permit and be
arrested to test this law.
So he was arrested.
The Chinese Six Company
and the laundry association
backed him, and they
took it all the way
to the Supreme Court,
saying that all though a
law is good on the surface,
if you apply it differently
to different groups
of people, is against
the 14th Amendment
which provide equal
protection under the law.
It was never tested before.
- The idea of a Chinese
person being harassed,
seeking the court's remedy
at the same time that
his people are being
excluded from the country,
to mix ethnic metaphor
shows a lot of chutzpah.
And Yick Wo pulled it off.
He pulled it off.
- And this is a really
important case because
the courts said first
that the 14th Amendment
provisioned for equal protection
applies to all persons.
That's the language
of the amendment.
Not just citizens.
Not just whites.
All persons.
So this is the key
ruling that applies
the 14th Amendment to
aliens, to immigrants.
- [Narrator] Year after
year the federal onslaught
against the Chinese continued.
Under the terms of a
treaty signed two years
before the exclusion
act was passed,
Chinese Americans
who returned to China
could come back to
the United States
if they obtained the
return certificate
prior to leaving.
- They had used
that piece of paper
to go back to China,
to visit their wife,
their children or
to do business,
and then come back with
that piece of paper.
- [Narrator] In 1888,
Congress passed the Scott Act,
starkly contravening the treaty,
rendering 20,000 Chinese
reentry certificates
null and void, and
blocking thousands of
Chinese Americans visiting
relatives in China
from returning to
the United States.
- [Martin] In 1888,
Congress absolutely overrode
the terms of the
treaty by barring
the use of the return
certificates to
reenter the country.
So the Chinese sued.
And the Supreme Court in
1889 upheld the Scott Act.
They essentially said that
the political branches
have the absolute right
to let into the country
who they please.
- The Chinese Exclusion
Act had to be re-upped
every 10 years and in 1892
it's re-upped again
by Congress with the Gary Act.
And this time they
add a provision
that every Chinese
person has to carry
on their person a
photo identity card.
The United States never has had,
and still does not have,
an internal passport.
And this was the first.
- [Woman] And if you don't
have it you'll be deported.
And if there's a good reason
why you don't have it,
like your house burned
down or something,
we'll only let you stay
if you have at least one
white witness to vouch for you.
- [Renqiu] Well, the Chinese
refuse to believe that
this could be a law
of this country.
- So the Chinese
say you know what?
We're not gonna
respect this law,
and the leadership
of the community
organizes a boycott.
And this is very daring.
They're telling people
don't get the certificate.
We're gonna have a mass civil
disobedience, basically.
- [Man] If America is
fair in her dealing,
her laws ought to be
applicable to all,
regardless of nationality.
To single out a
despised Chinese,
the only people
who hold no votes,
shows cowardliness.
For the only class that are
required to give photographs
are the criminals,
and the only animal that
must wear a tag is a dog.
The Chinese declined
to be counted in
with either of these classes.
So they refused to register.
And I do not blame them.
Jee Gom, February 1892.
- And one morning across
the country posters emerged
that have been organized by
the Chinese Six Companies
saying do not register
for this card.
And over a 103,000 refuse.
They don't register.
The mass refusal of
over a 100,000 Chinese
I think is the largest act of
civil disobedience to date.
- And the Chinese then
went to court to challenge
the constitutionality of
the Geary Act and they lost.
They lost.
- [Man] The Supreme Court
said Congress has the power
to do what it's doing.
So it's not for us to
decide as the court
whether the political branch
is doing the proper thing.
They have the power to do it,
so if you have a quarrel
with what they've done,
take it up with them.
Except you don't have
any power to take it up
with them because
you're not a voter.
- They lost it, and that
must be a huge blow to them.
They have a faith in
the American system,
in the principle.
But the American
leadership failed them.
That's a huge letdown.
- United State said the
Chinese will be denied
the Bill of Rights protection.
You know, right
to remain silent,
right to be represented
by attorney,
right to be tried by jury,
and their important
habeas corpus right.
So that if you got
stopped and you cannot
produce the document that
you appeared legitimately,
you can be deported
without judicial review.
And that's so un-American.
- [Narrator] Soon
an even more fateful
and fundamental legal
battle was underway,
over the very definition
of citizenship in America.
