Dominion From Sea To Sea Part 3

If scholars may quibble about the meaning of Cook's visits (was he taken for a G.o.d or not, was he really eaten),7 missionary founding father Hiram Bingham decided that England's finest navigator deserved exactly what he got: he died because he violated G.o.d's will. "How vain, rebellious, and at the same time contemptible, for a worm to presume to receive religious homage and sacrifices from the stupid and polluted worshippers of demons and of the vilest visible objects of creation ... to encourage self-indulgence, revenge, injustice, and disgusting lewdness as the business of the highest order of beings known to them, without one note of remonstrance on account of the dishonor cast on the Almighty Creator!"8 Twenty years later Bingham was still complaining (this time to the House Foreign Affairs Committee) about "the lowest debas.e.m.e.nt of idolatry" among Hawaiians.

The reader may have gathered that Mr. Bingham was less than impressed with the ways of the natives, but what gave ultimate offense to those in the missionary position was the joyful, effulgent abandon of Hawaiian lovemaking; what Bingham and his ilk took to be a repugnant, unavoidable necessity, the uninhibited natives-and particularly the women-regarded as one of life's sublime pleasures. For centuries their mores had smiled on men and women taking several mates, sometimes sitting around in circles trying to locate a good one for the night, if not for every night; men and women appeared to have s.e.x whenever they wanted, even if they had rigid rules about other matters of gender (men and women were forbidden to eat together, women couldn't eat coconut or pork, and so on). "No women I ever met were more ready to bestow their favors," said Captain Cook. What were a handful of bleached-out Calvinists going to do about all that-were they going to try and abolish human desire, as Walter Lippmann once put it, "with a law or an axe"?9 Even with missionary boys succ.u.mbing to the temptations of the flesh and marrying Hawaiian girls?

The racism so central to the missionary vision was quickly diluted by intermarriage, as first families with prominent names like Bishop and Wilc.o.x acquired Hawaiian in-laws, usually from royal lines: a sugar baron, magistrate, and haole lawgiver of the i85os, Benjamin Pitman, married Chiefess Kino'ole- o-Liliha; two-thirds of haole men outside Honolulu had taken Hawaiian wives by the i85os, and that was before major Asian immigration. Soon the elite included District Court Judge George Washington Akao Hapai of white, Hawaiian, and Chinese extraction, who married Harriet Rebecca Kamakanoenoe Sniffen in 1870, a union that produced seven children of indeterminate ethnicity. Hawaii's current status as the most diverse ofAmerican states thus has a long pedigree, forwarded in the first instance by Hawaiians themselves who had no taboos or proscriptions regarding "miscegenation" (indeed, they had no word for it). By 2000 only 39 percent of the population claimed to be all or partially white, 21 percent had two or more ethnicities in their background, and the majority (58 percent) were of Asian ancestry.1o The missionaries were moral people doing good works by their own lights, and a little over a decade after their arrival they had 53,000 students in their schools, and by 1846, 8o percent of the population could read. The missionaries developed an alphabet for the Hawaiian language, pushed the monarchy toward const.i.tutional government, and admitted so many natives into their churches that Reverend t.i.tus Coan used a whisk broom dipped in water to baptize more than 5,ooo converts. The general absence of armed resistance reinforced the missionary idea that this was a marriage made in heaven, except for the troubling tendency of Hawaiians to die-of mild illnesses like diarrhea and the common cold, or dread diseases like smallpox that killed more than io,ooo in 1853; four more smallpox epidemics came along one after another. Other natives got drunk and stayed that way until their livers gave out, and still others seemed to die simply by virtue of lacking the will to live. Observers spoke of an "overwhelming despair" as Hawaiians watched their civilization evaporate, and as the population withered from 300,000 at the time of Cook's first visit to less than 6o,ooo by the 185os, some wondered if the natives would eventually disappear. In fact they nearly did: only 24,000 remained by 1920.11 Nearer My G.o.d to Sugar.

Hawaiians abjured land ownership but the haoles from Maine had no deficiency in the acquisitive instinct, and within a short few years had acquired huge tracts of land. Reverend Richard Armstrong had i,8oo acres by 1850, and sixteen other missionaries had an average of almost Soo acres apiece. Secondgeneration missionaries were even more likely to shed their mission and turn into capitalists, usually sugar barons. Reverend William Shipman's son got most of his land on the Big Island from the estate of King Lunalillo, who died in 1874, and soon the Olaa Sugar Plantation was among the largest in Hawaii. Sugar prices doubled from the 184os to the i86os, by which time haoles owned nearly all the important sugar plantations and the majority of mer chant ships visiting the islands; they controlled about 8o percent of all Hawaiian trade. Three million pounds of sugar were raised in Hawaii by i86o, 24 million pounds a decade later, and for the next half-century sugar dominated the economy.

Sixty-three sugar plantations operated in Hawaii by i88o, but real power rested in the hands of a tiny oligarchy of "factors." These were the sugar agents-the companies that hired the laborers; stored, shipped, and marketed the sugar; kept the accounts; husbanded the commissions; banked the profits and provided the lawyers to protect their monopolies. Castle and Cooke, Alexander and Baldwin, Brewer and Company, American Factors, and Davies and Company were the "Big Five," and they were involved in everything important to the economy: banks, insurance, utilities, railways, department stores, hotels; Matson steamships carried whatever they exported, Bishop First National Bank loaned out their money, they suppressed compet.i.tion even in minor industries like cigars. Like Noah Cross in Chinatown, Richard A. Cooke owned the telephone exchange and the electric company. The Big Five were mostly run by the second generation of missionaries, but they still called each other father, mother, cousin: "Father Cooke, Brother Castle, Sister Bishop." Their kids all attended the elite Punahou School, they all intermarried, and they interlarded their boards of directors with each other. Father and mother may have come to convert the heathen, but they ended up running a tight little plantation oligarchy with two overriding interests: no tariffs on sugar exports to the mainland, and "cheap servile labor" to work the fields.12 The owners quickly ran out of useful laborers among the natives, since they preferred fishing or surfing or raising taro (shiftless natives "doing nothing" in the planter argot) to the backbreaking toil of the sugar plantations, and most were now literate-whereas the owners preferred illiterate labor. Whites also shrank from the work: "you cannot get a man with white blood" into the fields, a plantation spokesman told a congressional committee; "it is most arduous work. Cane grows very thickly, there is hardly a breath of air in the dense growth." So they began importing labor-Chinese, j.a.panese, Portuguese. By the end of the nineteenth century nearly 50,000 Chinese and i5,ooo j.a.panese had come to work in the plantations, along with 13,000 Portuguese (many in supervisory roles) and nearly 2,000 Germans and Scandinavians, most of whom were employed as draconian field bosses called "lunas," famous for cracking their black snake whips.

