Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years
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Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years
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Overview
Between Mao and McCarthy looks at the divergent ways that Chinese Americans in these two cities balanced domestic and international pressures during the tense Cold War era. On both coasts, Chinese Americans sought to gain political power and defend their civil rights, yet only the San Franciscans succeeded. Forging multiracial coalitions and encouraging voting and moderate activism, they avoided the deep divisions and factionalism that consumed their counterparts in New York. Drawing on extensive research in both Chinese- and English-language sources, Charlotte Brooks uncovers the complex, diverse, and surprisingly vibrant politics of an ethnic group trying to find its voice and flex its political muscle in Cold War America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226193731 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 338 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Between Mao and McCarthy
Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years
By Charlotte Brooks
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-19373-1
CHAPTER 1
New York and San Francisco: Politics in the Political Capitals of Chinese America
Describing Chinese American San Francisco before World War Two, the journalist Gilbert Woo vividly recalled the way the politics of China divided the community. "There were disagreements over constitutional monarchy and constitutional democracy, there were debates over constitutionalism and dictatorship, there were arguments about Wang Jingwei versus Chiang Kai-shek, and there were disputes about Hu Hanmin versus Chiang Kai-shek," he noted. China politics was a constant source of discord partly because Chinese Americans feared for the future of their ancestral nation. Racist American immigration laws also encouraged this fixation on China politics: because Asian immigrants could not naturalize, few Chinese Americans could vote. Even native-born Chinese Americans viewed American politics with skepticism, since white demagogues routinely used anti-Chinese sentiment to win elections. The result in both San Francisco and New York was that Chinese American politics and China politics were essentially the same. But shifts in local politics and Chinese American demographics, coupled with the onset of the Great Depression and Japanese encroachment in China, began in the 1930s to disentangle the two—at least in San Francisco. There, an emerging population of native-born activists started to participate in both the Democratic and Republican parties, even as Chinese New Yorkers grew more polarized and more suspicious of American politics.
New York and San Francisco in the early twentieth century seemed fairly similar: major ports with cosmopolitan cultures, strong labor unions, and long histories of immigrant involvement in politics. In reality, their political cultures differed in numerous ways. Democratic political machines dominated New York's boroughs, but socialism also appealed to the heavily immigrant working classes. Laboring under terrible conditions and encountering the disdain of Protestant elites, many Jewish and some Catholic immigrants and their children engaged in radical politics that led them, by the 1930s, into the American Labor Party, or, sometimes, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. In San Francisco, working conditions were often better, the conservative American Federation of Labor wielded significant power, and the line between Asian and non-Asian defined desirability. Unquestionably "white," European newcomers and their children largely eschewed socialism, although some cast their votes for Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign in 1934. Radicalism and socialism were not totally absent in prewar San Francisco, especially on the waterfront and during pivotal moments like the 1934 general strike, but they never influenced the city's political culture to the same extent as in New York. Instead, San Francisco remained a solidly Republican city through the 1920s and early 1930s.
In those years, Chinese Americans in New York fared better in local politics than their West Coast counterparts did. The San Franciscans struggled with the remnants of the anti-Chinese movement on the Pacific Coast, while the New Yorkers enjoyed a few token crumbs from the infamous Tammany Hall Democratic machine. But over the course of the 1930s, the situation shifted markedly. In San Francisco, the first sizable native born Chinese American citizen generation came of age during the Depression. At the same moment, scores of younger California politicians, many of them former Republicans inspired by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, worked to revive the flagging Democratic Party in the state. Despite San Francisco's long anti-Chinese history, white Democratic activists there began welcoming Chinese Americans into the party, with local Republicans eventually following suit. In contrast, the influence of Chinese Americans in mainstream party politics in New York declined during the 1930s. Still a heavily foreign-born community, Chinese New York offered little reward to politicians seeking votes. Chinese Americans with ties to Tammany thus bought their connections with a steady stream of bribes and payoffs to machine leaders. During the Depression, liberal Republican mayor Fiorello LaGuardia used his tremendous popularity to attack Tammany, undermining much of its power and undercutting the position of Chinese Americans in city politics at the same time.
The different tenor and structure of local politics and the changing nature of party competition in the two cities meant that Chinese Americans who participated in mainstream political activism in San Francisco enjoyed new opportunities that their New York counterparts did not. In 1930s San Francisco, New Deal programs that benefited Chinatown enhanced the prestige of American party politics and Chinese American citizen activists. Many such men and women eventually discovered that their involvement in US party activism provided alternative routes to influence in a community that had traditionally favored the China-born and the well-connected. In New York, the political shifts of the 1930s played a different role. Despite the hopes of community liberals and leftists, the New Deal almost completely neglected Chinese American New York, as did LaGuardia's reform coalition. Most Chinese New Yorkers who sought political power within their community thus opted to do so in time-tested methods: some joined a secret society, such as the On Leong Tong or the Hip Sing Tong, while a handful bought enough votes to become leaders in the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. Others gravitated toward radical alternatives to mainstream politics, including the kinds of Marxist-influenced organizations that attracted fewer adherents in the Bay Area. Chinese American New York, which in the early 1930s occupied a stronger political position than San Francisco, fell far behind its Western counterpart by 1940.
