Bill Moyers Addresses the History of Chinese in America: From American Revolution to Wen-ho Lee May 5, 2000

Henry Tang, it's been my pleasure and privilege over the years to work with a lot of impressive people who knew how to get things done, but I've never worked with one more skilled, diligent, savvy or self-effacing than Henry who practices the ancient art of leadership through subtle persuasion than conspicuous exhortation with little fuss but considerable grace, Henry and his team have made the Committee of 100 a prime mover, and I am honored that he and I have become not just allies but friends.

Of course, all leaders have an Achilles heel, at least one flow that keeps them humble and honest. Henry's problems, he can’t count. He insists on calling this the Committee of 100 when the number is closer to 130. But if Henry could count, the name would lose its poetry and punch. Can't you just see it now? He reaches for that cell phone that has been grafted on his arm and says "Hello, This is Henry Tang of the Committee of 134."

Thank you Henry, for inviting me here. I'm not alone. I'm never alone on TV. Although I'm the one up front, on camera, I am merely the public face of a creative team. Television is enormously collaborative, and I have been lucky over the years to work with some of the best in the business. Three are of my colleagues are with me today. Later on you'll know why ---

Mi Ling Tsui --- producer and chief researcher

Ellen House and Ron Blumer

Ron and I have worked on many wonderful projects --- "Creativity" --- "Walk through the 20th Century," "The Power of Past."

Ellen: Six part series on "Liberty."

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In the few minutes we have together, I would like to talk about the paradox of success --- on, "When the Past Meets the Present." My thesis is this: You can't really appreciate being up until you've been down.

But there's a question attached. Here's the question.

"Why is it when you finally are up, some people persist in treating you as if you are still down?"

Let's begin with the news. As a journalist, I've followed the stories about the scientist Wen Ho Lee and the fundraiser John Huang. Huang has pleaded guilty to charges of illegal contributions to the Democratic Party in 1996. As to Wen Ho Lee: I honestly don't know if he is guilty or innocent of the charges against him. What I do know is that such a media spectacle descended upon him that guilt was presumed and due process suffered from the frenzy.

It's curious, for example, that while John Huang did bring in big donations from the Asian American community, the Clinton administration looked the other way until the press revealed the foreign sources of the money. Huang was then fired and made the fall guy, proving in the way, a perverse way --- that Chinese Americans have made it in this country. Politics is an arms race today, with money doing the work of missiles. Once you have made it in America, you are welcome in the race, because only then can you afford it. The Irish will tell you this. And the Jews. And the Italians. And the Pakistanis, who recently had to pay for a meeting with Hillary Clinton in order to get the President to stop in their native country on his way to India. You are welcome in the arms race as long as you have the software of money. But remember, as John Huang surely remembers, you can get shot down.

There is another dimension to his story. It's where the past meets the present. Huang was made the fall guy for a Democratic establishment that wants us to believe it had its eyes closed even as it had its hands out. (Oh, look, somebody put $100,000 dollars in our hand while we weren't paying attention.) But as Huang became the fall guy, others suffered the fall out. Democratic national committee investigators looking into possible sources of fraudulent contributions, called on people with "Chinese-sounding" last names. In other words, there was not just a small hint of guilt by stereotypical assumption --- the tendency to judge the entire group by one of its members.

Then Wen Ho Lee case takes us even deeper below the surface. Let me repeat. I don't know if he is guilty or innocent. Either way the case has holes. What we do know is the following:

One. The former head of counter-intelligence at Los Alamos Robert Vroomen participated in the investigation. He now tells the Washington Post that Wen Ho Lee was singled out because of his ethnicity. A lot of caucasions were not investigated although they had access to the same information and the same people in China as Lee.

Two. After being fired and branded as a suspected spy, Lee was arrested last December and indicted --- but not for espionage. He was charged on 59 counts of illegally down-loading classified information and transferring the data onto 19 portable computer tapes, of which seven were missing. Not a smart thing to do if you work in a sensitive area. But not espionage. Lee has been denied bail, held in solitary confinement, shackled at his waist, and allowed only one visit a week from his family.