The j.a.panese, especially, became ever more numerous-after all, this was their outpost in the middle of the Pacific, too. Numbering 43 percent of the population by 1920, most of them had emigrated from Hiroshima, f.u.kuoka, and k.u.mamoto. A carefully calculated racial division of labor allocated $1.09 per day to a j.a.panese doing the same work as a Portuguese ($1.54) or a partHawaiian ($1.73). But if people of "white blood" ran away from the harsh work in the fields, so did everyone else. Chinese were 5o percent of plantation labor in 1882 and only io percent two decades later, as they virtually monopolized the restaurant business, while j.a.panese left sugar cane for dry goods shops and truck farming (and later on they all hustled into real estate).13 Ana.n.u.s Comosus: Strange Fruit.

It is true: rich people are different from us. They can be childlike in trying to convince us that they rose to great wealth or high position through dint of their own efforts. James Dole arrived in Hawaii at the age of twenty-four with "no money," according to his grandson, and "no business connections." Yet somehow he single-handedly built the largest pineapple operation in the world.14 His cousin Sanford Dole may have been governor of the territory, he may have been a Harvard graduate with a degree in horticulture, he may have had instant entree to top status in a place wholly owned and controlled by a tiny elite of odd propensities-rigid Calvinism, Maine stubbornness, sugar plantations-running a banana republic masquerading under the "rule of law": but he did it all on his own. As it happened, James Dole arrived in Honolulu in 1899 with $i,5oo in his pocket (about $40,000 today) and quickly came under the wing of Castle and Cooke, who pointed out the virtues of the Ewa Plantation, which Dole plowed cash into for a 21 percent return on his money in a short four months. Governor Dole then called his attention to 200 acres of Ana.n.u.s comosus, the p.r.i.c.kly big apple that Guarani Indians had first cultivated in Paraguay, the halakahiki or "foreign fruit" to the Hawaiians, long considered a rare delicacy (eaten by the rich)-and soon he owned them. Beyond that nice head start, James Dole was an effective entrepreneur. He was a close student of the natural habits of the pineapple and horticulture more generally; he learned to raise pineapples commercially where others in Hawaii had failed going back to the i85os; he made one innovation after another in the virgin field of ma.s.s production and consumption of this strange fruit, especially the Ginaca machine that automatically removed the tough outer sh.e.l.l; like orange growers in California, he joined the fledgling canning industry just in time for new technologies that would keep the fruit edible long after it reached mainland markets; he convinced investors to buy stock in his fledgling company, including fifty shares bought by William R. Castle Jr., son of William Castle and later amba.s.sador to j.a.pan (in the late 1940s he was a key player in bringing j.a.pan back under the American wing). By 1903 Dole had his company, his plantation, and his fortune. Finally Dole just outright bought the entire island of Lanai and gave it over to pineapple production."

Soon Americans learned all about Hawaiian pineapples through ad campaigns in the major magazines, or via wahinis in gra.s.s skirts slicing them up at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon Exposition, or through popular ditties about the pineapple's virtues in keeping people regular. By 193o Hawaii produced 9o percent of all the canned pineapple in the world, and Dole held about a third of that market. The Big Five never acquired the stranglehold on pineapples that they had on sugar, and in 1931 Dole infuriated them by switching his shipments away from the Matson line (which monopolized Hawaiian exports and was mostly owned by Castle and Cooke) to another company which offered cheaper rates. He had no choice because it was the Depression and Dole Pineapple wasn't doing well, but soon Mr. Dole found himself unable to secure loans from the banks. The next year the directors unceremoniously put him out to pasture-while appropriating the famous Dole name for the brand-and reorganized the company, replacing Dole with a Castle and Cooke executive named Atherton Richards. It was a telling measure of the oligarchy's continuing power.16 James Dole was never a team player with the oligarchy-even though he was a charter member by birth. Otherwise the Doles differed but little from the Bishops and the Baldwins. Like the original missionaries they lived a life of extraordinary tropical privilege, courtesy of an ethnic division of labor a.n.a.logous to Evelyn Mulwray's estate in Beverly Hills. The main plantation was managed by Dole and an indispensable man named Ah Wo, who dedicated his working life to the firm. Ah Kui and two helpers kept the gardens and grounds of their Green Street mansion on the hillsides of the Punchbowl. An unnamed cook handled the kitchen and his wife was the downstairs maid, while Ah Kyau handled the upstairs duties. Howard Ho chauffeured the children back and forth to the Punahou School. The entourage spent their summers on Kahala Beach next to the Cookes and the Athertons. In 2004 Dole's daughter summed up their quotidian existence: "Jim had adequate means, but none of the children grew up thinking they were wealthy."17 This equable complacency, incomprehensible to anyone unused to a phalanx of servants, nicely ill.u.s.trates the ineffable blindness through which the haoles ran their splendid little colony and exemplifies the incapacity of G.o.dfearing white Americans in the West and the Pacific to hold their actions to any realistic mirror, given ideals of liberal and Christian mission that were beyond reproach (plus they did it all on their own ...). Meanwhile under the blazing sun and amid the backbreaking labor, the workers always seemed happy-at least that's what the pineapple ads and posters always portrayed. When I chugged around the Dole Plantation on a little choo-choo train in zoos, that's what I saw: here a worker, there a worker, strategically placed to grin and wave at the tourists. (Just to make sure I went around twice.) The companies also inserted publicity shots of smiling Caucasians among the women of color laboring in the canneries.18 "Handy at Honolulu": The Annexation.

By the late nineteenth century Hawaii had acquired a peculiar character merging Atlantic and Pacific experience: the American towns had a distinct New England feel, but the missionaries were pioneers in the tryptic ofAmerican expansion in the Pacific-missions, diplomacy, and capitalism went hand in hand, often in the same person, and all were of one mind about any natives they encountered: they should be civilized, that is, "modernized." As Martin Sklar aptly put it, "'Missionary diplomacy was the very essence of rationalism in the strict sense of modernization theory. It was the other side of the same coin occupied by 'dollar diplomacy' and struck in the name of the Open Door." The haoles' imperfect appreciation of native culture led to a quick resort to the use of force, but that hardly marked a departure from the liberal doctrine of the time. No less an authority than John Stuart Mill had sanctified despotism as "a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians" if the goal was their improvement, the elevation of "backward peoples"; liberalism achieved its universality precisely through a kind of missionary dictator- ship.19 In Hawaii the pioneers plunked down New England villages amid a cla.s.sic tropical, monocultural plantation economy; the two cultures merged in the fabulous mansions that the planters raised up in the hills overlooking Honolulu or Pearl Harbor and in the exclusive clubs renowned for their extravagant society b.a.l.l.s. Navy officers were quickly welcomed into this elite; when the Great White Fleet rounded Diamond Head and docked off Waikiki in 19o8, "wealthy pineapple and sugar growers entertained the officers royally. 1120 American white settlers-planters, missionaries, freebooters-followed the California model by overthrowing the Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, in January 1893. A "Committee of Public Safety" drawn from the white oligarchy and compliant natives called in 162 sailors and marines from the USS Boston, which happened to be sitting in the harbor (the marines were "handy at Honolulu" in Frederick Merk's words), told the queen to abdicate, and elected Sanford Ballard Dole (the son of Maine missionaries, he was running the Punahou School) president of a provisional government. For good measure marines surrounded government buildings and someone declared martial law21 Instead of declaring another "Bear Republic," however, the conspirators pet.i.tioned Washington for annexation, with sugar planters William R. Castle and Claus Spreckels in the lead (their export interests had been undermined by the McKinley Tariff of i89o). But they also fretted about whether they could sustain their contract labor system under American law.

