On January 1, 1877, the San Francisco Chronicle heralded the new year with a patriotic catalog of the city’s industrial and artistic institutions. In an article titled “In the Lead: California in Her True Position,” the Chronicle boasted of California’s natural resources and bolstered commercial standing and praised San Francisco’s burgeoning performing arts sector. Sketches of elegant Victorian architecture cut through the text of the “General Business” section, with each drawing displaying business storefronts, from textile makers to locksmiths to the San Francisco Laundry offices on 33 Geary Street.^[1] The Laundry’s “handsome three story building” contained “no less than nine washing machines, four centrifugal wringers, a collar starcher,” and the only flannel washer in the city. Yet, even more notable to the author than its stunning technological power, the Chronicle made sure to note: “Only white labor is employed” at the San Francisco Laundry. This emphasis signaled a dangerous and unspeakable alternative: Chinese labor.^[2] The Chronicle, focused on promoting the image of a polished city and state, masked the foreign taint of Chinese labor with its clean-cut sketch of a “handsome” industrial enterprise.^[3] Just six months prior to the article’s publication, the US Supreme Court had established in Yick Wo v. Hopkins that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause applied to noncitizens, thus ruling in favor of the city’s 240 Chinese-owned laundries.^[4] 

This paper focuses on the racialized urban and labor dynamics surrounding the Supreme Court case Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), sparked by the imprisonment of a Chinese laundry owner for continuing to operate his laundry business without a formal permit. In 1880, the San Francisco city government passed an ordinance requiring all laundries operating in wooden buildings to request a permit, yet the Board of Supervisors regularly and exclusively denied permit rights to Chinese-owned laundries. Following the ordinance, Yick Wo was arrested for continuing his operation without a permit and petitioned the California Supreme Court, which remanded Yick Wo and discharged the writ.^[5] This case was combined with that of plaintiff Wo Lee, a similarly imprisoned laundryman who brought his case to the Ninth Circuit Court for the District of California.^[6] These two cases were combined upon appeal to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of the petitioner, Yick Wo.^[7] On the surface, Yick Wo v. Hopkins applied the Equal Rights Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and protected economic freedom on paper. However, it did little to prevent municipalities from utilizing the language of public and urban health to discriminate against the living spaces of Chinese residents as seen by the increasing anti-Chinese legislation in the Exclusion Era.

Yick Wo v. Hopkins marked an exception in judicial interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment at the beginning of the Exclusion Era by ruling against de facto discrimination. The 1880 ordinance regulated the physical space of laundry shops, thereby limiting Chinese laundry owners who lacked access to the resources of larger white-owned enterprises. This ordinance was touted as a safety measure to reduce fire risk, yet it specifically denied Chinese laundry owners the right to continue operating in alignment with xenophobic political platforms. The Court ruled that the 1880 ordinance banning laundries from operating in wooden buildings disproportionately affected Chinese laundries, therefore violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause due to unequal administering of the law. Yet, rather than set a precedent for future protection of equal rights, Yick Wo v. Hopkins failed to prevent the enactment of additional exclusionist legislation for noncitizens in the late 19th century as anti-Chinese sentiment became a popular political platform among white workers. Therefore, when examining the legacies of Yick Wo, it is necessary to look beyond legal thought to understand the social context of Chinese labor and the structures of urban property and economic power. How did desirability of land translate into desirability of the people who lived on it, and how did these biases limit the success of Yick Wo in the social sphere? Ultimately, the Supreme Court majority opinion failed to extend its impact into the social sphere, thus limiting its success, as existing regulation of urban space in San Francisco directly aligned with xenophobic sentiments of “clean” and “unclean” people, which associated Chinatown and its residents with dirt and disease.^[8]

Prehistory

Prior to Yick Wo, urban and environmental history reinforced stereotypes of Chinatown as an immoral labyrinth. In the decades following the Gold Rush, California suffered from a decline in gold production and repeated drought, and the subsequent San Francisco real estate market collapse caused the loss of millions in land speculation. For laborers who had imagined the West as a natural bounty rife with new economic opportunities, the economic downturn marred the real and imagined landscape of California. As the extractive industry struggled, laborers and politicians sought to reestablish California’s desirability by turning toward city life. Within the urban sphere, the portrayal of San Francisco’s Chinatown as a petri dish for epidemic and immorality impacted citizens across the city. Simultaneous to public health concerns arose an interest in regulating which immigrants could be granted the right to remain. Following the Chinese Exclusion Act, San Francisco immigration officials, as operators at the largest port of Asian immigration, adopted a stringent interpretation that restricted the types of occupations Chinese immigrants could hold. As organized labor advocated for exclusionary legislation, immigration officials in the Chinese Bureau enforced exclusionist policies advanced by the anti-Chinese movement.^[9]

As a location rich with natural resources, agriculture and extractive industries drove economic growth in the mid-1800s. Economic development was predicated upon exploiting the natural environment, with California representing the ideal site for white capitalists civilizing the landscape through industrial destruction. Grey A. Brechin described California’s extractive economy as a “Pyramid of Mining,” beginning with the influx of miners seeking for gold in the early 1850s. The mining industry shifted from individual labor-intensive work to industrial mining dependent on amassed capital machinery. Mining enterprises employed explosives, constructed large-scale hydraulics, and erected dams. This massive undertaking destroyed the natural landscape, blasting apart sections of the Sierra Nevada and altering the hydrological cycle for profit.^[10] Industrialists voraciously consumed natural resources as conquerors of the newly annexed territory. This new frontier of seemingly unlimited natural extraction carried into how residents^[11] defined themselves as citizens of this new state rich with bounty for the taking.^[12]

