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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2013 Regulating the Dead to Protect the Living: Chinese Immigrants, Religion, and the Bio- Politics of Public Health in Nineteenth Century San Francisco Zachary M. Johnson
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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
REGULATING THE DEAD TO PROTECT THE LIVING: CHINESE IMMIGRANTS,
RELIGION, AND THE BIO-POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH IN NINETEENTH CENTURY
SAN FRANCISCO
By
ZACHARY M. JOHNSON
A Thesis submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2013
Zachary Johnson defended this thesis on March 28, 2013. The members of the supervisory committee were:
Amanda Porterfield Professor Directing Thesis
John Corrigan Committee Member
Joseph Hellweg Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
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This thesis is dedicated to my parents, who taught me to wonder.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... v
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
1. LOCATING RELIGION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY SAN FRANCISCO ...... 10
2. INTERPRETING EXHUMATION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY SAN FRANCISCO ...... 24
3. THE STATE BOARD OF HEALTH OF CALIFORNIA AND THE BIO-POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH ...... 48
CONCLUSION ...... 66
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 70
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 78
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ABSTRACT
The challenge posed by Wong Yung Quy, a Chinese immigrant living in San Francisco in the 1870s, to a law regulating the exhumation of human remains on the basis of religious freedom reveals the subordination of religious practice to public health concerns and regulation in nineteenth century California. This thesis examines the relationship between religion and public health in nineteenth century California through an analysis of the religio-racial climatology of the State Board of Health of California as well as the court's privileging of public health in Wong Yung Quy's challenge to California's law regulating the exhumation of human remains (In Re Wong Yung Quy, 1880). The intersection of religion, law, and public health in this context reveals the bio-political authority held by public health authorities, and the means by which a vision of the United States as a Christian society was normalized and enforced.
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INTRODUCTION
On an October night in 1879, a Chinese immigrant named Wong Yung Quy was arrested in San Francisco’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. His crime: the illegal disinterment of human remains.
His crime was not, however, one lifted from the pages of a horror story, nor was it one of a profiteering “body snatcher.” Rather, Wong was arrested as a result of his failure to pay the appropriate fee before disinterring the remains of his deceased relative. In accordance with a
California statute passed the year before, in April of 1878, any exhumation of human remains required a permit that could be obtained only with a certificate from the coroner stating the cause of death of the deceased, and after a $10 fee had been paid. Wong, officials charged, had failed to pay the required fee. Wong challenged his arrest, filing a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the law regarding exhumation was in violation of the Burlingame Treaty provisions protecting both trade and the religious practice of Chinese immigrants, as well as the equal protection clause of Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The case (In Re Wong Yung
Quy, 1880) was eventually decided against Wong Yung Quy, the court arguing that the ordinance provided no undue obstruction to the religious practice of the Chinese, but rather an appropriate exercise of state power for the purposes of protecting the public health.
Despite its failure to succeed in court, Wong’s appeal is instructive not only for historians of religion in the United States, but for scholars interested in the intersection of religion and law as well. Raising the specter of religious freedom (for the first time, where Chinese immigrants in
California are concerned), the arguments put forward on Wong’s behalf provide some indication of the importance of the case for understanding not only the history of Chinese immigrants in the
United States, but also for understanding the complex relationship between the law and religion in the United States. This thesis considers the court’s decision with particular attention to the
1 categories of “religion” and “public health.” Further, it considers public health regulation within the framework of a system described by Michel Foucault, in the first volume of his History of
Sexuality, as “bio-political” power or “bio-power.” Responding to claims of religious freedom with an appeal to concerns over the public health, the court’s decision reveals that religion was rendered subordinate to the ostensibly non-religious, universal laws of sanitation and public health. At the same time, concerns over Chinese “heathenism” were medicalized and racialized, incorporated into a growing body of knowledge disseminated by the State Board of Health of
California. This knowledge, combining climatological data with theories of race and religion and thus referred to in this thesis as a “religio-racial climatology,” encouraged associations of
Chinese religious and racial inferiority with physical states of cleanliness. Thus, I argue that the exhumation of human remains by Chinese immigrants in nineteenth century San Francisco was considered problematic not simply because such practices were “unsanitary,” but because they were seen as a threat to a (normalized) Christian establishment, whose hegemonic power expressed itself in the supposedly non-religious realm of public health regulation. Thus, it was through the exercise of bio-political power held by the State Board of Health that a particular vision of the United States as a Christian nation came to be normalized, regulated, and enforced.
This analysis, while maintaining a specific temporal, geographic, and topical focus, aims to bring together and respond to a number of diverse yet related historiographies. The most readily apparent contribution of this thesis will be to the field of Asian American studies, in which a number of scholars have addressed anti-Chinese legislation and landmark legal cases and legislative acts like the Chinese Exclusion Act. Much of this work has attempted to identify the root causes of anti-Chinese agitation generally, and the Exclusion Act in particular. Indeed, many explanations for the Chinese Exclusion Act have been offered. Mary Roberts Coolidge
2 suggested in her 1909 work Chinese Immigration that the act was the result of the disproportionate representation of the political interests of Californians in Washington, D.C - an argument later scholars have dubbed the “California Thesis.” Alternatively, scholars have located the origins of the California anti-Chinese movement in deep-seated racial stereotypes held by Americans since the 18th century, as argued by Stuart Creighton Miller in The
Unwelcome Immigrant, published in 1969. More often, scholars have linked the Exclusion Act to unrest over Chinese labor, an argument offered by Alexander Saxton’s 1971 work The
Indispensable Army: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Others, like historian
Andrew Gyory, have returned to a version of the “California thesis,” describing the passage of the Act as the result of the political maneuvering of power-hungry politicians (Gyory, 1998). In this body of scholarship, far less attention has been given the numerous other pieces of anti-
Chinese legislation passed on the local, state, and federal levels throughout the 1870s.
Providing an alternative to this focus on the the Chinese Exclusion Act, Charles J.
McClain’s 1994 study, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in
Nineteenth Century America, gives one of the most comprehensive legal histories of anti-
Chinese legislation. McClain’s work is also significant in that it focuses on Chinese challenges to anti-Chinese legislation made in American courts, showing that Chinese immigrants were not simply rendered mute by discriminatory legal attempts at segregation and exclusion. He focuses, however, on those cases in which Chinese immigrants were able to successfully argue against discriminatory legislation. Legal cases in which the Chinese were unsuccessful, like the 1879 challenge to a San Francisco ordinance regulating the exhumation of bodies (discussed in the final chapter of this thesis), are seen as less significant. In this sense, McClain seems bound to the aims of the field of Asian American studies and the related field of American Studies -- a
3 discipline, as Erica Doss has put it, dedicated to “exposing the flaws within national paradigms of exceptionalism, egalitarianism, and autonomy, [resisting] previously dominant models of
‘consensus’-based national identity and [positing] more expansive and often conflicted concepts attuned to multicultural and multivocal narratives.”1 While the case of Wong Yung Quy may not demonstrate the agency of Chinese immigrants in nineteenth century California in directing their own lives, it is nonetheless important and instructive for the historian as it illustrates how power was able to operate both implicitly and explicitly, and how the hegemonic power of a Christian majority could be advanced through naturalized systems of regulation.
Still another approach to the question of anti-Chinese legislation in nineteenth century
California can be found Nyan Shah’s Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San
Francisco’s Chinatown (2001). Shah’s study analyzes the role of legal discourses about public health concerns and legislation in shaping San Francisco’s Chinatown, arguing that Chinese immigrants came to be considered the embodiment of those diseases most feared by the San
Francisco’s Anglo-Americans, and that, in the nineteenth century, public health law functioned as a means of regulating and excluding groups - especially the Chinese - deemed outside the bounds of respectable society. Shah lends support to the claims of other Asian Americanists who have sought to demonstrate how social spaces (like Chinatown) and identities were shaped gradually over time through processes of segregation and exclusion, rather than forming naturally due to Chinese self-segregation (e.g. Lui, 2005).
In Shah’s work, as in the works of Charles McClain, Andrew Gyory, and others interested in Chinese American legal history and the history of Chinese exclusion, analysis of religious discourse is conspicuously absent. The use of religious language connecting cleanliness and purity, as well as descriptions of California as a promised land threatened by
1 Doss, Erica. Memorial Mania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. pg. 53. 4
Chinese invasion is not adequately addressed. Rather, Shah follows the interpretation of earlier scholars interested in public health law and Chinese immigrants in nineteenth century San
Francisco such as Joan Trauner (1978), who argued that public health rhetoric used the Chinese as “medical scapegoats.” Trauner’s analysis suggests an array of arguments were put forth casting the Chinese as inferior to Euro-Americans. She argues that these arguments were economic (labor-related), cultural (portraying the Chinese as ‘backward’), assimilationist
(suggesting the inability of Chinese immigrants to assimilate into American culture), racist
(concerned with ‘miscegenation’), biological (casting the Chinese as physically inferior beings), and medical (that the Chinese were predisposed to living in filth).2 Yet, in Trauner’s analysis, as in Shah’s later work, religious understandings of not only race, but climate and geography as well (i.e., Euro-American’s as God’s favored race and California as their ‘promised land’), are not considered. This absence is problematic because, as I argue in chapter three, the aims of those physicians charged with the protection of the public health at the state level were clearly and explicitly bound up with the aims of a Christian mission interested not so much in Chinese exclusion, but evangelization. This reading points to a further difference between the present work and Shah’s: whereas Shah reads public health in nineteenth century San Francisco as a mode of “exclusion,” defining Chinese immigrants as the “other” and excluding them from participation in U.S. society and governance, the interpretation offered in this thesis is one that finds education and reform as central to the pursuance of public health. In this sense, public health regulation appears as a method of inclusion -- inclusion through education, evangelization and conversion -- more than exclusion.3
2 Trauner, Joan B. “The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870-1905,” California History, vol. 57., no. 1, The Chinese in California (Spring, 1978), pp. 70-80. Pg. 72. 3 This difference in interpretation may owe a great deal to the sources consulted. Whereas Shah’s work benefits from extensive archival work, and thus a close reading of the records of local boards of health (particularly the 5
While religion certainly remains a neglected subject in the field of Asian American
History, some Asian Americanists, as well as historians of American religion, have attempted to remedy this omission, most notably Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Derek Chang. While I share their interest in the role of anti-Chinese rhetoric in the construction of race, the treatment of religion in this thesis will differ from the works of Maffly-Kipp and Chang in two important respects. First,
I do not approach descriptions of Chinese religion found in nineteenth century newspapers and literary magazines as forms of “ethnology” (Chang, 2004), or as sources for the reconstruction of the material experiences of Euro-Americans viewing Chinese religion in nineteenth century
California (Maffly-Kipp, 2005). Rather, I contend that such sources tell us more about their authors than they do about the practices they claim to describe. Instead of approaching nineteenth century Chinatown travelogues and descriptions of Chinese temples (“joss houses”) as ethnologies, I approach the sources with a critical eye, examining both the functions of and interests served by such narratives. Second, as I suggest in the first chapter, scholarly treatments of the question of Chinese religion in nineteenth century California have tended to mirror nineteenth century debates in one important respect. The question of Chinese religion in recent scholarly work has primarily been concerned with practices taking place in contexts “religious”
Board of Health of San Francisco), the research for this thesis has been concentrated (due to a paucity of resources) on the reports of the State Board of Health of California, supplemented when possible by records of meetings of local health officials available in newspaper reports. While this approach is appropriate for the present work -- the legislation challenged by Wong Yung Quy was enacted at the state level, and thus the role of public health defined in the ruling of the court is discussed at the state level as well -- there are important differences. Shah’s work, for instance, demonstrates the role of such political parties as the Workingmen’s Party -- a party dominated by Irish Catholics -- in the city government in San Francisco, especially after 1879, when Issac Kalloch won the race for Mayor. While the Workingmen’s Party did not control the police or the Board of Supervisors, they did control both appointments to and the work of the Board of Health. The control of the local Board of Health by an Irish Catholic- dominated party in San Francisco was not mirrored at the state level, quite possibly explaining why the rhetoric of public health officials at the state level is more in line with the rhetoric of Protestant missionaries who generally favored Chinese immigration insofar as it enabled the evangelization of Chinese immigrants, whereas the rhetoric of the San Francisco Board of Health tended towards exclusion. However, further (archival) research will be required to fully explain the various ways religion, politics, and public health regulation interacted and influenced one another at the local and state levels. 6 in a sense familiar in Western culture, whether in spaces recognizable as “religious” (such as joss houses), or under the supervision of authorities considered religious. Taking seriously Wong
Yung Quy’s claims about the nature of exhumation as a “religious” practice, this thesis attempts to broaden the scholarly field of vision as it is concerned with Chinese religious practice in nineteenth century California.
A slightly different approach to the issues of religion and race in Chinese San Francisco during the nineteenth century has been offered by Joshua Paddison (2012). Paddison analyzes the role of religion in shaping ideas about race and citizenship, specifically considering the political utility of terms like “heathen” and “pagan” in defining the terms of citizenship in nineteenth century America. Conversely, the present work reflects an attempt to understand the role of bio-political systems of regulation, working in tandem with the American legal system, in determining what ought to be considered “religion.” While this approach has recently been applied to the case of anti-Mormonism in nineteenth century America (e.g., Fluhman, 2012;
Givens, 1997), the definition and interpretation of Chinese religion by American legal institutions remains unaddressed by existing scholarship.
In order to contextualize this analysis, chapter one situates the present discussion of
Chinese religion in nineteenth century California amongst contemporary debates over the nature of Chinese immigrants and their religious practices. The appeal of Wong Yung Quy, resting on a claim to the freedom of religious practice, appears in this setting as a novel approach to Chinese religion. As a practice well removed from the spaces recognized (albeit not without significant debate) as “religious,” and from contexts familiarly associated with religion (e.g., the interment of human remains in connection with a religious ceremony), exhumation appears in Wong’s appeal and subsequent court case as a “religious” practice in a manner unusual for its time.
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Particularly, his appeal presents an argument about the nature of Chinese religion not in order to demonstrate that the Chinese might be easily converted (and thus ought to be accepted into the
United States), as many Christian advocates Chinese immigration were happy to do, but in order to achieve for the practice of exhumation the same protected status other “religious” practices enjoyed. Indeed, the appeal presupposes that the designation of the practice of exhumation as
“religious” would protect the right of Chinese immigrants to engage, unobstructed (or, unregulated), in the exhumation of human remains. As I discuss in chapter two, this presentation of exhumation as a religious practice obstructed by the regulatory practices of the government of the State of California in pursuance of public health forced the court to distinguish between spheres religious and governmental (i.e., non-religious).
