Steamboat Excursions in the Era of Chinese Exclusion

On a bright June morning in 1883, a boat flying the red and yellow Chinese flag left a pier in lower Manhattan and steamed up the Hudson River. Onboard were hundreds of Chinese American men who attended missionary Sunday Schools. Though most of these adult pupils worked for low wages in steam laundries that mechanized the washing of clothes, they had saved their pennies to organize a getaway for the white women who taught them how to speak English and read the Bible. Through telescopes and opera glasses, students and their teachers watched from the deck of the steamer as city turned to mountains, wetlands, forests, and meadows.[1] After a journey of almost fifty miles, the party landed at Iona Island to explore hundreds of acres of woodland, grassy lawn, salt marsh, and an abandoned vineyard.[2] “Frantic with excitement,” the Chinese American students “immediately set off quantities of fireworks” that turned “the atmosphere of the island blue,” according to the New York Times. As smoke and sparks shaped like “dragons, serpents, and birds of different species” filled the air, the smell of gunpowder masked the salty sea breeze.[3] After a day spent listening to music, resting in the shade, flying kites, picnicking, and praying, the party embarked for home in the late afternoon.[4]

The Sunday school excursion traveled almost 50 miles from lower Manhattan, up the Hudson, to Iona Island. G.W. & C.B. Colton & Co., “Colton’s New Township Railroad Map of New York,” 1883, Library of Congress, https://lccn.loc.gov/98688526

 This was one of many steamboat excursions that exposed the city’s working people to the wilder places outside New York in the late nineteenth century. All excursionists shared the desire to see gorgeous scenery, relax and recover from a relentless work schedule, and breathe air that was much fresher than what could be found on the crowded and unsanitary streets of Manhattan. But excursions had extra layers of meaning for Chinese Americans during the era of Chinese Exclusion. 

 The excursion to Iona Island took place in 1883, the year after U.S. legislators passed the first Chinese Exclusion Act in the context of rising anti-Chinese xenophobia. For more than a decade, white workers had been condemning immigrants from China, framing boatloads of hungry newcomers as ruthless competitors whose willingness to labor for low wages would push others out of work. The following horrifically racist cartoon reflects this fear, blaming people of Chinese descent for low pay and job scarcity in the United States. 

This racist cartoon suggests that Chinese laborers, depicted through dehumanizing caricature, would monopolize jobs that should go to white workers. George Frederick Keller, “What Shall We Do With Our Boys,” The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, March 3, 1882, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:What_Shall_We_Do_with_Our_Boys,_by_George_Frederick_Keller,_published_in_The_Wasp_on_March_3,_1882_-_Oakland_Museum_of_California_-_DSC05171.JPG

Race drew a perceived line between worthy workers and harmful outsiders. Newcomers from Europe arrived in much higher numbers, but those from China faced extra blame and condemnation. Three hundred German American protesters who gathered in New York’s Tompkins Square in 1870 cheered as a labor leader condemned “the lowest and most degraded of the Chinese barbaric race” for taking jobs away from white immigrants.[5] Nativist fearmongering overshadowed the culpability of greedy employers, who drove down wages knowing that there would always be someone desperate enough to accept less pay. What made laborers replaceable, furthermore, was the mechanization of production that eliminated the need for extensive job training. Immigrants of Chinese descent were scapegoats during a complex transition to industrial capitalism. This prejudice became policy in 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese laborers from entering the United States.[6]

The excursion to Iona Island that took place the next year pushed back against the Chinese Exclusion Act. The strategic guest list suggests that the getaway was about politics as much as play. Organizer Der Ah Wing invited prominent Chinese Americans to join the Sunday school students and their teachers, like editor of the Chinese American newspaper Wong Chin Foo and Chinese Consul Au Yang Ming. White guests included Postmaster Henry Pearson, who managed the delivery of mail from China, and merchant Vernon Seaman, who spoke Chinese and was an advocate against exclusion.[7] Also onboard was Customs House Collector William Robertson, who enforced the Chinese Exclusion Act as the manager of New York’s port. Robertson shared the deck with a man he had detained: Professor Shin Chin Sun, who arrived without the proper paperwork to prove that he was not a laborer banned from entry to the country.[8] The excursion set the stage for influential men from opposing sides of the nativist law to meet one another and engage in potentially transformative conversations onboard the steamboat and in the leafy grove at Iona Island.

The Sunday School excursion furthermore pushed a story of friendship between people of Chinese and European descent into public view, countering the pervasive narrative of conflict and competition. Newspapers reported that “American ladies and Chinese gentlemen were chatting affably together, Chinese boys were playing with American children, and the language of America and China mingled in conversation.”[9] Harper’s Magazine printed the following image of students and their teachers listening to music and flying kites together at Iona Island. While the white women’s faces are drawn more carefully, the Chinese American men are depicted here with much more respect than in the cartoon above. The friendly relationships that the excursion showcased likely shaped this media coverage that was much less dehumanizing towards people of Chinese descent than was usual for the time.