The economic opportunities created by the mining and agricultural industries ran parallel to San Franciscans imagining themselves as residents of a golden state. As Gunther Barth writes in Instant Cities: The Rise of Urbanization in San Francisco and Denver, “Men and women carried in their heads a set of accomplishments that they hoped to see in their lifetime, the firsts of practically everything, all fused into their image of new cities, better ones than those they left behind.”^[13] Barth frames the rise of San Francisco in the late nineteenth century as the rise of an “instant city,” or a metropolis defined by its constant charge toward the future and residents’ inclination toward material progress. This urban space lacked distinct boundaries and underwent frequent changes to accommodate the skyrocketing population. Based on census numbers, the population of San Francisco County swelled from just over 50,000 in 1860 to nearly 150,000 in 1870 and 234,000 in 1880.^[14] But, this population influx limited opportunities for working-class individuals to cash in on industrial opportunities. As a result, Barth further argues, “With their dreams having vanished, the residents mellowed. They sublimated their determined chase for wealth with resolute devotion to San Francisco.”^[15] Residents turned to social collectivity to cope with individual economic misfortune. While Barth illustrates how white residents grappled with the elusive promise of striking gold by devoting themselves to developing the city’s identity as a modern metropolis, how they went about this process remains to be addressed. In this precarious new economy, how could residents ensure their socioeconomic status in the absence of monetary gains?

The sharp economic downturn during the 1870s exacerbated xenophobic sentiments against Chinese laborers in the form of fledgling political parties. The collapse of the Bank of California and a housing crisis brought on by railroad speculation led to mass unemployment in San Francisco, with an estimated twenty percent of the labor force unemployed. Laborers rioted over competing positions, and wage decreases accompanied harsh job prospects.^[16] In response to the economic collapse and sudden attack on dreams of a life of luxury, laborers sought justification for their financial woes. They first needed to unite around a similar cause, and, to do so, they founded the Workingmen’s Party of California in 1876. Primarily composed of younger, European blue-collar workers and factory operatives, the Workingmen’s Party designated Chinese immigrants as a common political enemy. For business owners, the anti-Chinese movement created a group of vulnerable laborers without civic protections who could be easily exploited.^[17] Beyond describing the “Chinese evil” in abstract terms, the Workingmen’s Party and public officials invested in xenophobia as a political tool. The party rallied around the slogan “The Chinese Must Go!”, a chant coined by party leader Denis Kearney.^[18] In particular, its publications focused on the physical space of Chinatown as a manifestation of immorality upon the modern urban landscape, thus seeking to reduce economic competition through physical displacement.^[19] Local anti-Chinese movements combined with national legislation to exclude Chinese immigrants from passage into the country and from obtaining legal rights to exercise political power.

Entering the Exclusion Era

At a federal level, the 1880 Immigration Treaty signed by the U.S. and China cemented Chinese immigrants as aliens unable to attain citizenship. An 1899 document circulated by the U.S. Treasury Department summarized the immigration laws on Chinese exclusion from 1882 to 1895 and addressed customs officials “for the information and guidance of all concerned.”^[20] Article IV of the document notes the 1880 Immigration Treaty, which affirmed that all Chinese citizens residing in the U.S. would enjoy the full scope of legal protection, barring naturalization. Despite living and working in the U.S., Chinese immigrants were unable to attain citizenship, therefore barring them from exercising the right to vote or petition on behalf of other immigrants. Moreover, the 1880 Immigration Treaty only applied to Chinese laborers already residing in the U.S., but it noticeably did not acknowledge continued immigration. Less than two years later, Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act due to fears that “the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof…the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come.”^[21] The 1880 treaty barring naturalization and unilateral 1882 decision to suspend the immigration of Chinese laborers affirmed paternalistic American policies which treated the Qing government as a dependent. Chinese subjects theoretically enjoyed legal protections within the U.S. but not enfranchisement, preventing them from directly influencing the republican government system that governed their economic statuses. 

As the largest national port of Asian immigration, San Francisco’s customs officers held significant sway in interpreting exclusionist policies. This significant flexibility led to variable application of the law at the city’s ports, documented in an 1899 report addressed to the San Francisco Collector of Customs. Compiled by two special agents, the report sought to investigate the admission process for Chinese immigrants and charged the Customs Department for the cost of this investigation.^[22] The report raised complaints against unprofessional conduct of customs officers, such as faulty interpreters, or requested wage standardization for stenographers at the port. Officials detained Chinese immigrants for months at a time, resulting in as many as 300 prospective immigrants waiting on the docks at a time. Without an approved proof of right to land, they were subject to deportation. Rather than taking individual cases through the court, the Chinese Bureau ordered San Francisco dock inspectors to select immigrants and directly deport individuals.^[23] Joint collusion between the San Francisco Chinese Bureau and steamship companies responsible for transporting immigrants abroad indicated that customs agents applied the law by relying on private middlemen to lessen the logistical work of deportation. For Chinese laborers seeking job opportunities in the country, the arbitrary selection of individuals for deportation solidified their status as transient workers. On the literal borders of American society, they were not considered full participating members. Their physical containment on the docks created a concentration of civic space dedicated to foreignness, made more remote by the Customs Department’s continued inability to process and verify identification documents throughout the 1890s.

The Chinese Exclusion Act and related customs restrictions reinforced initiatives against Chinese labor competition inside San Francisco. In particular, all Chinese-owned businesses were required to register their employees and their places of residence with the Customs Collector. Chinese merchants who had filed reports to Ship and Custom Brokers along Battery Street by Chinatown in the 1870s directly reported to the San Francisco Customs Collector in the 1890s.^[24] These files were categorized under the Immigration and Naturalization Services, indicating that all operating Chinese merchants, even if the undersigned employees resided in San Francisco, were tied to their identities as noncitizens. Moreover, Chinese merchants who had previously lived in the city and engaged in cross-continental business could gain domestic access more efficiently if they did business with white companies. Chinese merchants who took this route gained entry to the U.S., and their white business partners benefited economically by preventing the merchants from joining a rival company.^[25] This process placed Chinese immigrants on an uneven scale at the custom ports based on American corporate interests, since corporate agents wielded the power to advance certain application papers through existing social connections between the government and business sector. Once immigrants received passage to reside in San Francisco, additional political forces sought to control their movement within the city.

