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By Root 1425 0

or support to a union that would not have them as members. Nevertheless, the tensions between the two immigrant groups rose. In September 1870, the Overland Monthly published a humorous poem by the famous newspaperman, writer, and poet Bret Harte that depicted the growing animosity between the Irish and the Chinese. The verse was originally titled “Plain Language from Truthful James,” but eventually came to be known almost exclusively as “The Heathen Chinee.” It recounts a card game between two fictional characters: Ah Sin, a Chinese man, and William Nye, an Irishman. Even though Nye blatantly cheats with cards stuffed up his sleeves, he keeps losing to Ah Sin. Finally Nye, losing patience, shouts, “We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!” and then assaults Ah Sin, knocking hidden cards out of the Chinese man’s sleeves.

Which group did Harte intended to ridicule more, the Chinese or the Irish? If his poem depicted the former as crafty cheaters, it mocked the Irish as inept ones, forced to resort to violence after losing to the Chinese, even after excessive cheating. Whatever Harte’s intention, “The Heathen Chinee” struck a chord deep within the American psyche and became the country’s most popular poem in the 1870s. It was set to music and reprinted in virtually every newspaper in the county. Newsstands sold illustrated copies of the poem as pamphlets. The New York Globe published it twice, and in January 1871 the paper reported that hundreds of people had gathered to see a version of “The Heathen Chinee” displayed in a shop window: “In all our knowledge of New York nothing like this has ever been seen on Broadway.” Bret Harte and Mark Twain even collaborated to bring “The Heathen Chinee” to the stage, under the title Ah Sin.

But underneath the laughter provoked by the poem was tremendous fear of the Chinese, especially in California. Everything about the Chinese—their physiognomy, their language, their food, their queues—struck many whites as bizarre, making it easy to demonize them. Large numbers of whites, seeing their livelihoods threatened by Chinese competition, began to feel as if the Chinese were somehow part of a giant, secret conspiracy to undercut the American working man. They complained, with some basis in fact, that the Chinese worked for less money, rarely spent what they had, and tended to keep their capital within the community, shopping at Chinese groceries and importing their food from China. They also believed that the Chinese who sent part of their money home to China were draining the country of its currency, its very lifeblood, while they ignored the larger contributions made by these Chinese in America. Anti-Chinese clubs soon flourished throughout California, pressuring officials in San Francisco to pass a series of municipal ordinances against Chinese residents, designed to drive them out of the city.

One was the 1870 Cubic Air law, which required lodging houses to provide at least five hundred cubic feet of open space for each adult occupant. On its face the law was not discriminatory, but it was flouted in poor white neighborhoods across the city while rigorously enforced in the Chinese section of San Francisco. City officials routinely arrested Chinese in the middle of the night, dragging them from bed and driving them “like brutes” into prison. Ironically, the local government violated its own cubic-air ordinance when it herded the Chinese into jail, where, as one newspaper noted, each Chinese enjoyed only twenty cubic feet of space. As an act of passive resistance, many refused to pay the fine, in essence staging jailhouse sit-ins. The San Francisco board of supervisors retaliated with the infamous “queue ordinance”: each male prisoner who did not pay his fine would have his hair shaved within an inch of his scalp. This ordinance devastated the morale of the Chinese, for a shorn head in their homeland was a mark of treason and occasioned a complete loss of caste.

Another discriminatory measure was the 1870 “sidewalk ordinance,” which made it a crime for anyone to walk through the city carrying