This image depicts the Sunday School picnic to Iona Island, where Chinese American students played music, set off fire crackers, and flew kites with their white women teachers. W.A. Rogers, “The Chinese Picnic,” Harper’s Magazine, June 23, 1883, 385.

The excursion taught some onlookers that people of Chinese descent could assimilate into New York’s general population. The Times framed the excursion as proof of “the civilization of American-resident Chinamen,” drawing on the racist framework that cast non-Westerners as uncivilized, but also breaking from stereotypes of Chinese Americans as permanent outsiders.[10] As other newspapers reported on the prayers and religious songs that excursionists sang together, Christian readers learned that they shared more with some of their Chinese American neighbors than they might have assumed. The excursion to Iona Island made similarities and amity between New Yorkers of Chinese and European descent visible at a tense moment when many whites argued that immigrants from China were too different to become Americans. Excursions became an annual tradition for Sunday schools because these getaways offered not just fun and relaxation away from the city, but also opportunities to shift ideas about Chinese Americans.[11]

As journalist Wong Chin Foo covered the Iona Island excursion, he recognized the power of the event. But Wong was not a Christian. In 1888, he joined with fellow members of the Knee Hop Hong mutual aid society to organize what he called a “heathen picnic” for “the anti-Christian element of the Chinese.”[12] This excursion, which landed at Staten Island’s Bay Cliff Grove, also pushed against anti-Chinese nativism—but from another angle. While the Sunday School excursion drew attention to Chinese immigrants who converted to Christianity, members of the Knee Hop Hong were proud “joss worshippers,” according to Wong, who held fast to their beliefs.[13]

The Knee Hop Hong excursion rejected cultural assimilationism too. While Sunday school excursionists drank coffee and ate what the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called “American dishes,” those on the Knee Hop Hong excursion toasted with “sparkling Noi Mai Dul” and ate chow chop suey.[14] Some smoked opium, a drug that was becoming increasingly taboo as prejudice towards Chinese people and culture mounted.[15] Excursionists indulged in Chinese American food, drink, and drugs as they celebrated what Wong called “the Birthday of Chinatown,” or the “founding of the New York colony.”[16] By praising the neighborhood where Chinese culture flourished, members of the Knee Hop Hong insisted that people of Chinese descent belonged in New York whether or not they assimilated.[17]

The Knee Hop Hong excursion displayed the political and economic influence of Chinese American New Yorkers.[18] Decked out in diamonds, the organization’s president Tom Lee was a prospective alderman who reaped riches from Chinatown’s gambling halls and opium dens.[19] Also aboard were the neighborhood’s prominent merchants and Gon Hor, the grand master of the Chinese Free Masons.[20] Only “a small number of tickets,” Wong explained, were given to whites, “who must come well recommended as to character.”[21] While the Sunday school excursion showcased paternalistic relationships between white missionaries and their Chinese students and included an enemy who enforced the nativist law, the Knee Hop Hong made it clear that the only whites welcome aboard were demonstrated friends and collaborators. Chinese Americans had power of their own making, organizers of the excursion seemed to say, and owed no one deference.

Once the party reached its destination in Staten Island, the crowd of at least 400 people listened to what Wong called “patriotic speeches,” given in both English and Chinese, that denounced exclusion.[22] JC Baptize asserted that “Chinese immigration was restricted by the politicians lest the Aldermen lose their jobs and a Chinaman be elected President of the United States.”[23] In his speech, Wong praised “the prosperity of the Chinese merchants, despite the opposition of Americans to them.”[24] The “prejudice of Americans” towards people of Chinese descent harmed the United States, Wong asserted, because “a grand result would be achieved if the moral and political virtues of the Chinese could be added to the enterprise and energy of the Americans.”[25] Insisting that immigrants from China enhanced the nation, speakers countered assumptions that their community was parasitic. Through their words and actions, these excursionists argued that they were worthy Americans because of, rather than despite, their Chinese roots.

Yet newspapers stuck to hateful tropes when they covered the Knee Hop Hong excursion. The Sun reported on “unmarried gentlemen” who smoked opium with their white dates before laying down together to “sleep off its effects.”[26] Hinting at the possible outcomes of these taboo activities, the Evening World mockingly quipped that “a number of the merchants had their white wives and cute half-breed children with them.”[27] The next week, the Philadelphia Inquirer called the engagement of grocer Huet Sing to Florence McGusty a “sequel to the great heathen picnic.”[28] Most Chinese American men who dreamed of marriage and family partnered with white women, as biased enforcement of the 1875 Page Act—which banned immigrants who might pursue “lewd and immoral purposes”—targeted Asian women. These interracial unions triggered a stereotype that cast men of Chinese descent as sexual predators.

