Taking a stand
The Exclusion Act demonized Chinese laborers. Wong Chin Foo made a stand in Chicago against the hatred.
In 1896, a Chinese activist hoped a carrot-and-stick strategy would persuade the Democratic Party to reject America’s rampant anti-Chinese prejudice. If Democrats allowed him to address their Chicago convention, that would put the party on the right side of history, he argued.
“Thirty years ago the people would call a man crazy who would (have) dared to have said that a negro would ever become a member of Congress,” Wong Chin Foo told party officials. “If they do not allow me to speak in this convention I will have a convention of my own, hire a hall and rally the humanitarians around me and make a new platform.”
Democrats called his bluff, so Wong held a meeting at Columbia Theater at Monroe and Dearborn streets to form the American Liberty Party. He “spoke of the slander, the ridicule and persecution which the Chinamen had stood without demure,” the Tribune reported.
One man responded to Wong: “The trouble with the world is cheap men,” a reference to immigrant laborers. The audience booed the man, but that’s what Wong was up against.
The cry that cheap Chinese labor was taking jobs away from Americans and contributing to economic ills produced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law prohibited additional Chinese immigrants from entering the United States, and threatened with expulsion those already here.
Wong campaigned to have the Exclusion Act repealed, but he made enemies among Chinese Americans.
“Mr. Wong had stated that the Chinese residents of Chicago had offered (a hit man) $1,000 to kill him,” the Tribune wrote. When a reporter attempted to talk with Chinese residents about Wong being marked for death, his name was met with “an expression of disgust in each case.”
The hostility Wong aroused partly stemmed from how he and white supremacists overlapped in their thinking.
The Exclusion Act rested on the claim that the Chinese resisted assimilating into American society, making Chinatown home to a defiantly foreign culture. Wong agreed with that point. He criticized Chinese immigrants for not embracing assimilation wholeheartedly; he extolled it as essential for peace and progress.
“The great trouble with the Chinese in this country is that they do not enter into the spirit of Americanism,” he told Democratic Party convention planners. “We have a great many, however, who love this country.”
While he preached the gospel of assimilation, Wong didn’t shy away from confronting America for not following through on its ideals. He established the Chinese Equal Rights League in part to protest the Geary Act, which forced Chinese immigrants to register and carry proof of legal entry into the U.S.
The Tribune in 1897 published a mission statement of sorts: “America was for over 100 years the only spot on God’s earth where the poor and oppressed of all races found an asylum, a home, and a country, where they might not only live in peace and joy but be truly proud of,” the president of Wong’s organization wrote. “We do not believe that the American people at large desire to create a caste in this republic by making their fellow men cringe and crawl before them.”
Wong was born in China but ultimately raised by a Christian missionary who baptized him, tutored him in English and sent him to America. He was supposed to train to help spread Christianity, then return and preach to the Chinese. But he was bewildered by Christianity’s competing sects, as he explained in the essay “Why Am I a Heathen?”
“On one point this mass of Protestant dissension cordially agreed and that was a united hatred of Catholicism,” he wrote. “And Catholicism returned with interest this animosity.”
While he preached the gospel of assimilation, Wong didn’t shy away from confronting America for not following through on its ideals.
Reverting to Confucianism, he went on the lecture circuit, earning barely enough to support his publishing of Chinese newspapers. Otherwise indifferent to money, he would sleep wherever a free room was available and kept his possessions in a trunk in the back of a restaurant.
He founded a Chinese newspaper in New York and, when it folded, reestablished it in Chicago, where he also founded a Confucian temple. He moonlighted as a translator when a Chinese American was arrested.
His growing political recognition brought him additional speaking engagements even as it enraged the elders of the Chinese community in Chicago. The leaders of fraternal associations known as tongs imported Chinese laborers and prostitutes. Wong advocated plural marriage, or polygamy, as one way of keeping men from vice — which threatened the tongs’ income. And the help he gave Chicago’s justice system by translating undermined the tongs’ position as arbiters of disputes in Chinatown.
In 1897, the conflict between a reform-minded Wong and the tradition-bound tongs wound up in a Chicago courtroom. Sam Moy, the leader of those who opposed Wong, directed an informer to tip off police to gambling in the backroom of a junk shop on South Clark Street, a meeting place for Wong’s supporters and a business competitor to Moy.
“Practically the whole ‘League of Americanized Chinese’ was engaged in the social game of ‘fan-tan’ and 43 of its charter members were hustled off in patrol wagons to the Harrison Street Station,” the Tribune reported. When the case was heard, Wong came to court to defend his followers. He was arrested and charged with “being the keeper of a gambling resort.”
Acting as his own attorney, Wong told the court: “I have given up my whole life for the good of my fellow-men. I have endeavored to teach them the honorable things in American civilization, but I have never taught them the mean tricks of detectives.”
Courtroom spectators burst into applause. But bail bonds and court costs cut deeply into the funds for a Chinese New Year’s banquet marking the kickoff of the League of Americanized Chinese, a campaign seeking citizenship for Chinese immigrants.
Wong also tangled with racist labor leader Denis Kearney. Based in San Francisco, Kearney traveled the country whipping workers into a hateful frenzy over Chinese laborers. In each speech, he issued the war cry: “The Chinese must go!”
On a Chicago street, Wong was harangued by a Kearney disciple. He argued back, the Tribune reported, “for which he was rewarded with a swollen eye.” When Kearney came to New York for a speech, Wong challenged him to a duel, telling a reporter: “I would give him his choice of chop-sticks, Irish potatoes, or Krupp guns.”
The potato reference was a slur on Kearney’s Irish ancestry. Wong was no less averse to hitting below the belt than Kearney, who refused to duel.
By 1898, the fight had gone out of Wong. He was discouraged by his movement’s lack of success and several business failures. Then he got a letter in Chicago from his son in China saying his wife was sick.
Finally he decided to return to a family he hadn’t seen in 25 years — likely due to a lack of money to visit his loved ones or bring them to America.
In Hong Kong, the American consul-general confiscated and canceled his U.S. passport. It might have protected him from Chinese authorities aware of his revolutionary activities in his motherland and America.
Even though Wong became seriously ill, he decided to push on from Hong Kong to reunite with his family. But their celebration was cut short by the discovery that Chinese officials were on his trail.
He fled to a district under British control, China then being divided up by the European powers. There Wong died in September 1898.
The Exclusion Act he devoted his life to fighting wasn’t repealed until 1943 during World War II. At that point, China was our ally and Japan the enemy, so it was Japanese Americans who were deemed pariahs and confined behind barbed wire.