For six or seven decades, Chinese were active participants in California’s agricultural development, as cooks, tenant farmers, or vegetable peddlers, and also as owner-operators of farms and as commission merchants, positions that gave them considerable control over their own lives.6 Their entrepreneurial drive proved remunerative in an economy where production of raw materials was more important than manufacture of finished goods. Individuals with little capital but a great deal of energy and a willingness to take risks could achieve a measure of economic success.7
In acquiring capital to start a business, individual Chinese were often helped by the huiguan, local associations based on organizations that had existed in China for hundreds of years or, in Hawaii, by immigrants from the same district. Led by merchants, the huis, as they were called, performed social and charitable functions, mediated disputes, and provided protection. Some of them functioned as rotating credit associations to aid members in going into business for themselves. Hui members would put a certain amount of money into a common pool. Then they would compete by some method, often by lot, for the right to use the entire sum to start a small business. Members would meet again the next month, and those who had not yet had their turn would continue the process until every member of the hui had a chance to use the pool.8
Even without assistance from huis, Chinese laborers often were able to bid up the price of their labor because the supply of workers in the late nineteenth century was still relatively short in times of rapid economic expansion. Once having amassed a small amount of capital, an entrepreneur could quickly establish a business with a limited but sure Chinese clientele, in which his familiarity with the language enabled him to serve customers in ways difficult or impossible for whites. There are thousands of stereotypical stories of such entrepreneurship: Lee Bing began working as a dishwasher and janitor in the Walnut Grove Hotel, then took the place of a Chinese cook and received an increase in salary from $20 to $60 a month, which eventually enabled him to save enough money to buy a restaurant of his own in partnership with another Chinese man. Subsequently, he became a partner in a hardware store and a drugstore, and bought a share in the Shang Loi gambling house, where he served Chinese only.9
The Chinese also were able to establish niches in the agricultural economy of California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Chinese renter of land in the Sacramento Valley in the 1870s, knowing his value to the owner of the land, would insist on hiring two or three Chinese to help him at wages of at least $1 a day.10 The whites may have dominated all sectors of the economy, but they had to call on Chinese middlemen to help them recruit and manage Chinese labor because industrial and agribusiness expansion accelerated so rapidly.11 And the labor was paid relatively well. For example, in the 1870s and 1880s, when a farm laborer could save $8 to $15 a month, Chinese who rented land actually earned more than whites who rented land in the South and much more than blacks.12 When other industries expanded, the price of their labor was bid up, as in the canneries of Contra Costa County, California, where they earned more than white women.13
Merchants in all kinds of businesses and entrepreneurs in vice industries could accumulate capital and develop a sense of self-direction impossible for all but a few African-Americans under caste pluralism.14 After passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts and as agriculture became more diversified, the labor of Chinese was more valuable than before, with growers depending on them for their skills as pruners of fruit trees and as fruit packers.15 At one point in 1884, farmers agreed to bring in blacks to replace Chinese hop pickers who were striking in Kern County, but on second thought the farmers decided against what they saw as a dangerous experiment.16
The main opportunities both in Hawaii and on the West Coast were not in agriculture; they were in the dynamic, expanding nonagricultural economy of the fastest-growing portion of the U.S. Capitalism itself undermined the structure of sojourner pluralism as it applied to the Chinese, even when the overwhelming majority thought of themselves as strangers. When more married and established families, they, and especially their children, became ethnic-Americans with a stake in the larger society.
A growing number of Chinese developed strategies for claiming citizenship, the most important of which was to assert citizenship by birth or by “derivation.” The U.S. Supreme Court had decided in 1898 that a person born in the U.S. of Chinese parents was an American citizen by birth, and therefore eligible for reentry after visiting China. Two years later, the Court ruled that the wives and children of Chinese merchants were entitled to come to the U.S.17
Those decisions increased the number of Chinese admitted as citizens between 1920 and 1940 to 71,040, compared to only 66,039 aliens. When records were burned in the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, many Chinese were able to allege, even if some fraudulently, that they had been born in the U.S. Once armed with citizenship, a father could claim citizenship for his Chinese-born children too. After subsequent trips to China, the father upon his return would report the birth of a son or two (more than four hundred sons to one daughter were reported). Often extra sons were reported, opening such slots for sale to boys who had no family connections in the U.S.18
With the admission of women in the early twentieth century and some intermarriage (particularly in Hawaii, where it was extensive), the ratio of Chinese males to females, while still one-sided, went steadily down between 1900 and 1930, when one of every five Chinese in the U.S. was a female.19 With a more stable family and community life, the Chinese and their children established organizations typical of those created by European immigrants and their children in the process of ethnic-Americanization.
The earliest organizations were fraternal, such as the Native Sons of the Golden State, founded in San Francisco in 1895 and renamed the Chinese-American Citizens’ Alliance in 1905. It grew rapidly in membership, with branches in a half dozen cities in the East and Midwest by 1915. With its primary headquarters in San Francisco, it fought against discriminatory immigration laws and segregation in the public schools and encouraged Chinese-Americans to participate in politics. In 1924, the CACA began publishing The Chinese Times in San Francisco in Chinese, and eleven years later American-born Chinese founded The Chinese Digest in the same city, the first Chinese-American newspaper in English. By 1921, five Chinese YMCAs and three YWCAs had been established. Many Chinese-Americans celebrated Independence Day and Thanksgiving, the great holidays of the civic culture.
After the First World War, Chinese-Americans became much more active politically, successfully defeating anti-Chinese politicians and conducting an effective campaign in support of Roosevelt’s candidacy in 1936. By then, the sojourner period was over. The majority of the Chinese in the U.S. had been born here. Chinese-Americans had been elected to many offices in Hawaii and even on the West Coast, and in 1954, in a typical example of ethnic-Americanization, a Chinese-American Democratic club was established as a counterpoint to the CACA, which had become markedly Republican.20
Cracks in the System: The Japanese
A substantial portion of the Japanese who remained in the U.S. also broke the bounds of sojourner pluralism. As with the Chinese, the Japanese in California were to some extent able to control the labor supply desired by white farmers, who preferred to lease their holdings to Japanese tenants as a way of obtaining a steady stream of labor and of turning over to the tenants the