- Wong Kim Ark was a native-born
American born of Chinese
immigrant parents in
California in the 1870s.
He had made several trips
to China a few times before,
but in 1894 he goes
again and he comes back
through San Francisco.
And at that time the San
Francisco collector of customs
is a well-known anti-Chinese
opponent named John Wise.
And he was eager for
a test case to have
the US government consider
is there such a thing
as a native-born Chinese
American who can be
a US citizen if his
parents are ineligible
for citizenship under the
nation's naturalization laws?
So even though Wong Kim Ark
had been allowed to reenter
the United States
a few times before
as a native citizen born
in the United States,
John Wise decides to deny
him re-entry in 1894.
- [Narrator] At stake was a
bedrock constitutional issue.
Under the 14th Amendment
could a Chinese American
born in the US of
immigrant parents
be considered an
American citizen or not?
The US attorney arguing
the government's case
insisted that even
though Wong Kim Ark
had been born in
the United States,
it was an accident
of birth that did not
override the fact that his
parents were foreigners,
ineligible for citizenship.
- [Man] Wong Kim Ark
fought it all the way
to the supreme court
to establish something
that we take for granted today.
- [Narrator] In 1898
in a landmark ruling,
the US Supreme Court, citing
the citizenship clause
of the 14th amendment,
ruled that Wong Kim Ark,
like anyone else born
on American soil,
was an American citizen.
- [Woman] And this is the
case, this is the precedent
that establishes a US
birthright citizenship for all.
- Wong Kim Ark of 1898
is really important
because it secures
the citizenship status
of Chinese born in
the United States
and all children born of
immigrants in the United States.
(piano music)
The court said that the
language of the 14th Amendment
is plain, and if you
started to tinker with it
you would jeopardize
the citizenship
of all the children of
Europeans in this country.
So it was not necessarily out
of any love for Chinese people
but an understanding of what
the implications would be
more broadly.
- One would think
that with this victory
things would change
for Wong Kim Ark.
This is a landmark law,
students learn about this
in their legal case
books all the time.
The ironic thing
with Wong Kim Ark is
the story doesn't end there.
When you look at
his immigration file
he made a few more
trips to China.
He married and had
children living in China.
But every time he left or
re-entered the United States
it was like a slap in the face
because he had to
fill out a form for
alleged citizens of
the United States
and he had to re-prove
his citizenship
via the Supreme Court
case every time he left
and re-entered
the United States.
(street crowd chattering)
- [Narrator] The
ruling in Wong Kim Ark
was a ray of light in
the gloom of exclusion
which had divided families,
reduced opportunities,
diminished civil rights,
slowed to a trickle the arrival
of new Chinese immigrants
while millions of white
Europeans streamed in.
Marooning a mainly
male Chinese population
yearning for loved ones they
could seldom if ever see.
And stranding tens of
thousands more offshore
unable to return to a country
they had once called home.
- The American population during
the exclusion era doubled.
The Chinese population
declined by 25%.
- [Narrator] Of the 7170
Chinese living in New York City
in 1900, 25 years
after the Page act,
only 142 were women.
And in the wake of the
Geary and Scott acts,
the country had become
even less hospitable
to its Chinese residents.
In 1903 Boston police
used the Tong killing
as a pretext to descend on
Chinatown in a massive raid.
Rounding up 234 Chinese
Americans unable to produce
certificates of
registration on the spot.
Fewer than 50 were
actually undocumented
but the rest languished
in jail for days,
slowly released by
the ones and twos,
as their friends and families
trickled in to vouch for them.
- As the years passed, the
Chinese Exclusion Bill was
reenacted first in 1892
then again in 1902
and then tacked on to a bill
hat had nothing to do with
immigration whatsoever in 1904.
It simply declared all
existing Chinese exclusion acts
will be extended indefinitely.
- During the period
of the enactment
of the Chinese
Exclusion statutes,
nine pieces of major
legislation, seven
of which became law
two of which were vetoed,
were aimed squarely
at one population.
They weren't talking about
the Japanese and they weren't
talking about other Asians,
they extended it later
and used the Chinese
exclusion laws as a foundation
for doing that, but when
the laws were passed
in the first place from the
time they were first proposed
until the time they were
made permanent in 1904,
they were aimed at
one population and
one population only.