In any event, newly elected President Grover Cleveland turned them down (and even had the audacity to demand the return to power of the queen, and even said the proposed acquisition violated republican traditions), so they had to form an ersatz lone-star state after all, called the Republic of Hawaii. Seventy percent of its officers were from missionary-related families; it aptly represented planter interests by collecting "very large powers in the hands of the few," in the words of one const.i.tutional delegate (or powers concentrated "in the hands of the Teutons," as a professor put it). Queen Liliuokalani, a strong leader determined to take back the islands and run them on behalf of the natives, continued to resist this usurpation-and so in early 1895 the Teutons knocked on the door of her fine mansion on Washington Place, said "aloha," and clapped her in jail. Remanded to trial, she was given a large fine and duly sentenced to five years hard labor. A limited pardon followed, but she remained under house arrest and later "island arrest" in perpetuity (she couldn't leave O'ahu). In the middle of war with Spain and amid a huge patriotic fervor, President McKinley finally granted the haoles their wish: "We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California," McKinley said incredibly; "It is manifest destiny." The haole elites were now Republicans, not a vigilante Committee of Public Safety, and that party dominated the islands through World War II, providing one governor after another (usually of Maine genealogy) and a majority of five or six to one in the state house, patiently legislating in favor of the Big Five, big sugar, and the lowest real estate taxes in the country.22 Hawaii's new destiny hadn't seemed very manifest to Grover Cleveland, but McKinley was a Republican who never liked to see a business interest go unpromoted, and here was the stepping stone or "half-way house" to the China market (not to mention those sugar planatations); furthermore the upstart j.a.panese had made an audacious move on the new Pacific chessboard after Samuel Dole had blocked anymore j.a.panese immigration to the islands. (j.a.panese had grown to one-quarter of the Hawaii population, and writers like Nagasawa Setsu had already promoted the islands for j.a.panese expansion.) A month after McKinley's inauguration, Tokyo sent the heavy battle cruiser Naniwa into Honolulu Harbor and let it sit there-agitating a.s.sistant Secretary of the Navy Teddy Roosevelt to announce the "very real present danger of war." He and his president considered dispatching the USS Maine-but it was needed in Havana. After several months the Naniwa took its leave and the episode was over-except that Congress finally appropriated $ioo,ooo to dredge Pearl Harbor, the Naval War College drew up the first "Plan Orange" for war with j.a.pan (the first of many), and McKinley moved quickly to annex Hawaii. It was now a "territory," not just a bunch of islands, and all its residents were U.S. citizens-that is, Americans-including the overly amorous wahinis. And as if history had a sense of humor, "President" Dole was instantly rechristened "Governor" Dole.23 Most Americans had little idea what they were getting, but Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Alfred T. Mahan had brought continuous pressure upon the president to seize this strategic outpost because they thought American Pacific power could take a big leap forward-from a point just north of Honolulu.

A Pearl Worth Its Weight in Sugar.

It is difficult to find any place in the world where significant American influence came before that of the other great powers, but Hawaii was one of them-the ill-fated Captain Cook notwithstanding. It was like California, remote and essentially undiscovered. A stepping stone across the Pacific and a stopping point, Hawaii quickly gained a place in American naval strategy. In 1840 the U.S. Exploring Expedition had stumbled upon "the best and most capacious harbor in the Pacific" right where the Pearl River, known for its succulent oysters concealing tiny pearls, spilled into the ocean: Pearl Harbor. The British and the French took an interest, too, of course, but the island power elite was mostly American, and they began to tempt Washington with Pearl's strategic virtues in the i86os, as a means toward annexing the islands to the United States. The 1875 reciprocity treaty between Washington and the islands was mainly a gift to sugar interests (sugar exports to the mainland would now come in free of tariff), but the treaty had a deeper significance because it "excluded foreign compet.i.tion and at the same time protected the islands from conquest by any third power" (a protectorate, in other words) and transferred Pearl Harbor to the U.S. Navy for use as a coaling station. This treaty was only good for seven years and then had to be renewed annually, so in 1887 Washington got King Kalakaua to give Pearl Harbor (where the royal family maintained fish ponds) over to the exclusive uses of the navy-but it didn't become a naval base for two more decades.24 The strategic visionary who first recommended Pearl Harbor as the centerpiece of American power in the Pacific was a Medal of Honor recipient from the Civil War, Major General John M. Schofield. Unlike any other port in the islands, he wrote in 1873, Pearl was "deep enough for the largest vessels ofwar" and "s.p.a.cious enough for a large number of vessels to ride at anchor, in perfect security against storms." The narrow channel to the sea was good for naval defense (when the harbor is looked at from its Pacific mouth, it resembles a narrow colon opening out to a uterus, or kidneys); it would have to be widened and dredged at an estimated cost of $25o,000-but little else needed to be done. America would then have a base of critical strategic importance, "the key to the Central Pacific Ocean." His study was done for the secretary of war, but it soon got printed in a local magazine, carrying a perfect oligarch's t.i.tle: "Worth Its Weight in Sugar-Pearl Harbor." Along came the Panic of 1873 and General Schofield's prescient report rotted on the shelf 25 The navy declined precipitately after the Civil War, slashed from boo to 6o ships, and its leaders, such as they were, preferred sail to steam-even though the United States held the world lead in steam-driven ocean speed (sails dominated long-distance seafaring until the end of the nineteenth century). So Pearl wasn't even much of a coaling station for the next quartercentury, and more dithering followed annexation of the islands. In spite of congressional appropriations, the navy did nothing in the matter of cutting and dredging a usable path to the sea, so Congress anted up more money in i9oi, and finally a narrow channel good for small gunboats was dug: but thirty years after the first American accession, the United States was still crawling along on "its slow, b.u.mbling path toward creating a Naval Base."26 Hawaii was a colony masquerading as a territory, but it didn't look much like an imperial outpost, let alone an artifact of urgent and manifest destiny. President Roosevelt felt some urgency after j.a.pan smashed Russia in lightning naval strikes in 1904-5, however. In 1907 the Asiatic and Pacific Squadrons merged into the Pacific Fleet, and a year later Congress appropriated real money for Pearl Harbor: Si million for dredging, dry docks, machine shops, and the like, which soon amounted to more than $2 million. By the end of 1911 a big ship finally could negotiate the narrow channel into Pearl: the cruiser USS California, as it happened, carrying on its flying bridge the newly cordial Sanford Dole and Queen Liliuokalani (no longer under "island arrest," it would appear). During World War I the United States built a submarine base inside Pearl, but the war drew American subs to Europe and after the war when the subtender USS Beaver returned, the sailors found the base to be "a swamp covered with cactus." Meanwhile the dredging continued -and continued, as if it would never end. j.a.pan's aggression against China in the 1930s concentrated minds, however, and by 1939-but only by 1939-Pearl was capacious enough to harbor the Pacific Fleet, and the navy had developed a sense of style to match Pearl's strategic value: the great ships would turn at Diamond Head and parade past Honolulu "mounting lights on every mast and line of every ship and sweeping the skies with searchlights" before traversing the channel into Pearl and lining up alongside Ford Island. Franklin Roosevelt took a close interest in Pearl, believing its strategic mid-Pacific placement had a huge deterrent effect on j.a.pan; he named it a Defensive Sea Area in 1939, forbidden to all aircraft except Pan Am Clippers, and ordered the fleet to remain at Pearl after sea maneuvers in 1940. In May 1941 FDR declared a state of national emergency and jumped Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz over fifty senior officers to become CINCPAC-commander in chief, Pacific Fleet (it had been CINCUS, but that rhymed with "sink us"). Except that Nimitz thought it unseemly to jump that far, so the command went to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who liked to dock the entire fleet at Pearl over weekends to give his men a pleasant Sat.u.r.day night sh.o.r.e leave.27 When viewed from the air, Ford Island sits at the center with a narrow channel leading into the ocean-widened many times to accommodate larger and larger ships. Today Hickam Air Force Base is to the side of the channel, but in 1941 the air force didn't exist: the army air forces were at Hickam, and so were B-17 heavy bombers. Ford Island harbored the Naval Air Station, and to its eastern side was "Battleship Row" where much of the Pacific Fleet sat on December 7,1941-the battleship Arizona (flagship of the Pacific Fleet, it was two football fields long with twelve i8-inch guns in four triple turrets), the Nevada, the Maryland, the West Virginia, and several others, but not (to subsequent j.a.panese regret) the carriers: the Enterprise was returning from Wake, the Saratoga was docked in San Diego, the Lexington was heading for Midway. Wheeler Air Field, in the middle of the island next to the Schofield Barracks, deployed P-4o, P-36, and P-26 fighter planes all nicely gathered together (to prevent sabotage).21 The End of Haole Hegemony.