Reshaping the Urban Landscape

While the Workingmen’s Party successfully advocated for the prevention of continued immigration from China, they also turned inward to confront aliens at home in San Francisco’s gleaming coastal empire. By attempting to remove Chinese residential areas, white residents emphasized their own identities as inhabitants of a desirable location. In a pamphlet published by the Workingmen’s Party in March 1880, the organization turned to xenophobia to challenge the existence of Chinese-owned businesses. The introductory letter from the Workingmen’s Committee declared, “The Republican supervisors of today refuse to take action in the condemnation of Chinatown…its filthy conditions endangers the health of the City and County of San Francisco.”^[26] The pamphlet directly drew on Public Health Department reports, in which officials attributed the city’s natural ventilation to its coastal position. Contrasting Chinatown’s stagnant, squalid conditions against the naturally clean new city, these twelve blocks emerged as an unnatural and improper use of civic space.^[27] However, such reports by the Workingmen’s Party and the San Francisco Board of Health failed to consider the race and class discrimination that led to increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants living in high-density tenements. Bound in all four directions by formally designated urban zones – the wealthy Nob Hill district, San Francisco’s central business districts, and the Latin Quarter – Chinese residents had little room to expand past the existing twelve block settlement and faced challenges in establishing social connections elsewhere in the city.^[28]

The Workingmen’s Party painstakingly compiled a list of reported locations in Chinatown that explained its status as a nuisance, targeting specific undesirable features of the land. This itemized report featured a slew of alleyways in an allegedly slovenly state. Although Chinatown only encompassed a twelve-block area, the party raised over forty grievances about the “Chinese paradise of dirt and filth.” Between 1860 and 1870, the general Chinese population in California steadily rose from 34,988 to 49,310, solidifying their definite presence in the state.^[29] By 1880, Chinatown housed over 20,000 people, thus creating a high-density and primarily male neighborhood as earlier employment opportunities had been in the extractive industry. For residents across the city and the nation, sewage systems had only recently emerged in the past couple of decades in an effort to reform wastewater schemes and divert toxic waste from homes and drinking water. Despite this general lack of proper sanitation systems, the pamphlet only criticized the city’s Chinese quarters.^[30] Moreover, given that the voters behind the Workingmen’s Party were primarily working-class, they were not guaranteed access to ideal sanitation conditions. However, the pamphlet nevertheless criticized these locations for their violation of “all sanitary and police regulations and fire ordinances” and accused the Chinese residents of running illegal or immoral businesses such as opium dens or prostitution houses.^[31] While the illegal trade of opium might have been easier to condemn, the pamphlet also pointed out another violation: the neighborhood’s laundry houses.^[32] In particular, the laundry establishment located in an intersection between two alleyways was:

the filthiest hole imaginable; piles of dirt, mixed with excrements of the human body lay all about. The structure itself is of wood and about three feet from the ground. All the water used in this wash-house is allowed to escape underneath, and, with the filth, is in a fearful condition.^[33] 

By anonymizing the store name, this description also warned readers against frequenting not only this specific laundry but any Chinese laundry. In contrast to the dignified structure of the San Francisco Laundry, this nondescript wooden building situated between two equally unwashed alleyways fed into gross stereotypes regarding the cleanliness of the Chinese lifestyle. Describing Chinatown’s dismal living conditions as a “paradise” to Asiatic inclinations challenged the validity of Chinese-operated laundries elsewhere in the city.

Weaponizing Legislation Against Chinatown

Historians Erika Lee and Gwendolyn Mink have argued that from the perspective of San Franciscan trade unions, Chinese immigrants posed an economic threat. In particular, the expansion of Chinese businesses from within the twelve-block enclave of Chinatown to white neighborhoods extended their range of potential clientele. Anti-Chinese sentiment in California contributed to trade-union politics that took advantage of anti-immigrant hostility to exclude Chinese laborers. Existing unions enforced hostility against Chinese workers, including the American Federation of Labor (AFL) trade union that pitted American masculinity against “Asiatic coolieism.” American workers who envisioned California as a pristine environment for labor to flourish found their vision disrupted by incoming Chinese immigrants, whom they viewed as labor competition. Moreover, even if workers did not directly interact with these new immigrants, they were susceptible to narratives created through reports from American traders, diplomats, or missionaries. These narratives often portrayed Chinese people as exotic threats, a gendered characterization that will be discussed below with the laundry industry.

An 1893 map of Chinatown provides insight into the neighborhood’s building density at the end of the nineteenth century (see Figure 1 for a georeferenced mapping).^[34] U.S. immigration officer John Lynch, responsible for mapping out various Chinatowns across California, marked each individual storefront with the business name and occupation.^[35] This mapping of Chinatown, with a focus on small businesses, portrays the area as a spatially compressed, self-contained unit that caters to Chinatown’s residents. Such a cartographic depiction could be used to validate perceptions of Chinatown as a labyrinthine, enigmatic enclave. Forty-three lots operated in the one-block stretch along Waverly Place alone from Sacramento Street to Clay Street, including nine barber shops, seven grocery stores, three cigar or liquor stores, one drug store, one suspected brothel, and seventeen other stairways, vacant lots, or specialized businesses. By marking the brothel with a question mark, Lynch argues that any corner of Chinatown could be a site of vice. Clay Street to Washington Street contained another sixty-three shops, including eleven barber shops, three grocery stores, two cigar or liquor stores, two drug stores, five gambling shops, and thirty-nine stairways, store rooms, or specialized businesses. Out of the small businesses operating along Waverly Place, only one saloon was marked as white-owned, and all except two buildings were constructed using brick. Although white residents and immigrants certainly lived in Chinatown, their limited numbers ensured that Chinese laundry-owners would not be able to gather twelve signatories to obtain a working permit. Similar store categories often clustered on the same block, such as the dominance of barber shops on Waverly Place, shirt makers on Stockton Street, or the butcher and fish shops along Washington Alley. The clustering indicates that Chinese merchants in various businesses often sought spatial locality within their communities. Most strikingly, Lynch marked under ten laundries, yet the Yick Wo case notes 240 Chinese-owned laundries.^[36] Therefore, most Chinese launderers must have operated outside of Chinatown, a phenomenon affirmed in Nayan Shah’s Contagious Divides.^[37] The lack of laundries also suggests that Chinese-owned laundries did not cater to Chinatown’s own residents but rather were frequented by white customers, a concerning occurrence for those who worried that Chinatown might curl its tendrils of depravity across the city’s hundreds of laundry shops and compete for clientele.