- The Chinese were very very
clear in their own minds
that what was happening to them
and the exclusion
laws was unjust,
it was discriminatory,
it was singling them out.
And they were stuck between
a rock and a hard place
knowing that the United
States was open to every other
immigrant group who was
coming over, that there were
jobs, that there was
economic opportunity,
yet they had been singled out.
So with the means as well
as the desire to continue
to migrate in the face
of exclusion laws,
you have undocumented
border crossings as well as
the birth of what we call
the paper son system,
or immigration through
fraudulent papers
and with false relationships.
One mode of resistance is the
refusal of Chinese migrants
to acquiesce to
the exclusion laws.
They saw these laws
as simply unfair
and basically devised ways
of getting around them.
Whether it's forging documents,
purchasing papers that
would allow them to get in,
a whole host of means to
try to circumvent the laws.
(crashing)
- [Narrator] The
tribulations of California's
despised community
of Chinese residents
would soon be
compounded when in 1906
one of the worst natural
disasters in American history
struck San Francisco and with
it, the heart of the oldest
and largest Chinatown
in North America.
(rumbling)
- [Tchen In 1906 the
earthquake and fire happened.
A lot of San Francisco
is destroyed.
A lot of Chinatown was
actually burnt and destroyed.
- [Man] The earthquake
and fire of April 1906
was a real crisis
for the Chinese.
They're at literally the
epicenter of the difficulties.
- So there's a moment when
the city of San Francisco
then want to relocate
all the Chinese
further away from
the core of the city
because Chinatown developed
in prime real estate.
This is the heart of the city.
But the Chinese
refuse to relocate
and they begin
rebuilding very quickly.
Quicker than many other
parts of the city.
To reclaim the San
Francisco Chinese community
and this part of San
Francisco and rebuild it.
- The fact that the
Chinese came back
the fact that the Chinese
resisted ethnic relocation
I think is a very big
moment in the evolution
of full Chinese American rights.
- The earthquake totally
destroyed San Francisco's
Chinatown, but the
Chinese word for crisis
has the word for
opportunity in it.
That whenever
there's some crisis,
there's always opportunity.
So the flip side was that all
the records were destroyed
in city hall of
who was born here,
who immigrated here,
who had kids here.
So all the records
were gone, clean slate.
- [Man] This paper son
system really picks up after
the San Francisco earthquake.
When all of the records in
San Francisco are destroyed
all the birth records, all
the immigration records,
The Chinese figure out they
have no idea who's legal
who's not legal, they
don't know who's born here,
who's not born here.
So the Chinese develop this
system, this paper son system.
In which they eventually
tell the authorities
I was born here in
America at such a date
and during this time
I have gone back
to the village in China
to visit my parents
or my grandparents and during
that time I also married
but because of your laws
I can't bring my wife
or my wife is taking care of
my parents still in China.
But during all these trips
I have fathered three sons.
These are their names,
these are their ages.
And the American authorities
would take that
information down.
That gentleman would let it
be known both in Chinatown
and back to the village in
China, I have just created
three slots, I've created
three fictional men.
And those slots
would go up for sale.
People in the village
would buy those slots.
They would have to learn
the fictional lives
that people would create in
order to enter the country.
- [Narrator] In 1910 as
Chinatown rose from the ashes
and rubble of the earthquake
and as enforcement issues of
the exclusion act spiked upward
a new immigration facility
opened on an island far out in
San Francisco bay that in the
years to come would become
synonymous with the
hardships, heartbreak,
and long deferred or broken
dreams of the exclusion era.
(seagulls calling)
- When the exclusion
laws were passed,
the Chinese immigrants
used to come directly to
the San Francisco docks and
there was a detention shed
at the docks that was
just a filthy horror.
So in 1910 the immigration
service builds a station
out on Angel Island.
It's supposed to be modern,
it's supposed to be cleaner
but it was also a way of
keeping Chinese arrivals
separate from their friends
and relatives in the city.
Because people would go
down to the detention shed
and shout up the stairs the
answers to the questions
you were going to be asked.
So they thought that if they
put people out on this island
in the middle of the bay
they would be able to keep
people from communicating
with the arrivals.
(birds chirping)
- [Narrator] Over the next
three decades from 1910
to 1940 when the
immigration facility closed,
just three years before
exclusion itself was rescinded,
more than 100,000 Chinese
immigrants would come through
Angel Island who's
principal purpose
was to enforce exclusion more
strictly than ever before.
