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By Root 1429 0

citizenship. Would the Supreme Court embrace the judicial principle of jus soli (“law of the soil”), whereby a person obtained citizenship simply by virtue of being born in America? Or would it turn to the racial principle of jus sanguinis (“law of blood”), by which the citizenship of a child would be determined by the citizenship of his or her parents? In theory, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the United States had embraced the right of birthright citizenship, but in practice, the government had failed to protect the full privileges of citizenship of blacks and Native Americans. Legally, the Wong Kim Ark affair forced the Court to determine whether nonwhites born in the United States would be entitled to U.S. citizenship on the same basis as that applied to whites or be relegated to a permanent foreign underclass.

To the credit of the Supreme Court, the majority opinion ruled on March 28, 1898, in Wong Kim Ark’s favor, declaring that all children born in the United States are American citizens, even if their parents are ineligible for naturalization. In his dissent, Chief Justice Melville Fuller insisted that all Chinese, native or foreign born, should be ineligible for citizenship, because he believed that no matter where they lived, they owed their allegiance to the emperor of China. But Justice Horace Gray, speaking for the majority, declared, “The fact ... that acts of Congress or treaties have not permitted Chinese persons born out of this country to become citizens by naturalization cannot exclude Chinese persons born in this country from the operation of the broad and clear words of the Constitution: ‘All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.’ ”12

Although the Chinese community was relieved by this Supreme Court decision, victory in the courts did not always translate into a new respect for the Chinese community or for the Chinese in America as a people. To the contrary, by the turn of the century, a shameful series of local and federal acts reminded the Chinese that any court ruling, to have meaning, must have the support of local officials prepared to carry out its provisions.

In 1899, U.S. officials in Hawaii learned that a few people had died of plague in Hong Kong. Fearful that the disease had spread to Honolulu, they forbade the local Chinese from boarding ships headed for the continental United States. In addition, the board of health burned down a section of the city’s Chinatown. Health officials in San Francisco followed their example, shutting down all Chinese-owned businesses and ordering all Chinese who wished to leave the city to submit to inoculation first. The illegality of these measures prompted a Mr. Wong Wai to sue the department of public health, a lawsuit he won in both the local district court and the court of appeals. In May 1900, the court ordered the San Francisco public health department to cease and desist, but officials persisted in their campaign by enlisting the support of the board of supervisors. Soon, in contravention of the legal order, Chinatown was cordoned off by the police, barricaded, and completely quarantined, while city officials talked about burning and razing it to the ground. It took the combined efforts of the Chinese Six Companies, their attorneys, the Chinese ethnic media, the local Chinese consul, and China’s minister (ambassador) to the United States to break the quarantine and save the San Francisco Chinatown from total destruction.

It didn’t help the Chinese cause that, just at this time, the Boxer Rebellion was developing in China. Calling themselves “The Boxers United in Righteousness,” gangs of impoverished Chinese peasants, blaming foreigners for China’s economic ills, besieged and slaughtered white Christians and Chinese converts in northern China as well as white missionaries and diplomats in Beijing. While China’s ills were by no means solely attributable to the influence of foreign powers, the Opium Wars early in the nineteenth century had certainly disrupted the