Police in the early days delivered sex slaves to Chinatown brothels
The previous Portals described how sex slavery was widely practiced in 19th century Chinatown. Starting in 1852, secretive associations called tongs began kidnapping or buying young girls and women from China and forcing them to work in Chinatown brothels.
This abhorrent trade not only condemned most of the enslaved women to a miserable life and early death, but it was the leading factor behind the tong wars that racked Chinatown for decades. City officials realized early on that sex slavery was being practiced in the heart of the city, but made only halting and ineffective efforts to stop it.
Street scene in Chinatown during the early days of San Francisco when prostitution was an institution and the police did not discourage it.
San Francisco had a notoriously lax attitude toward vice of all kinds, especially in the early days of the Gold Rush when most of the women in the instant city were prostitutes. After “decent” women began arriving and complaining about public prostitution, vice was driven from the main streets and into alleys.
In 1859, Police Chief Martin Burke boasted that many prostitutes “have been removed from Clay, Washington, Stockton, California, Bush, and other streets, where families reside.” But there was no effort to actually end prostitution.
As historian and former San Francisco police Officer Kevin Mullen points out in “Chinatown Squad: Policing the Dragon from the Gold Rush to the 21st Century,” the city’s attitude reflected the “Victorian compromise,” which countenanced a certain amount of vice as long as it was kept away from family life.
But civic leaders soon began to realize that Chinese prostitution was what Mullen calls “a matter apart.” This was partly because of the sheer number of women involved: In 1859, Burke reported that there were 520 Chinese prostitutes in the city and 631 women of other races, a wildly disproportionate number for the number of Chinese residents of the city. But it was also recognized that unlike other prostitutes, many of whom were independent agents, Chinese prostitutes were essentially slaves.
Burke began to crack down on Chinese prostitution. In 1864, with the support of the Six Companies, a powerful association of Chinatown leaders, he directed police Capt. William Douglas to seize 19 slave girls and ship them back to China. The following year, Burke asked the Board of Health to come up with a plan to remove Chinese prostitutes from Jackson and Dupont streets — the latter now Grant Avenue — and move them to where they would not “offend public decency.”
He also asked property owners to place barriers at the entrances to the alleys to “hide the vice and degradations of those localities from the view of women and children who patronize the streetcars, and of the multitudes who daily pass through our public thoroughfares.”
But official commitment to ending Chinese prostitution, or even removing it from sight, proved half-hearted.
The city took a handsoff attitude toward Chinatown, a passivity encouraged by the failure of the Six Companies and other community notables to do anything about sex slavery. When Mayor John Geary condemned Chinese prostitution, one of the presidents of the Six Companies chided him, saying, “Yes, yes, Chinese prostitution is bad. But what do you think of German prostitution, French prostitution, American prostitution? Do you think them very good?”
It was, of course, a false argument, since white prostitutes were not slaves, but it was effective. White racism toward Chinese was partly responsible for the official tolerance: No one would have allowed white women to be treated like this.
But payoffs and greed played a role, too. City attempts to close down the brothels were resisted by the white owners of the properties, who were making big profits. And when Chief Burke tried arresting the prostitutes, the Board of Supervisors intervened and gave control of prostitution to a panel of doctors. In 1867, Burke was replaced as chief by Patrick Crowley, whose laxer attitudes toward vice were more in tune with city sensibilities.
The city’s attitude toward Chinese prostitution was dramatically revealed on Feb. 23, 1869, when a Pacific Mail steamer arrived with 369 Chinese women aboard. Crowley sent police Capt. Douglas — the same officer who had deported Chinese slave girls five years earlier — with 18 officers and additional special officers to meet the women at the Brannan Street docks.
After searching the women for contraband, the Examiner reported, the officers placed them in wagons and escorted them up Second Street to Chinatown, where they were delivered to “the destination fixed by the (Six) Companies.”
A similar scene played out eight months later, when a steamer with 246 Chinese women arrived. Douglas again escorted them to a barracoon on St. Louis Alley in Chinatown, where they were distributed to the companies that had ordered them.
The Examiner viewed these goings-on with suspicion. The paper pointed out that whenever a steamer arrived from China, “there is a certain Captain of the Police always in attendance” who made sure the human cargo was delivered to its destination. The newspaper called for an investigation.
The Examiner’s rival, The Chronicle, was solidly in the camp of the police — and, by extension, of official San Francisco, which had washed its hands of the blatant human trafficking. Mocking the Examiner for implying that something was amiss in a police captain escorting a load of sex slaves to their owners, The Chronicle editorialized, “We shall unite with Captain Douglas in deliberately and boldly protesting against any such investigation as that called for by our termagant contemporary.”
Although these disgraceful episodes were the nadir of open official connivance with the tongs, payoffs and an “it’s Chinatown” attitude allowed sex slavery to continue for decades. The victims of the trade seemed doomed to their fate.
Then a guardian angel appeared, in the form of an indomitable young Protestant missionary named Donaldina Cameron. Her long struggle to save the sex slaves of Chinatown will be the subject of the next Portals.