Figure 1: A map of the following streets in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1893: Waverly Place, Washington Street from Kearney to Stockton, Stockton Street from Jackson to Sacramento, Sacramento Street from Kearney to Stockton, viewable here on ArcGIS Storymaps. Clicking on the destination icons will result in a pop-up box describing the location.^[38]

Beyond exploring xenophobic sentiments in relation to trade-union politics, existing literature more broadly investigates the development of Orientalist ideology around perceived Chinese sexual norms. This body of literature investigates how stereotypes of sexually deviant Chinese prostitutes and feminized Chinese men morally challenged existing standards of conduct. Following the Gold Rush in California and the corresponding mining boom, Chinese immigrants began arriving in San Francisco, most of whom were male laborers. Chinese men were perceived as sexually ambiguous due to their traditional Manchu queue hairstyles despite working in traditionally masculine extractive industries.^[39] They were further feminized due to the Chinese dominance in the laundry industry, a traditionally domestic responsibility. While white laundry owners unionized to remake public perception of laundry as an industrial undertaking, Chinese laundrymen continued to be perceived as domestic workers. Increasing hostility from trade unions, which perpetuated this effeminized image, further explains why Yick Wo was unable to amend the existing socioeconomic segregation within the laundry industry.

The dominance of Chinese labor in the San Francisco laundry industry merged with the imagination of the emasculated Asian man. As Chinese laborers transitioned from extractive work in the railroad industry and sought employment in cities, urban organized labor pushed them out of trade union industries such as tobacco or shoe manufacturing.^[40] The lack of employment opportunities prevented Chinese residents in cities such as San Francisco from conducting large-scale enterprises. In response to the economic downturn in the 1870s and increased racial hostility, Chinese workers turned to non-organized industries associated with feminized service work.^[41] According to The Daily Examiner, as of 1886 Chinese laundries held a total capital of $200,000 and paid $180,000 annually for rent, gas, water, licenses, and taxes, representing a substantial financial investment.^[42] The 1870 census reported 12,022 Chinese people residing in San Francisco, of whom 1,333 worked as laundrymen, or over ten percent of the population.^[43] This significant fraction of male Chinese laborers working in the laundry industry generated stereotypes of Chinese men as naturally feminized and domestic, a stereotype that ignored their limited economic realities. Under the slogan “The Chinese Must Go,” popularized by the Workingmen’s Party, playwright Henry Grimm staged a play revolving around the imagined lives of the Blaine family and their Chinese male domestic servants.^[44] Grimm’s choice of the name Blaine, which possibly referred to a pro-Exclusion Act politician James Blaine, and specifying the Chinese characters as domestic workers cheated of their wages indicates the wide reach of this feminized stereotype, even into cultural settings.^[45] Chinese male laborers occupied a space at the intersection of overly feminine–due to their occupation in domestic work traditionally performed by women–and threatening–due to competing with white workers in the extractive industry. 

Chinese laundry owners and employees lacked a means of advocating through organized laundry associations, which exclusively admitted white laundry workers. In the 1880s, white laundry owners shifted from being members of the laundry trade to calling themselves laundrymen of the laundry industry. White laundry workers established trade journals such as the American Laundry Journal, an industry periodical representing laundrymen and laundry trade associations.^[46] The founding of the Laundrymen’s National Association (LNA) in 1880 established a formal nationwide trade organization that regulated prices, shared technological advancements, and set general guidelines for laundry services.^[47] By classifying the laundry trade as a formal industry and developing organized labor mechanisms, the LNA enabled the development of laundry factories with a clear division of labor between receptionists and specialized laundry workers who cleaned, dried, and operated steamed engines.^[48] This shared technological network reshaped laundry work directly on shop floors as successful laundries invested in mechanized capital.^[49] A white-dominated organization, the LNA was attentive to the question of competing Chinese laundry services nationwide.^[50] This transition to mechanization renovated existing guidelines on the physical space of a laundry shop, which also targeted smaller Chinese-owned operations. Given that San Francisco housed the largest Chinese population in the nation, the city established legislation to protect white owners by raising the barrier to entry into the laundry industry.

The work that took place within Chinese laundries was also imagined as technologically and therefore socially retrograde. In a political cartoon published in Frank Leslie’s Weekly Newspaper, three caricatured Chinese male workers dressed in traditional clothing “wash” and iron clothes in a laundry shop (see Figure 2 below).^[51] Shirts and pants hang from a clothing line on the ceiling while the workers sort through piles of clothing on the table and ground. Titled “The Coming Man--A Chinese Laundry in San Francisco, California--The Coming Man Washing, Drying, Sprinkling and Ironing Clothes,” this cartoon drew on stereotypes of the “Coming Man” from Guangzhou, in southern China.^[52] The “Coming Man” proved to be a versatile tool used to characterize Chinese laborers, on one hand warning of “Chinese barbarism” in the extractive industry while also demonizing feminized Chinese domestic work. The leftmost figure in the cartoon spits onto the clothing in an imitation of washing while a shallow bowl sits on the table beside him. Approximations of Mandarin characters hang along the wall. Dressed in a dark shirt and white trousers in contrast to his coworkers, the laborer in charge of the “wash” dominates the frame. Spraying saliva from his mouth, this malevolent caricature confirmed existing propaganda surrounding the immorality of Chinese laundries. Compared to the LNA’s technologically involved approach to expanding the laundry industry, the perceived crowded confines, walls made of wood planks, and unnatural workers dirtying rather than cleaning the clothes further justified the Board of Supervisors’ right to regulate workplace conditions.