The Anti-Chinese Movement and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association
San Francisco was both the center of American anti-Chinese political activism and the economic, social, and political capital of Chinese America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The city, which contained the largest ethnic Chinese population in the continental United States (around 20,000 in 1930), had been a hub of anti-Chinese agitation since the Gold Rush era. Throughout much of the late nineteenth century, white San Franciscans attacked and harassed the Chinese, threatened to burn the growing "Chinatown" area to the ground, and blamed "coolies" for economic problems in the city. Fearful of the anti-Chinese Workingmen's Party of California, Democrats and Republicans in the 1870s and 1880s redoubled their anti-Chinese efforts in order to compete with the upstart group. Heeding the growing anti-Chinese unrest in California and other Western states, Congress in 1882 also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting all Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States for ten years; lawmakers later extended the measure in 1892 and made it permanent in 1904. Earlier court decisions, together with the exclusion law, barred Chinese aliens from becoming naturalized US citizens.
Politically and socially marginalized, Chinese immigrants turned to each other, creating organizations and clubs based on shared surnames, districts of origin, and professions. Some also formed secret societies, sworn brotherhoods that protected men who belonged to "small surnames" or who simply disliked the other associations. Many of the organizational names contained the Chinese word "tang," meaning "hall," and white observers took to calling all of them "tongs." Most of these groups performed various types of charitable work for their members, feeding and sheltering the destitute and shipping home to China the bones of those who died in America. But a handful responded to the decline in economic opportunities for the Chinese by seeking control over illegal or semi-legal activities, such as prostitution and gambling. When these groups fought over economic turf, the resulting conflicts confirmed to white supremacists that all "tongs" were violent and all Chinese were criminal and undesirable.
Chinese in nineteenth-century San Francisco also organized to defend themselves from anti-Chinese agitators and to govern a community that city officials almost completely neglected except when they needed a scapegoat. In the 1850s, several of the origin-district groups, or huiguan, in San Francisco joined in an umbrella organization that became known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), or the Chinese Six Companies. The CCBA acted as the government of Chinatown, mediating disputes and raising money for its activities by charging fees to Chinese residents. The group also tried to protect the Chinese American population as a whole, corresponding with US officials and suing to prevent the deportation of arriving immigrants and the implementation of unconstitutional local laws. This function was particularly important because the imperial Qing dynasty government did not officially allow its subjects to emigrate until 1860. Even when the Chinese government finally endorsed emigration and sent diplomats abroad, it was too weak to protect the rights of Chinese in the United States.
By the 1870s, thousands of Chinese were moving east to avoid hostility in the Western states and to seek new opportunities, and they created similarly structured communities from Denver to Chicago to Washington, D.C. In the larger settlements, Chinese immigrant leaders formed their own umbrella organizations, often borrowing the name "Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association" and loosely allying with the original in San Francisco. New York's Chinese population, which began to grow quickly in the 1870s and early 1880s, created its own CCBA in 1883, although the Chinese name differed slightly from San Francisco's (zhonghua gongsuo in New York; zhonghua huiguan in San Francisco).
The structure of the two groups differed as well. By the 1930s, the San Francisco CCBA consisted of a fifty-five-member board of directors allocated by population. Members of the Ning Yung Association, representing the huge number of immigrants from Toisan (formerly Sunning), made up almost half the board, while seven other origin-district groups held the remaining seats. The presidency of the CCBA alternated every two months between the leader of the Ning Yung Association and the head of whichever of the other huiguan was next in line. The CCBA-NY consisted of sixty different groups, including huiguan but also trade organizations and similar associations. Its chairman served a two-year term and came from either the Ning Yung Association or the Lin Sing Association (the umbrella organization for Chinese from all the other districts). Although both CCBAs lobbied for better treatment of Chinese in the United States, neither organization was particularly egalitarian or representative of the community as a whole. Instead, the leaders of the constituent huiguan, and thus of both CCBAs, were generally wealthier merchants who tended to protect their own interests. By the 1930s, this protection increasingly came at the expense of ordinary Chinese Americans.