Weeding out as much as
possible paper sons,
segregating detainees
from family and friends
who might help them pass
the rigorous process of
interrogation and at the
same time safeguarding
American citizens from
foreign contamination.
Unlike Ellis Island,
where 98% of the
incoming immigrants
made their way through,
18% of the applicants
at Angel Island
were initially rejected
and 5% deported outright
after grueling interrogations
and harrowing detentions
that averaged more than
two weeks and frequently
stretched to more than a year.
- Somebody once said that Ellis
Island was to let people in
and Angel Island was
to keep people out.
Only 1% of the people who
showed up at Ellis Island
were turned back, so Ellis
Island really was a gate that
swung in, and Angel Island
was where the gate was closed
and you had to really
fight to get in.
- The longest detention that
we know of was 756 days.
Questions could range
from 200 questions asked
to 1000 questions asked.
(water sloshing)
Angel Island is not unlike the
history of Chinese exclusion
in that it is hidden
in plain sight.
It has had so much
impact on our history
and on who we are as a people,
yet it remains almost out
of reach, almost mysterious.
It's in the middle
of this urban area
yet so few people know about it.
And then there's
the ghostly presence
of the building itself.
(whispering indistinct
ghostly voices)
- [Narrator] In counterpoint
to the harsh and bureaucratic
reality of the
processing center itself
was the palimpsest of writings
scores of Angel Island
inmates carved on the walls
of the barracks-like
detention center.
(whispering indistinct voices)
- You can still see the peeling
paint, the layers of paint
that immigration officials
had continuously put over
the walls of the detention
barracks to cover up
what they thought was graffiti.
And how the immigrants kept
on reclaiming that space
and writing it over, or
carving it even deeper.
So there's so much
about that space
where the walls
literally talk to you.
- [Ghostly Woman] Grief
and bitterness entwined
are heaven sent.
The sad person sits alone
leaning by a window.
- [Ghostly Man] On a little
island the wailing of the wild
winter geese can
be faintly heard.
One should know that
when the country is weak,
the people's spirit dies.
Why else do we come to this
place to be imprisoned?
- The vast majority of
inscriptions preserved
on the walls of Angel Island
are from Chinese immigrants.
The poems, the vast majority
are carved in the walls
of the men's detention barracks.
But women also wrote poetry
and also wrote expressions.
They are alternately, and
sometimes in the same poem,
angry and sad, despondent
and frustrated.
Many of them talk about if
only I had known it was going
to be so hard, I would
have never come at all.
Or send word back to my cousins,
don't bother coming to America.
So often outlying or identifying
the hypocrisy of America,
dashed hopes, frustrations.
There's one poem in particular
that has always spoken to me.
It is written by a author
who only identified himself
as one from Xiangshan
and he wrote
"There are tens of thousands
of poems composed on these
"walls, they are all cries
of complaint and sadness.
"The day I am rid of this
prison and attain success,
"I must remember that
this chapter once existed."
That speaks volumes to me.
It's about remembering
that there's the suffering
but also there's a hope
that he will be released,
that he will be able to
get off of the island
and do whatever he
was hoping to do,
but that it was
important to never forget
the origins of that journey.
(gulls calling)
- [Narrator] In the years
following the opening of
Angel Island in 1910, as the
United States came of age
and took its place
on the world stage,
in the opening decades of
what would soon be called
the American Century, the epic
human tide that had brought
24 million immigrants to the
nation's shore in less than
two generations would
be slowed to a trickle
and the gates of
immigration all but closed
ushering in 40 years of
demographic isolation in America
and the most exclusionary era
the country has ever seen.
In 1917 congress passed a new
and vastly more far reaching
immigration act based on
the Chinese exclusion laws.
Creating an Asiatic barred
zone, a vast empire of excluded
nationalities encompassing every
Asian nation east of Turkey
and west of the
islands of Japan.
- Once defining Chinese
as a suspect class
that do not belong it
becomes very easy to then
build a while host
of other laws,
you can kind of
scaffold other kinds of
exclusionary laws and practices.