Chapter two turns the attention of this work to the practice of exhumation, situating the practice of Chinese immigrants in a matrix of Chinese interpretations and Euro-American reactions. The exhumation of human remains emerges as simultaneously critically important to
Chinese immigrants and horrifyingly grotesque to Euro-American observers. Forced to negotiate between these extremes, the court’s decision distinguished between the realm of religion and the realm of public health, ultimately subordinating religious commitments and practices to concerns related to the public health. The subordination of religion to public health relied, I argue, on the normalization and universalization of Euro-American ideas of cleanliness and sanitation. In this manner, the operation of the regulatory mechanism of the State Board of Health California can be seen as an exercise in what Michel Foucault has termed “bio-power.”
Finally, chapter three examines the rhetoric of the State Board of Health of California as a bio-political entity. That is to say, chapter three explores the ways in which the Board of
Health, in pursuance of the public health, was used as a means of “social hierarchization …
8 guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony.”4 The dominant, hegemonic power protected by the regime of Public Health, I argue, was one of a Christian establishment.
Interested not simply in addressing sanitary concerns, but with converting the “heathen” masses, physicians appointed to the State Board of Health utilized their authority as a mode of “practical
Christianity.”5 Thus, naturalizing this religious pursuit as a deference to the laws of sanitation and cleanliness, the court’s subordination of religion to public health in its decision regarding
Wong’s appeal affirmed a religio-racial hierarchy dominated by Euro-American Christians.
4 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans., Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. 1978 (1976). pp. 135-159. pg. 141. 5 “Report on Chinese Immigration” in First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871 (Appendix). Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 54-77. pg. 64. 9
CHAPTER 1
LOCATING RELIGION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY CALIFORNIA
When Wong Yung Quy challenged his arrest and imprisonment with a writ of habeas corpus (“in pursuit of judgement” for the crime of failing to pay the fee required by the State of
California for the exhumation of human remains), he and his lawyers mounted a tripartite defense.6 In addition to being in violation of trade agreements outlined in the 1868 Burlingame
Treaty and the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment of the United States
Constitution, Wong’s lawyers argued, the law under which Wong was charged, arrested, and imprisoned violated provisions in the Burlingame Treaty defining the right of Chinese citizens in the United States to free and unobstructed religious belief and practice. Specifically, the petitioner (Wong) called on Article 4 of the Burlingame treaty, which provided that “Chinese subjects in the United States shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience, and shall be free from all disabilities or persecutions on account of their religious faith or worship.”
That the practice in question -- the exhumation of the deceased for the purpose of preparing the bones for shipment to China -- was indeed a religious practice, thus protected under the provisions of the Burlingame Treaty, was presented as a simple fact by the petition.
Referring to sworn affidavit of Wong Suh Woo, a “teacher of Chinese literature and religion,” a man, the court was assured, who was “well versed in the religious teachings and beliefs of the
Chinese people,” Wong’s attorneys argued that “the worship of the dead … has been the universal religious belief of the Chinese for many thousands of years.”7 However, the fact that testimony was needed at all, and given by an individual presented as an “expert” on the
6 In re Wong Yung Quy, on habeas corpus, Circuit Court, D. California, 1880 U.S. App. LEXIS 2032, pg. 5. 7 San Francisco Bulletin/Daily Evening Bulletin, vol. xlix, issue 12 (October 21, 1879), pg. 1. AHN. 10
“universal religious belief of the Chinese,” suggests that the nature of Chinese religion was not a matter of common sense, but rather open to debate.
While there was certainly debate over the nature of Chinese religion in nineteenth century
California, Californians in the 1870s were not altogether unfamiliar with Chinese practices considered religious. Indeed, a whole range of practices observed in temples known as “Joss” or
“Josh” houses, were considered by many to constitute a Chinese “religion.”8 The subject, however, was rarely clearly defined. Chinese practices which for some constituted “religious” practices were for others the product of a distinctly false “religion,” or “heathenism.” Still others denied altogether that the Chinese had any practices that could be described as “religious.” That there was any debate at all over the existence of something that might be called religion, or the description of Chinese behavior or practices as religious, indicates that there was indeed something important at stake in the application of the term. Given that Wong’s defense rested on the assumption that the classification of the practice of exhumation as “religious” would grant it a protected status under the law, the case presents one example of the practical effects of debates over the nature of Chinese religion and its status as “religion” or not “religion,” revealing a
(Chinese) vision of the possibilities of religious freedom in a Christian nation.
This chapter aims first of all to demonstrate that the classification of a number of Chinese practices familiar to residents, reporters, and city officials in San Francisco throughout the 1870s and 1880s as “religious” practices was a point of contention, as scholars like Derek Chang and
Joshua Paddison have shown. Although the Burlingame Treaty declared in 1868 that Chinese nationals in the United States should be free to exercise their “religious belief,” there was
8 “Joss,” or “josh” in this term is generally considered to be derived from the Portuguese word for God, “Deus.” Commonly cited on this point is Rick Fields (How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America. Boston: Shambala, 1981, pg. 73.) See also: Yang, Fenggang. “Religious Diversity Among the Chinese in America” in Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities, Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim, eds. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2002, pp. 71-98. Pg. 79 11 widespread disagreement over what, in fact, constituted “religious” belief where the Chinese were considered. I contend that the novelty of Wong’s appeal is not clear unless placed within the context of nineteenth century debates over the nature of Chinese religion.
Much of the debate over Chinese religion appeared as an extension of arguments over
Chinese immigration and the nature of the Chinese as a racial group. As Derek Chang has noted, the late 19th century saw the development of new theories of race as derived from culture, rather than from biological traits.9 While American Christian missionaries pointed to Chinese religious traditions as evidence of the rationality of the Chinese and the possibility of their conversion, opponents of Chinese immigration pointed to Chinese “heathenism,” “idolatry,” and “paganism” as evidence of both the futility of missionary efforts and the evils of Chinese immigration. These debates over the nature of Chinese religion (including its status as religion) took place throughout the 1870s not simply in cloistered academic halls or in the pages of missionary tracts, but in the public sphere; in the pages of newspapers, anti-Chinese writings, and travel narratives.
However, Wong’s appeal was novel in its attempt to expand the definition of what might be considered Chinese “religion,” moving beyond those spaces and practices familiar to Euro-
Americans as “religious” to include the practice of exhumation, a step not yet taken by many scholars of Chinese religion in nineteenth century America.
Further, and perhaps more importantly, I argue that Wong’s appeal was unique among the varied conceptions of Chinese religion in nineteenth century California in that it presupposed a level of toleration of Chinese religion on the part of the United States government, given the
Burlingame Treaty’s ostensible protection of Chinese religious practice. Wong’s appeal argued not simply that Chinese immigrants ought to be allowed to stay in the United States, given their
9 Chang, Derek. Citizens of a Christian Nation. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 12 rational minds and “convertibility,” but that Chinese religion ought to be allowed in the United
States, given its special, protected status in the provisions of the Burlingame Treaty.
Locating Religion
At the center of debates over and descriptions of Chinese religion in nineteenth century
San Francisco was the institution considered to be essential to Chinese religious (or quasi- religious) practice: the joss house. While reactions to joss houses varied, one can assume some level of familiarity on the part of San Francisco residents during the 1870s with the locations of joss houses, as well as with the practices for which Chinese immigrants used such spaces. San
Francisco newspapers could, and often did, refer to joss houses without explanation. For instance, when one joss house was closed and relocated, the San Francisco Bulletin reported simply that “the old Chinese Joss-house, located between Second and Third streets...was yesterday torn down, previous to which all the sacred vessels were removed to another locality.”10 Apparently, the editors of the newspaper were confident that their readers would be familiar with not only the joss house, but with the “sacred vessels” contained therein. In other reports, joss houses appear even more commonplace. An 1876 report in the Bulletin noted that the injuries sustained by one unfortunate worker had been the result of an accident which occurred “while working on the roof of a Chinese joss house.”11
However commonplace the joss house was in the landscape of 1870s San Francisco, though, more detailed stories can be found. Newspapers, literary journals like The Californian and Overland Monthly, as well as travel narratives describing the “mysteries and miseries” of
10 San Francisco Bulletin. Vol. XLII, issue 145, pg. 2. September 25, 1876. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers (hereafter, AHN) 11 San Francisco Bulletin. Vol. XLII, issue 145, pg. 2. September 25, 1876. AHN. 13
San Francisco’s Chinatown often included narrative accounts of Chinese religious practices.12
Such narratives described in detail Chinese joss houses, the practices undertaken within them, as well as practices undertaken outside the physical confines of the joss house, such as processions and parades associated with a particular “joss.” At first glance, these narratives describe authors’ explorations of the unknown, providing readers an experience otherwise unavailable. This is the interpretation offered by Derek Chang, who describes such narratives as a form of “ethnology,” bringing readers into “a world to which most European-American readers had no access and
[describing] a culture mired in a superstition and immorality.”13 While this reading may be appropriate for narratives such as J.W. Buel’s Metropolitan Life Unveiled, which focuses not only on San Francisco, but on New York, Washington City, Salt Lake City, and New Orleans as well, and thus had a target audience not limited to San Francisco, Chang’s explanation is less satisfying when considering publications aimed at audiences in San Francisco, especially newspapers and literary journals.
Chang’s explanation of joss house narratives as ethnologies presupposes that joss houses were spaces to which Euro-Americans “had no access” -- a presupposition that is not consistent with reports about joss house visits in San Francisco newspapers throughout the 1870s.
Consider, for example, the following announcement of the building of a new joss house in San
Francisco in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1874:
The new Joss House on Clay Street, opposite the Plaza, is nearing completion. It is not as
large as several other establishments in the city, but when completed, will be the finest,
12 I refer here to J.W. Buel’s Metropolitan Life Unveiled, or The Mysteries and Miseries of America’s Great Cities, Embracing New York, Washington City, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and New Orleans (St. Louis: Historical Publishing Co., 1883). 13 Chang, Derek. “‘Marked in Body and Spirit’: Home Missionaries and the Remaking of Race and Nation,” in Race, Nation and Religion in the Americas, pp. 131-156. Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister, eds. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004. pg. 144. 14
most gorgeous, and, by far, the best for visits, it being accessible, located on a clean
street, and containing much less that is offensive to the sight and smell.
It would seem that the author was able to assume not only that the reader would be familiar with the term “joss house,” but also with several similar establishments throughout the city. What’s more, the author seems to anticipate excitement on the part of the reader over the increased accessibility. It appears that visiting a joss house was both a common and an acceptable practice.
Other reports lend further support to this reading, as well. An 1873 report in the Bulletin alerted readers that those in charge of one joss house, “greatly exasperated” by acts of vandalism, had decided to “exclude all visitors from the temple during the rest of the week.”14 The fact that this penalty leveled on would-be visitors to the joss house was reported in the paper suggests not only that there were indeed visitors to ban, but that such a ban would in fact be seen as undesirable.
Visits were common for out-of-towners, as well. When Henry Ward Beecher visited San
Francisco in August, 1878, the Bulletin reported that he and his wife had “made a short tour of
Chinatown this afternoon, visiting a joss house and one of the Chinese restaurant.”15 Visiting a joss house, it would seem, was no more unusual or problematic than dining in a Chinese restaurant.
Another aspect of Chinese worship in California seems to have been commonly understood, as well: the relationship of Joss house worship to older (or original) forms of
Chinese religion -- Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. The link between Joss house worship and older forms of Chinese religion, however, was often called upon as evidence for opposite sides of the same argument. For many observers of California life in the late nineteenth century,
Chinese practices linked with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were evidence of a once
14 San Francisco Bulletin. Vol. XXXVII, issue 24, pg. 1. November 4, 1873. AHN. 15 “Brief Mention.” San Francisco Bulletin, vol. xlvi, issue 122, pg. 3. August 29, 1878. AHN. 15 great civilization degraded by centuries of “heathenism.” As one travelogue writer, B.E. Lloyd, described in his narrative of San Francisco,
its history gives proof that its civilization, when at its climax, was superior, and
wonderfully progressive; but unlike the European nations, it has undergone a retrograde
movement, during the last five centuries, and to-day has in it some of the offensive
features of barbarism. Such is China, the home of that people whom Europeans have
chosen to call heathens, because of their ignorance of the Christian religion16
For those opposed to Chinese immigration, the result of such retrograde movement was clear.
Any virtue once found in the religious practices of Chinese civilization had since been degraded, lost to history. John Swinton, writing on the “Chinese-American Question,” suggested as much:
Chinese paganism has, for its fruits, a practical immorality fouler by far than that known
among any European or Christian people. Confucius and Buddha may have proclaimed
virtue as the law of existence, but only those who have made themselves familiar with
Chinese life … can have any idea of the utter moral debasement of the Chinese millions
who are now invited to emigrate to America17
Swinton was not alone in contrasting the practices of Chinese immigrants with the high moral virtues of their Confucian and Buddhist pasts. An 1885 report from the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors, too, contrasted Confucian past with heathen present. Describing a San Francisco joss house, the report described “idols that typify, not the precepts of morality taught by
Confucius … more frequently represent and give license to the practice of a vice than a virtue to be inculcated and lived up to.”18 For those opposed to the immigration of Chinese “pagans,” the
16 Lloyd, B.E. Lights and Shades in San Francisco. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft and Co. 1876. pg. 208. 17 Swinton, John. The Chinese-American Question. New York: American News Company. 1870. pp. 13-14. 18 “‘The Chinese Must Go’: A Report by the San Francisco Supervisors,” New York Herald, July 30, 1885. AHN. 16 historical trajectory of heathenism had, indeed, pulled the Chinese far from grace -- too far, perhaps to allow their immigration to continue.
Such a contrast is reminiscent of the distinctions made between noble religious traditions and degraded practices associated with those traditions, made by nineteenth scholars interested in
Asian religions. Along these lines, Philip Almond has argued that Buddhism, as “an entity that
‘exists’ over against the various cultures which can now be perceived as instancing it, manifesting it, in an enormous variety of ways,” was, by 1860, constructed as a “textual object” whose “essence” could be found only in Western understandings of a particular textual past.19
Buddhism as understood by Western scholars was then differentiated, Almond suggests, from
Eastern Buddhism, which was “seen as being in a general state of decay,” having been for centuries in the care of ‘inferior’ cultures, influenced by a people “in a state of backwardness that might … be remedied by the benevolent care and attention of Occidental parents.”20 While few
Californians seem to have been interested in the restoration of such a “heathen” tradition as
Buddhism (or Confucianism), the view of Chinese history in terms of retrograde movement remains. Clearly, though, such a view was not limited to the halls of the academy, but rather expressed in the writings and actions of newspaper reporters, travelogue writers, and public officials.