Three. Meanwhile, and in contrast, during his tenure as director of the CIA, John Deutch transferred 1700 pages of classified documents (some secret) onto his unsecured home computers which were attached to modems with access to the Internet, and therefore vulnerable to hackers. When the transfer was discovered, Deutch refused to be interviewed and dozens of the files in his computer were mysteriously deleted. No action was taken for a year --- the CIA didn't even formally notify the Justice Department of the security breach. Deutch is now teaching at MIT.

Four. Two and a half months AFTER Lee was fired from Los Alamos but six months before he was indicted on something other than espionage --- a House Select Committee, chaired by congressman Christopher Cox, released a 909-page report on Chinese nuclear espionage.

The tabloids had a field day.

In addition to demonizing China as America's arch enemy, the Cox report carried a more insidious message. It warned that "essentially ALL Chinese visitors to the U.S. are potential spies. Futhermore, all Chinese Americans are potential "sleeper agents," who can be used at any time but may not be activated for a decade or more." This means everyone in this room is a potential traitor, with all that implies for the need for surveillance, wiretaps, anonymous tips, and all the onerous intrusions and abrasions of the cold war. Indeed, on its June 7 issue last year, Time Magazine put on its cover a Chinese eye peering through a star with a red background. The headline read: "The Next Cold War?"

The Cox Report has since been widely discredited and denounced by scientists and policy intelligence experts. Notably, a Stanford University study last November condemned the report for its "sloppy research, factual errors, and weakly justified inferences." Less than a month after its public release, the President Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board said that in the Cox Report "possible damage has been minted as probable disaster, workaday delay and bureaucratic confusion have been cast as diabolical conspiracies. Enough is enough.

Now very few people have read the Cox Report, including talk show radio hosts, but that didn't keep the airwaves from filling with toxic fumes from the wastelands of American nativism, paranoia, and prejudice. You would have thought every American of Chinese descent is working for the American government.

You would have thought there are Chinese agents imbedded in all levels of our nation's most sensitive military facilities. You would have heard something else, listening to talk radio after the Cox Report. You would have heard the wrenching, grating, ear-piercing, soul-shaking sound of the past meeting the present. We pride ourselves --- we Americans --- on our openness to the world as described on the base of the Statue of Liberty; on our tolerance, embedded in the First Amendment, on the pluralism that drives us ever forward, as if there were no yesterday.

But in fact, we are always hostage to the past. It runs like an underground river through our unconsciousness, and can overflow at anytime, to carry us furiously along on raging passions we do not understand but cannot contain. Those people I heard on talk radio after the Cox Report thought they were voicing their own opinions. But they weren't. The vitriol, the spite, the hatred and the fear were echoes from the past. Listening to them, reading the Cox Report, watching the reaction to Huang and Wen Ho Lee, I thought of the ancient prophet, who said:

"The Fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge. . ."

I thought of the British politician who said: "I will look to any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come."

You don't need me to tell you that the soil of American experience has been fertilized by two centuries of racist rhetoric and crude caricature whose memory traces are imbedded deeply in our social DNA.

Over dinner earlier this week, I listened to C.B. Sung talk about what it had meant to go up against the glass ceilings. The barrier no Chinese American had broken in business before him. It sounded more like a steel girder than a glass ceiling as C.B. described it, but when I got to thinking about it later in my room, I realized it wasn't a ceiling that had kept C.B. from getting there sooner. It was a long arm that had snaked out of the past and encircled C.B.'s ankles and pulled him back from the fulfillment of his natural talents and aspirations. He broke free, finally --- as did all of you. But the past never wants to let go. It's fingers can be like shackles, pulling you back into the quagmire of bigotry and caricature.

It didn't start out badly. The founders of this nation were men of ideas --- some were intellectuals. And though the didn't possess any first-hand knowledge of China, they were fascinated by what they learned from contemporary Europeans who celebrated China as a prosperous and harmonious nation of industrious peasants and craftsmen governed by benevolent and moral rulers.