The small haole elite still dominated just about everything up to Pearl Harbor and acted politically through a Republican Party that merged white and Hawaiian native power as against the immigrants of color. As a sugar planter's agent, Royal M. Mead, told a congressional committee in 1920, "the white race, the white people, the Americans in Hawaii are going to dominate and will continue to dominate-there is no question about it." Plantation lunas stood by the polling offices as workers came to vote (and told them how to vote). Haole elites still went about the islands in morning coats and vests, even on the warmest days, peering at the natives through pince-nez, according to proper genteel tradition.29 And then came the war and their colonial idyll in the sun abruptly ended.

Hawaii posed a special security problem in the minds of the authorities after Pearl Harbor since so many j.a.panese-Americans lived there (16o,ooo or 40 percent of the population, with 38,000 of them foreign-born), with, they thought, questionable loyalties to the United States. Upwards of a thousand j.a.panese aliens were immediately interned and hundreds of Nisei (second-generation j.a.panese) were thrown in with them, as security risks. But you couldn't put 16o,ooo people into concentration camps30 without demolishing the economy. Thus the mainland solution-guilt by ethnicity, through the internment of 120,000 Americans of j.a.panese ancestry-was infeasible in Hawaii. And so they ran free, free enough to commit nary a single act of sabotage during the entire war, and free enough to form the Tooth Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the latter being the most decorated single combat unit in the war. (In a curious and glorious episode that recalled the Alamo, after weeks of draining and intense combat in Italy the 442nd was ordered into southern France to save the Lost Battalion, infantry troops made up mostly of Texans who were bereft of food and supplies and surrounded by Germans. Through hand-to-hand combat and firing at point-blank range, the Nisei liberated the Texans in what "may have been the most heroic battle of the war," according to Leonard Fuchs-and so when Hawaii wanted statehood, the entire Texas congressional delegation championed the cause.) In the end more than half of the 7,500 soldiers in the 442nd were wounded, 700 died, and 700 were maimed.31 The New Deal did not have the determining effect in Hawaii that it had elsewhere, but there were important strikes. Well before the Depression, labor struggles (j.a.panese launched a ma.s.s strike in 1909 and a sugar plantation walk-out in 1920, and Filipino workers walked off their plantation jobs in April 1937) had pushed many plantations toward paternal, company-town measures to placate their workforce, providing housing, health care, shops, various subsidized services, and above all, credit. Long and bitter strikes transformed labor relations in the sugar and pineapple fields, whose 30,000 workers eventually earned the highest paid agricultural wages in the country (field laborers in Hawaii were generally better off than Mexicans in the California fields or textile workers in New England). Hawaiian unions were the first to operate on an interracial basis, against much opposition from big labor leaders. Hawaii also had its Harry Bridges: Jack Hall, a former communist who brought industrial democracy to the islands when he began organizing dockworkers in 1935, broke the plantation barons in the 1958 sugar strike and had nearly 24,000 workers in his union by 1969 despite two attempts on his life. Within another generation, however, mechanization had reduced the number of field workers to a fraction of their former size.32 Asian-Americans eventually came to influence Hawaiian politics to a degree unmatched elsewhere in the United States, and the roots of this were in the 192os. The missionaries were zealots for education (at least those not running sugar plantations), and they established schools all over the islandswhich would eventually be their undoing. Public education was a primary route to upward mobility, and McKinley High School, sometimes called "Tokyo High," was the central educational inst.i.tution on O'ahu, even though it educated the majority of students on the islands. There Nisei children were taught to be Americans, through a.s.similationist doctrines that quickly created young football players and bobby-soxers but also taught liberalism in the cla.s.sic sense, ideals like the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence that, when long ignored, motivate people to fulfill them: all men are created equal. McKinley High's famous cla.s.s of 1924 contained politician Hiram Fong, multimillionaire Chinn Ho, Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Masaji Marumoto, and a host of future doctors, lawyers, and professorsalmost all of them sons and daughters of plantation workers. Of 2,339 students in 1929, 43 percent were of j.a.panese ancestry, 20 percent were Chinese, and less than one in ten were haoles. Ultimately nonwhites in Hawaii founded one fortune after another (Chinn Ho's real estate and automobile distributors, Hiram Fong's politics-and-business conglomerate, Larry Kagawa's insurance, Hung Wo Ching's Aloha Airlines)33-and then the endlessly burgeoning tourist trade, the real estate industry-c.u.m-cornucopia, and apparently bottomless investment emanating from j.a.pan allowed nearly everyone to live happily ever after (a.s.suming real estate prices didn't tank), under a liberal political regime that the tourist trade floated.

