The Madness of Chinatown: Chinese Exclusion during 1880s San Francisco

 America in the 1880s

On January 1^st, 1983, ARPANET adopted a “communications model” built by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf that forever changed the world: the Internet. Today we live in a society where the internet is indistinguishable from the air: 5G waves flow through our brains 24 hours a day, whether we are calling people on our cell phones, driving our cars, relaxing with a good book, or taking a bath. For many people, the realization that they suddenly don’t have access to the internet is a cause for questioning the meaning of life: instant feelings of regret, sadness, and disconnection erupt, which cannot be resolved until a connection is re-established and the internet is back.

However, 100 years before the advent of the internet, a more powerful revolution was occurring: the telephone. The inventor Alexander Graham Bell mournfully stated that he was “sick of the telephone” only two years after he had revealed the invention at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876.[1] After all, he invented the telephone as a medical device to aid the deaf, and his true passion was using technology to save lives.[2] Even four years later, still saddled with his overwhelming responsibilities to guide the telephone into a modern age, he labored at the bedside of a dying president with a new invention: an induction balance, so that he could locate a stray bullet fired from his assassin.

However, his efforts showed no results, and Garfield died on the night of September 19th, 1881, four months after becoming President. In his wake, the incredibly unpopular Chester Arthur became President of the United States, a man who “never held an office except the one he was removed from,” a “ridiculous burlesque”[3] whose presence in the White House eventually became as a representative for Roscoe Conkling, Collector for New York’s Customs House and arguably the most powerful in the country.[4]

However, this essay is not about the internet, the telephone, or even the US Presidency. This information is necessary for studying economic history, as cliometrics most often fails when historians use models of “knowledge that we do not have” and omit causality covariates which affect the error structures in their models.[5] These examples therefore set the stage: a violent age, buttressed by incredible advances in technology that threatened to destabilize all aspects of life, puppet masters with control over the flow of goods, people, and kings, and a clash of cultures between the East and West that nearly set the country back into war and predicated the fall of a 300-year-old dynasty.

Directory of Chinese Business Houses in San Francisco, 1878-1882

Garfield was famously pro-immigrant. In 1879, Garfield supported a veto for a bill that would restrict Chinese immigrants to 15 people per ship, setting the stage for his pro-Chinese stance, and Garfield even encountered controversy during his campaign that claimed he had authored a letter encouraging the continued use of Chinese labor. [6] Americans were heavily involved in China at the time, whether it was sending soldiers to train the Chinese military or selling them guns to use in their own civil war.[7] American connections with Chinese firms facilitated the rapid increases of technology in the steam engine, and the alliances between America and China became entwined around the development of train technology, the taming of central California for a farming revolution, and the creation of the mining industries of the Gold Rush.

In 1878, the Wells Fargo Bank published a list of Principal Chinese Businesses active in San Francisco,[8] the key port for Chinese immigrants to America. This is an important contextual document, showcasing how deeply Chinese immigrants had become to one of America’s key economic ports. In 1878, representatives from the bank traveled around the city and noted 424 different active businesses. Yong Chen provides an excellent analysis of this document in his book Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943, and breaks down the demographics of various industries and their importance to the local economy.[9] However, according to Chen, the bank representatives likely could not locate all the businesses due to resistance from the Chinese immigrants, resulting in a document that was most likely true but not necessarily 100% accurate.

In 1882, the bank released an updated directory.[10] This time, they had managed to scour the city and locate a staggering 656 different businesses – only four years after the release of their first directory. Many businesses were still left off, specifically operations such as brothels, gambling dens, and other houses of ill repute (in 1870, one sampling discovered that most Chinese women in the city were engaged in prostitution). What is fascinating about the directory isn’t the growth of business but the exceptional energy of movement. Between 1878 and 1882, 270 businesses left the city, while 504 businesses were brand new by 1882.[11] All these businesses were fluctuating within the 15-block radius the bank covered – San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Why did so many businesses leave the city? It’s difficult to perceive a 47% increase in the number of businesses today. Americans petition their local politicians to intercede when a longstanding bookshop closes, memories are forged at the 50-year-old restaurant, and the young children are told stories about the childhood shenanigans their parents got into with the guy running the pharmacy. Between 1878 and 1882, the changes in the city were faster than even the shuttering of Netscape. As Chen states, much of the reason was the Chinese Exclusion Act, enacted by President Arthur.[12] The Chinese Exclusion Act was one of the more injurious and disastrous policies of the United States government, restricting immigration from China for more than 60 years,[13] and most likely was a factor in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911.

