The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 Banned Entry of, But Did Not Define, Chinese Laborers

Below is the introductory section and closing section of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It is directed entirely to the exclusion of laborers as opposed to merchants, students, and diplomats but the text mentions only "laborers" which is not clearly defined.  It was not until the Surgeon General's Report on Leprosy 20 years later in 1902 that it is explicitly stated that Chinese laundrymen and restaurant workers are laborers and ineligible for entry after 1882.  In 1915, it was recognized the while some restaurant workers such as waiters, cooks, dishwashers were laborers, some owners of large restaurants could have a merchant status. As far as I could determine, Chinese laundrymen never received merchant status.

The law did not apply to Chinese laborers who had been in the U.S. by Nov. 17, 1880.

Transcript of Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)

An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese.

Whereas in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof: Therefore,

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the expiration of ninety days next after the passage of this act, and until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or having so come after the expiration of said ninety days to remain within the United States.

Only in the last section is any attempt made to "define" laborers.

SEC.15. That the words "Chinese laborers", wherever used in this act shall be construed to mean both skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining.

Complete text of Chinese Exclusion Act

Report on San Francisco Chinatown Bubonic Plague, 1900-1904 and Rules for Chinese Laborers

    San Francisco Chinatown, from its beginnings in the early to mid-19th century, was a small area with unhealthy, filthy, and crowded conditions which received few sanitation services from the city government. Not surprisingly, it was at high risk for contagious and other diseases. 

    In 1900, a Chinese died of bubonic plague and in the next years, two more Chinese suffered the same fate. Chinese, already targets of racial antagonism became "medical scapegoats by the last quarter of the century. Chinatown was quarantined and there was talk of razing all the buildings and moving the Chinese to a different part of the city.

    The federal government became involved over the possibility that the plague might spread beyond San Francisco.  The first annual report on the nation's health status, the Surgeon General's Report, published in 1902,  focused on contagious diseases such as leprosy and bubonic plague that were often viewed as associated with the Chinese.

 

The listing of topics related to Chinese was covered at length as the modified Table of Contents shows.

Considerable space focused on the distinction between merchants and laborers since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act allowed merchants, but not laborers, the right to enter the U.S. The document states in no uncertain terms that laundrymen were laborers, and not merchants.

Insofar as by 1902, the year of this report, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese who worked in laundries, several puzzles arise.  How did the Chinese become laundrymen if they were classified as laborers, ineligible for admission to the U.S.  Perhaps some were born here and could not be 'denied entry' for being laborers. Perhaps others were paper sons. As such, they were eligible to enter and work in laundries established before the 1882 law denying entry to laborers.

 

The document also devoted much detail to Certificates of Registration imposed by the Geary Act of 1892, describing the conditions for obtaining and presenting them when traveling out of the U.S.

Other topics included the prohibition of Chinese employed on ships to go on shore while their ships were docked in U.S. ports.

Laborers returning with documentation to reenter the U.S. could not bring their wives because of their laborer status.

The heights of laborers should be measured with their shoes removed.

Chinaman was the most used term in Newspaper Articles involving Chinese, 1870s-1940s

 

Newspaper articles from the mid-19th century until around 1940 that involved Chinese typically referred to them as "Chinaman" regardless of whether the topic was negative such as Chinese being robbed, attacked, or murdered or mocking such as descriptions of "strange" Chinese customs, attire, or food, or positive such as financial success, positive contributions to their communities. 

Examples of some of the headlines for these articles are presented here. After the end of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, there was a pronounced drop in the use of "Chinaman" which was viewed as derogatory.

A visual representation of this shift can be seen in the use of Chinaman in books using Google's Ngram.  Although the corpus of text for books is not the same as for newspapers, there is probably a positive correlation between the two sources.

How Images of the Chinese Laundryman Finally Improved

 Demeaning negative images of the Chinese laundryman existed by the 1850s when their numbers rapidly increased. Mocking images made fun of his queue, clothing, and work setting and method as in ads for laundry soap.

Other ads with hostile images conveyed aggressive actions toward them as in an ad for a wringer that urged the solution to the Chinese question as "the Chinese must go!".

It took several decades before ads that included Chinese laundrymen became less negative. A mid-20th century ad promoting a home washing machine used a group of Chinese laundrymen surrounding this object in a mixture of awe and puzzlement as well as a feeling of a threat to their livelihood.

In the 1960s, a leading maker of men's business shirts, Van Heusen, made a bold move in their advertisements in national magazines such as LIFE using handsome Chinese male models dressed in American style attire, Van Heusen shirts, of course, to promote their easy to clean shirts made with new material such as dacron. Suzanne Shapiro, the company historian contacted me for reaction to Van Heusen shirt ads from the late 1960s featuring Chinese men neatly attired in Van Heusen shirts, which pointed out that times had changed.  Whereas Chinese laundrymen once ironed Van Heusen shirts, now Van Heusen "presses his shirts," in the sense that new fabrics such as dacron did not require the labor of the Chinese laundryman.

The irony in the ads was more than a statement about Van Heusen's innovation displacing the need for the laundryman's services, but also a recognition that the Chinese laundry was a business in decline with technological changes, e.g., widespread home laundry equipment, aging laundrymen, and educated offspring able to enter white-collar and professional careers.

Chinese Surnames of Immigrants from Guangdong

 Chinese surnames pose problems for several reasons not the least of which is that the word order in Chinese is the opposite of that in English with the surname coming first so that Americans often assume that the surname is the person’s given name. 

Since the Chinese name is represented by an ideogram or Chinese character it is necessary to create a phonetic version based on how the Chinese name sounds when spoken. However, there are often slightly different spellings or anglicized versions. In practical terms, this may not be a major problem because the variations all sound more or less the same.  

However, when these variations of the same name are written with letters of the alphabet instead of spoken some major problems can arise. For example, if a Chinese wanted to leave the country for a visit, he must file for a Certificate of Registration before his departure so that he can return later.  However, if the spelling of his name on different documents is not identical, he risks not being readmitted even though he has proper documentation.

The authoritative guide to Chinese surnames published in 1904 in San Francisco was by David D. Jones, the official court interpreter in  San Francisco.

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As 'bonuses', included are definitive explanations of major topics of relevance to Chinese immigrants and people who deal with them such as the difference between a merchant and a laborer, rules regarding the status of sons of merchants, rules governing partnerships, rules governing rights of Chinese employed on U.S. ships, and rules about right to reenter the U.S. after leaving.

One surprise was learning that in 1904 Chinese laundrymen as well as restaurant operators were classified as laborers, not as merchants, even if they had earned a large sum of money. 

This fact raises the question of why many laundrymen were not deported if they had not been born in the U.S. and protected by birthright citizenship. Many laundrymen who came as paper sons would have not been protected by this mechanism and probably deportable.  My father would have had that tenuous status but he did pay $500 to be a "paper merchant" and I have to wonder if that action protected him from possible deportation.  I will examine this further in a future post.

An archive has a free readable and downloadable version of the entire volume.