For most Americans and the millions of tourists who visit every year, Hawaii's American history begins with the "sneak attack" at Pearl Harbor, and not a few who saw From Here to Eternity believe they actually witnessed the a.s.sault on that sudden Sunday, even if from the relatively unscathed confines of the Schofield Barracks where much of the movie was filmed-and where a scared teenager named James Jones was an office clerk in the 27th Infantry Regiment. Or they believe they know the beaches of O'ahu by watching Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr roll around in the surf below the Halona Blowhole Lookout. This in a paradise where a cadre of American pioneers had landed on an inexplicably sublime mountaintop and called it home for 12o years.

Edenic Wilderness.

One frontier did not close in 1890, indeed, it never closed: Alaska remains the singular American state where rugged individuals still hunt fur, dig gold, fell timber, fend off grizzly bears, and reel in sparkling salmon, and where they still confront the loneliness and isolation of the wilderness. Here Indians still imitate Marx's pastoral idyll-fishing in the morning, hunting in the afternoon, and writing (to their congressman) in the evening. Here Washington still appears as the capital of a distant colony with an Indian name ("Alaska" is an Aleut word meaning "great land"), given over almost completely to the extraction and export of raw materials. "Great Land" names an enormous expanse more than ten times the size of New York State; three Californias can fit inside Alaska's boundaries with New York and Pennsylvania thrown in. Three waves of settlers arrived during the Klondike gold rush, World War II, and the long cold war during which Alaska was a front-line state, yet in that broad land live barely more people than in the District of Columbia. Alaska also takes western history to another extreme: the federal government was, is, and will be the dominant force in this state, giving, taking, protecting, and legislating the lifeblood of daily affairs for 6oo,ooo people who depend on Washington as much as they resent its interference.34 Alaska is washed by the Pacific more than any other West Coast state, with a coastline 31,246 miles long. It's just not a very hospitable Pacific, dropping torrential rains and blizzards and never warming above 5o degrees in the summer. But then Alaskans are supposed to live in snow drifts at 4o degrees below zero for most of the winter, aren't they? In fact the southeastern panhandle, "knuckled to the main body of Alaska by a glacier the size of Rhode Island" (in John McPhee's words) and home to Juneau, is warmed by the j.a.panese current and has an inclement maritime climate much like Seattle's, with lows of 20 degrees in the winter, mild 6os or 70s in the summer, and as much as Zoo inches of rainfall annually (it rains about 22o days a year; some residents say Juneau ought to be domed). The Aleutian Islands are similarly foggy and wet, but cooler. Fairbanks has the best (or worst?) of both worlds, with summer temperatures that reach go degrees, but then frost arrives in late August, and byJanuary it's minus 6o degrees. Much of the state is green much of the year-and greening all the more with global warming.

The northern tundra steppe does not disappoint Alaska's frosty image, however. It is arid, with something close to permafrost: the ground rarely thaws below a few inches, even in July. Some sixty-five mountains crest over io,ooo feet, and America's highest peak, Mt. McKinley, rises to 20,302 feet; Alaskans argue that in sheer vertical rise-i8,ooo feet from foot to crest-it is the world's tallest mountain. Indians worshipped this awesome rock pile, which still seems close when viewed from fifty miles away. They liked to call it Denali, but on his trek out of the mountains in 1896 a young Princeton graduate heard the news that William McKinley got the Republican nomination, and named the great peak for posterity. From an airliner window the largest American state appears to be an unbroken icy labyrinth of sharp peaks and glaciers, but it has at least sixty active volcanoes, io percent of the world's total. Russians watched an island being born out of a fiery volcanic eruption in 1796, and on Good Friday in 1964 an earthquake registering between 8.7 and 9.2 on the Richter scale erupted under Prince William Sound, sending a mammoth tsunami crashing into (and destroying) Valdez and demolishing many buildings in Anchorage. Alaska contains "most of the nation's designated wilderness," William L. Lang wrote, "the greatest expanse of roadless areas, the largest national forest ... the largest known oil reserves, and a physical isolation that ranks second only to Hawaii ... a place of wilderness dreams and experiences .1131 A Frosty Cripple Creek.

Whites showed up in numbers not too long after Seward's folly, when modest amounts of gold were discovered on Douglas Island in i88o and homes, hotels, and shops sprouted in Juneau, across a narrow channel from the mines. Along came more strikes at Fortymile in the Yukon, also Mammoth Creek, Mastodon Creek, and Birch Creek; by 1900 the Treadwell Mines had the largest gold stamp mills in the country, and Juneau had twenty-two saloons swamping its three churches in a river of alcohol. Eventually the Gastineau Channel overflowed the mines (in 1917), ruining them, but the rough-hewn citizens of Juneau persisted through rain and flood, thick and thin, and one day found themselves residing in Alaska's capital. Meanwhile people came clambering up to the Klondike after four oddb.a.l.l.s out of the western imaginary-George Washington Carmack (aka "Lying George"), his Indian common-law wife Kate, and two other Indians calling themselves Skook.u.m Jim (Skook.u.m is an Indian word for "strong") and Tagish Charlie-found huge deposits of gold in 1896 at Rabbit Creek, a Yukon River tributary, and announced it in Big Bill McPhee's Caribou Saloon at Fortymile. Soon it was called Bonanza Creek, the richest placer stream ever known to the world.

