The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [130]
Even the end of the Korean War in 1953, and the cessation of open hostilities between China and the United States, brought no respite. Indeed, the darkest moment may have come in December 1955, when Everett F. Drumwright, the U.S. consul in Hong Kong, released a report in his Foreign Service dispatch that accused the community of, among other things, orchestrating “a fantastic system of passport and visa fraud.” Drumwright insisted that almost all Chinese in America had entered the United States illegally, all the way back to those who mined for gold and built the transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Drumwright not only leveled a host of broad-brush charges (trafficking in narcotics, using fake passports, counterfeiting American currency, and illegally collecting Social Security and veteran’s benefits), but also suggested that a network of Chinese spies had exploited the paper sons system to infiltrate the country. All the PRC had to do, according to the report, was to dispatch agents to the port of Hong Kong to buy fake American citizenship papers. Steps had to be taken “to destroy that system once and for all,” before “Communist China is able to bend that system to the service of her purpose alone.”33
After Drumwright’s report was released, virtually the entire Chinese community fell under federal scrutiny. No one was immune from investigation: if you were Chinese it was likely that you would soon receive that knock on the door and be subjected to a long series of questions about every aspect of your life. “Only once before in modern times, has an entire race been charged with ‘a criminal conspiracy,’ ” wrote Dai-ming Lee, editor of the China World. In 1956, U.S. Attorney Lloyd Burke subpoenaed forty major Chinese American associations, demanding that they produce all records and photographs of their membership and a full account of their income within twenty-four hours. “Chinatown was hit like an A-bomb fell,” one observer wrote. Another called it “the worst incident since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.”
Chinatown leaders fought back by appealing to politicians for help and by posing legal challenges to the constitutionality of the Justice Department investigations. Fortunately, in March 1956 a federal judge threw out the subpoena attack, calling it a “mass inquisition.” But by then, much damage had been done. Business activity dropped when investigators raided Chinatowns on both coasts; Chinese merchants in New York City lost $100,000 a week in sales. American authorities also leaked the Drumwright report to the press, which ran stories accusing the Chinese community of immigration fraud.
In 1956, three years after the end of the Korean War, the U.S. government initiated a “confession program” to encourage the Chinese who had immigrated illegally to voluntarily confess their true status. Each confession, however, could implicate dozens of Chinese relatives, who in turn would be compelled to cooperate with authorities to protect themselves. In San Francisco, some ten thousand Chinese confessed, and 99 percent of them were permitted to stay in the country. A few, however, were deported as a direct result of their political activities. In psychological terms, the impact was far greater than the number of actual deportations. Long after the Drumwright-inspired inquisition was over, its shadow remained over Chinatown, instilling in the Chinese American community a terror of government authority and a legacy of silence.
Another group vulnerable