For others, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, as Chinese “religions” were not so easily connected with Chinese practices in California. One Russel Conwell wrote that, among
Chinese immigrants in California, “the tenets of the different religions are so intermingled that the priests themselves have considerable difficulty in deciding which is Tauist and which is
Boodist.” Thus, for Conwell, “the belief of this Coolie class (if their faith may be called a belief
19 Almond, Philip C. The British Discovery of Buddhism. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 1988. pp. 12-13. 20 ibid, pg. 37, 48. 17 at all) is made up by a strange combination of all that is unnatural and mysterious to be found in the faith of all the several sects.”21 Travelogue writer J.W. Buel, while recognizing the existence of Buddhists, Taoists and Confucians among the Chinese, argued that “they have no well-defined religious belief.” Thus, while referring to Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism in order to outline the historical origins of Chinese culture, Buel uses the term “religion,” whereas in his discussions of Chinese practices in California -- in joss houses, particularly -- Buel argues that the practices of the Chinese “can hardly be called a definable religious belief -- using the term
‘religion’ in its common acceptation.”22 The anxieties of writers like Conwell and Buel seem to echo those of European scholars described by Tomoko Masuzawa. Masuzawa argues that descriptions of Buddhists as rarely “strictly or purely Buddhist,” often combining their practice with Confucian, Daoist, or Shinto practices, reflected an attempt to ease the “anxiety felt by
European scholars and their audiences” over “the preponderance of Buddhism.”23 Descriptions of Asian religious practices as “syncretic” thus appear in Masuzawa’s analysis as a means of de- authenticating Asian religious practice, much as Conwell’s description of “intermingled” Taoist and Buddhist practices suggests the need for a status other than “religion” where those practices are concerned.
For still others, however, it was unnecessary to consider the link between the practices of
Chinese immigrants and the religions of China. Rather, what was more important was what
Chinese immigrants were not. For many, Chinese immigrants’ status as non-Christians made any further discussions of their religious practices irrelevant. In many accounts, the Chinese
21 Conwell, Russel H. Why and How: Why the Chinese Emigrate, and the Means They Adopt for the Purpose of Reaching America. Boston: Lee and Shepard, Publishers. 1871. pp. 33-36. 22 Buel, J.W. Metropolitan Life Unveiled, or The Mysteries and Miseries of America’s Great Cities, Embracing New York, Washington City, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and New Orleans St. Louis: Historical Publishing Co., 1883. pp 291-300. 23 Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005. pg. 139. 18 would seem to be little more than a threat to the Christian nation. Speaking at the State Capitol,
Rev. O.C. Wheeler argued that the Chinese, “instead of co-operating with us in building civil and religious freedom … antagonize us at every point, and use all their powers to undermine and subvert our prosperity, and rob us of our God-given heritage.” For Wheeler, the appropriate response was clear: “it is inevitable,” he wrote, “that we must Christianize them or they will heathenize us.”24 The “heathen Chinee,” in other words, was, for some, first and foremost a
“heathen,” inadmissible to a Christian nation like the United States.
Many Christian ministers and missionaries were more optimistic. For some, the link between “pagan” Chinese practices in California and those of a Confucian, Buddhist, or Taoist past was evidence of high intellectual (if not moral) faculties. As Derek Chang has noted in his study of American home missionaries in the late nineteenth century, “evangelicals working among the Chinese [found an] encouraging attribute in the supposed rationality imparted by
Confucianism.”25 For Rev. William Speer, who founded the first Presbyterian mission in San
Francisco in 1853, it was just such a rationality that had saved the Chinese from total debasement and degradation.26 Speer distinguished between Chinese heathenism and heathenism elsewhere in Asia. “They are a heathen people,” he wrote of the Chinese, “and yet their very heathenism is not the fantastic, obscene and bloody religion elsewhere seen in Asia, which insults the reason and sense of mankind, and sends its stench to the heavens.”27 It was the “great common sense” of the Chinese race, Speer argued, that “led them to resist the introduction from abroad of many
24 Wheeler, O.C. The Chinese in America: A National Question; an Address Delivered in Metropolitan Temple, San Francisco, Dec. 21, 1879, and in the State Capitol at Sacramento, January 16, 1880. Oakland, CA: Times Publishing Co. 1880. pp. 13-23. 25 Chang, Derek. Citizens of a Christian Nation. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. pg. 85. 26 Lloyd, Lights and Shades in San Francisco, pg. 281. 27 Speer, D.D., William. The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States. Cincinnati, OH: National Publishing Co. 1870. pg. 501. 19 of [paganism’s] worst features.”28 Guarded from the “worst features” of paganism by their rationality, the Chinese were thus opened to evangelization. Seen in these terms, missionaries like Speer came to see Chinese immigration as the working of providence, the work of God
“regenerating the continent of Asia, through the multitudes of its people to be brought hither, enlightened with Christianity and returned to it again.” Thus, Chinese religion was important for what it revealed about the Chinese as human beings capable of receiving salvation. This sort of cultural racism, assuming an inferior yet redeemable status for Chinese people (what Chang has termed the “new racism” of the late nineteenth century), when promoted by missionaries like
Speer nowhere assumes that Chinese religious practice itself was worth saving.29 Rather, it demonstrated that the Chinese “heathenism” might be easily eliminated, replaced through conversion to Christianity. While the Chinese people might have been seen as redeemable, its religious practice certainly was not.
Broadening the Scope
The appeal of Wong Yung Quy, however, stands out from these contemporary debates over Chinese religion during the the 1870s in two important ways. First, Wong’s appeal broadened the terms of the debate over Chinese “religion,” which had previously been limited in scope to practices whose form and context resembled Western systems recognizable as
“religious.” That is, although discussions about Chinese “religion” most often focused on practices observed within spaces perceived as “sacred” (i.e., Chinese temples, or joss houses), in the presence of individuals recognizable as “religious” authorities (i.e., priests), or in ritual contexts commonly associated with religious ceremonies (e.g., funerals, the interment of bodies),
Wong’s appeal claimed the status of “religion” for a set of practices not typically considered in
28 ibid, pg. 656. 29 Chang, Citizens of Christian Nation, pg. 85. 20 debates over the nature of Chinese religion. Because scholarly analysis of Chinese religious practice in nineteenth century California has tended to ignore the practice of exhumation and secondary burial introduced as “religious” in Wong’s case -- instead mirroring Euro-American ideas of what might constitute Chinese “religion” -- Wong’s case is instructive, calling for a definition of Chinese “religion” in Chinese terms.
Perhaps the most significant attempt to expand the scholarly discussion of Chinese religion in the nineteenth century American West can be found in the work of Laurie Maffly-
Kipp. She argues that “liberal academic sympathies” have contributed to the lack of academic attention granted “features that scholars might consider local, incidental, or undignified.”30
Unfortunately, although she critiques nineteenth century liberal academics and the scholars who have followed in their footsteps for attempting to cull from their observations “something recognizable to them as a religious tradition, no matter how strained the resemblance or how awkward the gymnastics involved in pulling ‘religion’ away from ‘culture,’” her work falls into a similar trap as she draws popular depictions of Chinese religion out from depictions of more general (and presumably non-religious) Chinese practices.31 Many of the depictions in her account describe scenes of Chinese religious life contained in temples, or “joss houses,” comfortably analogous to Western religious spaces. One of the few ‘encounters’ of Chinese religion she describes which takes places outside the more familiarly religious setting of the joss house is a Chinese funeral. While her reading of these accounts is informative in many ways, her analysis is tarnished by a glaring omission: Chinese burial rites as practiced in the United
States in the nineteenth century did not end with practices focused around burial. They included, rather, a practice of “secondary burial,” which necessitated the exhumation of human remains
30 Maffly-Kipp, Laurie. “Engaging Habits and Besotted Idolatry: Viewing Chinese Religions in the West,” Material Religion, vol. 1, no. 1 (March, 2005). pp. 72-97. pg. 78. 31 ibid, pg. 77. 21 several years after burial, that the bones might be interred in an ancestral shrine -- the very practice claimed as “religious” by Wong Yung Quy. Continuing with a study of the “local, incidental, or undignified,” in an attempt to expand the scholarly view of Chinese religion in the
United States guided by the arguments put forward in Wong Yung Quy’s case, chapter two approaches the practice of exhumation as a religious practice.
A second factor setting Wong’s petition apart from contemporary debates over the nature of Chinese religion is its assumptions about the power and protection gained in the designation of the practice of exhumation as a religious practice. While many Euro-Americans recognized some Chinese practices as “religious,” they did not assume that such a designation meant they were practices worth keeping, much less protecting. Even the most generous appraisals of
Chinese religion by Euro-Americans, praising the “rationality” evinced by Confucian practice, for example, assumed that Chinese citizens would leave behind their native religion (converting to Christianity) in order to truly become American. Wong’s appeal, on the other hand, presented the practice of exhumation as a practice that was “good” and worthy of protection by virtue of its being “religious.” Given the assumption that, as a religious practice, exhumation ought to remain unobstructed, the appeal was directed at particular regulatory practices of the State of
California, arguing that regulation interfered with the practice of Chinese religion, the only such case in which this argument was made by the Chinese in California during the 1870s (even as
Chinese immigrants won numerous legal battles with appeals to the fourteenth amendment of the
United States constitution, a point discussed in chapter two). Wong’s case raised, for the first time (where the Chinese in American courts are concerned), the specter of religious freedom, calling into question the place of religion in American law. Wong’s case effectively raised the question of what, precisely, constituted Chinese religion in a manner that required the court to
22 distinguish between religious and governmental (i.e., “non-religious”) spheres, and determine the extent to which the government could interfere in practices considered “religious.” The court’s decision reveals much, indeed, about the construction of these spheres, and, together with an examination of the Chinese practice of exhumation, will be the subject of chapter 2.
23
CHAPTER 2
INTERPRETING EXHUMATION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY SAN FRANCISCO
The writ of habeas corpus put forward on Wong Yong Quy’s behalf in 1879, provides some indication of the importance of the case for understanding not only the history of Chinese immigrants in the United States, but also for understanding the complex relationship between the law and religion in the United States. The case stands at a unique moment in the history of
American law as perhaps the most significant Chinese challenge to American law based in claims to religious freedom in the nineteenth century. As such, there is much to be learned from the case about the place of religion in American law.
This chapter first describes Chinese practices related to the handling of dead bodies, highlighting the ways in which Chinese immigrants in the California in the 1870s and 1880s preserved and adapted Chinese practices in a new context. It then provides an overview of some nineteenth century Euro-American approaches to death and the handling of dead bodies in order to contextualize the reactions of Euro-Americans in San Francisco to Chinese burial and exhumation practices, as reported in San Francisco newspapers in the 1870s and 1880s. This chapter considers judge Sawyer’s ruling in the Wong Yung Quy case, discussing the case in the context nineteenth century challenges to anti-Chinese legislation, with particular attention to the categories of “religion” and “public health” in the court’s decision. Responding to claims of religious freedom with an appeal to concerns over the public health, the court’s decision reveals that religion was seen as subordinate to the ostensibly non-religious, universal laws of sanitation and public health. Finally, I suggest that the treatment of corpses by Chinese immigrants in nineteenth century San Francisco was seen as a threat to a Christian establishment, whose
24 hegemonic power expressed itself in the supposedly non-religious realm of public health regulation (a claim more fully elaborated in chapter three).
Dealing With the Corpse in China and Chinese America
The corpses seen as problematic to San Francisco residents in the 1870s were Cantonese corpses. When the Chinese began immigrating to the United States in large numbers in the
1850s, they came almost entirely from a single province in Southeast China. As explained by
Haiming Liu, young men in Guangdong (Canton) province, driven by “population pressure, disintegration of a traditionally self-sufficient rural economy, and internal decay of the Qing
Dynasty” were met with opportunities for emigration in Guangzhou, “the capital city of
Guandong, [which] had been the main port to foreign commerce since the eighteenth century.”32
When one speaks of the influences of Chinese culture or Chinese practices in nineteenth century
Chinese communities in the United States, therefore, one is really speaking of a specifically
Guangdong (Cantonese) influence.
Immigrants from Guangdong province seem to have treated their dead in the United
States much the same as they had in China. Thus, to understand Chinese treatments of the dead in nineteenth century California, one must understand the treatment of the dead in Southeast
China. To provide the context for a discussion of Chinese burial and exhumation practices in late-nineteenth century San Francisco, I draw on the work of anthropologists James L. Watson and Rubie S. Watson, whose ethnographic work in the 1970s focused on practices related to the dead, burial, grave sites, and the practice of “secondary burial” in Southeastern China, unique to the Guangdong/Canton area from which most of the Chinese immigrants in the United States
32 Haiming Liu. “The Social Origins of Early Chinese Immigrants: A Revisionist Perspective,” in The Chinese in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millenium. Susie Lan Cassel, Ed. New York: AltaMira Press, 2002. pp. 21-36, pg. 24, 26. 25 during the nineteenth century originated.33 While the two contexts are by no means identical - they are, in fact, quite unique in demographic and political terms - I contend that understanding the treatment of the dead in a Chinese context can provide some insight into the practices of burial and exhumation as found in Chinese communities in nineteenth century California.
One concern must be addressed at the outset, however, before examining the death practices of Guangdong province. It is suspect, no doubt, to use ethnographic sources from the
1970s to illuminate a discussion of practices undertaken one hundred years earlier. To do so in the context of the United States would be unthinkable and absurd. In the context of rural southeast China, however, it may not be too great a leap to make. As Martin K. Whyte has recognized, political changes in China have had a profound effect on Chinese mortuary practice.
For Whyte, the most notable changes in mortuary practice came after the rise of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) in 1949. Whyte argues that it was “the Cultural Revolution, and particularly the ‘Destroy the Four Olds’ stage in the fall of 1966, that ushered in the period of greatest hostility to traditional funeral practices.”34 Whyte notes, however, that such hostility was most clearly felt in urban centers. Thus, he argues, “for most peasants in Kwangtung
[Guangdong] in the 1970s funeral customs were probably not that much different from what they had been … in the period before 1949.”35 While more detailed studies are needed to fully examine the development of mortuary ritual in southeastern China during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I will proceed in this paper with the available ethnographic studies of James
Watson and Ruby Watson.