The Chinese came to the United States as workers in the businesses that dotted the landscape of San Francisco. They came to work as miners, engineers, and support staff in those industries. However, after the Chinese Exclusion Act, many returned to China, and the remaining Chinese congregated in Chinatowns, where they were protected, found financial support, and began to rebuild their lives into a uniquely American culture.

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                [1] “I am sick of the Telephone”: Bell to Mabel Bell, September 9, 1878, Bell Family Papers.

                [2] Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, New York, Anchor Books (2011): 81.

                [3] “The nomination of Garfield”: John Sherman to Governor Foster, June 30, 1880; Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet, 777-78.

                [4] Millard, 96.

                [5] David A. Freedman, “Statistical Models and Shoe Leather,” Sociological Methodology 21 (1991): 302-304. Additionally, Lance E. Davis, Jonathan R.T. Hughes, and Stanley Reiter explore this idea in “Aspects of Quantitative Research in Economic History,” The Journal of Economic History 20, no. 4 (December 1960): 544-555, when the authors explain that regression models must use additional variables as well as the use of intensive machine learning technologies to properly conduct data into predictive models.

                [6] Sarah Laskow, “The Enduring Mystery of James A. Garfield’s Immigration Scandal: Instead of Emails, There Was the Morey Letter,” Atlas Obscura (March 13, 2017),  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/morey-letter-scandal-1880-garfield.

                [7] Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son: the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, New York: W.W. Norton (1997).

                [8] Directory of Chinese Business Houses: San Francisco, Sacramento, Marysville, Portland, Stockton, San Jose, Virginia City, Nev, Wells, Fargo & Co., 1878. Available through: Adam Matthew, Marlborough, Migration to New Worlds, http://www.migration.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/CHS_VAULT_DIR_S-F-1878 [Accessed July 03, 2023].

                [9] Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943, Stanford: Stanford University Press (2000): 51-69.

                [10] Directory of Chinese Business Houses: San Francisco, Sacramento, Stockton, Marysville, Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles, Portland, Virginia City, Nev., Victoria, B.C., Wells, Fargo & Co., 1882. Available through: Adam Matthew, Marlborough, Migration to New Worlds, http://www.migration.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/CHS_VAULT_DIR_S-F-1882 [Accessed July 03, 2023].

                [11] In my personal review of the documents, I found many of Chen’s observations to be incorrect, including the counting of businesses and the percentages of businesses that left the city between the publication of both documents. For example, Chen accounts for 423 businesses in the 1878 directory when in fact there were 424 businesses, and he also states that there was only a 40% increase in the number of businesses between 1878 and 1882, when according to my own calculations there appeared to be a 47% increase. Why these discrepancies occurred it’s unclear, but Chen may have been using a non-digitized version of the documents, while I had access to a digitized version and could manually print my own copy and annotate it in detail.

                [12] Chen, 60.

                [13] Chen states that the policies exacted in San Francisco Chinatown were injuriously racist and that the Chinese, in turn, responded with racism of their own through the creation of specific businesses serving “barbarian” interests. However, I disagree with Chen with his translation of the word 番 (fān), as he uses the word in opposition to the word 唐 (táng) as an indication of outsider versus insider emotionality. As Decker states in “The Silence of the Archives: Business History, Post-Colonialism and Archival Ethnography,” Management & Organizational History 8, no. 2 (2013): 161, “many historical narratives are first formed in the archive where researchers engage with the voices and silences of the past signals that the archive and the narrative ‘on the page’ are intimately entwined and not easily separated.” Much of Chen’s conclusions seem to stem from a basic bias problem, without considering alternate variables.