- By this time the Eugenicists
and the Pseudo-scientists
have decided that not only
is humanity divided amongst
different races, but what
we today call ethnicities,
Irish, Italians, Poles,
Hungarians, et cetera
also have immutable inheritable
differences that couldn't
be overcome, that were tied to
genetics and tied to biology.
- [Woman] And a threat
to the United States.
So the US government extends
what been racial
restriction laws aimed
at Asian immigrants to
Southern and Eastern Europeans
and national origins
quotas get established
to ensure that the United
States would continue
to be predominately be
of Northern and western
European stock.
- So in 1924 is really
the key legislation
that numerically
restricts immigration
to the United States in general.
Before WWI, you had an
average of over a million
coming a year and in 1924,
there's a ceiling put on
that its an annual
quota of 150,000.
That's a huge decrease.
Now we have a quota
system that has a absolute
numerical limit parceled
out to countries
based on a very
complicated formula of
who's more desirable
than others?
So Great Britain
has a huge quota,
Italy has a tiny quota
and Asians are
excluded all together.
So the treatment of
the Chinese foreshadows
this more comprehensive
restriction policy.
- [Narrator] As they had
for two generations now,
Chinese Americans continued
to do everything they could
to adapt to life
under exclusion.
Striving to get ahead,
starting families whenever
they could and struggling
to expand the boundaries
of their circumscribed world.
- By the 20s, you began to
see a second generation,
an American born generation.
Merchants who could
bring their wives
had families from early on
but as women slowly
began to trickle in
in one war or the other,
other people began
to have families.
Who have people trying to
live outside of Chinatown,
there was more intermarriage.
Chinese Americans
begin to go to college
if they can afford it
but they can't get jobs
outside of Chinatown.
They resisted, I
think, by trying simply
to be Americans.
But it’s really difficult
for them to get beyond it.
The confines of Chinatown,
for many Chinese Americans.
Was just very constraining up
until the second World War.
(explosions)
- [Announcer]
Shanghai August 1937.
- [Woman] Things start to
change in the run up to WWII.
Japan has invaded China,
it's taken over Manchuria,
it's threatening
the rest of China.
So American sympathies
start to go towards China.
Not so much because
it favors China
but because it’s against Japan.
The United States is
already very weary
of the spread of Japanese
imperial influence
so a kinder view
of China emerges
as a long suffering nation.
(men shouting)
And once the United States enter
the war after Pearl Harbor,
it becomes an official ally
of China against Japan.
Many Chinese Americans
join the Army,
they volunteer if
they're not drafted
and war propaganda
has to accommodate
this new international
relationship
and win the support
of the public.
- [Announcer] Gung Ho in
Chinese means all together.
- One of the things that
hurts the United States
is Japan's propaganda in Asia.
Japan is telling
the rest of Asia
throw off the western
colonial master, come with us.
We'll have an Asian
co-prosperity sphere,
is what they call it.
And so they point to the
United States and say look,
they don't like you.
They have exclusion
laws against Asians.
So the American
exclusion laws become
a point of embarrassment.
- [FDR] My friends, today we
and the Republic of China,
are closer together
than ever before
in deep friendship and
in unity of purpose.
- [Woman] Franklin Delano
Roosevelt does explicitly say
we must right a historic wrong.
He has a very eloquent speech.
He needs to convince
the American public
that this immigrant group
that we had maintained
was important to exclude,
they're now our friends
and our allies and we must
remove these discriminatory
barriers to immigration.
- These laws begin to
look anachronistic,
in an international context
where the United States
wants to present itself
as the standard bearer
of democracy and equal rights.
So congress repeals the
exclusion laws in 1943
during war but it’s basically
a propaganda measure
because they give
Chinese a quota of 100.
- The repeal comes because
of the politics of the war
and not because there's a
realization that Chinese
should not be excluded
based on moral grounds.
- [Announcer] But back
in New York's Chinatown.
- [Narrator] On
December 17th, 1943
not long after Madame
Chiang Kai Shek,
the charismatic wife
of the embattled leader
of the Republic of China,
toured New York and
Washington to adoring crowds
and delivered a
stirring address before
a joint session of congress.
The Chinese exclusion laws
were officially repealed
with the passage of
the Magnuson Act,
which kept in place laws
prohibiting Chinese nationals
from owning property
but which did permit,
for the first time
in nearly 62 years,
a small number of
Chinese workers to enter
the country each year,
in strict accordance
with the 1924 quota system.