The pervasive xenophobic language used by the Workingmen’s Party and even in official city health reports reveals a social atmosphere conditioned to affect legislation that targeted Chinese spaces. The same year the pamphlet was published, the 1880 ordinance preceding Yick Wo v. Hopkins capitalized on the opportunity to expand San Francisco’s public health system and advance its reputation as a modern city at the cost of shutting down hundreds of the city’s Chinese-owned laundries. After the Supreme Court of California remanded Yick Wo to the custody of Chief of Police Patrick Crowley, the plaintiff once again appealed the ruling, this time to the federal Circuit Court for the District of California. The judge in this case, Yick Wo v. Crowley, once again dismissed Yick Wo’s request to be released from prison due to lack of jurisdiction over a state court ruling. In the subpoena summoning Crowley to court, the Circuit Court stated that on May 26, 1882, Ordinance 1569 “declared it unlawful for any person to operate a laundry within the corporate limits SF ‘without having first attained the consent of the Board of Supervisors’ unless the laundry is located in building constructed of either brick or stone.”^[53] Two months later, in July, the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco adopted a comprehensive system of policing and sanitary regulations in Ordinance 1587, which expanded ordinance 1569. Henceforth, it was unlawful to maintain a laundry east of Ninth and Larkin Streets without consent from the Board of Supervisors, which required “the recommendation of twelve or more citizens and taxpayers in the block where the laundry was to be established.”^[54] East of the Ninth and Larkin Streets points to an area that lies outside of Chinatown, indicating that Chinese-owned laundries may have operated in that region even before Yick Wo. Considering that no Chinese immigrants could obtain citizenship, simply knowing of twelve or more citizens in a block was a challenge. Only permitting the operation of laundries housed within brick or stone buildings such as the three-story San Francisco Laundry targeted Chinese laundry owners operating in older wooden buildings. Given that Ordinance 1569 carried a fine of up to $1000 and six months in prison, violating the decree posed a significant risk to a laundryman’s career and promised economic devastation if revenues from the laundry shop supported family expenses. Moreover, the ordinance exploited existing social relations only accessible to enfranchised citizens. 

This twofold economic and social attack reinforced Exclusion Era legislation. Although the U.S. may have promised protection to Chinese residents, this seemingly innocuous ordinance stripped them of social security and unveiled the challenges of operating a business without political representation. Without explicitly banning Chinese laundries, the ordinance managed to target those businesses through knowledge of urban space. Legislation took advantage of existing hatred for Chinatown’s imagined labyrinthine filth to promote San Francisco’s proper cleaning services operated in a clean environment by racially clean employees.

Figure 2: Cartoon of Chinese laundry workers from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (May 21, 1870)

Justice Is Blind (to Urban Reality): The Shortcomings of Yick Wo  

On top of stemming the proliferation of Chinese modes of living across the city, the ordinances preceding Yick Wo sought to regulate the physical space within a laundry. According to section 74 of the Consolidation Act of 1856, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors gained jurisdiction over making “such regulations concerning the erection and use of buildings as may be necessary for the safety of the inhabitants.”^[55] The Supreme Court of California’s decision on Yick Wo’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus indicated that the Board of Supervisors also could remove “nuisances to public health” by regulating building appearance, writing that the board may: 

prohibit or regulate all occupations which are against good morals, contrary to public order and decency, or dangerous to the public safety. Clothes washing is certainly not opposed to good morals or subversive of public order or decency, but, when conducted in given localities, it may be highly dangerous to the public safety…we do not find that they have prohibited the establishment of laundries, but that they have, as they well might do, regulated the places at which they should be established, the character of the buildings in which they are to be maintained, etc. The process of washing is not prohibited by thus regulating the places at which and the surroundings by which it must be exercised.^[56]

The opinion failed to establish a direct argument linking clothes washing in “given localities” to dangers to the “public safety” and did not provide specific examples of dangers endemic to certain localities and not others. In the decision to remand Yick Wo rather than overturn his arrest, the Supreme Court of California reframed the act of prohibiting Chinese laundry operations as a general regulation of the characteristics of a laundry building. The opinion simultaneously declares that the board may regulate a laundry’s location in the city and that this regulation does not ban “the process of washing,” an assumption inattentive to the realities of operating a laundry business with limited capital. Without the necessary resources to relocate, refurbish an old wooden structure, or the social connections to file a permit to maintain operating, Chinese laundries would be forced to close unless they continued to operate illegally. Therefore, the opinion itself admits the inextricable connection between the laundry business and the regulation of urban space, both geographically and in terms of the actual building architecture.

