The Race Card. Tara Fickle

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, it was accompanied by equally seismic shifts in the meaning of work. As work became “just work,” as sociologist C. Wright Mills put it, the leisure sphere—and the concept of the ludic as pure creativity and invigorating 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 СКАЧАТЬ