33 Naquin, Susan. “Funerals in North China: Uniformity and Variation,” in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, Eds. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. pp. 37-70, pg. 44, 54. 34 Whyte, Martin K. “Death in the People’s Republic of China,” in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, pp. 289-316, pg. 300. 35 ibid, pg. 305. 26
There are several aspects of the Chinese practices discussed by Watson and Watson pertinent to our discussion of Chinese practices in nineteenth century California. First among these is the role and conception of pollution caused by death, dead bodies, and the souls of the deceased. Rubie Watson explains that in Guangdong province, “the treatment of the dead implies a threefold division of the soul; one is found in the grave, one in the ancestral tablet, and the third in the underworld.”36 The state of the soul after death, furthermore, was cause for great concern where the living were concerned. “The general aversion to death, and anything associated with the corpse,” James Watson explains, “is so overpowering that ordinary villagers hesitate to become involved [with funeral rituals].”37 Watson describes further the fear of
“killing airs” in Cantonese society:
News of an imminent death spreads rapidly in Cantonese villages. Residents usually
have enough warning to protect those who are most at risk. Pregnant women and
children are advised to stay well away from the house in question; neighbours close their
doors and find an excuse to be away for a few hours … These precautions are necessary,
it was explained, because newborn creatures of all types are extremely vulnerable to the
‘killing airs,’ sat hei, that emanate from the corpse at the moment of death38
The importance of the initial stage of the mortuary sequence in gaining control over powerful, unpredictable spirits is further evident in the fact that, in Guangdong province, “destitute villagers are given an abbreviated funeral and are buried at community expense.” Watson notes that “members of the community heaved a collective sigh of relief when the guardsmen carried
36 ibid 37 Watson, James L. “Of flesh and bones: the management of death pollution in Cantonese society,” in Death and the Regeneration of Life, Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, Eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. pp. 155-186. pg. 155. 38 Watson, James L. “Of Flesh and Bones: Death Pollution in Cantonese Society,” pg. 158. 27 the (very cheap) coffin out to the hills.”39 Proper (and timely) disposal of the corpse was thus not simply an individual or family concern, but a community concern.
A second form of pollution was connected to the decaying flesh of the corpse rather than the spirit exiting the corpse. Unlike the “active” threat posed by the “killing airs” emanating from the corpse, the flesh of the corpse is described by Watson as “passive” pollution, harmful only when an individual comes into contact with the polluting flesh.40 The funeral ceremony, dealing with the polluting corpse, is a highly gendered one, men and women performing different duties in accordance with their gendered relationship with the deceased. In the end, the pollution of death is shared by the entire community, though the burden of pollution falls on the eldest son, married daughters, and daughters-in-law. Whereas the eldest son takes on the pollution of death as a means of “earning” his inheritance, according to Watson, the daughters and daughters-in- law take on the “fertility of the deceased, embodied in the flesh” (the “female” element of the corpse), as a means of ensuring the reproduction of the patriline.41
Watson notes the importance of differentiating flesh from bone in this case. Human flesh, gendered as female, “in the absence of life, represents a particularly dangerous combination of yin (female) forces,” whereas the bones represent “primarily yang - the male element.”42 The aim of Cantonese mortuary ritual, then, is to “progress smoothly and efficiently to the stage when it is possible to exhume the bones and cleanse them of the last, corrupting remnants of flesh.”43 This separation is often a process of literally scraping flesh from bone,
39 ibid, pg. 171. 40 Watson, James L. “Of Flesh and Bones: Death Pollution in Cantonese Society,” pg. 159. 41 ibid, pg. 174. 42 Watson, James. “Of Flesh and Bones: Death Pollution in Cantonese Society,” pg. 179. 43 Watson, James L. “Funeral Specialists in Cantonese Society: Pollution, Performance, and Social Hierarchy,” in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. pp. 109-134, pg. 113. 28 undertaken upon exhumation of the corpse several years after its initial burial.44 “The bones,”
Watson explains, “once free of flesh, are treated in a cool, calm manner, as they are manipulated for worldly benefits.”45 Whereas decaying flesh is to be avoided, men are able to “commune freely and enthusiastically with the yang remains [bones].”46 This observation is critical for the present consideration of Chinese practices in nineteenth century California. Dealing with the bones of the deceased, (male) Chinese immigrants engaged in the exhumation of human remains and the preparation of those bones for reinterment in China would not likely have thought of their actions as “polluting” or a threat to the public health.
A final aspect of Chinese (Cantonese) mortuary ritual that must be understood is the role of specialists in the mortuary process. Described as the “lowest of the low” by James Watson, corpse handlers in particular occupy a clear position in the mortuary process, and Cantonese society more generally. Corpse handlers are those individuals that deal directly with the corpse: washing, dressing, and arranging the body in the coffin prior to the funeral, and carrying the coffin to the burial site.47 Interestingly, the community in which Watson conducted his research seems to have employed primarily male corpse handlers (suggested by his reference to corpse handlers as “stigmatized men”), though no consideration is given to whether this task might have been more appropriate to marginalized women. What is clear, however, is that corpse handlers were a marginalized people in Cantonese society. Given the extent to which corpse handlers were marginalized in Cantonese society -- Watson claims, in fact, that “the local priest is the
44 Watson, Rubie S. “Graves and Politics in Southeastern China,” in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. pp. 203-227. pg. 208. 45 Watson, James L. “Of Flesh and Bones: Death Pollution in Cantonese Society,” pg. 180-181. 46 ibid, pg. 179. 47 Watson, James L. “Funeral Specialists in Cantonese Society: Pollution, Performance, and Social Hierarchy,” in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. pp. 109-134, pg. 124. 29 only resident who dares to speak to the corpse handlers”48 -- it is hard to imagine an individual stepping into a societal role that was not their own upon arrival in the United States, at least as far as mortuary practice is concerned.
Nonetheless, in the United States, new approaches to handling the dead seem to have arisen out of necessity. Information on who, precisely, handled the Chinese dead in the United
States is hard to come by, but it is clear that the treatment of the dead was, early on, attended to by district organizations, or “companies.” Immigrants organized themselves according to the district from which they came, and these district organizations were eventually combined under the title The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association for the purposes of advancing
Chinese interests in the U.S.49 District organizations were responsible for arranging both the burial of deceased Chinese immigrants and the exhumation of the bones of those deceased for shipment back to China. The first such shipment of bones was undertaken by the Nam Hoy Fook
Yum Benevolent Association in 1855.50 The shipment of bone and practice of exhumation, however, were relatively rare until the early 1880s. In fact, according to listings of businesses in
San Francisco examined by Linda Crowder, the first Chinese mortuary in the city was not established until 1878,51 indicating the low level of demand for Chinese mortuary specialists in
San Francisco in the 1860s and 1870s.
In the absence of funeral specialists, notably corpse handlers, Chinese immigrants handled the problem of pollution in interesting ways. Reports of unusual activity in San
Francisco newspapers up to 1878 suggest that the task of handling the dead - that position
48 ibid, pg. 125. 49 Him Mark Lai’s Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions provides a remarkably thorough outline of the histories of the CCBA. 50 Him Mark Lai. Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions. New York: AltaMira Press, 2004. pg.114. 51 Crowder, Linda Sun. “The Chinese Mortuary Tradition in San Francisco Chinatown,” in Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors. New York: AltaMira Press, 2005. pp. 195-240. pg. 200. 30 reserved for the ‘lowest of the low’ - was at times, for lack of a better term, “outsourced” to the local (Euro-American) coroner. In 1870, a Chinese man named Ah Yon was arrested for depositing the bodies of two Chinese women on a San Francisco sidewalk. The women had, the report suggests, “died in a private hospital,” and were left on the sidewalk “to save expenses” (a reason the reporter cites as unlikely to be truthful).52 The bodies were only discovered after
“eight or ten days,” however, so the state of the women when left on the sidewalk is uncertain.53
A Bulletin report from the following year, however, suggests that the women may not have been dead when left on the sidewalk. A report on the “Chinese Death Bed” in 1871 suggested the following about the practices of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco: “to prevent the manifestations of the restless spirit, as soon as the doctor gives it as his opinion that a patient can not survive he is taken to another place and left alone to die.”54 In the particular case discussed in the report, the body of a woman left alone to die was subsequently collected by the coroner and taken to the morgue to be prepared for burial. Travelogue writer B.E. Lloyd complained that
“it is not an unfrequent occurrence in San Francisco to find a dead or dying Chinaman in some damp, dark, and deserted cellar or tenement house, where even the most filthy living would not remain a day.” He explained further,
Sometimes they are discovered in the alleys where there is little or no travel … This is
due to the custom observed among them that the person at whose house any one dies
must incur the funeral expenses, if the dead have no relatives. It is a popular belief with
52 San Francisco Bulletin (Daily Evening Bulletin), vol. xxxi, issue 2 (December 10, 1870), pg. 3. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers (online; hereafter, AHN). 53 ibid 54 San Francisco Bulletin (Daily Evening Bulletin), vol. xxxii, issue 71 (June 29, 1871), pg. 1. AHN. 31
them that if such person fails to provide for a suitable burial, the spirit of the dead will
return and bring great trouble upon the house.55
In a similar but rather remarkable and unusual case reported in 1878, the body of another not-so- dead Chinese man was brought directly to the coroner. The coroner was reportedly “engaged in removing the [recently delivered] body, [when] he discovered, to his horror, that the body was alive.”56 The supposedly deceased man eventually sat up, “bid [the coroner], in pigeon [sic]
English ‘Good Morning,’” and walked out of his office. For Euro-American observers like
Lloyd, the reported practice of abandoning the nearly-dead was “one of the most inhuman customs” of Chinese immigrants, evidence that the Chinese were “yet slaves to superstition.”57
For the Chinese, the practice likely meant something quite different. In the absence of mortuary specialists, Chinese immigrants appear to have (at least occasionally) passed off the nearly-dead and dying to Euro-Americans, thereby avoiding the polluting effects of death and the corpse and instead passing them on to the coroner.
The practice of exhuming the already interred dead, cleaning the bones, and shipping the bones back to China, however, seems to have been much less problematic for the Chinese in San
Francisco. The Chinese dead were exhumed only after decomposition had dealt with the problematic flesh.58 Thus, for Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, it is perhaps not so surprising that there seems to have been less concern with who exhumed the dead. Sometimes, community members took responsibility, while at other times exhumers were appointed by the district association with which the deceased was affiliated.59 In other instances, as in the case of
55 Lloyd, B.E. Lights and Shades in San Francisco. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft and Company, 1876. pg. 227. 56 San Francisco Bulletin (Daily Evening Bulletin), vol. xlvii, issue 48 (November 21, 1878), pg. 1. AHN. 57 Lloyd, B.E. Lights and Shades in San Francisco, pg. 227. 58 Crowder, 199. 59 Rouse, Wendy L. “‘What We Didn’t Understand’: A History of Chinese Death Ritual in China and California,” in Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors. New York: AltaMira Press, 2005. pp. 19-45, pg. 37. 32
Wong Yung Quy, the responsibility of exhumation fell to a family member of the deceased. In any case, the practice of exhumation seems to have been much less objectionable to the Chinese immigrants in San Francisco than it was to Euro-American observers.
Dealing With the Corpse in Nineteenth Century (Euro-)America
The Postbellum era of the nineteenth century in United States saw a great deal of change in attitudes towards the treatment of the dead - dead bodies in particular - among Euro-
Americans. Early in the nineteenth century, there were certainly concerns about dead bodies and the practice of exhumation in the eastern United States. The exhumation with which Americans were preoccupied, however, was exhumation of the illegal, for-profit variety, known as “body snatching.” With the rising popularity and acceptability of the study of anatomy in U.S. medical colleges came a rising demand for cadavers, a shift outlined in the work of Michael Sappol.60
The reactions to exhumations of bodies for the use in anatomical research were varied.
While support for anatomical research grew steadily throughout the nineteenth century, significant opposition remained. This opposition, however, was not only concerned with the act of exhumation. Rather, it was the act that followed that provoked the most violent of responses: dissection. Although, as Sappol argues, the “unearthing and dissection of bodies was seen as an assault upon the dead and an affront to family and community honor,” the dissection seems to have been the most objectionable aspect of the practice.61 For those opposed to the use of cadavers in anatomical research, the concern was not often over how the bodies were procured, as legislative changes increasingly alleviated those concerns. Sappol explains that the “anatomy acts” passed in many states limited the use of cadavers in medical research to the use of the
60 Sappol, Michael. A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. See also: Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Towards Death, 1799-1883, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. 61 ibid, pg. 3. 33
“‘unclaimed’ (those without money for burial who died in workhouses, hospitals, and similar institutions),” thus eliminating the need for burial and exhumation altogether, and “rescuing the profession from the taint of association with unsavory lower-class body snatchers.” 62 In this sense, dissection replaced body snatching as the focus of the opposition, as it was considered a
“rape of the body” as much as body snatching had been “a rape of the grave.”63
The opposition to dissection came primarily from the poor, who felt the effects of anatomy legislation the most. Much of this opposition, furthermore, was appealed explicitly to religious belief. Opposition on the grounds of religious belief came especially from Irish
Catholics, among whom the number of poor (and thus the number dissected) individuals was high. Irish organizations denounced bills allowing dissection for medical research, arguing that
“any violation of the remains of the dead are abhorent [sic] to their feelings.”64 Patrick Maguire, a New York City Democrat, was more explicit yet. Maguire “denounced the bill as anti-
Christian” and argued that “believers deserved a decent burial.”65 In the debates over exhumation and dissection for the purposes of medical research, the alleged victim was the exhumed or dissected.
In San Francisco, however, debates about exhumation during the 1870s and 1880s were not centered on the question of dissection as they were in the East. These questions would not become an issue until much later. In fact, it was not until 1927 that California enacted its own legislation to regulate the use of cadavers for anatomical research (its own “anatomy act”).66
While San Francisco newspapers did occasionally report on the threat of “body snatching” in
62 ibid, pg. 4. 63 ibid, pg. 4-5 64 ibid, pg. 130. 65 ibid, pg. 131. 66 ibid, pg. 123, table 4.2. 34
California,67 the majority of the reports published in the 1870s and 1880s were reports of body snatching in the eastern United States.68 In San Francisco, the concern over exhumation was not a concern for the feelings or religious beliefs of the exhumed, or a concern over the rape of body or grave, but rather a concern for the “public welfare.”
