Joy
I heard the cheers even before I saw the result on the TV screen: a spontaneous exclamation of joy rolling across the city of San Francisco. Rushing outside, we waved at neighbors — all of us still sleepy at 8.30 on a Saturday morning, shaking wild bed-hair manes and wrapped in dressing gowns. By 10am crowds were dancing in the streets. Strangers poured each other champagne.
Of course, there was never any doubt that San Francisco would celebrate the end of Trump with a single, exuberant voice. In American politics San Francisco is liberalism writ large, a progressive bubble within a bubble. The last Republican to win a Presidential election in San Francisco was Eisenhower. This is a city that builds bridges, not walls. The country beyond those bridges — a place in which 70 million citizens could choose four more years of Trump’s bigotry — is another universe.
And yet I don’t think the story we should tell about San Francisco is one about difference. I think we should tell a story about change. For San Francisco was not always a shining sanctuary city upon a hill. One hundred years ago, San Francisco was the beating heart of a nativist movement intent on driving the “yellow peril” of Asian immigration from American shores altogether. Crowds 10,000 strong gathered regularly outside City Hall, demanding that “The Chinese Must Go!”.
It’s almost impossible to imagine that level of intolerance ever thrived in the city I live in today. But that, I think, is why San Francisco’s immigration story matters. Not for the inclusion, the welcome, the sanctuary — though of course those things matter — but for the fact that cosmopolitan San Francisco was not inevitable. San Francisco chose welcome. And I hope that means that other, still hostile parts of American can change too.
Gold Mountain
So how does San Francisco’s immigrant story begin? With gold, of course. When it joined the Union in 1848, California was a polyglot state far away from the Anglican East Coast. There were only 800 Anglo-Americans in the entire state when Mexico ceded the territory to the US. Then the cry went up: there was on the American River.
The California Gold Rush brought thousands of Americans overland, the legendary ‘49ers. But news of the finds also brought tens of thousands of foreigners from every corner of the globe. In particular, the Chinese left behind poverty in Guangdong to mine the Californian foothills. Within a few years, one in every four of the men digging in California’s Sierra was Chinese. They joined Chileans, Peruvians, Mexicans, Germans, Irish and Italians. Almost overnight, California was crowded with immigrants, all dreaming of striking a fortune.
But as quickly as the immigrants arrived, so too did the xenophobes. The white American men who held power in California started levying taxes on immigrants in 1850. In 1858, the California legislature successfully passed a law declaring California a whites-only state, only for the State Supreme Court to declare the measure invalid. This judicial protection, coupled with the taxes immigrants paid — and their work in the 1860s building the TransPacific railway — held off the populist agitators who were demanding Chinese expulsion. But then the 1870s, California’s economy crashed. In the midst of a recession, with the mines largely exhausted, Chinese laborers were nothing more than unwanted competition.
This view was especially widespread among the community of equally-recently arrived Irish immigrants, who now made up one-third of San Francisco. Growing in numbers, the Irish were nonetheless still viewed as second-class citizens by California’s Anglo-American elites: lazy Catholics who were not-quite-white-enough to join the ruling class.
Partly in response to this, the Irish in San Francisco began to organize and to agitate, focusing their rage on Chinese immigrants. In 1877, Irishman Dennis Kearney (who himself had arrived in the United States less than a decade before) established the Working Man’s Party of California. As its leader, he salted progressive working class politics with virulent anti-Chinese racism. Every speech that Kearney delivered ended with the same crescendo: “The Chinese Must Go!”. He was a populist demagogue: screaming crowds of thousands cheered his every word in front of City Hall.
These displays were not just fringe politics: they were electoral math. In 1876, a disputed Presidential Election eventually separated Rutherford Hayes from Samuel Tilden by just one elector’s vote. California — the state with a “Chinese Problem” — was worth six. With the politics of Reconstruction still dividing north from bitter south in the East, California was seen as a crucial battleground state, and Chinese immigration was the issue. Four years later in the 1880 Presidential election, the Republicans won the White House — but lost California by a razor-thin margin: 144 votes. These political calculations — as much as any populist demonstrations — explain why in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, ending Chinese immigration to the United States.
The Exclusion Act passed by Congress in 1882 barred new Chinese laborers from migrating to the US, and prohibited their naturalization. In place for ten years in the first instance, the bar was made permanent in 1902. By this point even legal Chinese residents of the US were required to carry ID papers at all times. Finally, in 1924 — as the same time as National Origin Acts drastically reduced immigration from Europe — the US government placed a total bar on all Asian immigration.
It looked as though San Francisco’s populist agitators had won. San Francisco’s Chinatown became a ghetto. The lives of Chinese migrants were now lived almost entirely within 24 square blocks, bordered by Nob Hill’s mansions to the West, the Italian working class district to the North and the city’s central business district to the South and East.
And in the first 25 years of operation, the Exclusion Acts were very effective. Between 1870 and 1900, the number of Chinese immigrants in California halved. There were already very few Chinese families living in the United States. Unmarried bachelors returned home to China, or grew old and passed away. Doubtless, in some parallel universe — some Man-in-the-High-Castle alternate-reality — Chinese immigrants in California did just fade away.
But that is not what happened here. Instead, the Chinese fought back.
A Resistance
Between 1882 and 1905, the Chinese in California alone bought more than 10,000 cases against the federal government in court. The Chinese community — only numbering about 100,000 in total — organized and fundraised; it hired sympathetic counsel; identified test cases. One in ten of the Chinese immigrants in America hired a lawyer and sued the government. The sheer volume of habeas corpus cases lodged by these efforts brought the California courts to a standstill.
Inevitably, the Chinese lost most of their cases in a legal system stacked against immigrant justice. But the victories they won helped shape the fundamental meaning of what it is to be an American citizen, none more so that the case of Wong Kim Ark.
Wong Kim Ark — an American-born Chinese man — fell foul of the Exclusion laws when he made a visit to China and then attempted to return to the US. He sued, arguing that as an individual born on US soil, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed his citizenship — and his right of reentry. But the US Government insisted that — whatever the Fourteenth Amendment might appear to say — Wong Kim Ark was not an American citizen. In a landmark 1898 judgement, the Supreme Court found for Wong Kim Ark, determining that the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to every baby born on American soil — regardless of their ethnicity. That judgement — despite President Trump’s rants about the injustice of birthright citizenship — has now stood for 122 years.
Read on its own, Wong Kim Ark is a powerful call to action. Placed in context, I think it stands as a still more potent reminder that the best parts of America — this country’s most powerful statements in the name of equality and justice — have usually been hard-won, acts of resistance, forged in dissent.
But sometimes, even when justice is on your side, you also need a little luck — and for the Chinese in San Francisco, luck was in short supply. By 1900, even with the Wong Kim Ark judgement, the future of the community looked bleak. With very few Chinese women living in San Francisco, very few Chinese could claim American citizenship as a birthright, whatever the findings in Wong Kim Ark. Worse still, US Supreme Court turned hardline in its decisions after Wong Kim Ark, before recusing itself altogether from most questions relating to Chinese immigration policy in 1903. It looked increasingly likely that within a generation, the story of the Chinese in California would be little more than a historical curiosity.
But then, on 18 April 1906, the earth shook.
No one yet realized, but the luck had turned.
Next week: In Part II, find out why the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake saved San Francisco’s Chinese community