The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [55]
First, the Chinese worked under labor contracts and, to the dismay of the southern elite, proved to be shrewd and litigious negotiators. To spell out every detail of their contracts, they hired bilingual interpreters, men who served not only as translators but as surrogate agents and lawyers. Their job was to haggle over the terms of the contract, communicate worker grievances to employers, and secure new employment for their clients if they were dissatisfied with their jobs. When planters violated their contracts, the interpreters filed lawsuits on behalf of the Chinese.
Second, the Chinese in the South could sue or press charges against their employers. For example, in 1871, Chinese workers took their case to court after a skirmish with an overseer left one Chinese dead and two others wounded. The local judge not only permitted their testimony to be delivered in Chinese but later ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. In this respect, the Chinese enjoyed greater protection under the law in the South than in California, where state law specifically barred them from testifying against Caucasians.
Third, Chinese workers were protected by a postwar federal government deeply suspicious of southern efforts to exploit people on the basis of race. As early as August 1867, U.S. authorities halted Chinese labor recruitment in the South until they received testimonials and certificates from the Chinese stipulating that they had migrated to the South voluntarily and signed labor contracts of their own free will. This governmental vigilance made it difficult for southern plantation owners to hold Chinese workers in bondage.
For the southern oligarchy, the experiment with Chinese labor, begun with such high hopes, proved to be a disaster. Within a few years, most Chinese had walked away from their contracts and accepted other jobs at better wages. Many gravitated toward cities like New Orleans, where they opened their own stores. Some simply ran away, and most planters lacked the resources to pursue them. By 1915, scarcely a single plantation still employed Chinese labor.
If the southerners thought that they could import Chinese labor to discipline their former slaves, the North thought it could exploit Chinese labor to discipline its white workers. The northern attempt came during the “Gilded Age,” as Mark Twain called it, a showy, counterfeit epoch, its gilt veneer barely hiding underlying corruption. It was a time when ruthless capitalists, known as “robber barons,” ascended to positions of enormous power, not through exemplary hard work a la Horatio Alger, but through wholesale bribery, collusion, and intimidation. It was an age of contrasts, of conspicuous consumption by the wealthy juxtaposed against a backdrop of deep despair and disillusionment within the working class.
This yawning gap between rich and poor, which widened further during the second half of the nineteenth century, was already apparent during the Civil War, when men like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and James Mellon eluded military service by paying less privileged men to act as their substitutes. Many of the rich grew richer selling shoddy equipment to the government for use by the Union armies. Class differences grew more distinct in the postwar era, especially during the presidency of U. S. Grant, a legendary Civil War general but a spectacularly incompetent public official. In an administration wracked by scandal, federal officials consistently protected the interests and ignored the excesses of those willing to pay them off. The robber barons engaged in an orgy of confiscatory expansion, first wounding and then gobbling up competitors, all with the connivance of the courts and the help of the legislatures they purchased. Financiers and railroad moguls watered down stocks, used strong-arm tactics to bully employees into submission, and bought off federal, state, and city politicians to create their empires. Washington spent millions of taxpayer dollars to