The debates in San Francisco over the Chinese practice of exhumation more clearly reflect the concerns of sanitarians in the Postbellum period. Stephen Prothero has argued that early sanitary reformers throughout the United States, obsessed with sanitation, “believed contagious diseases were caused by ‘miasma,’ a mysterious but noxious gas emitted from fermenting organic matter,” which included (but was not limited to) “the decaying underground corpse.”69 “Convinced that urban graveyards, too, represented a threat to public health,”
Prothero explains, “sanitarians agitated for changes in the American way of burial. In the process, the dead joined immigrants as scapegoats for urban perils, and burial was added to the agenda of the ‘body reformers.’”70 The fear of miasmic vapors emanating from decaying bodies in postbellum San Francisco was widespread, and quickly lead to legislation and regulations of not only graveyards but the corpses they contained.
As early as 1873, legislation was in place to regulate the interment of bodies in San
Francisco cemeteries. Section 24 of the Act of Quarantine and Sanitary Laws for San Francisco, as reported in the San Francisco Bulletin, stated that
67 One report, titled “Grave Robbery at Oakland,” for example, detailed the robbery of the grave of a recently deceased young woman whose body was later found on a dissecting table at a nearby medical college. San Francisco Bulletin, vol. lvi, issue 1 (April 9, 1883), pg. 2. AHN. 68 See, for example: “Body-Snatching Colleges,” San Francisco Bulletin, vol. xlvii, issue 1 (October 8, 1878), pg. 2. AHN; “The Ohio Ghoul,” San Francisco Bulletin, vol. xlvi, issue 72 (July 1, 1878), pg. 3. AHN. 69 Prothero, Stephen. Purified By Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Berkley: University of California Press, 2001, pg. 46-47. 70 ibid, pg. 47. 35
Every Sexton, Undertaker, Superintendent of a cemetery, or other person, who shall inter,
or cause to be interred, any human body, without having first obtained and filed with the
Health Officer a physician’s certificate, or the Coroner’s certificate, setting forth, as
nearly as possible, the name, age, color, sex, and date and place of birth, date and locality
of death, and cause of death of the deceased, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor,
and on conviction shall be punished as provided in Section 29 of this Act.71
The impetus behind this act, according to the Bulletin report, was the Chinese immigrants among whom “many deaths occur, for which no attending physician’s certificate can be had.”
Described as a “matter of both humanity and necessity,” the reporter conceded that it was important that “Chinamen who die be gotten under the ground as soon as possible,” though not before a cause of death had been established. The interment of bodies without noting the cause of death was, the reporter claimed, “not only opening the door to crime, but removing the wholesome check upon contagious diseases in our midst.”72 The risk of disease posed by San
Francisco corpses, it seems, was greater when those corpses were Chinese.
Sanitarians were particularly concerned with the dangers of “noxious gases emitted by decomposing organic matter” - so concerned, Prothero argues, that these gases came to be seen as a “prime public health danger.” The “stench of death” was the means by which pollution and contagious disease were thought to be “wafting through the graveyards.”73 This way of thinking clearly guided officials’ response to the Chinese practice of exhumation. At a meeting of the
Board of Health in San Francisco in 1884, one Dr. Douglas reported that “the bodies could be
71 “Our Sanitary Law,” San Francisco Bulletin, vol. xxxvi, issue 38 (May 21, 1873), pg. 3. AHN. 72 ibid, my emphasis. 73 Prothero, pg. 54. 36 smelled one-quarter of a mile away” - evidence that, as Mayor Washington Bartlett suggested, the “wholesale disinterment of Chinese bodies” would “endanger the health of the people.”74
There was at that meeting of the Board of Health some debate, however. The Inspector for the Board of Health argued (in terms familiar to the debates about sanitation) that the Chinese practice was not, in fact, offensive. Inspector Green’s report on the Chinese disinterments described the practice as such:
some of the bodies when taken up were quite ‘green,’ while others were well bleached
out. The ‘green’ bodies had their bones scraped, while the flesh was stripped from the
dry bodies. Some of the bodies that smelled badly were put in a hermetically sealed box.
Others had the bones separated from the flesh and were placed in the sun to dry, after
which they were rubbed down, polished with a cloth and placed in a bag. The Inspector
declared that the bodies were not offensive, as they could not be smelled unless a person
got within fifteen or twenty feet of them.
Throughout the Inspector’s report, despite his disagreement with Dr. Douglas, the connection between smell and the threat of pollution remains clear. In the interest of containing the smell of the Chinese corpses, thereby containing the threat to the public health, the Board directed the
Inspector “not to permit any disinterments to be made that are in any degree offensive.”75
Despite the efforts of the Board of Health to contain the offensive smells that evinced a threat to the public health posed by disinterred Chinese bodies, public sentiment regarding the Chinese exhumation of bodies and cleaning of bones continued to tend towards revulsion and fear.
“Offensive” smells were not simply unpleasant, but dangerous. Appealing to the Board of
Health, residents hoped that the danger posed by offensive corpses might be mitigated through
74 “The Board of Health - The Wholesale Disinterment of Chinese Bodies - Ghastly Sights,” San Francisco Bulletin, vol. 1, issue 63 (December 19, 1884), pg. 1. AHN. 75 ibid. 37 regulation of or an outright ban on exhumation. It was not long until the revulsion and horror with which Californians reacted to the Chinese practice of exhumation was reflected in local and state legislation.
California’s Anti-Exhumation Legislation and Wong Yung Quy’s Challenge
The first legal action that concerned the Chinese practice of exhumation in San Francisco came in 1876 with the request of a city ordinance requiring a certificate from city Health Officer for the disinterment of a dead body. The ordinance followed a resolution passed by the Board of
Health in December, 1876. The problem presented to the Board was a familiar one. A report in the Daily Evening Bulletin provided a summary of the issue as addressed by one Milo Hoadley:
Milo Hoadley complained of the intolerable nuisance caused by the burning of decayed
human flesh at the Chinese Cemetery, and said that a thousand bodies had been exhumed
from the graveyard, the flesh stripped from the bones and burned. There were five
hundred coffins piled up on the ground now. The stench was sickening and unbearable.76
In response to Mr. Hoadley’s complaint, one Dr. Simpson inquired as to whether “there was not an ordinance to prevent bodies from being disinterred without permits.” There was no such ordinance, though one Dr. Meares explained that permits were given for the shipment of exhumed bones to China.77 A resolution was then passed “requesting the Board of Supervisors to pass an ordinance preventing the disinterment of dead bodies, without a special permit from the Health Officer,” though it does seem that any such ordinance ever passed.
The next legal challenge to the exhumation of Chinese bodies came at the state level little more than a year later, when the Governor signed into law “An Act To Protect Public Health from Infection Caused by Exhumation and Removal of the Remains of Deceased Persons.” The
76 San Francisco Bulletin/Daily Evening Bulletin, vol. xliii, issue 70 (December 29, 1876), pg. 3. AHN. 77 ibid. 38 law instituted three requirements for the exhumation and/or transport of human remains between counties or through the state. First, the exhumation or transport of human remains required “the person or persons so doing [to] first obtain from the board of health, health officer, mayor, or other head of the municipal government … a permit for said purpose.”78 Second, the Act stated that
permits to disinter or exhume the bodies or remains of deceased persons … may be
granted, provided the person applying therefor shall produce a certificate from the
coroner, the physician who attended such deceased person, or other physician in good
standing cognizant of the facts, which certificate shall state the cause of death or disease
of which the person died.79
Finally, the Act stipulated that the “officer of the municipal government of the city or town, or city and county, granting such permit, shall require to be paid for each permit the sum of $10.”80
When passed, the law was praised in San Francisco newspapers for its ability to combat the sanitary problems of Chinese exhumation practices. One such report announced the approval of the bill by the legislature and Governor and the actions taken under the law by the San
Francisco Board of Health. The reporter seemed pleased to announce that the new powers of the state under the law would “have the effect of breaking up some customs of the Chinese which are not only highly offensive but deleterious to health.”81 The Act, however, was quickly challenged as unconstitutional.
78 “An Act to Protect Public Health from Infection, Caused by Exhumation and Removal of the Remains of Deceased Persons,” as reported in C.J. Sawyer, In re Wong Yung Quy, on habeas corpus, Circuit Court, D. California, 1880 U.S. App. LEXIS 2032, pg. 2. 79 ibid, pg. 3. 80 ibid. pg. 4. 81 “Civilizing the Chinese,” San Francisco Bulletin, vol. xlvi, issue 116 (August 22, 1878), pg. 2. AHN. 39
When Wong Yung Quy was arrested in 1879, for failure to pay the $10 fee for the permit required for an exhumation of human remains, his defense appealed, ultimately bringing the case before the United States Court of Appeals, in the Circuit Court of the District of California, with a writ of habeas corpus. Wong Yung Quy’s defense rested on two primary claims: first, that the
Act was in violation of the Constitution of the United States, and second, that the Act violated the terms of the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. Specifically, the Act was said to be in violation of the Constitution of the United States on two counts - as an unlawful regulation of foreign commerce, and as a violation of the equal protection clause of Fourteenth Amendment - while also violating Article IV of the Burlingame Treaty, which provided that “Chinese subjects in the
United States shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience and shall be exempt from all disability or persecution on account of their religious faith or worship in either country.”82 The latter two claims, to equal protection under the law and freedom from religious persecution, are most relevant to the present discussion.
In his decision, Judge C.J. Sawyer dismissed the defense’s claim that the Act violated the equal protection clause, arguing that “there no discrimination against or in favor of any class of residents. It operates upon aliens of all nationalities and upon all citizens alike.”83 A review of the reports published in San Francisco newspapers in support of the Act suggests otherwise. One author, cited above, who praised the Act for its protection against the offensive and deleterious actions of the Chinese, was confident that “as a matter of fact, the law will bear but slightly on persons of our own race.”84 This was not an unreasonable assumption, considering that, according to the Superintendent of Interments in 1879, Donald McDonald, “96.72% of
82 Article IV, Burlingame Treaty (1868), online: en.wikisource.org/wiki/Burlingame_Treaty 83 In re Wong Yung Quy, on habeas corpus, pg. 14-15. 84 “Civilizing the Chinese,” San Francisco Bulletin, vol. xlvi, issue 116 (August 22, 1878), pg. 2. AHN. 40 applications at the Health Office for disinterment permits were made by Chinese.”85 An early report of the bill’s progress in the California legislature even stated explicitly that the Act was directed at the Chinese: on March 23, 1878, a report on the day’s legislative activity in the Daily
Evening Bulletin stated that “Ream from the Committee on Hospitals, reported back with a majority recommendation for passage, Assembly bill prohibiting the removal of human remains after interment. Intended to cover the case of removal of bones by the chinese.”86 More telling still is a report from a decade later, in March, 1889. The day’s legislative update for March 6 noted the following:
Joseph Naphtaly of San Francisco is here to secure the passage of a bill which amends the
Act regulating the exhumation of human bodies. It appears that the present law, which
was passed for the benefit of the Chinese, imposes charges on removals amounting to $50
or $60, and now that removals are necessary in San Francisco caused by the movement to
locate cemeteries out of town an amendment cancelling the expense is sought.87
Not only was the Act therefore conceived of as intended to affect only the Chinese, but it was apparently unthinkable that the effects of the law might be felt outside the Chinese community
(i.e., by Euro-American residents).
The appeal in the Wong Yung Quy case to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment was not unique. In fact, the case was one of several major challenges to anti-
Chinese discrimination in California law in the 1870s on those grounds, although it was the only case of the three which failed to see the law in question overturned as unconstitutional.88 The
85 “The Chinese Exhumation Case,” San Francisco Bulletin, vol. xlix, issue 12 (October 21, 1879), pg. 1. AHN. 86 San Francisco Bulletin/Daily Evening Bulletin, vol. xlv, issue 142 (March 23, 1878), pg. 3. AHN. 87 San Francisco Bulletin/Daily Evening Bulletin, vol. lxvii, issue 127 (March 6, 1889), pg. 3. AHN. 88 For an early history of anti-Chinese legislation, see Elmer C. Sandmeyer, “California Anti-Chinese Legislation and the Federal Courts: A Study in Federal Relations,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 5, no. 3 (Sep., 1936), pp. 189- 211. online: JSTOR. See also: Charles J. McClain, Jr., “The Chinese Struggle for Civil RIghts in 19th-Century 41 failure of Wong’s appeal was seen as a victory by opponents the Chinese practice of exhumation.
As one report of the verdict in the Wong case put it, “the heathen Chinee having scored two victories in the law courts, namely, in the queue and corporation labor cases, has now met with a single defeat.”89 Indeed, a “victory” for the anti-Chinese camp in California was not common in the late 1870s. For example, the latest case to challenge anti-Chinese legislation that had been passed in the mid-1870s, Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan (the “queue case”) was decided in favor of the defendant, Ho Ah Kow, whose “queue” (a long hair braid, characteristic of many Chinese immigrants in nineteenth century California) was cut off while he was held in the county jail. Ho
Ah Kow’s appeal challenged an ordinance passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which allowed for the cutting of prisoner’s hair in the interest of “sanitation.”90 In his decision,
Justice Field argued that the ordinance constituted “special legislation on the part of the supervisors against a class of persons who, under the constitution and laws of the United States, are entitled to the equal protection of the laws.”91 Likewise, the Circuit Court of the District of
California decided against the state in the habeas corpus case of a California mining company and its president, Tiburcio Parrott. Parrott had been arrested under a provision in the recently revised constitution of the State of California, which made it illegal for any corporation to employ Chinese workers. In addition to violating, like the “queue case,” the fourteenth amendment of the United States constitution, the court determined that the law in question was
clearly designed to force the Chinese out of the state of California and was thus in open
and contemptuous violation of the right that Chinese possessed under the Burlingame
America: The Unusual Case of Baldwin v. Franks,” Law and Historical Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 349-373. online: JSTOR.; William J. Courtney, “San Francisco’s anti-Chinese Ordinances, 1850-1900,” M.A. Thesis, San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1974. 89 Philadelphia Inquirer, vol. ciii (July 15, 1880), pg. 7. AHN. 90 McClain, Charles J. In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America. Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1994. pp. 73-76. 91 quoted in McClain, In Search of Equality, pg. 74. 42
Treaty to reside in the United States with all of the privileges, immunities, and
exemptions possessed by other foreign nationals.92
Yet, although cases such as the corporation labor dispute of In Re Tiburcio Parrott had introduced successful arguments based appeals to the Burlingame Treaty, none had appealed specifically to the treaty’s provision of religious freedom.