The Chinese American Citizens Alliance and Generational Power
Scapegoated immigrant groups in the United States have often sought recourse through involvement in electoral politics, but for many decades laws and demographic realities limited Chinese American access to the vote. Although alien Chinese could not naturalize, the US Supreme Court's 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision confirmed that the American-born children of Chinese aliens were US citizens. Still, in the nineteenth century, most Chinese men left their wives in China because of anti-Chinese violence, the high cost of living in the United States, the tendency of immigration inspectors to harass Chinese women, and the traditional duty of Chinese wives to wait upon their parents-in-law. Even many of the few American-born men in the United States in these years dealt with the dearth of Chinese women in their communities by marrying in China, although immigration law prevented most of these women from ever setting foot in the United States. As a result, the American citizen population of Chinese ancestry was incredibly small even fifty years after the Gold Rush, and its political culture remained overwhelmingly male-dominated long after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
At the turn of the century, American politics had little to offer San Francisco's handful of Chinese American citizens, for it provided almost no status or influence in their segregated world. Isolated and marginalized, they lived in a community still organized into groups based on district, surname, and trade, with the CCBA continuing to serve as the umbrella group for many of the traditional associations. When local officials needed to deal with the residents of Chinatown, they did so through the CCBA, further empowering the community's unelected, foreign-born merchant elites. Leadership in the traditional organizations, particularly the CCBA, was thus one of the only markers of prestige and success that a Chinese American could hope to obtain in a ruthlessly segregated and discriminatory society, and San Francisco's China-born men monopolized such positions. Often contemptuous of the American society that rejected them, they ridiculed the tusheng, or native-born American-citizen Chinese, as weak, brainless, and lacking proper ethnic identity. Some China-born men jokingly likened tusheng to locally processed opium, which was far less desirable than the purer type of opium imported from China. They usually blocked the native-born from leadership of the traditional organizations that served as economic referees and networking centers in the ethnic economy. To the frustration of the American-born population, China-born men even dominated the new Chinese Chamber of Commerce, which was founded after the turn of the century.
In the late 1890s, a handful of Chinese American citizens interested in American politics sought to change the marginal position of the tusheng in both Chinatown and San Francisco by founding an organization called the Native Sons of the Golden State. They had originally tried to join the Native Sons of the Golden West, a group of white, California-born men, including many leading politicians, who exerted considerable power in the state and routinely lobbied for anti-Chinese measures. Unsurprisingly, the white supremacist NSGW rejected the Chinese American applicants, who then founded their own group. Although the Chinese American organization folded in the late 1890s, some of its founders revived it in 1904 under the name Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA). The CACA pushed its members to vote in American elections and fined them when they did not.
For years the CACA remained outside the main community power structure, unable to challenge the primacy of the traditional organizations. Historian Sue Fawn Chung has noted that while China-born residents initially scoffed at the group, it eventually earned their respect through its energetic lobbying for fairer immigration laws. Although leaders of the traditional organizations may have respected CACA members—some of whom were their own sons—they did not include the American-born men in the community's leadership circles for decades. The closest CACA members came was occasional service as English language secretaries to the CCBA, a role that involved explaining the group to the white press. As a result, the alien dominated CCBA, not the American-citizen CACA, served as the community's mouthpiece and liaison with US officials in the early twentieth century.
Chafing under this system, some CACA members and other tusheng in San Francisco saw China politics as a way of potentially exerting influence in their community. By the late nineteenth century, the Chinese empire was in rapid decline as it struggled to resist internal rebellion and Western and Japanese encroachment. In 1898, two Western-influenced scholars, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, briefly became advisors to the Guangxu Emperor until his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi, moved to suppress their reform activities. Fleeing China, Kang and Liang eventually arrived in North America and founded the Baohuanghui (Chinese Empire Reform Association), later known as the Chinese Constitutionalist Party and, after 1945, the Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party. Around the same time, Sun Yat-sen, a native of Guangdong who traveled around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries raising money to fund an anti-Qing revolution, created the rival Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance), the forerunner of the Kuomintang (KMT/Chinese Nationalist Party). Branches of both the Tongmenghui and the Baohuanghui operated in San Francisco, where they recruited Chinese and Chinese Americans, including several CACA leaders.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Between Mao and McCarthy by Charlotte Brooks. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
A Note on Names and Translations
Introduction
Chapter One
New York and San Francisco: Politics in the Political Capitals of Chinese America
Chapter Two
War, Revolution, and Political Realignment
Chapter Three
The Resurgence of China Politics
Chapter Four
Divergence: New York and San Francisco in the 1950s
Chapter Five
The “Immigration Racket” Investigation and the Rise of a New Politics
Chapter Six
Chinese Americans, Orientals, Minorities: Politics in a New Era
Epilogue
Notes
Who’s Who
Index