The Race Card. Tara Fickle
profession.8 As one witness before the joint congressional committee remarked, “California was originally settled by gamblers, and this early passion has continued to the present day, till we may almost say today that our population is composed of gamblers!”9 Why, then, given gambling’s widespread cross-racial popularity, was it yet, as Stewart Culin noted in 1891, “often looked upon as one of the distinctive traits of the Chinese, and as such is almost invariably commented upon when any reference is made to them in casual speech”?10 Why, too, given gambling’s legitimization as a productive occupation in California and other frontier communities, would the practice be seized on by white exclusionists in these same communities as definitive evidence of the Chinese’s dangerously immoral influence on American youth?
The answers to these questions lie in pejorative shifts in American attitudes toward gambling and toward Chinese immigrants between the 1850s and the 1880s. During this period, as Ann Fabian notes, “the moral values of a world based on production and productive labor gave way before the miraculous fertility of speculative capitalism.”11 Even the San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, arguably the most virulent anti-Chinese publication of the day, saw Chinese gambling as part of a broader social ill stemming from such shifts in economic and social relations. In 1879, the Wasp published a fictionalized letter from a Chinese American laborer to his love back in China. “Ah Fong,” as he was called, was introduced in the paper not simply as “a Love-Lorn Chinaman” but “an Observant Critic” on American social dynamics. Having recently bribed his way out of jail on charges of gambling, he reflected on the injustice of both the charge and his release: “in this country,” he tells his beloved, “I smack justice on each eye with a piece of gold and she becomes blind.” But while he surmises that “in this country I shall always be the debtor and never the creditor,” he yet notes that the very notion of gambling’s criminalization is equally bankrupt:
Why the sages and wise men have declared gaming to be, socially, an evil I am at a loss to know. Life, everywhere, and in this country, perhaps, more than any other, is a risk, a gamble, a chance.… What is called business is but a game of chance. The merchant sends off his ship full of merchandise to where he thinks there will be a good market; if there is not a good market, he loses; if there is a good market, he wins. What is that? The stock speculator buys his securities in the hope of a rise; upon exactly the same principle that the gambler backs a horse in the hope that he will win the race. Where is the difference? Even the very solons who have pronounced against gambling hold their own positions as the result of a successful game of chance—an election.12
As this unexpectedly sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese American dilemma suggests, the perceived linkage between the age’s “most reviled vice” and the age’s most reviled immigrant group was reflective not merely of regional racial anxieties about Asian Americans in particular, but of national anxieties about broader sea changes in material and ideological economies of the period. Gambling was, until well into the century, understood less as a moral failing than an economic boon: lotteries were regularly used to fund state and city projects. It was not until the 1870s—when even California followed other states in criminalizing house games—that it acquired a uniquely vilified status on economic grounds as a parasitic scourge, embodied by the growing numbers of late-century stock and commodities traders who “brought nothing to market and … offered no real exchange for the profits they made.”13
So, too, with early Chinese immigrants, who in the mid-1800s were, if not celebrated, at least tolerated in mining camps and in the United States as a whole—in part for their tax contributions during economic depression.14 It was also not until the 1870s that exclusion grew from a concern of the Western states—which, due to frontier industries like gold mining, had the highest concentration of Chinese immigrants—to a galvanizing issue nationwide.15 Now, their “heathenness,” association with vices like gambling, opium, and prostitution, and “cheap” labor were all marshaled by exclusion proponents as evidence of Chinese immigrants’ unassimilability and their unfitness to be (and to compete with) American citizens. Like stock traders, Chinese workers were then framed as economic parasites, undercutting American laborers’ efforts to secure fair pay and funneling the profits of American industry back to China rather than reinvesting them in the national economy. In short, exclusionists framed Chinese Americans as the embodiment of the moral as well as economic ills of gambling.
Historians of nineteenth-century U.S. culture have identified gambling and games of chance as central sites through which these tensions—and hence U.S. identity—were articulated throughout the second half of the century. Jackson Lears, for example, has suggested that gambling debates revealed the “fundamental fault lines in American character,” counterposing two distinct yet equally influential narratives and images through which the United States had historically defined itself. The first account
puts the big gamble at the center of American life: from the earliest English settlements at Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay, risky ventures in real estate (and other less palpable commodities) power the progress of a fluid, mobile democracy. The speculative confidence man is the hero of this tale—the man (almost always he is male) with his eye on the Main Chance rather than the Moral Imperative. The other narrative exalts a different sort of hero—a disciplined self-made man, whose success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.16
Given that the very decades in which these struggles over the meaning of gambling were being waged were the same in which the status of Chinese immigrants was most hotly contested, it is striking to note the almost total absence of scholarly consideration given to that group—as either workers or gamblers—in historical accounts. While one frequently finds an entire chapter devoted to African American gaming in studies of nineteenth-century gaming, there are rarely sufficient mentions of Asian Americans to warrant even an index entry.17 Such an omission not only gives the false impression that Asian American gambling was irrelevant or historically minor during these years, but reinforces the tendency to understand gambling, and American race relations more broadly, as an exclusively black-and-white affair.
Work Cheap, Play Cheap
The difference between us and other pioneers, we did not come here for the gold streets. We came to play. And we’ll play again. Yes, John Chinaman means to enjoy himself all the while.
—Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey
The competition over the meaning of gambling as legitimate occupation or criminal enterprise was no more a purely moral debate divorced from economic realities than was the criminalization of Chinese labor immigration purely an economic debate in which gambling served merely as sensationalist fodder. Although gambling was certainly used as ammunition in arguments about Chinese immorality, ultimately its most efficacious role was as a rhetorical vehicle used to influence debates specifically over Chinese labor practices. As one witness noted in his testimony before Congress, “To object to Chinamen because they ‘labor too well’ or because they are ‘cheap, reliable, and industrious laborers’ is void of reason or humanity.… The Chinamen are the first people treated as criminal or objected to because they were ‘reliable, industrious, or economical. With all other people those qualities are considered virtues.’”18 Gambling, as we will see, provided the crucial vehicle that allowed such arguments to transcend “reason or humanity” and successfully rewrite Chinese labor from economic virtue to racial vice.
Although games are popularly understood to be the antithesis to labor, in fact, as Ann Fabian and others have compellingly demonstrated, games of chance were sites through which the ideological and economic tension between contrasting labor systems was materially and rhetorically reconciled in nineteenth-century national culture. The ludic theories of Huizinga and Caillois, discussed at length in chapter 4, defined games as “magic circles” isolated from economic reality. As Michael Oriard observes, however, gaming is more accurately seen as existing along a continuum of work and play, marking “the meeting of ‘play’ and ‘work’ in the social world. A game is paradoxically a workful expression of the play spirit,” or, conversely, “a playful kind of work.”19
And as the nature of work fundamentally changed with the onset of industrialization in nineteenth-century America,