This racist myth was what eventually brought about the end of Sunday school excursions. The News described “pretty Sunday school teachers” watching students who played “in their childlike way” on an excursion in 1886, but assumptions that these Chinese American men were naïve and asexual eroded the next decade.[29] In 1895, the Police Illustrated News reported that a white teacher went “in the shrubbery” at Iona Island with her “favorite Sunday School scholar.” Making it clear what the pair were up to, the paper noted that many “slant-eyed children of white women by Chinese fathers” attended the trip too.[30] Then in 1909, the body of Sunday school teacher Elsie Siegel was found in a trunk in Chinatown. As authorities searched for her murderer, the media cast suspicion far beyond her classroom and acquaintances—towards all Chinese Americans.[31] The annual excursion was canceled, as newspapers from as far away as Minnesota reported that “there were many Lotharios among these Chinamen, sleek satiny yellow men, who boasted of their conquests of young pretty teachers.”[32] The annual excursion became a threat, rather than a boon, to the reputations of Chinese Americans.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New Yorkers of Chinese descent used steamboat excursions to make a case for their belonging. Sunday school students showcased friendly relationships with their teachers along with their religious and cultural assimilation. Members of the Knee Hop Hong proudly practiced traditions from China as they sailed out of New York Harbor, asserting that they could be Chinese and American at the same time. Both encountered suspicion and harmful stereotypes that only grew in the following decades, as the Chinese Exclusion Act was extended multiple times and expanded to cover most of Asia. Excursions aimed to soften views of immigration from China, but there was no escaping xenophobia and racism during the long era of Chinese exclusion—even during a holiday away from daily urban life. 

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Endnotes:
[1] “A Celestial Racket,” Truth, June 12, 1883, 1.
[2] Iona Island Application to General Services Administration, May 20, 1965, Bear Mountain Archives at Iona Island, Palisades Interstate Park Commission.
[3] “The First Chinese Picnic,” New York Times, June 12, 1883, 1.
[4] “The First Chinese Picnic,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 17, 1883, 1.
[5] “The Coming Coolie,” New York Times, July 1, 1870, 1. This protest responded to the hiring of 68 Chinese immigrants to work at the Passaic Steam Laundry in Belleville (now Newark), NJ. More people of Chinese descent were settling in East Coast cities, as violence on the West Coast pushed them away. Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 521.
[6] Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 73-112.
[7] “Mails from China and Australia,” New York Times, May 20, 1883, 10; “The Baptist Pastors,” New York Times, March 14, 1882, 3.
[8] “The Chinese Excursion,” Evening Telegram, June 9, 1883, 1.
[9] “The First Chinese Picnic,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 17, 1883, 1.
[10] “The First Chinese Picnic,” New York Times, June 12, 1883, 1. For views of Chinese immigrants as incapable of assimilation, see Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century Neighborhood That Invented Tapdance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 422; John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture 1776-1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 266-278.
[11] “Chinamen have a Picnic,” New-York Daily Tribune, June 9, 1885, 5; “Chinamen in New York,” The News, July 23, 1886, 1.
[12] “A Celestial Racket,” Truth, June 12, 1883, 1.
[13] Joss houses are statues that believers in Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship care for as homes to deities. Older stock New Yorkers were highly suspicious of Chinese religion. Anbinder, Five Points, 417-418.
[14] “The First Chinese Picnic,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 17, 1883, 1.
[15] “Chinamen on a Picnic,” New-York Daily Tribune, July 24, 1888, 5; Anbinder, Five Points, 407, 410, 413.
[16] Wong Chin Foo, “A Heathen Picnic,” The Sun, July 16, 1888, 5.
[17] By the time the neighborhood gained the name “Chinatown” in the 1880s, few Chinese American New Yorkers lived there, instead settling throughout the city and Brooklyn near the laundries where most they worked. But they went to Chinatown to shop and socialize. Daniel Czitrom, New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 396-401; Anbinder, Five Points, 405.
[18] While many New Yorkers of Chinese descent were among the city’s lowest paid workers, some had amassed fortunes. Anbinder, Five Points, 403.
[19] “Chinatown’s Mayor Dead,” New York Times, January 11, 1918, 6; Arthur Bonner, Alas! What Brought Thee Hither? The Chinese in New York, 1800-1950 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 85; Anbinder, Five Points, 410-413.
[20] “The Chinamen’s Picnic,” New York Times, July 23, 1888, 8.
[21] Wong Chin Foo, “A Heathen Picnic,” The Sun, July 16, 1888, 5.
[22] Wong Chin Foo, “A Heathen Picnic,” The Sun, July 16, 1888, 5.
[23] “Chinamen on a Picnic,” New-York Daily Tribune, July 24, 1888, 5.
[24] “Knee-Hop-Hongs on a Lark,” Evening World, July 23, 1888, 2.
[25] “The Heathen Chinese,” The Sun, July 24, 1888, 2.
[26] “The Heathen Chinese,” The Sun, July 24, 1888, 2.
[27] “Knee-Hop-Hongs on a Lark,” Evening World, July 23, 1888, 2.
[28] “A Heathen Captures a Christian Heart,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 26, 1888, 1.
[29] “Chinamen in New York,” The News, July 23, 1886, 1.
[30] “Ching a Ling’s Picnic,” Illustrated Police News, June 22, 1895, 3.
[31] Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Bonner, Alas!, 120.
[32] “Boasts of the Pagans,” The Duluth Evening Herald, June 25, 1909, 6.

Author

Dr. Marika Plater studies steamboat excursions as a window into environmental inequity in nineteenth-century New York City.

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