The Race Card. Tara Fickle
self-expression—took on the responsibility for the measure of a meaningful life.20 Scholars like William Gleason have argued that this shift was catalyzed by declining faith in the Protestant work ethic. As factory labor “bankrupted” the Protestant work ethic, Americans increasingly turned to nonwork forms for the sense of fulfillment once ostensibly provided by the “gospel of work.”21 Many nineteenth-century play theorists accordingly sought to make work more meaningful by making it more “joyful” or by encouraging fitness and exercise as a form of “productive” leisure. The result, beginning in the late nineteenth-century and culminating in the years following World War II, was a rise in the cultural significance of play that labor sociologists in the postwar period would call a “leisure ethic.” Mills and others, however, rued the fact that “now work itself is judged in terms of leisure values. The sphere of leisure provides the standards by which work is judged; it lends to work such meanings as work has.… It becomes the center of character-forming influences, of identification models: it is what one man has in common with another; it is a continuous interest.”22
This tension between work and play crystallized in debates over Chinese exclusion. Games of chance provided both language and logic for nineteenth-century Americans to articulate the benefits and costs of ostensibly “free” competition and Chinese “cheap” labor—a phrase popularized, although not invented, by Bret Harte’s infamous 1870 poem “The Heathen Chinee.” “Cheapness” here had a double meaning. In a literal sense, it referred to the fact that Chinese immigrants tended to be willing to work for lower wages than their American counterparts. While immigrant populations in general, including those hailing from eastern Europe, were a primary source of “cheap labor,” Chinese cheap labor in particular was seen as threatening because of its perceived “unfree,” indentured, “coolie” status. Although in truth only a fraction of Chinese immigrant laborers were coolies, exclusionists painted all Chinese workers as essentially slave labor, whose ability to survive on starvation wages, thrive in the most deplorable living conditions, and be satiated by the meagerest of rations threatened to reduce all Americans to an equally “degraded” condition.23 According to such commentators, the deck was stacked against the “honest” white workingman: if given free competition, they complained, “John Chinaman” would win every time.24 For their part, proponents of Chinese immigration—including Harte himself, as we shall see—defined justice in ludo-Orientalist terms, framing exclusionists as poor sports hiding behind the excuse of racial prejudice. Chinese immigrants’ improbable success, in this view, was the most compelling evidence of all that the game was fair.
While opponents to exclusion praised Chinese cheap labor as a testament to the colorblind justice of supply and demand, exclusionists put the language of gambling to equally dubious ludo-Orientalist use to contest such celebratory narratives, suggesting that the never-ending “hordes” of Chinese laborers arriving (and lingering) on American shores was the result not of economic rationality but its opposite. In one “expert” witness testimony or anti-Chinese op-ed after another, white tailors, miners, and merchants testified to the “well-known” fact that in China, both women and men were regularly forced to immigrate as prostitutes or coolies as a result of “runners” coercing them into accruing significant gambling debts, for which the victims were forced to sign an extended labor contract.25 Gambling, in this version of the story, was not merely a problematic by-product of Chinese immigration, but a driving factor in that immigration’s continuation; some “experts” even claimed that stopping gambling would effectively end immigration from the supply side.
Ann Fabian wryly notes that “just as gambling enabled some of small means to speculate in financial matters, debates about gambling enabled some, who might otherwise have hesitated to address economic issues, to speculate on financial matters.”26 While this was certainly the case for some of the above self-declared authorities, more remarkable was that such speculation was not limited to sham experts. George Duffield, a policeman and Chinese “special”27 who was one of the few non-Chinese with extensive insider knowledge of the workings of Chinatown gambling (such houses were usually not open to whites), spoke at length on everything from the rules of fan tan to the average Chinese laborer’s cost of living—a major point used by anti-Chinese elements to emphasize their driving down cost of fair wages:
CHAIRMAN: What is the general result with Chinamen who work [for those wages]? Do they lay up money? Do they accumulate?
DUFFIELD: Hardly. You may find a few in the washing business here who may accumulate a little money, but gambling is such an inveterate passion with them that it nearly all goes that way. Very rarely will you find any of them who can raise any considerable amount of money …
BROOKS: Then the laboring class, according to your idea, do not send much money out of the country.
DUFFIELD: I do not think they do.28
The matter-of-factness of his answers conceals the radicalness of their content. Duffield’s statements bluntly, and seemingly unintentionally, upend the reigning historical understanding of anti-Chinese sentiment—as motivated largely by the “parasitic” nature of Chinese sojourners whose wages were whisked away back to China—that has defined our current understanding of the “yellow peril” and its relation to the model minority. Duffield’s comments, in short, undercut one of the most entrenched assumptions about nineteenth-century Chinese labor and immigration. Here, Chinese American gamblers are cast not as inscrutable, scheming parasites but as victims of their own violent passions and, further, as the hosts for unscrupulous intra-ethnic parasites who bleed them of their money. Stewart Culin, whose 1891 book The Gambling Games of the Chinese in America reveals both significant research knowledge and sympathy for Chinese immigrants and the “vulgar prejudice” leveled against them, underscored Duffield’s claims in observing that significant gambling losses were regularly incurred by Chinese laborers, most of whom, “from their youth and lack of money, if for no other reason, were quite unaccustomed to hazard their earnings in the manner that is almost universal among the Chinese in the United States effectively.”29 Becoming easy marks for the gambling house proprietors—who, in Culin’s account, were the only ones who “reap the benefit” of Chinese labor and, as true sojourners, “return with competencies to China”—these poor saps were “compelled to stay on far beyond the time they would otherwise remain in this country,” thus lending “permanency to their settlements.”30
The Chinese American exclusion debates showcase the capaciousness and flexibility of a ludo-Orientalist rhetoric that is capable of at once buttressing and critiquing competing arguments. As gambling could be used to explode the sojourner myth, so it was also used by other “experts” to counter the foundational myth that the majority of immigrants were coolies: thus, as Giles Gray, an attorney and surveyor of the Port of San Francisco pointed out, not only had his twenty years of dealing with court cases involving Chinese immigrants convinced him, “most positively, that the Chinese do not come here slaves to any person nor to any company”; the very fact of their gambling provided the most indisputable proof of it. For “if they were all slaves,” Gray argued, then “their masters would hardly allow them to spend their earnings in gambling, as many now do.” The very “voluntariness” of gameplay, which Huizinga and Caillois identified as the ludic’s most essential characteristic, here becomes a means of asserting the non-coerced status of Chinese labor.
Gambling allowed both sides of the exclusion debate to discuss work and play not only as cause and effect, but as a two sides of the same racial character trait. For exclusionists, this meant linking, as one witness put it in a separate congressional inquiry, the idea of the Chinese as both “cheap labor” and “cheap men.” In arguing that “the Chinaman could live longer without food than without lying or cheating,”31 exclusionists implied that their “cheapness” in a ludic sense—of playing “dishonorably”—was the psychological analogue to the bland and meager rice that made up their diet and ensured their unfair competition against those who “lived on beef.”32
“The Heathen Chinee”
For all their adaptability, gaming tropes and allegories often prove to be as risky as games of chance themselves; the very flexibility of meaning and possibility that gaming allows means the gap between intention and interpretation is significant. The same game can look very different from