The Yick Wo v. Hopkins’ majority opinion reversed the California court’s ruling on discriminatory application of the law, affirming that, in practice, the ordinances specifically targeted Chinese-owned laundries. Justice Matthews wrote:

There is nothing in the ordinances which points to such a regulation of the business of keeping and conducting laundries. They seem intended to confer, and actually do confer, not a discretion to be exercised upon a consideration of the circumstances of each case, but a naked and arbitrary power to give or withhold consent not only as to places, but as to persons…It is purely arbitrary, and acknowledges neither guidance nor restraint.^[57]

Matthews reinterpreted the ordinances to mean that regulating technicalities such as building material did not directly correspond to regulating the work of operating a laundry business. Rather, the Supreme Court ruling argued that the neutrality of the ordinances resulted in a biased application, and, in particular, an application that prioritized the power of an individual municipal entity. The majority opinion successfully targeted the “naked and arbitrary power to give or withhold consent…as to persons,” but it did so by assuming that the original ordinances did not in fact regulate laundries using the language of public danger. Under this interpretation, the law’s arbitrary application became the main cause for why Yick Wo, despite addressing the city’s public health requirements, had yet to be released from state custody while his white counterparts were granted permits. Thus, the opinion escaped the burden of a structural debate about the ordinance’s regulatory goals in favor of the easier solution: simply condemning city officials’ racially discriminatory review process.

The inherent racialized element of urban labor in San Francisco challenged the ability of the ordinances to be executed impartially. The court arrived at the final ruling through the following logical steps: The 1880 treaty between the U.S. and China promised that the U.S. government would uphold all measures of protection for Chinese laborers, and the language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause gave no indication that it applied only to citizens; rather, it applied to “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States.”^[58] By extension, the laundry ordinances could not be “applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand.”^[59] Yet the opinion failed to consider Ordinance 1569 as the latest iteration of a series of public policies attacking Chinese-owned businesses by targeting their relative lack of economic resources. With the continued operation of the Workingmen’s Party, the successful passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the increasingly industrial laundry trade gatekeeping access to technological advancements, the Supreme Court majority opinion remained glaringly silent on the racially-divided power imbalance in the San Francisco laundry trade. At issue was not only the “naked and arbitrary power” to exclusively shut down Chinese laundries and imprison Chinese laundrymen for continued operations, but also the inherent divisions in the city’s spatial boundaries that framed Chinese laundries as an encroachment on white civic spaces. Yick Wo v. Hopkins clearly reinforced the government’s obligation to uphold the Fourteenth Amendment for noncitizens, yet it did so in a juridical vacuum without acknowledgment of the plaintiff’s experience as a disenfranchised Chinese resident.

Following Yick Wo and Wo Lee’s discharge from custody and imprisonment, the Chronicle remained quiet.^[60] What followed their release? Did Yick Wo return to his former laundry at St. Francis Street and Harris Street crossing? Yick Wo’s disappearance from major San Francisco newspapers despite winning a Supreme Court case that upheld the Equal Protection Clause suggests an editorial board and readership uninterested in the plaintiffs. In the face of public disinterest, California Representative Thomas Geary sponsored the Geary Act of 1892, which extended the Chinese Exclusion Act and enforced additional stipulations, such as forced labor and deportation for “any Chinese person or person of Chinese descent convicted and adjudged to be not lawfully entitled to be or remain in the United States.”^[61] Thus, complaints of Chinese competition from disillusioned white laborers became enshrined in legislation that challenged their belonging (and that of their children) while desiring to extract production from their bodies. Yick Wo ruled against the selective prosecution of the 1880 Laundry Ordinance, yet it did little to protect Chinese nationals from enjoying the November 1880 Immigration Treaty that promised Chinese laborers “all rights that are given by the laws of the United States to citizens of the most favored nation.” The eye of the law, blind to the political and urban realities of operating a Chinese laundry in the face of xenophobic rhetoric, discharged the petitioners to a little-changed environment.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Legal Cases and Statutes

1. In the Matter of YICK WO, on Habeas Corpus. 68 Cal. 294. Supreme Court of California, 1885.
2. In re Wo Lee. 1886, 26 F. 471. United States Circuit Court, District of California.
3. Worley, A. E. T. Comp. The Original Consolidation Act: An Act to Repeal the Several Charters of the City of San Francisco, to Establish the Boundaries of the City and County of San Francisco, and to Consolidate the Government Thereof. San Francisco: WM. M. Hilton & Co., 1887.
4. Yick Wo v. Crowley, No. 3942. U.S. Circuit Court, Ninth Circuit, District of California January 12, 1886.
5. Yick Wo v. Hopkins. 118 U.S. 359. U.S. Supreme Court, 1886.

Newspapers 

1. “In the Lead: California in Her True Position,” San Francisco Chronicle (1869-1922), San Francisco, January 1, 1887. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: San Francisco Chronicle.
2. “The Laundry Ordinance: Its Enforcement Disputed in the Circuit Court.” The Daily Examiner, San Francisco, January 12, 1886.

Maps 

1. Maps/Chinatown Directories, 1893. Immigration Chinese Business Partnership Investigation Case Files, ca. Lynch 1894–ca.1944 (FRC 85-60-0504). National Archives at San Francisco, San Bruno.

Drawings and Plays

1. Doré, Hunk E. The Coming Man -- John Chinaman, 1869. Print. 1869. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
2. Grimm, Henry. The Chinese Must Go: A Farce in Four Acts. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft and Co. Printers. 1879.
3. The Coming Man--A Chinese Laundry in San Francisco, California--The Coming Man Washing, Drying, Sprinkling and Ironing Clothes. From Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, May 14, 1870. Accessed from The University of Virginia.

Archival Collections 

1.  Miscellaneous San Francisco Firms late 1800s, ca. 1894-1944. File Number 13500/05, Chinese (Business) Partnership Investigation Case Files, Immigration and Naturalization Service – San Francisco District Office, National Archives at San Francisco, San Bruno.