The Wong case was thus unique among these challenges to anti-Chinese legislation in its appeal to the rights of religious freedom granted Chinese subjects in the United States by the
Burlingame Treaty. Wong’s appeal included the affidavit of at least one “teacher of Chinese literature and religion,” by the name of Wong Suh Woo. The affidavit explained, with the authority of one “well versed in the religious teachings and beliefs of the Chinese people,” the importance of exhuming and shipping bones to China for Chinese religious practice:
The worship of the dead is a universal feature of their religion. They believe that the
salvation of the living and the eternal peace for the dead require that their remains be
finally interred in the land of the nativity, and that their tombs be frequently visited by
their relatives, and that once a year services be performed over their graves. Such has
been the universal religious belief of the Chinese for many thousands of years93
To restrict the exhumation, collection, and shipment of bones to China, the defense argued, was tantamount to a restriction on religious practice. Judge Sawyer, while “conceding that the religious sentiment of the Chinese requires that they shall remove the remains of their deceased friends to China for final burial,” did not agree that the Act provided any restriction on this
92 ibid, pg 89. 93 San Francisco Bulletin/Daily Evening Bulletin, vol. xlix, issue 12 (October 21, 1879), pg. 1. AHN. For the purposes of this paper, I am limited to accounts of the Wong case in San Francisco newspapers and Judge Sawyer’s decision to reconstruct the details of the appeal. Further research is needed to outline the full scope and range of content of the arguments made on Wong’s behalf. 43 practice.94 “There is nothing in the provision forbidding or unduly obstructing the performance of that rite or religious duty,” Sawyer wrote.95 He continued:
the fee established is only to liquidate the portion of expense of supervision and
inspection imposed upon the public resulting from their custom; and, like the other
expenses of disinterment and removal, which the surviving friends voluntarily incur, is
necessarily incident to their peculiar practice … The customs of the Chinese in this
respect renders the supervision necessary and proper; and we can perceive no impropriety
in charging them with the expense incident to it.96
The action of the state in regulating and supervising the Chinese practice of exhumation, in
Sawyers estimation, did not constitute inappropriate government involvement in religious matters. Rather than asserting the right of the state to subordinate religion in the public interest,
Sawyer denied that the state was asserting its authority and restricting religious practice at all.
This move is significant, indicating a lack of consensus regarding the place of the state in relation to religion, even after the legal precedent established only two years earlier in the widely publicized Mormon polygamy case, Reynolds v. U.S. In Reynolds, the court ruled that while the government “cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices,” arguing that to allow a man “to excuse his practices [contrary to the law] because of his religious belief” would effectively “make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect … permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”97 Although Judge
Sawyer, in his opinion in the Wong Yung Quy case, referred to the Reynolds decision,
94 In re Wong Yung Quy, pg. 16. 95 ibid. 96 ibid, pg.16-17. 97 Opinion of Chief Justice Waite, Reynolds v. United States, Supreme Court of the United States, 1878 U.S. LEXIS 1374, pg. 42-43. 44 suggesting that “it may well be questioned whether the treaty-making power would extend to the protection of practices, under the guise of religious sentiment, deleterious to the public health or morals, or to a subject-matter within the acknowledged police power of the state,” he did not take this line of questioning to be appropriate in the Wong case. “It is unnecessary to consider this question now,” he concluded.98
Public Health and the Usefulness of “Bio-Power”
Sawyer thus determined that the law in question did not interfere with Chinese religious practice. Yet, the court’s decision did acknowledge the “religious” nature of the practice of exhumation in question. There is an evident tension in the judgement, given that the practice of exhumation was clearly being restricted (as intended by the law in question and the exorbitant fees required for exhumation), yet no obstruction of religious practice was acknowledged.
Sawyer’s language is revealing in this respect, particularly his appeal to the “sanitary considerations generally recognized among enlightened nations” in arguing that there was no undue obstruction of the religious practice of the Chinese. The Chinese were free to continue with the practice of exhumation, so long as the “proper precautions [were] taken not to endanger the health of the people among whom they have elected to live.” The regulatory powers of the state in controlling matters of the public health, “like the regulation of slaughterhouses and other noxious pursuits,” fell “strictly within the police powers of the state.”99 Regulation did not amount to an undue obstruction of religious practice by the state, but rather an appropriate exercise of state power.
Sawyer’s decision rested, therefore, on a distinction between those matters that were appropriate for control under the “police powers of the state” and those that were not. The
98 In re Wong Yung Quy, pg. 17. 99 In Re Wong Yung Quy, pg. 10. 45 important distinction in the case at hand was between matters of public health, which could be regulated, and “liberty of conscience,” which could not. Ultimate authority, however, rested in the realm of public health, reflecting the universal law of sanitation. As with commerce (e.g., slaughterhouses), religious practices were protected where they did not conflict with the interests of public health. A conflict between the realms of religion and health, however, was not foreseen as a problem by the court. It was only “under the guise of religious sentiment” that practices related to religious worship would ever endanger the public health, and in such a case
(as decided in Reynolds) the protection of the public health at the expense of such practices was reasonably within the realm of state power.100 The protection of public health would never encroach on the protected realm of authentic religious practice. Put differently, public health can be said to have stood for the norm, setting the limits on acceptable acceptable (and authentically religious) behavior, determining the set of possible behaviors from which citizens were free to choose to partake in.
As a means of regulation and a source of power, public health might thus be considered a means of exercising what Michel Foucault has described as “bio-power.”101 Foucault argues that, beginning in the eighteenth century, and taking its present form by the nineteenth century, the modern state has operated through the supervision and control made possible by
“interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population.”102 Such regulatory power is considered a means of “social hierarchization … guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony.”103 That the court’s opinion that the sanitary concerns addressed
100 ibid, pg. 16. Emphasis mine. 101 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans., Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. 1978 (1976). pp. 135-159. 102 ibid, pg. 139. emphasis in original. 103 ibid, 141. 46 through the regulation of public health reflected “considerations generally recognized among enlightened nations,” seems, indeed, to confirm Foucault’s thesis that, operating through the use of “bio-power,” legal authority in the modern state tends to “operate more and more as a norm” rather than an explicit exercise of power. This suggestion begs the question, however, of just what sort of power might be said to be operating hegemonically; what sort of society is being
“normalized.”104 Turning now to a closer reading of the workings of public health regulation in nineteenth century San Francisco, I argue in the third chapter that the “enlightened” nation protected and normalized by public health regulation was, unquestionably, a Christian nation.
104 ibid, 144. 47
CHAPTER 3
THE STATE BOARD OF HEALTH OF CALIFORNIA AND THE BIO-POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Ten years before Wong Yung Quy’s arrest, Senator Eugene Casserly addressed a crowd at San Francisco’s Mercantile Library Hall on the divisive issue of Chinese immigration, “a question deeply affecting the permanent, and social elements of the American Republic.” For
Casserly, the threat of Chinese “invasion” was a threat not only to American labor and the economic well-being of the United States, but to the “moral forces which are the life of the nation.” The health of the body politic was imperiled, it seemed, by the Chinese contagion; by a people “tainted … with a leprosy of sin not fit to be named among men.”105
I intend to demonstrate in this chapter that Casserly’s description of a Chinese “leprosy of sin” can be seen as more than an illustrative analogy; more than the impassioned speech of an imaginative anti-Chinese politician and orator. Such rhetoric reveals the deep connection and interplay between religion, religious understandings of a nation imperiled, and a growing concern for the public health, as well as the development of new forms of government concerned with the protection and regulation of the public health -- what Foucault has termed “bio- power.”106 Cast as the very embodiment of disease, Chinese immigrants and their religion posed a threat to a healthy (i.e., Godly) nation. In response to this threat, linking Chinese immigrants and Chinese religion with filth and disease, activists, reporters, physicians, and politicians created a means by which both Chinese immigrants and their religious practices could be more successfully regulated.
105 “The Asian and the American,” The Examiner, July 10, 1873. Reprinted in The Chinese Invasion; revealing the habits, manners and customs of the Chinese, political social and religious, on the Pacific coast, Coming into contact with the free and enlightened citizens of America. Containing careful selections from the San Francisco press. Compiled by H.J. West. San Francisco, CA: Excelsior Office, Bacon and Company. 1873. pp. 83-86. 106 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans., Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. 1978 (1976). pp. 135-159. 48
While anti-Chinese politicians like Casserly certainly viewed the Chinese threat as a plague to be eradicated, others considered the disease of Chinese heathenism to be one that could be treated and healed. In postbellum San Francisco, the newly formed boards of public health
(both State and local), served as a primary means of treating the “disease” of Chinese immigration -- a sickness hindering both the physical and moral progression of Americans.
Utilizing what will be referred to in this chapter as a religio-racial climatology, many public health officials believed that the elimination of filth and protection of the public health might serve to elevate the Chinese race, improving its position in a divinely ordained racial hierarchy, the apex of which was Euro-American Christian society. Considering the work of the public health officials in this light illuminates the ways in which public health laws reflected understandings of the United States as a Christian nation, the health and civilization of which depended on, and was reflected in, adherence to standards of hygiene set and enforced by government officials charged with the maintenance of the public health. The civilization pursued in the maintenance and regulation of public health was, indeed, a Christian civilization.
The Birth of Public Health
The regulation of public health by the State of California began in 1870, with the passage of the Act Establishing the State Board of Health. The Act granted Governor Henry Haight the authority to appoint seven physicians to the Board, and of the seven physicians appointed, two were from San Francisco. One of the two physicians appointed from San Francisco, Henry
Gibbons, Sr., was elected by his fellow board members to serve as President of the Board.107
Part of a larger public health movement, the State Board of Health in California reflected the concerns of medical professionals engaged in public health regulation not only in California, nor
107 Logan, Henry. “Report of the Permanent Secretary,” in First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871. Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 15-16. 49 indeed only in the United States, but in Europe as well, particularly in France, Germany, and
England. As early as the sixteenth century, and certainly by the first half of the nineteenth century, public health as a means of government -- “government” understood here, in Michel
Foucault’s terms, “in the broad sense of techniques and procedures for directing human behavior” -- had emerged in Europe, appearing slightly differently in its various centers, but responding nonetheless to a similar set of concerns wherever it appeared.108
In its earliest iterations, according to public health historian George Rosen, public health as a concern and a means of government emerged alongside the modern state, “as part of a scheme of policy and administration whose supreme aim was to place social and economic life in the service of the state.”109 In France and England, these concerns were reflected in the development of census surveys aimed at measuring rates of birth and mortality, seen as “true indications of the population’s health and growth.”110 In Germany, on the other hand, the creation of the Medizinischepolizei (Medical Police) in 1764 led to the standardization of medical training and practice and the creation of medical officers. These medical officers’ duties included not only the monitoring of the health of the state in terms of birth and death rates, but the recording of observations on epidemic and endemic phenomena and their treatment, as well as directing investigations based on this data.111 The German system of state medicine, in other words, was interested in not only recording and analyzing but also improving the public health.
In France, the institution of regulatory public health concerned itself with changes resulting from increasing urbanization. This system, which Foucault refers to as “urban
108 Foucault, Michel. “On the Government of the Living,” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. Paul Rabinow, Ed. New York: The New Press, 1994. pg.81. 109 Rosen, George. A History of Public Health. expanded edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993 (1958), pg. 86. 110 Foucault, Michel. “The Birth of Social Medicine,” in Power. James D. Faubion, Ed. New York: The New Press, 1994. pg. 139. 111 Foucault, “The Birth of Social Medicine,” pp. 140-141. 50 medicine,” emerged as an outgrowth of “the politico-medical schema of the quarantine that appeared at the end of the Middle Ages,” a method of “medicalizing” and separating the individual from society, thereby “purifying” others; a “medicine of exclusion.”112 The eighteenth century program of urban medicine as developed in France built on this earlier system of quarantine, stressing the analysis of “zones of congestion, disorder, and danger” in urban areas, and developing systems to ensure the “establishment and control of a good circulation of water and air.”113
By the early nineteenth century, the German and French forms of state and urban medicine developed in England amidst growing concerns about the urban poor. Foucault argues that “in the second third of the nineteenth century, the problem of poverty was raised in terms of menace, of danger.” By the 1830s, he explains, “cohabitation between rich and poor in an undifferentiated urban environment constituted a health and political hazard for the city.”
Further, he argues that the system of public health exemplified by the Poor Laws of 1834 operated as a system of “control by which the wealthy classes, or their government representatives, would guarantee the health of the needy classes and, consequently, protect the privileged population.”114 Thus, in Foucault’s reading, European systems of public health had, by the 1830s, become systems of government aimed at ensuring the political and physical health of the state, at times through the control of certain populations.
These trends converged in California with the creation of the State Board of Health, one of the first of its kind in the United States. Even with the creation of the American Public Health
Association in 1872 -- two years after the creation of the State Board of Health of California --
112 Foucault, “The Birth of Social Medicine,” pg. 146. 113 ibid, pp. 147-148. 114 ibid, pp. 152-153. 51 there was no considerable interest in public health regulation at the federal level until 1879, when congress formed a National Board of Health. Thus, in California throughout most of the 1870s, the State Board of Health was effectively the highest authority on matters of public health.
Ranking below the State Board were various local Boards of Health, which in San Francisco -- being the the important port city that it was, an entry point of not only goods but disease as well -
- was made up of four physicians appointed (as with the State Board) by the Governor, under the authority of the mayor who served ex officio as the President of the Board.115
Salubrity and Science
In California, as elsewhere in the United States, public health concerns were expressed in terms of “salubrity” -- in Foucault’s terms, the “state of things and of the environment as they affected health,” to be regulated by means of the “politico-scientific control” of institutions such as the State Board of Health.116 Such a concern with “the balance between man and his environment,” has been linked by Gregory Rosen to the Hippocratic text on Airs, Waters and
Places -- a text Rosen argues was the “basic epidemiological text and … theoretical underpinning” of epidemiology for over two thousand years, until the late nineteenth century,” though this concern over man’s relationship to his environment was, in San Francisco, discussed in terms of “airs” more than “waters and places.”117 Accordingly, public health reports and the writings of physicians in San Francisco during the 1870s express a great deal of concern over
“ventilation” as a primary means of protecting health.