Benjamin Franklin marveled how the most populous country on earth still "clothes its inhabitants with silk, while it feeds them plentifully." Franklin even upheld the Chinese civilization as a model for the new country. "Could we be so fortunate as to introduce the industry of the Chinese, their arts of living and improvements in husbandry," said Franklin, "America might become in time as populous as China." James Madison wanted to know all he could about Chinese agricultural techniques and both James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson admired China's political disengagement as a mark of superiority and independence. Upper class Americans prized Chinese wallpaper, silk canopies, vases, and lacquered screens. George Washington bought an entire porcelain dinner service from China traders in 1786. You can see it on the table at the estate of the DuPont family in Delaware. But then tastes changed, and the new young nation saw China less as a model than a market. America needed money and wanted trade. But we had little to offer. Then, early in the 19th Century, American merchants finally found a profitable export for the China trade --- opium. Americans discovered they could do as the British were doing exporting and redress our balance of trade by exporting opium. There was a hitch. We had no opium. America had to go to India to buy opium from the British. This cut our profits substantially so we encouraged the peasants in Turkey and Persia to grow opium, which they did. Now 200 years later, we are paying Turkish peasants not to grow opium. Call it poetic justice. Call it the long arm of the past. Soon, all the American firms doing business with China were handling opium with the most prominent firms in Boston becoming the lead traffickers. Among them were names that would become famous in times. Abbot Low, Forbes, Delano (as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

They weren't alone. Government agents knew a good thing when they saw it. In 1812, Benjamin Wilcocks was appointed American consul in Canton, and three years later, would use his consul seal to prevent a Chinese attempt to search an opium ship owned by his family. Why do I tell you this? Just to illustrate that the United States needed to develop an ideology about China from the very beginning. An ideology is a world view that cannot be proven wrong because the only evidence it allows is chosen to prove it true. You see people a certain way, and pretty soon you see them only that way. Americans moved on from the opium trade to what was called the "pig trade." American ships began to transport indentured laborers from China to British colonial plantations in the Caribbean, including Cuba. They were called "coolies" --- from the Hindi word "kuli," meaning unskilled labor. Impoverished young Chinese peasants were tricked or kidnapped, and made to sign dubious labor contracts. They were held in baracoons --- or pig pens --- until they were packed onto ships, often in chains . The vast majority were brought to Latin America where they were simply worked to death. In 1866 alone, five American ships smuggled three thousand coolies from a southern Chinese port not officially open for foreign trade. In 1861, as the first shots were being fired in our civil war, the American ship Norway made a harrowing journey from Macau to Havana with 1,037 Chinese men aboard. During the voyage 130 of them died from dysentery and gunshot wounds. Historians tell us (historians tell us all of this, we just don't hear them) --- historians tell us the survival rate among Chinese shipped to Cuba was about as low as that of the African slave trade.

American movies and American television have told us the story of the African trade. Everyone (knows) Kinta Kunta's roots. Who knows about Cy Wong's roots, whose great grandfather was a coolie who escaped Cuba with 14 others and made it to New Orleans?

Do you see how the ideology grew? We made the Chinese into utilitarian objects --- not human beings --- they became exotic curiosities for exploitation and amusement.

P.T Barnum opened a Chinese museum at 539 Broadway in lower Manhattan whose main attraction became a 17-year-old girl with feet 2 ½ inches long. Barnum advertised her as "the first Chinese lady has yet visited Christendom." The New York press described her "so pretty, so arch, so lively, and so graceful, while her minute feet are wondrous."

The dots filled in the necessary picture. American traders began publishing their memoirs. They described Chinese merchants as "the greatest villains in the universe," wrote a Portsmouth New Hampshire trader: "The Chinese of the present day are grossly superstitious depraved and vicious gambling is universal they use pernicious drugsare gross gluttons bloodthirsty and inhuman."

First trade, then religion. One of the first American missionaries to China wrote to his father. "I have been here a week and in that short time have seen enough idolatries to call forth all the energies I have to see the abominations practicedand not to be affected with a deep sense of the depth to which this people has sunk, is impossible to a warm Christian man" a journal published in China for western missionaries concluded that China was "a defective civilization."

Connect the dots: Trade to Religion to Culture. In 1824, America's foremost philosopher rendered his judgment on a land he had never visited and a people he had never known. Here is what Ralph Waldo Emerson said. Listen to what Emerson said.

