The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [67]
To escape the bleak job prospects of the cities, some whites retreated to the countryside, hoping to work as small farmers, but there, too, they encountered Chinese competition, which, given the social and financial disruption of the time, was contorted to feed the notion that the Chinese were the tools of a giant conspiracy. During the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the U.S. government had granted the project some ten million acres, with the stipulation that the property later be sold to the people. Yet when the time came, individual tracts were offered only at outrageous prices far beyond the reach of the typical American family farmer. Instead, railroad moguls kept the land for speculation, selling plots to the wealthy, many of whom used teams of Chinese labor to develop them into arable land.
After the war, the industrial strength of America and its resources were increasingly controlled by monopolies, or trusts, managed by financiers who understood that reducing competition meant greater profits. Lacking the resources to fight the railroad monopolies, the land speculators, and other industrial giants, white Americans felt backed into a corner and lashed out at the Chinese. In San Francisco, white workers began to hold anti-Chinese demonstrations. Marchers carried placards with slogans like “WE WANT NO SLAVES OR ARISTOCRATS” and “THE COOLIE LABOR SYSTEM LEAVES US NO ALTERNATIVES STARVATION OR DISGRACE” and “MARK THE MAN WHO WOULD PUSH US TO THE LEVEL OF THE MONGOLIAN SLAVE WE ALL VOTE.” San Francisco businessmen who hired Chinese employees soon faced boycotts, arson, and physical intimidation.
In such emotionally driven conflicts, reason is often an early casualty. Some whites tried to blame a myriad of social problems on the Chinese, arguing that they filled American prisons, almshouses, and hospitals. The statistical reality was precisely the opposite: the Chinese, so often singled out for discriminatory taxes, shouldered more than their share of the total tax burden, yet they were regularly turned away from hospitals and most other public institutions in San Francisco. According to Otis Gibson, a missionary in the city, in 1875 Chinese represented less than 2 percent of the patients at the San Francisco city and county hospital, while more than 35 percent of the patients had been born in Ireland. More significant, he wrote that in a single year, the number of European immigrants to the United States was than twice the number of Chinese who had entered the country in the previous twenty-five years. The United States also harbored more Europeans at public expense in hospitals, asylums, prisons, and other reform institutions than the average number of immigrants from China within a whole year. The anti-Chinese activists, he argued, were “chasing a phantom.”
But none of this stopped the opponents of the Chinese from making outrageous claims. Some white doctors lent credibility to the anti-Chinese movement by suggesting that the Chinese brought inexplicable diseases to the United States. Back in 1862, Dr. Arthur Stout had published Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of the Nation, arguing that the Chinese posed a serious health hazard. In 1875, the American Medical Association even supported a study that attempted to measure the role of Chinese prostitutes in spreading syphilis in the United States—an investigation that turned up nothing unusual. The absence of hard facts, however, did not deter the president of the AMA from charging that “even boys eight and ten years old have been syphilized by these degraded wretches,” or prevent a medical journal from publishing an editorial under the title “How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison in the Anglo-Saxon Blood.” If data could