- In 1943, it was repealed
but the repeal was
quite symbolic.
The quota was only 105.
It's so insignificant.
- Yeah, what's important
about it is that
it's 105 Chinese a year,
not just people from China.
So it's 105 a year
based on blood.
You could come from London,
you were a part of that 105
and it's the only country
that was treated that way
and it's based on
the 1924 quota of 105
being the bare minimum.
So the Chinese got the
bare minimum to (mumbles).
- Nevertheless, it
is very significant
that the Chinese now had
the right to be naturalized,
to become naturalized
citizens in this country.
- [Woman] Which is incredibly
important for the community
and droves of Chinese immigrants
do take out their
naturalization papers
in those very early years,
including my grandfather.
- It is an important
opening because first
on principal the idea of
exclusion is overturned,
that's huge.
That no longer marks
Chinese as the one group
who by name cannot
enter the United States.
That's a huge victory.
And it also opens
up opportunities
for Chinese to come.
Chinese men can now bring
their wives over from China,
where they couldn't before.
Chinese Americans who have
gone to China during the war
and marry a Chinese
woman can now bring over
the bride under
the war brides act
and things just
begin to loosen up.
You know the exclusion of
Chinese from professions
and for certain occupations,
these laws begin to
fall in the 1940s.
Racial covenants in housing
are struck down in 1947.
By the late 40s, state
laws that forbid Asians
to own agriculturally
property are struck down.
- [Narrator] Though
relieved of the stigma
of exclusion in the
aftermath of repeal,
Chinese Americans would
continue to be haunted
by the shadows and silences
of the exclusion era.
Which would come back to
haunt them in unforeseen ways,
with the rise of
Communist China.
- [Announcer] This is
the time for Mao Ze Dong,
and Beijing, on October
1st, mainland China.
- 1949, communists
win the civil war.
Chinatowns then are
put under surveillance
for the fear that this is
the hotbed of communism,
this is where all the
spies are going to be.
We've opened a door,
family reunification,
war brides acts,
we have more Chinese
now than we've ever had
and they're coming
from mainland China.
So there's this great fear
that we made a mistake
by repealing exclusion
and that communism
would take a foothold.
- [Narrator] In 1956,
as fears of communism
came to a crescendo,
the federal government
established the Chinese
confession program,
offering amnesty and legal
status to Chinese immigrants
if they confess to
having entertained
the country fraudulently
and named names
of others who had done so.
Confronting tens of thousands
of Chinese Americans
with an agonizing dilemma.
- The problem with
the confession program
was that it didn't just impact
one’s own personal status
but you essentially had to
rat out your close relatives
or people with whom
you did business
for fraudulent entry.
It was a domino effect
within the community.
An extremely divisive.
So there were about 33
thousand who did confess
during this time
period but it was
a no win situation.
You lost either way.
(soft guitar music)
- [Narrator]
Immigration to America
was at an all-time low
and the Chinese restricted
to a bare handful
of immigrants annually.
When on the verge of the 1960s,
a sea change began to occur
in federal policy
towards immigrants.
Who for the first time
in American history
would soon find themselves
officially embraced
as a crucial and defining aspect
of the American experience.
- It's a very recent phenomenon,
it's a post WWII, a cold war
and civil rights phenomenon.
In the 1950s, John F Kennedy
published A Nation of Immigrants
and he explicitly was
advocating for reform
of immigration
laws at that time.
Kennedy believed that not
only was there a civil rights
prerogative but also a cold
war International relations
prerogative to be changing
these discriminatory
immigration laws because
we were shutting out
the vast majority of people
from around the world
while also proclaiming ourselves
the land of freedom, democracy,
and the American way.
So it’s really
through these debates
and this remaking of a
new American identity
as one that was more inclusive
that allows this idea of
the nation of immigrants
to really become so strong
and so embraced by so many.
- [Narrator] The sea
change would be consecrated
in 1965, in a landmark
piece of federal legislation
called the Hart Celler Act,
which in the years to
come would dramatically
transform the face of America.
- The Hart Celler Act
is the immigration law
that really took away those
national raced based quotas
and instead tried to make
immigration much more fair
and even and across the board.