Documents and Reports

1. The Workingmen’s Party of California. Chinatown Declared a Nuisance! San Francisco, 1880.
2. “Irregular Application of Chinese Exclusion Laws at San Francisco, California, and Operation of U.S. Customs Service.” 1898-1899. Chinese Exclusion Laws--California, Casefile 53108/9A, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Series A: Subject Correspondence Files, Part 1: Asian Immigration and Exclusion, 1906-1913 and Supplement to Part 1: 1898-1941. National Archives, Washington, D.C.
3. Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments. Population by County, 1860-2000. n.d.
4. Secretary of the Interior. Population of Civil Divisions Less than Counties in Totals, and as Native and Foreign, White and Colored, at the Census of 1870. Government Printing Office, 1872
5. Secretary of the Interior. Population of the United States (By States and Territories) in the Aggregate, and as White, Colored, Free Colored, Slave, Chinese, and Indian, at Each Census. Government Printing Office, 1872.
6. United States Treasury Department. Laws, Treaties, and Regulations Relating to the Exclusion of Chinese. 1899.

Secondary Sources:

1. Barth, Gunther. Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver. Oxford University Press, 1975.
2. Bernstein, David. “The Supreme Court and ‘Civil Rights,’ 1886-1908.” The Yale Law Journal 100, no. 3 (1990): 724–44.
3. Beardsley Butler, Elizabeth. Women and the Trades: Pittsburgh, 1907-1908. Pittsburgh: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1909.
4. Brechin, Gray. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
5. Chen, Yong. Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community. Stanford University Press, 2000.
6. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
7. Lew-Williams, Beth. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018.
8. Mink, Gwendolyn. Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920. Cornell University Press, 1986.
9. Mohun, Arwen P. Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
10. Ou, Hsin-yun. “Chinese Ethnicity and the American Heroic Artisan in Henry Grimm’s ‘The Chinese Must Go’ (1879).” Comparative Drama 44, no. 1 (2010): 63–84.
11. Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
12. Shumsky, Neil. The Evolution of Political Protest and the Workingmen’s Party of California. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991.
13. Sullum, Jacob. “Smokin Opium Is Not Our Vice.” Reason. May 2024.
14. Wang, Joan S. “Race, Gender, and Laundry Work: The Roles of Chinese Laundrymen and American Women in the United States, 1850-1950.” Journal of American Ethnic History 24, no. 1 (2004): 58–99.
15. Wu McClain, Laurene. “From Victims to Victors; A Chinese Contribution to American Law: Yick Wo versus Hopkins.” Chinese America: History and Perspectives, 2003.
16. Salinger, Sharon V. Taverns and Drinking in Early America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004.
17. Salmon, Marylynn. Women and the Law of Property in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Appendix

Figure 1a: Customs report from 1991 for a Chinese-owned business conducting cross-continental operations.

Figure 1b: An 1875 report to the Hughes, McDaniel, and Edson Ship and Custom House Brokers from 亚(亞)贝宁 (romanized Yà Bèi Níng), the only employee at a firm located at the Sacramento and Dupont Streets in Chinatown.

Footnotes

^[1] “In the Lead: California in Her True Position,” San Francisco Chronicle (1869-1922), 1887, 15, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: San Francisco Chronicle.

^[2] “In the Lead,” 17.

^[3] “In the Lead,” 17.

^[4] Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 359 (1886).

^[5] In re Yick Wo, 68 Cal. 294, 9 P. 139 (1885).

^[6] In re Wo Lee, 26 F. 471 (1886).

^[7]  Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 359.

^[8] David Bernstein, “The Supreme Court and ‘Civil Rights,’ 1886-1908,” The Yale Law Journal 100, no. 3 (1990): 277; Laurene Wu McClain, “From Victims to Victors; A Chinese Contribution to American Law: Yick Wo versus Hopkins,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives (2003): 3; Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886).

^[9] Neil Shumsky, The Evolution of Political Protest and the Workingmen’s Party of California (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 61, 65; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 12, 69; Erika Lee, “The Chinese Are Coming. How Can We Stop Them?: Chinese Exclusion and the Origins of American Gatekeeping,” in Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader, eds. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen (Rutgers University Press, 2010), 48, 51–52.

^[10] Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 33–5.

^[11] Residents in this context refers to white settlers who came to San Francisco and enjoyed the legal rights that came with citizenship. I refer to them as residents due to the permanence of the term. The term “residents” implies that despite the newness of the California frontier, these people perceived themselves as long-term inhabitants with spatial stake and therefore social power.

^[12] California was already home to estimated hundreds of thousands of Native peoples with distinct languages and regional practices. In the nineteenth century, a systemic state-sanctioned genocide reduced the Native population from over 300,000 in the late eighteenth century to barely over 25,000 by 1900 (see William Bauer, “Stop Hunting Ishi,” Boom: A Journal of California 4, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 48). Moreover, a map of state-registered Native tribes reveals that tribes registered with the Bureau of Indian Affairs are almost all located outside of the most heavily colonized regions (first Spanish colonization and later American settlement following the Gold Rush), such as the San Francisco Bay Area (see California Tribal Lands (California: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011)).

^[13] Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (Oxford University Press, 1975), 131.

^[14] Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments. Population by County, 1860-2000. n.d.

^[15] Barth, Instant Cities, 153.

^[16] Shumsky, The Evolution of Political Protest and the Workingmen’s Party of California, 67.

^[17] Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community (Stanford University Press, 2000), 46.

^[18] Shumsky, The Evolution of Political Protest and the Workingmen’s Party of California, 20.

^[19] Workingmen's Party of California, Chinatown Declared a Nuisance! (San Francisco, 1880), 2.

^[20]  United States Treasury Department, Laws, Treaties, and Regulations Relating to the Exclusion of Chinese, 1899, 1.

^[21] “Laws, Treaties, and Regulations Relating to the Exclusion of Chinese,” 8.

^[22] “Irregular Application of Chinese Exclusion Laws at San Francisco, California, and Operation of U.S. Customs Service,” 1898-1899, 7, [Chinese Exclusion Laws--California] Casefile 53108/9A, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Series A: Subject Correspondence Files, Part 1: Asian Immigration and Exclusion, 1906-1913 and Supplement to Part 1: 1898-1941, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

^[23] “Irregular Application of Chinese Exclusion Laws at San Francisco, California, and Operation of U.S. Customs Service,” 9.