Argonauts had to thrust and drag themselves over the nasty terrain and the heights of Chilkoot Pa.s.s, but as many as 40,000 did so, and by 1898, 20,000 of them lived in the instantly legendary town of Dawson. The vast majority were Americans who couldn't be bothered about poaching on foreign territory (the Klondike happened to be in Canada, where the Yukon Territory triangle almost reaches the Gulf of Alaska and almost divides Juneau from Anchorage), most came up empty-handed, and so did Dawsonnot even a thousand people lived there by 1901. But $15o million in gold came out of the Klondike, and elsewhere there was copper; the Guggenheim Corporation mined rich deposits with funds underwritten by J. P. Morgan, and Alaska got America's only national railroad courtesy of the federal government. Even E. H. Harriman showed up (in 1899), bringing a big research crew of scientists and a retinue of servants (120 people in all) along on a 25o- foot-long yacht, to reconnoiter Alaska and see if his dreams of a railway through the Aleutians to Asia had merit. Harriman brought along chickens, pigs, and cows to feed everyone, but he also bagged a brown bear on Kodiak Island-after his men had beaten the bushes for three days to flush out his quarry: "an old sow with cubs." Then he sailed away-but the good federal bureaucrats stepped in and declared Kodiak's bears a protected species, and they still are: so it takes about three hours, not three days, to find one today.16 Alaska was no different than Hawaii in the transformation that Pearl Harbor wrought in government spending, as World War II and the cold war provided most of the investment and growth in Alaska for fifty years until the Trans-Alaska Pipeline boom. Before 1941 most big business was absentee, dealing in gold, salmon canning, and copper. From the turn of the century until the war the settler population was steady at about 30,000, with Indians about an equal number. New Deal agencies built bridges and breakwaters, munic.i.p.al buildings and roads during the Depression, but Pearl Harbor sent federal spending skyrocketing. The U. S. Army built the Alaska Highway and army and army air bases in Anchorage, which became headquarters of the Alaska Defense Command at a time when fears of a nearby j.a.panese invasion were not fantasies like they were in California. Indeed, in June 1942 j.a.panese forces captured the islands of Kiska and Attu at the western tag end of the Aleutians (Attu is the closest Aleutian island to the Kuriles, about 65o miles away from where Yamamoto's strike force a.s.sembled at the end of November 1941). The army's Seventh Division together with Canadian units took Attu back in bitter fighting in May 1943, with 6oo American dead and more than i,ooo j.a.panese killed or suicides, save for 28 POWs. Around 6,ooo j.a.panese were still holding Kiska, but they evacuated the island-first by submarine (losing three of them to U.S. attacks), and then in July some 5,ooo soldiers crept away in heavy fog aboard the cruiser Tama and several other ships. A-2o light attack bombers flew from Ladd Field in Fairbanks to Siberia, delivering Lend-Lease aid to the Russians, and by the end of the war nearly 8,ooo flights had departed Fairbanks on this "Red Star Line." A southern racist, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, ran the Anchorage Defense Command and much else as Jim Crow territory-except the "crows" were usually Indians. Restaurants posted signs saying "no dogs or Indians allowed," and the military operated segregated movie theaters. Buckner's command removed nearly goo Aleut villagers from the Aleutians and interned them in four abandoned fish canneries, leaving them to fend for themselves the rest of the war with no doctors and skimpy provisions. Military personnel occupied-and lootedtheir homes, and the navy burned several villages, presumably to deny them to invading j.a.panese. The Aleuts returned to their homes after the war, minus the 40 children and elderly who had died during internment.37 Seward's Savvy.

It took a while, but "Seward's folly" turned out to have been a master stroke: his offhand acquisition permanently removed the Russians from the continent, pushing them back just far enough to pose no strategic threat (until ICBMs made them a threat everywhere). More important, Alaska capped the ceiling of the Pacific with its twin panhandles, running southwest to Unalaska Island and the Aleutians, back through Anchorage and then southeast to the sliver of temperate land containing Juneau and Ketchikan and Prince of Wales Island, thereby mimicking the shape of the North Pacific itself-like the silhouette of Commodore Perry's "fore and aft" c.o.c.ked hat. Now a comprehensive American Pacific Rim began in San Diego, ran north along the coast for more than 2,ooo miles and then northwest to the Bering Strait and the Aleutians, arced down along the Asian coast by the Kamchatka Peninsula, j.a.pan, and Korea, and then on to the Philippines, potentially gathering in everything Pacific north of the equator. Isolated Hawaii now sat in the middle, looking suddenly like a strategic centerpiece rather than a bunch of Polynesian islands almost equidistantly remote from Los Angeles or Shanghai. By 1900 Manila and Pearl Harbor were in American hands, and by 1945 American forces would garrison every valuable strategic point (j.a.pan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Okinawa, Guam, Midway, Wake Island), turning the seemingly limitless North Pacific into an American lake.

The first generation pa.s.sed away, the next de-Chinaized, Americanized and educated, would soon become absorbed in the national life, and known only as model artisans and workers. As the ocean receives all rains and rivers ... so America receives the Saxon and the Celt, the Protestant and the Catholic, and can yet receive Sambo and John, and absorb them all.

-GENERAL JAMES F. RUSLING, 1866.

rom the very moment that Americans welcomed California into the Union, the westward march of empire ran into people going the other way-"eastering" across the Pacific. This ocean crossing eventually brought millions of Asians to the Pacific states, but for more than a century after the gold rush these early pioneers endured an appalling racism that barely distinguished the West from the abusive treatment of blacks in the South. If slavery was not widespread (it did exist from time to time), various kinds of indentured servitude often began an Asian pioneer's life, lynchings were frequent, and many ma.s.sacres stained the soil. This sorry record culminated in the forced removal to ten concentration camps of 12o,ooo Americans ofj.a.panese descent after Pearl Harbor. Opportunities for everyone abounded after the war ended, but public s.p.a.ces remained segregated in the Pacific states, real estate covenants kept cities divided, antimiscegenation laws were still on the books, and Asian immigration remained sharply restricted until 1965. The dramatic change that year-a new immigration law that was also a strong expression of the civil rights movement-opened floodgates that brought millions of new Asian-Americans to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

Longtime Californ'.

Tens of thousands of Chinese '49ers crossed the Pacific, and no significant group of pioneer Californians was any earlier. The pull of the gold rush and the push of the ma.s.sive Taip'ing Rebellion brought Chinese streaming to the West, as many as 25,000 by 1852, and in some states, like Idaho, they came to const.i.tute as much as 30 percent of the population. They were unquestionably pioneers, but their pa.s.sage and arrival evoked the experience of other Americans-those from Africa: workers ubiquitously known as "coolies" were sold or indentured to European and American agents for transit across the Pacific. In 1852 a British report described the scene in Amoy: "The coolies were penned up in numbers from 10 to 12 in a wooden shed, like a slave barrac.o.o.n, nearly naked, very filthy, and room only sufficient to lie [down]; the s.p.a.ce 120 by 24 feet [held] ... the number in all about Soo." Each one's destination was scrawled on his chest-C for California, S for Sandwich Islands-and then they were shoved onboard and into the hold where they were confined for the ocean voyage, often in cages and chains. One load in 1855 led to the suffocation of nearlY300 people; about 30 percent of coolies shipped to Peru over a three-year period died during the pa.s.sage. California's Ellis Island had a wholesome name: Angel Island. But the Pacific immigrant pa.s.sage was not like that of the European: the Guantanamo prison camps of the second Bush administration would be a closer comparison. For three decades after 1910, some 175,000 Chinese were detained on Angel Island in appalling, overcrowded conditions; they spent weeks, months, and even years trying to show that they should be admitted to the United States. In the end, the vast majority (about 9o percent) were, but many others were deported for any kind of infraction, however minor. For decades Chinese could not return to China to see relatives without fearing that they would not be allowed back in.'

A grand total of seven Chinese residents lived in California in 1848, a decade later there were 35,000, and by 186o every tenth Californian was Chinese; they were present at the creation of this state and present for the creation of long-lasting Anglo stereotypes. The Shasta Courier reported the arrival of Chinese miners in April 1852: "An immense number of the uncouth visaged [sic] and picturesquely dressed sons of the Orient pa.s.sed through this place . . . enroute [sic] for the Trinity mines. . . . How these little, weakly looking hombres manage to carry such loads over such mountains ... we cannot possibly comprehend. However, we suppose it is done by some sort of legerdemain, as it is well known that the Chinese can do almost anything through the instrumentality of certain mystic sciences." 2 But there was nothing surprising, let alone "mystical," about it: southern China had a long tradition of sending adventurous young males throughout Southeast AsiaSingapore, Indonesia, Malaya. Now they were just extending the domain of their Pacific.