When the senators and
congressmen debated
the passage of the
immigration act,
they had no idea what
was going to happen
but the reality is that
because the Hart Celler
act privileged
certain occupations
like the medical field, the
science industry fields,
Asian immigration
completely skyrocketed
and changed completely the face
of Asian American communities.
- So in the late
60s and early 70s,
you have a disproportionate
number of highly educated
Asians who came in
under the 1965 act
and once they come,
they can then avail
themselves with the
family categories
but they're bringing people
from their own social class,
upper middle class
and middle class
college educated professionals.
This is a kind of
selective immigration
that's driven both by people
who have opportunities
in China but also by the
structure of the law itself.
In fact, the laws
favored those people
and that's also deliberate
because the United States
did not want Chinese
laborers to come,
they wanted Asian professionals.
This is a period of expanding
economy in the United States
with more and more R&D
work, technical work.
Now a curious consequence
of the Hart Celler Act
is that we're still
left with the idea
that Chinese are other.
They may not be the yellow peril
of the 19th century
and early 20th century,
but now they're the
super achieving students
who keep your kids
out of college, right?
I mean, you know, if
you look at China,
there aren't 1.3 billion
doctors in China, right?
But we were made a kind
of racial characteristic
that Chinese are
smarter than others.
So they're either evil
or super achievers
but the Chinese never
stop being the other.
They never can seem
to find a place
of just being part
of the mainstream.
- [Narrator] With
the passage of time,
memories of the
Chinese exclusion era,
so painful for Chinese
Americans themselves,
faded from public view
and were forgotten.
In the nation that now
preferred to think of itself,
in principal at least,
as having always
welcomed immigrants.
- Those of us who are
descendants of paper sons
and discovering that you're
a descendant of a paper son.
(somber classical music)
That generation, my generation,
who did not know
that our grandfathers
were paper sons,
because it was a secret
that were kept in our families
and never talked about
and then one day perhaps
before a funeral or
before a birthday party
or something, something is said
that lets everyone know
and you realize,
oh that's why we
never talk about him
or oh that's why that
family in Chinatown
is related to us but
we can't figure out why
or something, it's
because of that legacy
of exclusion and
getting around exclusion
and once you realize that,
then that sense of
alienation perhaps
or that sense of understanding
that you are a legacy
of exclusion hits you
and you realize oh I'm
part of that long history
of immigration,
exclusion, assimilation,
acculturation, or
marginalization
all of those processes
that take place
has its seeds in exclusion.
It made me feel even more a part
of the flow of generations
of that Chinese
experience in America
and for those generations
who came after
who didn't have
to face exclusion,
I don't think they
fully understand it
because they never
had to deal with it.
- We only have to pick
up a newspaper or listen
to the news or read a blog
about immigration today
to understand why immigration
is a complicated matter
in the United States.
The history of China's
exclusion highlights
that we have had a
complicated relationship
about immigration from
the very beginning
and that it’s that duality
of welcoming immigrants,
of understanding their need,
our dependence on them,
how they contribute
to the United States,
as well as our fear
and anxiety of the different
changing demographics,
changing economic structure,
that has made us who we are.
That duality and our
complicated relationship
with immigration has shaped
who we are as a nation
it shaped our
economy, our society,
our politics and it continues
to shape our ongoing
understanding
of what it means
to be an American
and how we continue to
debate that to this day.
- [Man] (mumbles)
woman from California.
- Mr. Speaker, I rise in
support of House Resolution 683.
Today for the first
time in 130 years,
the House of Representatives
will vote on a bill
that expresses regret for
the Chinese Exclusion Act
of 1882, one of the
most discriminatory acts
in American history.
Over a century ago,
the Chinese came
here in search of a better life.
During the California
- When we look back,
I think we can learn now
the Chinese have
these reason and faith
in the founding principles.
I think that's Chinese
Americans contribution
to these grand
American experiment.
The exclusion law can be
seen as a fundamental flaw,
a huge mistake in that
historical process
of great experiment.
I think if you really
look at this system
because of say that,
you know the exclusion
law was democratic.
It was legal.
But it was wrong.
So something wrong could
be done in that process
of building a democratic system.
On the other hand,
even under the enormous
difficult circumstances
with so many disillusions,
so many disappointment,
and so much suffering.
Generations of Chinese
Americans never
give up their faith
and their hope.
And I think that's
very remarkable.