^[24] Miscellaneous San Francisco Firms late 1800s, ca. 1894-1944, File Number 13500/05, Chinese (Business) Partnership Investigation Case Files, Immigration and Naturalization Service – San Francisco District Office, National Archives at San Francisco, San Bruno. – See Figures 1a and 1b in the Appendix for examples of the reports sent to customs collectors.

^[25] “Irregular Application of Chinese Exclusion Laws at San Francisco, California, and Operation of U.S. Customs Service,” 11–2.

^[26] Chinatown Declared a Nuisance!, 2.

^[27] Chinatown Declared a Nuisance!, 43–44.

^[28] Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 25.

^[29]  Secretary of the Interior, Population of the United States (By States and Territories) in the Aggregate, and as White, Colored, Free Colored, Slave, Chinese, and Indian, at Each Census (Government Printing Office, 1872), 8.

^[30] Shah, Contagious Divides, 49.

^[31] Chinatown Declared a Nuisance!, 14–16.

^[32] San Francisco public officials staged raids of locations they suspected to be opium houses. One of these locations was 609 Dupont Street in Chinatown, which was declared an opium den by the San Francisco Examiner. The Board of Supervisors also enacted an ordinance on November 15, 1875, a month prior to the raid, declaring that “no person shall, in the city and county of San Francisco, keep or maintain, or become an inmate of, or visit, or shall in any way contribute to the support of any place, house, or room, where opium is smoked, or where persons assemble for the purpose of smoking opium” under the idea that Chinese drugs were making their way into mainstream white culture. See Jacob Sullum, “Smokin Opium Is Not Our Vice,” Reason, May 2024.

^[33] Chinatown Declared a Nuisance!, 15.

^[34] Refer to Figure 1 for the map, which can be accessed on Yale ArcGIS Online Storymaps, also in the Appendix (can zoom in to view the maps in detail). The maps are marked as beginning in 1894, but one of the pages is dated to November 23, 1893, so I chose to use that date. Lynch may have extended in the project into 1894, although it is unclear from the writing on the maps how long the cartography project lasted. I overlaid Lynch’s maps onto a modern map of Chinatown based on the street names, although the dimensions of the stores on Lynch’s binder paper sketches do not entirely accurately map onto current building sizes (the text would be extremely distended horizontally).

^[35] Map of Dupont Street from Clay Street to Washington Street, 1894, Immigration "Chinese (Business) Partnership" Investigation Case Files, ca. 1894 - ca. 1944, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives at San Francisco, San Bruno, CA.

^[36] Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 359. – Lynch also distinguished between “Chinese” and “White” “Houses of Prostitution” and marked certain lots as “Opium(?).”

^[37] Shah, Contagious Divides, 68.

^[38] John Lynch, Maps/Chinatown Directories, ca.1894–1944, Record Group 85, Immigration Chinese Business Partnership Investigation Case Files.

^[39] Lee, “The Chinese Are Coming. How Can We Stop Them?”,  25–27, 57; Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Cornell University Press, 1986), 72, 96.

^[40] Joan S. Wang, “Race, Gender, and Laundry Work: The Roles of Chinese Laundrymen and American Women in the United States, 1850-1950,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24, no. 1 (2004): 60.

^[41] Wang, 60.

^[42] “The Laundry Ordinance: Its Enforcement Disputed in the Circuit Court,” The Daily Examiner, San Francisco, January 12, 1886, 2.

^[43]Secretary of the Interior, Population of Civil Divisions Less than Counties in Totals, and as Native and Foreign, White and Colored, at the Census of 1870 (Government Printing Office, 1872), 91.

^[44] Henry Grimm, The Chinese Must Go: A Farce in Four Acts (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft and Co. Printers, 1879). – Coincidentally, the A.L. Bancroft and Co. Printers publishing company was established by Hubert Howe Bancroft, an American ethnologist whom the Berkeley Bancroft Library is named after. Bancroft was instrumental in supporting early ethnological studies and anthropological work in California, which (often violently) centered around the study of indigenous peoples.

^[45] Grimm, The Chinese Must Go, 64.

^[46] Arwen P. Mohun, Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 55.

^[47] Mohun, Steam Laundries, 57.

^[48] Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, Women and the Trades: Pittsburgh, 1907-1908 (1909: reprint, Pittsburgh, 1984), 161.

^[49] Mohun, Steam Laundries, 71.

^[50] Mohun, 51.

^[51] The Coming Man--A Chinese Laundry in San Francisco, California--The Coming Man Washing, Drying, Sprinkling and Ironing Clothes, from Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, May 14, 1870, accessed from The University of Virginia.

^[52] Hunk E. Doré, The Coming Man -- John Chinaman, 1869, print, 1869, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

^[53] Yick Wo v. Crowley, 118 U.S. 356 (1886), 4.

^[54] Yick Wo v. Crowley, 6-7. – The Ninth and Larkin Streets lie to the West of Chinatown, indicating that Chinatown would have fallen in this geographic category.

^[55] The Original Consolidation Act, 1856, sec. 74, in The Original Consolidation Act: An Act to Repeal the Several Charters of the City of San Francisco, to Establish the Boundaries of the City and County of San Francisco, and to Consolidate the Government Thereof, comp. A. E. T. Worley (San Francisco: WM. M. Hilton & Co., 1887), 20.

^[56] Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 360.

^[57] Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 at 360. 366–67.

^[58] Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 368-69; U.S. Constitution. amend. XIV, sec. 1.

^[59] Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 373–74.

^[60] Could not find any newspapers in the Proquest News and Newspapers Vault that mentioned Yick Wo past the decision date in May 1886 through 1900.

^[61] Geary Act, 27 Stat. 25 (1892), sec. 4.