"The closer contemplation we condescend to bestow, the more disgustful is that booby nation I have no gift to see a meaning in the venerable vegetation of this extraordinary people. They are tools for other nations to use. Even miserable Africa can say I have hewn the wood and drawn the water to promote the civilization of other lands. But China, reverend dullness, hoary idiot! All she can say at the convocation of nations must be --- I made the tea."

Connect the dots: Trade. Religion. Culture. Politics. In 1877, the United States was in the fourth year of a major depression. On the morning of July 16 railroad workers blocked a train in West Virginia to protest a wage cut. The strike spread --- Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, Newark. The Midwest, the South. Federal troops joined the state militia to put down the unrest. Newspaper headlines warned of anarchy and revolution. Washington needed to mollify the workers. The powers-that-be needed a scapegoat. Why not the Chinese. They weren't human, anyway. Opium-smokers, "pig" workers, freaks and heathens all. Now Chinese Exclusion --- immigration restriction --- became the political panacea --- to make the angry white workers think that their troubles were the fault not of the politicians, speculators, and bankers, but a weak, vulnerable minority of Chinese laborers.

It had worked in California. During the presidential campaign of 1876. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties needed to take California to win the presidential election. Both decided they couldn't win the White House without finding a demon to run against the Chinese were an easy target, adopted anti-Chinese planks, a congressional investigation of the effects of Chinese immigration. The Democrats went further, calling for legislation to "prevent further importation or immigration of the Mongolian Race. The nation was filled with the invective of hate. The election that year produced the closest electoral margin in the nation's history. The Republican won --- Rutherford B. Hayes, by one vote in the electoral college. 185 to 184. He carried California. The press said California would never have given him her vote if there had not been an anti-Chinese plank in the party's platform. Both parties got the message: national political dominance would require the California vote, and that meant running against the Chinese. And that meant demonizing a whole people.

Over the coming years, the ideology took on the apocalyptic fervor of a religious frenzy. Good men became apostles of malice for their own gain. Preparing to run for the White House, Senator James G. Blain converted to the cause. In a speech supporting the restriction to limit Chinese immigration, he said: "The question lines in my mind thus: either the anglo-saxo race will possess the Pacific slope or the Mongolians will. You cannot work a man who must have beef and bread, and would prefer beer, alongside of a man who can live on rice. It cannot be done."

In 1881, Republican senator John Miller of California introduced a bill in Congress to suspend immigration of Chinese laborers. He spoke for two hours on the Senate floor. Here is what he said. "The Chinese are inhabitants of another planet. Machine like. They are automatic engines of flesh and blood. Why not discriminate? Why aid in the increase and distribution over our domain of a degraded and inferior race, and the progenitors of an inferior sort of men. We ask you to secure us American anglo-saxon civilization without contamination or adulteration. Let us keep pure the blood which circulates through our political system. And preserve our life from the gangrene of oriental civilization." The New York Times called Miller's speech "a mastery statement, admirable in temper and judicial in fairness."

A famous cartoon that year replaced the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor with that of a Chinese radiating "filth," "immorality," "diseases," and "ruin to the white labor," a popular pamphlet proclaimed "The Last Days of the Nation." Chinese were depicted as invaders and conquerors of the nation. The final two panels showed Chinese Mandarins in Washington and a Chinese as governor of California. "The Last Days of the Republic:

"The Fathers have eaten a sour grape,

And the children's teeth are set on edge."

John Huang and Wen Ho Lee never had a chance. Listening to talk-radio indict a whole people for the alleged transgressions of a few. I heard, in the angry voices of callers and the condescending snideness of the hosts --- I heard it all over again the voices of Boston traders and Yankee missionaries; of P.T. Barnum and Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Blaine and John Miller. A virus spread through the molecular membranes of the nation's other GNP --- the Gross National Psychology --- the subterranean chambers which send us their silent signals without our even knowing it --- a virus spread through the collective circuitry of our collective member --- and the message didn't read: I love you: It read: I loathe you."

So, C.B. it wasn't a glass ceiling that held you back. It was the strong shackle of a past that grips us although we may be ignorant of it. And that's why history must be confronted, not repressed. That's why the truth must be told. You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.