Chinese workers on the railroad were often highly skilled, and unlike many others they didn't pa.s.s the nonlaboring hours with whiskey and women -mostly they sipped life-giving green tea or took daily baths or laundered and pressed their clothes (astonishing the slovenly whites), while the white workers reinvented the gold rush days: the railroad brought "a brawling, whoring, drunken civilization" to the West (yet again). Upwards of 12,ooo Chinese built the western line, fully go percent of the workforce. They were hardworking and fearless-dangling from long ropes in wicker baskets, a venerable Yangze River technique for canyon labor; poking dynamite holes into the face of granite mountains (Summit Tunnel was drilled through a quarter mile of granite); laboring through the howling Sierra winter; learning how to deploy nitroglycerin without blowing themselves up (which nonetheless happened all too often); or facing a blank wall of prejudice that led to frequent murders and lynchings: the western railroad was the handiwork of thousands of nameless and faceless individuals, most of whom embarked from a few counties near Canton. From this point onward, big business favored Chinese immigration, and organized labor became its biggest and most powerful opponent.'

In 1854 the California Farmer wrote that growers were tired of the "bindle stiffs" and "fruit tramps" representing the flotsam and jetsam of failed '49ers; they wanted instead to bring in the Chinese: "The Chinese! ... educated, schooled and drilled in the cultivation of these products are to be to California what the African has been to the South. This is the decree of the Almighty, and man cannot stop it." Chinese immigrants were particularly important in the Central Valley: they built d.y.k.es, dug irrigation ca.n.a.ls, and showed whites how to farm intensively, whether they were raising rice, potatoes, strawberries, or apple orchards. They were "the first farmers in the West to produce and market" a host of commercial crops, "leading the way in the transformation of California's wheat fields and cattle ranges."4 By i88o one-third of all farm laborers were Chinese. Giant producers like Miller and Lux liked Chinese labor because it was low cost, disciplined, and self-sufficient-the workers fed and housed themselves. The owners contracted with the Six Companies (Chinese firms or "tongs") in San Francisco to bring labor gangs to the fields, giving the brokers $27 a month per worker in the i87os, from which the broker took his cut and then used the rest to pay off the debts incurred in shipping the laborer from China (no Chinese could return to his home village without a clearance from the Six Companies). The growers loved the system. As Alice Prescott Smith put it, the Chinese labor boss would provide fifty replicas of himself, carrying their own food and bedding: "They lived in the field, worked as locusts, cleared the crop, and melted away." In return the companies provided social protection, insurance, and banking services, even armed force through the "specials" that roamed through the Chinese ghetto. And as Jake Gittes could have told you, "For many years the Six Companies kept a special Chinatown contingent of San Francisco policemen on their payroll." Jack Manion spent twenty-five years running "the Chinatown Squad" from 1921 into the World War II era; an Irishman like most of the city police force, he was "really the law" in Chinatown-well, either he was or the Six Companies were. Actually these companies were above the law, enforcing their own rules somewhat like the Mafia to sponsor illegal gambling, extort protection money, and traffic in women and drugs. (It seems that they still do, at least in NewYork.)5 Chinese males probably const.i.tuted about one-fifth of the gainfully employed in California by the i87os, and among wage workers it was more like one-quarter. Where Chinese were not excluded-in mining, agriculture, and trades like cigars and tailoring-they almost took them over: of about 8,700 people in the cigar industry in the i88os, 8,5oo were Chinese; of 8,51o tailors, 7,510 were Chinese. Many of them were Californians much longer than whites, but they had to live in their own hermetic Chinatown world. Chinese were excluded from San Francis...o...b..siness clubs, law firms, brokerage houses, and the ranks of judges and city supervisors. Large sections of the city would not sell or rent to them; they quickly ran into trouble if they dared cross the perimeters of Powell Street, Broadway, or Kearny by themselves. Thus they had to live cheek-by-jowl in sections of the city open to them, which in turn became objects of Anglo curiosity-people liked to gather and watch Chinese laundrymen "distend their cheeks with water and then sprinkle the undergarments of ladies and gentlemen there from."6 Others drew a truer picture of people of color in the new West. General James F. Rusling wrote a fascinating account of his military inspection mission in 1866, full of insight and wise observation. In Portland he encountered "John Chinaman" and decided that "as a cla.s.s [they] were doing more hearty honest work by far, than most of their bigoted defamers. We could not refrain from wishing them well, they were so sober, industrious, and orderly." By the time he got to San Francisco he concluded that without the Chinese, the industry of the Pacific Coast "would soon come to a stand-still." On New Year's Eve 1866, General Rusling gathered at the grand Occidental Hotel in San Francisco with a.s.sorted city fathers and many of the wealthiest Chinese merchants to celebrate the launching of the Colorado-the first steamer on the new monthly route to Hong Kong. Representatives of the big Chinese companies were there, too, and they all seemed to get along amiably with the San Francisco elite. "Here, surely," General Rusling wrote, "is evidence of fine talent for organization and management-the best tests of human intellect and capacity ... [that] imply a genius for affairs, that not even the AngloSaxon can afford to despise."7 General Rusling was appalled by the wh.o.r.ehouses in Chinatown-but mainly by the white men who frequented them: "the brutality and b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of Saxon and Celt here all comes suddenly to the surface, as if we were fiends incarnate." This and other "shameful spectacle[s]" that he observed led him to think that "justice will not sleep forever" when confronted by "a strong race trampling a weaker one remorselessly in the mud." He went on to urge that millions more Chinese be enticed to emigrate; they will do all the hard work and slowly a.s.similate: "The first generation pa.s.sed away, the next de- Chinaized, Americanized and educated, would soon become absorbed in the national life, and known only as model artisans and workers. As the ocean receives all rains and rivers ... so America receives the Saxon and the Celt, the Protestant and the Catholic, and can yet receive Sambo and John, and absorb them all." Rusling thought this was what Jefferson meant by the preamble to the Declaration of Independence-his was an early call for a.s.similation and multiculturalism.8 Outside the relative sanctuary of San Francisco, whites could do with Chinese whatever they wanted. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, whites demolished the Chinese community in 1885: they ma.s.sacred twenty-eight people and drove some six hundred more from their homes, which they then put to the torch at a total loss of $150,000; the authorities sided with the whites. Two years later renegade "cowboys" murdered thirty-one Chinese miners working along the Snake River, mutilated their bodies, and looted their belongings. A white jury later refused to convict anyone for the crime ("none of the jury knew the Chinamen," a local rancher explained). Meanwhile Indians were equal-opportunity marauders: Paiutes slaughtered forty to sixty Chinese miners in 1866, and lesser ma.s.sacres of Chinese by Indians were commonplace in the West.9 Relatively few Chinese lived in Washington's cities and towns in the late nineteenth century compared to California or Oregon, but that did not stop the proper citizens (especially the police) of Seattle and Tacoma from abusing and ultimately banishing them. In 1885 the mayor and the police chief of Tacoma spearheaded a movement to expel several hundred Chinese from their homes and buildings, and a year later the Seattle police chief led an angry mob of whites into Chinatown under the guise of examining sanitary conditions, whereupon the mob broke into homes, loaded belongings and furniture onto wagons, and forced the Chinese to march to the dock and get onboard the Queen of the Pacc, bound for San Francisco. The rule of law resurfaced momentarily when a federal judge kindly informed the Chinese that no law required them to go, but most of them had the good sense to clamber aboard-especially since teamsters had already loaded their furniture and belongings. Trouble was, there were too many of them. So 196 left and 200 remained, as the threatening crowd closed in on them-"raving, howling, angry men." Whites grabbed rifles from the police and fired into the crowd, killing two Chinese. The governor declared martial law and began summary arrests; the next day President Grover Cleveland ordered in federal troops. The remnant got out as best they could, and Chinese did not return to Seattle for many years. Similar efforts to drive the Chinese out occurred all over the West in the i88os and particularly in California-except for San Francisco, to which the Chinese typically fled; newspapers once estimated that the city's Chinese population grew by 20,000 in a few months. Labor unions didn't like that, so they organized a Pacific Coast anti-Chinese congress given over to nauseating racial invective. Within a few years, all the anti-Chinese agitation culminated in the 19o2 law permanently excluding Chinese immigrants.10 In both Los Angeles and San Francisco new Chinatowns replaced old Chinatowns, like a palimpsest burying history. The first Chinatown in Los Angeles was legendary-an underground city, "a nest of catacombs where inscrutable sins were committed," in Norman Klein's words. For paleface sinning there was also an aboveboard city: all legalized prost.i.tution was situated in Chinatown until i9o9. The wh.o.r.es and the opium dens were mostly for whites, and it was all fine until the city fathers decided to demolish Chinatown to make way for the Southern Pacific train depot (the Union Station that still sits as a monument to 193os art deco, Mission Revival style); here was a multiple palimpsest, because Union Station and the old Chinatown stood on the site of the first orange grove ever laid out in California (by a Kentucky trapper in 1841). City fathers burned the brothels, opium dens, and cribs to the ground in fear of bugs and germs that might carry bubonic plague." A new Chinatown emerged a few blocks away, a spilled up Potemkin Village attractive to tourists instead of the slumming whites who patronized the cribs. In San Francisco the great earthquake and fire destroyed a Chinese ghetto that traced its roots back to the gold rush, so the city replaced it with a red-and-gold simulacrum for tourists. (The 19o6 fire also burned up city records on Chinese immigration, enabling thousands to make up genealogies attaching them to Chinese families already resident in the city.) A German photographer, Arnold Genthe, recorded the old Chinatown and then tried to reconnoiter the lost past of his own camera images in the new one. All the grime and dirt, the inclement density of people forced to live on top of each other, the fascinating human panorama-it had all washed away, he wrote in 1913: "On brilliantly illuminated streets, smoothly asphalted, filled with crowds in American clothes, stand imposing bazaars of an architecture that never was, blazing in myriads of electric lights. Costly silk embroideries in gaudy colors, porcelains of florid design, bronzes with handmade patina, and a host of gay Chinese and j.a.panese wares which the wise Oriental manufactures for us barbarians, tempt the tourist to enter." Some tourists were taken in, while others saw more: Oscar Wilde called San Francisco's Chinatown "the most artistic city I have ever come across." Will Irwin, in a book containing Arnold Genthe's photographs of Chinatown, exemplified the interchangeability of Oriental stereotypes in California. He offers a paean to the Chinese cook (found in every California mansion according to him): "He was the consoler and fairy-teller of childhood. He pa.s.sed on to the babies his own wonder tales of flowered princesses and golden dragons ... he saved his frugal nickels to buy them quaint little gifts.... The Chinaman was an ideal servant." But now, "the insolent and altogether less admirable j.a.panese" were taking their places by the cook stoves, and so "your San Francisco housewife will never cease lamenting for the old order."12 American Stoics.