Fears about ventilation stemmed from concerns over “miasmic” vapors and impure air, consistent with Prothero’s description of early sanitarians (see chapter two). Such concern is
115 “Laws of the State Relating to the Preservation of the Public Health and Medical Matters,” in First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871. Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 215-235, pg. 216-217. 116 Foucault, “The Birth of Social Medicine,” pg. 150-151. 117 Rosen, pg.9. 52 revealed in a California Medical Gazette report by Arthur B. Stout, a San Francisco physician whose writings were included in the first biennial report of the State Board of Health of
California, and who was appointed to the Board himself in 1873. Stout’s description of the dangers of sewage is worth quoting at length:
Imagine then this vast distillery of pestilence seething its vapors beneath your soil,
beneath your houses, beneath your beds, evolving them day and night without
intermission, intoxicating every breath you inspire with a fractional dose of poison. You
will begin now to comprehend why a sudden congestive chill has destroyed in an hour or
a day some young and beautiful woman, in the joy and bloom of life118
For Stout, as for others, the dangers of such filth as sewage were to be found in the odors of the substances. Indeed, as explained by the Secretary’s report in the first biennial report of the State
Board of Health, physicians believed that it was only through “a process of deodorization” that
“sewage will be rendered innocuous,” no longer a threat to the public health. Although Henry
Gibbons, Sr., the first President of the State Board of Health would claim by 1876 that physicians in California “give undue importance to those [morbific agents] which offend the senses, especially to repulsive odors,” a statement indicative of the trend towards “germ theory” and an interest in microbes which developed in the late 1870s and 1880s, the State Board devoted many pages of its first biennial reports to the question of ventilation.119 The dangers of
118 Stout, Arthur B. “Sewerage is the Mechanism by Which the Sewage of a City is Removed,” California Medical Gazette, October, 1863. Reprinted in Transactions of the Session of the Medical Society of the State of California, Sacramento: Russell & Winterburn, 1872, pp. 194-226. 119 Gibbons, Sr., Henry. “Report of the Committee on Practical Medicine,” Transactions of the the Medical Society of the State of California, Sacramento: Sacramento Leader Printing Office, 1876, pp. 29-39. The shift from “miasmic theory” to “germ theory” has been discussed not only by historians like Rosen, but also Nancy Tomes. See: Tomes, Nancy. Gospel of Germs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 53 poor ventilation were many, including intemperance and the delayed development or permanent impairment of children.120
Peculiar Habits
Chinese immigrants, most often described as living in poorly ventilated, subterraneous dens, were portrayed as predisposed to living in filth. Henry Gibbons wrote to his fellow
California physicians in 1872 that the “crowded, underground life which abounds in large cities elsewhere, is unknown in California … except among the Chinese, with whom it is the normal condition.”121 Along the same lines, State Board of Health secretary Thomas Logan described the conditions of Chinese quarters thus:
narrow and filthy lanes, low-built, miserably-ventilated houses, small and crowded
apartments, into some of which the light of day never enters; damp walls and floors, and
uncleanliness of personal habits … these are the general conditions and surroundings of
their miserable existence122
This attitude towards the Chinese persisted throughout the 1870s. In an appendix to the second biennial report of the State Board of Health of California, Arthur Stout, the San Francisco physician and later member of the State Board of Health, discussed the “peculiarities” of Chinese immigrants: “one of the most marked and dangerous of Chinese peculiarities,” he argued, “is the filth, the terrible filth, in which Ah' [generic name for a Chinese immigrant] is content to live, and which seems to follow him as naturally as does his pigtail, into whatever den he makes his
120 Logan, Henry. “Report of the Permanent Secretary,” in First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871. Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 4-5. 121 Gibbons, Sr., Henry. “Report of the Committee on Practical Medicine,” Transactions of the Session of the Medical Society of the State of California, Sacramento: Russell & Winterburn, 1872. pp. 227-248. 122 “Report on Chinese Immigration” in First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871 (Appendix). Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 54-77. pg. 55. 54 home.”123 Perhaps more publicly, the Reverend O.C. Wheeler complained in a speech given at the Metropolitan Temple in San Francisco in 1879, and again in a statement given at the State
Capitol in 1880, that the Chinese “herd together in such a manner, and indulge in such practices, as to pollute the whole atmosphere of their quarters, in the heart of the city.”124
To live in such miserable conditions was not generally considered an accident or simple misfortune. On the contrary, the state of Chinese lodgings was often viewed (somewhat paradoxically) as a conscious refusal to live in accordance both with the rules of civilization and the laws of nature. James Buell, a travel writer seeking to expose the “mysteries and miseries” of metropolitan life in America, described the habits of the Chinese in San Francisco as not unlike “hibernating rattle-snakes.” Such a description calls to mind Buell’s description of
California as a land once filled with the sound of “myriads of rattle-snakes” before being transformed into a “hive of industry” -- a vestige of a pre-modern landscape.125 At the same time that the Chinese were seen as uncivilized, not fully incorporated into a modern, industrial civilization, they were also portrayed as being unable or unwilling to utilize nature’s powerful, health-generating forces.
Climatology in California
The naturally therapeutic or health-promoting characteristics of California were of great interest and concern to those physicians that made up the State Board of Health. These characteristics were typically discussed in terms of climate, and climatic knowledge was used to assess the utility of certain areas for the pursuit of good health. For example, in 1871, the
123 Stout, Arthur B. “Sewerage,” in Second Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1871 - 1873. Sacramento, CA: T.A. Springer, State Printer, 1873. pp. 202-209. pg. 202. 124 Wheeler, Rev. O.C. The Chinese in America: A National Question; an Address Delivered in Metropolitan Temple, San Francisco, Dec. 21, 1879, and in the State Capitol at Sacramento, January 16 1880. Oakland, CA: Times Publishing Company, 1880. 125 Buell, James. Mysteries and Miseries of America’s Great Cities, Embracing New York, Washington City, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and New Orleans. St. Louis, MO: Historical Publishing Co., 1883. pg. 237, 270. 55
President of the State Board of Health called upon the members of the Board to “commence the investigation of the subject of the prevalence of consumption [tuberculosis] in our State, and to ascertain to what extent climate has to do with its fatality.” He continued:
Doubtless a great number, dying here, have brought the germs of the disease with them,
under the general opinion that a trip to California would prove beneficial, and without
considering that it was necessary to find out what modification of climate, caused by
locality, was best adapted to the particular stage and character of their disease.126
Treatment of disease in California thus relied not only on proper medical treatment, but on proper medical treatment in the proper location. Because the health-promoting climate was seen as one of California’s greatest features (and thus generators of revenue), the identification of the most salubrious locations and climates was of the utmost importance to the Board. The Board’s reports abound with tables, descriptions, and analysis of California’s various climates, aimed at generating a “comprehensive knowledge of the influence of various conditions upon the causes and rate of disease and mortality,” a body of knowledge which was referred to in the Board’s reports as “climatology.” Climatological surveys of each major city and region in the state were undertaken, bringing together topographical, meteorological, and geological data, including measurements of altitude, rainfall, temperature, humidity, and wind patterns.127 This data was then compared to other locations, both within California and around the world.128
The salubrious nature of San Francisco and its climate was considered by those officials appointed to the State Board of Health to be, above all, a result of the winds coming off of the
126 “Consumption and a Sanatorium,” in First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871. Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 43-44. 127 “Medical Topography and Climatology,” in First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871. Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 70-72. 128 “Temperatures of Various Locations” [table] in Second Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the years 1871 - 1873. Sacramento, CA: T.A. Springer, State Printer, 1873. pg. 106. 56
Pacific Ocean. As Henry Gibbons put it, the sea breeze was regarded as “more important than any other element of the ocean climate.” According to Gibbons, the ocean breeze not only
“invigorates the laborer and infuses strength in every person of active habits,” but also “sweeps away pestilential exhalations and preserves the purity of the atmosphere.”129 The Board’s first report also praised the weather for its positive effects on the health of San Francisco’s residents.
“The trade winds blow strongly and steadily,” it explained, “cold enough to chill invalids, but invigorating to the health and peculiarly favorable to mental and physical activity.”130 Arthur
Stout explained further:
San Francisco … has been recognized as a remarkably salubrious city by many medical
authorities. The equability of its climate, the warmth of its Winter, the coolness of its
Summer, the dryness of its atmosphere, the strength of its breezes, the abundance of its
ozone, the tonic influence of its atmosphere, the open air life and the pecuniary comfort
of its people, should make it exceptionally healthy131
Travel writer G. B. Densmore even praised the city’s natural ventilation for the protections it provided American citizens from such dangers as the Chinese. Densmore wrote in his narrative of life in Chinatown how the “carbonic acid and poisonous gases” expelled by the “exhalations of the withered inhabitants” of Chinese dwellings, were, “happily, dispensed by the fresh sea air before they have vitiated the lung-food of the entire city.”132 However, the health benefits thus bestowed on residents of San Francisco, for many Californians, were too great to be considered
129 Gibbons, Sr., Henry. “Remarks on the Climate of San Francisco and of California, with Special Relation to Pulmonary Disorders,” in Third Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the years 1874 and 1875. Sacramento: G.H. Springer, State Printer. 1875. pp. 235-242, pg. 236. 130 “Coast Climate,” in Second Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the years 1871 - 1873. Sacramento, CA: T.A. Springer, State Printer, 1873. pg. 73. 131 Stout, Arthur B. “Sewerage,” in Second Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1871 - 1873. Sacramento, CA: T.A. Springer, State Printer, 1873. pp. 202-209. pg. 204. 132 Densmore, G.B. The Chinese in California. Description of Chinese Life in San Francisco: Their Habits, Morals, and Manners. San Francisco: Pettit and Russ. 1880. pp. 29-30. 57 simply accidents of nature. Quite often, the salubrious climate was taken as a reflection of the divine will or evidence of the working of providence.
Climatology, Race, and Religion
Physicians and religious leaders alike spoke in terms of what might be called a religio- racial climatology, viewing the climatic conditions of the different continents as evidence for a divinely ordained racial hierarchy. As early as 1853, the Reverend William Speer addressed the
“Chinese question” by appealing to a religious understanding of the place of Euro-Americans in
California. “We live in a country established of God to be a fountain of blessings to all the kingdoms of the earth … The God of creation has granted us a new and boundless continent, of immeasurable capabilities,” he wrote. In Speer’s estimation, it was in this land of
“immeasurable capabilities” that the heights of Christian civilization might be attained.
Accordingly, Speer connected immorality and “heathenism” with climatic conditions, including
“seething swamps and scorching sands” found in the “hot and often pestilential strongholds of pride, hatred, vice, and superstition,”133 thus linking insalubrious climate, disease, and sin as common characteristics of “heathen” races (and their geographic origins) in a divinely ordained hierarchy.
Such a merger of climatic description and moral assessment can be found in the reports of the State Board of Health, as well. Arthur Stout’s assessment of the issue of Chinese immigration (and the looming threat of the “decay” of the nation), also found in the Board’s first biennial report, outlines a clear racial hierarchy of divine origins, reflected in climate and topography. Stout suggested that although “the Divine Will has imbued every race with excellent qualities,” there remained important “distinctions established in accordance with
133 Speer, William. China and California; the relations, past and present. A Lecture in Conclusion of a Series in Relation to the Chinese People. San Francisco: John O’Meara, printer. 1853. pg. 26. 58 topography, clime and physiological development,” clearly marking some races as superior, others as inferior, and all certainly distinct, “not created to be indifferently blended.” The seeming inability of the living quarters of Chinese immigrants to be helped by the natural
(perhaps divine) ventilation provided by San Francisco’s all-important ocean breeze, thus seemed to many to be further evidence Chinese immigrants’ low place in the divinely ordained hierarchy of race, civilization, and hygiene.
It is only in the context of this religio-racial climatology that the connection between
Chinese religion, or “heathenism,” and filth can be clearly understood. The various vices and immoral practices of Chinese immigrants, described as tendencies of the inhabitants of subterranean Chinese “dens,” coincident with -- if not resulting from -- poor ventilation and a general lack of hygiene, situate the Chinese outside the domains of proper hygiene or social conduct. In Chinese dens, it was argued, the “breathing of unpure air, and living in filth” predisposed the Chinese to all manner of vice and depravity, “by blunting the finer moral sensibilities of [human] nature.”134 Chinese immigrants also resided outside the community of the “chosen,” those benefitting from (harnessing, if necessary) the climatic conditions enjoyed by
Christian society. It should come as no surprise, then, that Chinese religious or “heathen” practices could likewise be connected with filth, as those practices which set the Chinese apart from the standards of Christian society.
As discussed in chapter one, to speak of Chinese religion in 1870s San Francisco was more often than not to speak of practices undertaken in temples known as “joss houses.”135 The
134 Logan, Thomas. “Report of the Permanent Secretary,” in First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871. Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 4-5. 135 “Joss,” or “josh” in this term is generally considered to be derived from the Portuguese word for God, “Deus.” Commonly cited on this point is Rick Fields (How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America. Boston: Shambala, 1981, pg. 73.) See also: Yang, Fenggang. “Religious Diversity Among the Chinese in 59 worship of the Chinese gods, or “heathen” idols, in such joss houses was a necessarily filthy practice. Descriptions of San Francisco’s joss houses in the popular press described scenes of
“dirty altars,” and “air heavy with incense,”136 found in buildings left “dark and gloomy from the lack of windows, while the smoke of candles and incense … add to the gloominess of the place.”137 For authors such as G.B. Densmore, who penned an exemplary “travel narrative” of his journey into Chinatown, described one joss house located in a hotel turned Chinese lodging house as the existing in the very “heart of this den of filth.”