That's why I want to tell the story of the Chinese experience in America. And I want to tell it for a national audience, on PBS. We've told the story of the Jews in America. We've told the story of the Irish in America. We've told the story of the English in Americaand the Italiansand the Africans in America. But not this story. And what a story it is. Not only of terror and tragedy but of triumph, too. The Chinese fought back --- the American way. A hundred years ago Won Kim Ark --- a 22-year-old Chinese cook returned to San Francisco, the city of his birth, after visiting his parents in China. He was denied entry. Immigration officers declared that he was a laborer and could not enter the U.S. under the Exclusion Act. He sued, arguing that he was, by birth, a citizen. He took his case all the way to the Supreme Court. The United States government opposed him. The Solicitor General asked the Supreme Court:

"Are Chinese children born in this country to share with the descendants of the patriots of the American Revolution to exalted qualification of being eligible to the presidency of the nation?"

And the Supreme Court said: "Yes." The court decided for Wong Kim, the cook. Chinese Americans challenged the Exclusion Act with over 7000 petitions in state and federal courts --- cases that profoundly affected the course of American jurisprudence, contributing significantly to the molding of equal-protection jurisprudence under the 14th amendment.

It's a great story --- and it hasn't been told. Even as we meet here today, May 5, 2000, far away in New Haven, Connecticut, the president of Yale University is welcoming the Chinese Minister of Education and a select group of Yale Alumni and friends. They are there, in the Grand Hall of one of America's oldest and most elite universities, to unveil a portrait of the first Chinese to earn a diploma from an American university. His name was Yung Wing. He graduated from Yale in 1854 --- at a time when Chinese were considered immoral heathens. Yung Wing was highly regarded at Yale; he married a f girl from a prominent Hartford family, befriend Mark Twain, became a naturalized citizen, and died here. He did this at a time in this country when Chinese were being massacred in the West and a Chinese man could barely speak to a white woman much less marry one yet Yung Wing wasn't afraid to speak out and he fought the Chinese Exclusion Act. Only two states voted against that act --- Massachusetts and Connecticut. And Yung Wing's grandson says you can't help thinking that Yung Wing could have been a factor influencing that vote. He also established the Chinese Educational Commission which brought 120 young Chinese boys to America to study western science and technology. Some of the descendants of those first students are at the unveiling today. So is Yung Wing's grandson. So are our cameras. We wanted to be there for an historic and important part of the story of the Chinese experience in America. You are part of that story. The Committee of 100 reads like a "Who's Who of Chinese descent in America." Your success in corporate and high-tech America --- your leadership in politics, the arts, communications, literature --- confirms the latest remarkable chapter of the Chinese experience in America. That's the story of how, in the last half of the 20th Century, Chinese have not only emerged (in) the mainstream of American Society, of rejection and exclusion endured by earlier generations, but all of you are beneficiaries of the sacrifices they endured as they struggled to make America their home. All of us --- whatever our roots --- all of us who make it in America --- all of us stand on the shoulders of ghosts.

A personal note:

Thirty-five years ago (October 3, 1965), at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, President Lyndon B. Johnson descended from his helicopter and stood at the base of the Statue of Liberty. And there he signed into the law the Immigration Reform Act, removing the quota system that had favored European immigrants and marked the true end of Chinese Exclusion in America. I was on that helicopter with President Johnson. I was 31 at the time --- and I was his White House assistant. I helped to draft what he said that day. Let me read it to you:

"This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. Yet it is still one of the most important acts of his country and this administration. For t does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation. This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to emigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here. The fairness of this standard is so self evident, yet the fact is that for over four decades the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted and distorted by the harsh injustice of the National Origins Quota System. That system violated the basic principles of American democracy. Today with my signature that system is abolished."

So it was. It was the beginning of a new era --- our era ---the era of which this meeting today is an epitome --- the era of the new America. A lot of ghosts, legions of ghosts, ancestors whose voices had been silenced, whose stories had never been told.

Among them were coolies and sailors and miners and railroad laborers and all those who paved the way. History has neglected them. In 1796, when a Dutch merchant returned to the United States from China, he brought 8 Chinese house servants to Baltimore. They are believed to be the first Chinese to come here. There are no records of what happened to them.

No matter how powerful we are --- no matter how rich or successful or celebrated --- we will never be truly heard, until our ancestors have spoken.

I want this series to give them their voice back.