Throughout the United States and much of American history Chinese individuals and families have lived in isolation, running a restaurant or a laundry in a small place, often as the only Chinese-Americans in town. It is a largely unnoticed diaspora, taken for granted by other Americans as a fact of lifebut not a very interesting one. In 1953 Paul Chan Pang Siu completed a dissertation at the University of Chicago ent.i.tled "The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation." (People on the Pacific Coast had sent laundry to be done in Canton before many Chinese came to America, believe it or not, which began the a.s.sociation of Chinese with washing clothes.) Siu called the laundryman neither a marginal man nor a person interested in a.s.similation; he was instead "a sojourner." Not that he expected to return to China (although Americans liked to ask when he was planning to go back)the sensibility of the sojourner was a response to discrimination. Likewise he worked as a laundryman out of necessity, not choice; none of the subjects Siu studied ever said their ambition was to be a laundryman. Most of them were single, social contact with customers was perfunctory, the hours were long; they led miserable workdays waiting for a few hours of "frantic release" on Sundays to gamble or visit a prost.i.tute. They pa.s.sed the time in the laundry thinking up new Cantonese insults to mock unsuspecting customers who came and went.13 Racial oppression cannot destroy the curious phenomenon that it creates, namely, W. E. B. DuBois's famous "gift of second-sight," which takes the measure of the oppressor.

When Jack Nicholson comes looking for Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, a Chinese maid greets him at the door: "Mrs. Mulwray no home." That was the only line Beulah Ong Kwoh spoke in the film-an English literature major at Berkeley with a master's degree from the University of Chicago who spoke perfect English. The writer Frank Chin, a fifth-generation American, still b.u.mps into whites who congratulate him on his fluent English and ask what part of China he's from: "You dumb b.i.t.c.h, I'm not from China," he wants to say. When he worked in a bar as a student they called him "the Indian"; drunks would apologize to him for nuking Hiroshima. Blacks feel that they have been emasculated by whites, Chin wrote, but "the genius of white racism in regard to the Chinese is that they never granted them b.a.l.l.s in the first place. They convinced them that it's so. That it was a virtue to be pa.s.sive, to keep your place." His own father was example number one-yet he was president of the Six Companies. "I look at the way he tunes the television set, it's all wrong. The people look like they're dead. They come on looking dingy, gray, the color of Roquefort cheese. But that's the way he sees the world."14 A "New j.a.pan" in California.

Chinatown in Los Angeles was much smaller and less influential than its northern counterpart. The City of Angels was instead a mecca for j.a.panese. Also pioneers in an easterly direction, early migrants hoped to find open land that they could develop, thus "to create the second, new j.a.pan" in the American West (as an 1887 guide for emigrants put it). Between 1895 and 19o8 about 130,000 j.a.panese migrated to the United States and Hawaii, most of them m