Outside the context of the joss house, too, fears about Chinese practices were expressed in hygienic and atmospheric terms. As discussed in chapter two, non-Chinese San Francisco residents were disgusted by the Chinese practice of exhuming the bodies of the deceased, after having been buried for some time (generally a period of several years), and preparing the bones for a secondary burial at ancestral shrines in China.138 Seen as a matter of public health, San
Francisco residents and doctors took their complaints to the local Board of Health. At a meeting of the San Francisco Board of Health in 1884, Mayor Washington Bartlett appealed to claims that the stench of exhumed bodies in one cemetery could be smelled a quarter mile away as evidence that the continuation of the practice would “endanger the health of the people” of San
Francisco.139
America” in Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities, Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim, eds. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2002, pp. 71-98. pg. 79. 136 “In San Francisco,” Littell’s Living Age, March 18, 1871. (Online) American Periodicals Series. pg. 768. 137 “Our Heathen Temples,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, vol. 1, no. 5 (Nov. 1868). (Online) American Periodicals Series. pg. 453. 138 Rubie Watson describes this practice in Cantonese villages, in the same area from which Chinese immigrants in nineteenth century San Francisco arrived. See: Watson, Rubie S. “Graves and Politics in Southeastern China,” in Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. pp. 203-227. pg. 208. 139 “The Board of Health - The Wholesale Disinterment of Chinese Bodies - Ghastly Sights,” San Francisco Bulletin, vol. 1, issue 63 (December 19, 1884), pg. 1. (Online) America’s Historical Newspapers. 60
The fact that Chinese vice, immorality, and “heathen” religious practices were considered to be so closely connected with an ignorance of Euro-American standards of cleanliness and concerns about the public health reveals much about the nature of public health as a means of government. Public health officials did not serve merely to protect citizens from “pestilential vapors” and impure air, much less “germs” and microbial diseases. Rather, they sought to protect a civilized, Christian America from the “disease” of Chinese immigration. Records suggest that this aim was pursued not only through segregation and quarantine -- the casting of
Chinese immigrants as the diseased “other,” unfit for inclusion into the American body politic -- but in the elevation of Chinese immigrants out of the squalor of filth and immorality through the enforcement of public health laws. Ordinances and laws regulating the spaces of Chinese life were aimed at improving the physical conditions of Chinese life in order to create the necessary conditions for the development of healthy, moral citizens. The maintenance of a salubrious environment, it was hoped, would lead to the elimination of the immoral habits characteristic of and imported from less salubrious climates by the Chinese. The approach to the Chinese
“disease,” in other words, was as much one concerned with healing as it was with quarantine and segregation.140
Physicians and public health officials were quite explicit about the perceived role of public health education and regulation. Identifying the “general principles of action” guiding the Board following its creation, Permanent Secretary Thomas Logan outlined in the first pages of the first biennial report of the Board a concern for the “reciprocity of action … constantly taking place between the physical, moral and intellectual conditions of man.” Logan argued, in his report to the Governor on behalf of the Board, that, “although these conditions are not
140 On public health regulation as a means of segregation, see: Shah, Nyan. Contagious Divides. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. 61 capable of being explained demonstratively, still they may be so controlled by the aid of the powerful hand of the medical sciences, that the body, intellect and soul may be trained in a more perfect and well balanced order.”141 Public health, indeed, was aimed at a reform of both body and soul. Arthur Stout, in fact, praised Chinese immigration on the grounds that it would allow the opportunity to imbue the Chinese with “a desire to adopt the extended comforts of our social system, and a desire to adopt the extended comforts of our mode of living.” With the accomplishment of this goal, Stout believed, the Chinese would “return to their native homes, and diffuse, broad-spread, the instruction thus acquired.” The name Stout applied to this approach to the issue of Chinese immigration is telling: “This is practical Christianity,” he wrote,
“this is the means to protect the purity of our own race, and elevate the other to the highest degree of attainable civilization.”142 Logan concurred with Stout, arguing that Christianization of the Chinese was inextricably connected with the maintenance of public health. Logan argued that Californians ought to “look to education, and the cultivation of liberal Christian sentiments, as the only true and successful method of promoting human ennoblement, and thus of securing
… physical and moral health.”143 For Logan and Stout to hold such opinions privately would certainly be considered interesting, but it is the inclusion of both arguments in the official report of the State Board of Health that is significant for the present argument.
Of particular interest are the circumstances through which Stout’s writing came to be included in the Board’s 1871 report. The article, included in the appendix to the report under the title “Report on Chinese Immigration,” was earlier published by Stout in 1862 under a different
141 Logan, Thomas. “General Report of the Board,” in First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871. Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 1-11, pg. 1-2. 142 “Report on Chinese Immigration” in First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871 (Appendix). Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 54-77. pg. 64. 143 “The Chinese and the ‘Social Evil’ Question,” First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871. Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 44-48. 62 title: “Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of a Nation.”144
Secretary Logan wrote to Stout in March, 1871, requesting permission for the inclusion of
Stout’s writing in the Board’s first report:
I am endeavoring to enlist the aid of the medical men disseminated throughout the
State—who are the proper censors of the public health—in the cause of sanitary science
and the promulgation of hygiene. Occupying, as they do, to use your own language, a
high and influential position, their counsels and their teachings are all-powerful in
contributing to improve the health, the strength, the vigor, both physical and intellectual,
of the people. It is with this understanding I propose to invoke your services, for the good
of the State, in the discussion of the momentous question before us.145
The question referred to by Logan was one of great interest to Californians in the 1870s -- the
“Chinese question.” The “Chinese question” was not, however, simply an immigration question, or a labor question – it was, for Logan, a question of health. In the wake of the “flowery sentimentalism” of the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, Logan viewed the role of California’s
“medical men” as one concerned with the protection of the nation.
Requesting permission for the use of Stout’s writing, Logan acknowledged that the circumstances of Chinese immigration were not necessarily what they had been in 1862, when
Stout’s work was initially published. “There are new agencies springing into existence, and changes occurring 'in the civil status of the Mongolian, which may prompt you to reconsider what you have already advanced, and qualify your inferences,” he wrote.146 Stout allowed for the republication of his work, and his early writing was reproduced verbatim, with one important
144 Stout, Arthur B. Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of a Nation. San Francisco: Agnew and Deffebach, 1862. 145 “Report on Chinese Immigration,” First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871. Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 54-77. Pg. 54. 146 ibid 63 exception. At the end of the “Report on Chinese Immigration,” Stout included an addendum, reconsidering and qualifying his earlier conclusions. By 1871, Stout’s political ideas had shifted, favoring immigration and inclusion (by way of Christianization) over exclusion. While remaining firm in his opposition to the mixing of races (the cause, in his view, of the physiological decay of nations), Stout was no longer the staunch opponent to Chinese immigration he had once been. Such oppression, Stout argued, was not a mark of civilization:
It is not, then, by scorn and oppression—repeating the old persecutions of theocracies,
from which the world is now seeking its emancipation—that these people can be
regenerated, and become utilitarian co-agents in the progress of civilization by reason.147
An alternative to such oppression was found in the promotion of Christianity. “The exhibition of our own Christianity, in extending to them the right hand of fellowship, is not only our duty, but their right,” he argued.148 This “exhibition” of Christianity was to be accomplished, of course, would be accomplished through the sort of “practical Christianity” earlier described by Stout.
Emancipation from the “old persecutions of theocracies,” it seems, was sought not in freedom from theocracy, but in the right kind of theocracy; in an inclusive theocracy. Whether or not this was the sort of writing Logan had hoped for when he sought approval for the inclusion of Stout’s
1862 work, the fact that it was ultimately included in the report to which each of the Board members signed their names (not to mention his appointment just two years later to the State
Board of Health) suggests that Stout’s later view of the role of public health in relation to immigration and evangelization was seen as legitimate and authoritative by the state’s highest authorities in matters of public health.
147 “Report on Chinese Immigration,” First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871. Sacramento, CA: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1871. pp. 54-77. Pg. 76. 148 ibid 64
While not intended here to reduce the work of the State Board of Health of California to covert evangelism, the words of Stout and Logan are inescapable. The public health with which the State Board was concerned was not, in the 1870s, simply addressed in terms of physiology and epidemiology. For Board physicians in San Francisco during the 1870s, moral health, clearly understood in terms of a hierarchy in which Christianity stood as the pinnacle of moral achievement, was inseparable from physical health. Moral and physical health were -- together -
- the object of government regulation under the authority of the Board of Health. Thus, charged with the maintenance of the public health, physical as well as moral, officials of the Board of
Health sought to guard the United States, a bastion of Christian civilization, from the Chinese
“leprosy of sin.”
65
CONCLUSION
The political landscape of San Francisco saw marked change in September, 1879, the month before Wong Yung Quy was arrested. Candidates from the Workingmen’s Party of
California (WPC) won dozens of races in that month’s general election, one of which was the office of the Mayor of San Francisco. Isaac Kalloch, an Irish immigrant and Baptist minister, won the race while bedridden, having been shot by San Francisco Chronicle editor and member of the opposition Charles DeYoung.149 Winning the Mayor’s office, the WPC gained authority over the San Francisco Board of Health -- authority it was prepared to use in the pursuance of its anti-Chinese agenda.
Early the following year, while Wong Yung Quy awaited a decision of the court in response to his writ of habeas corpus, the San Francisco Board of Health, with Kalloch serving ex officio as President, addressed the “Chinese question” in bold fashion. On February 21, they voted in favor of a resolution condemning the area known as “Chinatown” as a nuisance and threat to the public health:
Whereas, we have in the centre of this city an alien population … with laws, customs,
courts and institutions of their own, utterly at variance with and dangerous to the health,
morals, and prosperity of our city, and threatening, unless efficient measures are
enforced, to destroy the value of our property, imperil the health of our citizens, and
make San Francisco an Asiatic instead of an American city150
The Board of Health called on the Board of Supervisors to enforce their ruling, which would have virtually eliminated San Francisco’s Chinatown and seen the resident Chinese relocated
149 Shah, Contagious Divides, pg. 33; Paddison, American Heathens, pg. 127. 150 “Chinatown Condemned: the Chinese Quarters Declared a Public Nuisance,” San Francisco Bulletin, February 21, 1880. vol. xlix, iss. 116, pg. 3. AHN 66 outside the city. Although the Board of Supervisors initially expressed support, that support was quickly withdrawn. The refusal of the Board of Supervisors to dismantle the condemned structures and remove its residents to somewhere outside the city center -- more likely due to the fact that, as Nyan Shah has pointed out, “many of the board’s constituents among the elite commercial establishment feared that property they leased to the Chinese would be destroyed and they would lose their tenants” than to Chinese Vice Consul Frederick Bee’s protests that “the report made to the Board of Health states what are not facts, and that the places described in it really have no existence whatever except in the report” -- ultimately rendered the Board of
Health’s declaration little more than symbolic.151
Even though it was never enforced, Kalloch and others in the WPC leadership may have benefitted from the Board of Health’s bold, unprecedented move. Speaking to a crowd of unemployed Workingmen (the very party members who had helped the WPC in the general election only months before), Mayor Kalloch insisted that he was doing all in his power to rid the city of the Chinese menace. He stated, “I believe that the Board of Health will, within a week, declare Chinatown a nuisance, and you all know what that means. If Chinatown is declared a nuisance, it must be removed. I think the time has now come for action.”152 Stalling and failure to act following the Board’s declaration was, then, the fault of the Republican Board of
Supervisors. Yet, despite the WPC’s call, made famous by Dennis Kearney, that the “Chinese
Must Go!,” members of the Board of Health insisted that they were not motivated by racial
151 Shah, Contagious Divides, pg. 37.; “Chinatown Condemned: Proclamation of the Health Officer - What the Chinese Vice-Consul Says,” San Francisco Bulletin, February 24, 1880. vol. xlix, iss. 118, pg. 1. AHN.; Shah notes as well that “no legal or extralegal action on the Board of Health’s condemnation of Chinatown ever occurred.” 152 “Unemployed Workingmen: Mayor Kalloch and Others Talk to Them on the Sandlot,” San Francisco Bulletin, February 10, 1880. vol. xlix, iss. 106, pg. 1. AHN. 67 hatred: “We utterly repudiate the idea of being moved by any race prejudice or class hatred in this matter,” they argued.153
In some sense, then, the politics of health in San Francisco had come to be dominated, by
1880, by a politics of exclusion.154 Yet, public health as a bio-political approach of inclusion through education and regulation did not disappear entirely. The Board of Health argued, in fact that it would “be a mercy to the Chinese themselves as well as to our people to compel them to live in healthier conditions.” “The fault is in conditions, and the conditions are under our control,” they reasoned.155 The Board’s idea of “compelling” the Chinese to live in healthier conditions, thereby correcting not only physical health but moral health as well (what San
Francisco physician and State Board of Health member Arthur Stout called “practical
Christianity”), was a task to be pursued outside the city limits. The Board was clear on this point:
The Chinese cancer must be eaten out of the heart of our city, root and branch, if we have
any regard for its future sanitary welfare … with all the vacant and healthy territory
around this city it is a shame that the very centre be surrendered and abandoned to this
health defying and law defying population.156
However, due to the lack of support of the Board of Supervisors and inadequate resources (i.e., a lack of space in local and county jails for Chinese residents found to be in violation of sanitary laws), it was at the center of the city that Chinatown remained.
153 “Chinatown Condemned: the Chinese Quarters Declared a Public Nuisance,” San Francisco Bulletin, February 21, 1880. vol. xlix, iss. 116, pg. 3. AHN. 154 As suggested by in Shah, Contagious Divides, pg. 155 “Chinatown Condemned: the Chinese Quarters Declared a Public Nuisance,” San Francisco Bulletin, February 21, 1880. vol. xlix, iss. 116, pg. 3. AHN. 156 ibid 68
In a twist of irony, the San Francisco Board of Health’s continued surveillance of the
Chinese quarter succeeded in cementing the status of the twelve square block area in which the
Chinese resided as “Chinatown” rather than erasing it from the map. As Nyan Shah has pointed out, by 1885 public health officials had produced a map of Chinatown, providing a visual representation of the physical space of Chinatown while cataloguing the “vice, lawlessness, and disease,” from which the rest of the city was protected by means of “normative regulatory apparatus” of the Board of Public Health.157 The production of this systematized discourse of public health, Shah argues, can be seen as a means of “production of Chinese difference and white norms” which “gave racial boundaries to social space and geography.”158
It has been the aim of this thesis to suggest, however, that it was not only the “social space and geography” of Chinatown that was constructed and organized through a discourse of public health, nor were the boundaries drawn and defended simply racial boundaries. Rather, the boundaries defined were those of a nation; the lines drawn marked not simply racial identity but religious affiliation. The regulation justified by the many pages of (religio-racial) climatological data published by the State Board of Health of California was thus not simply concerned with the protection of human bodies from Chinese contagion and miasma, but rather the protection of the souls of a Christian nation from a far more dangerous sickness, at once physical and moral: the sickness of “heathen” sin.
157 Shah, Contagious Divides, pp. 37-40. 158 ibid, pp. 10-11. 69
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Zachary Johnson received B.A. in Arts and Humanities, as well as a B.A. in religious studies from Michigan State University in 2011. He will receive an M.A. in American religious history from Florida State University in May, 2013. In the fall of 2013, he will begin teaching elementary school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as 2013 Teach For America corps member.
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