SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 33 (of 78) - Chinese Persecution and Hubris of Britain
The Rainbow Islands (1866)
Chapter 33
The Rainbow Islands (1866)
In 1866, I was feeling restless. Considering that I had written about all I could about the brutality shown foreigners by certain elements of the San Francisco populace and their servants, the police force, I cooked up a scheme that would get me to the Sandwich Islands without the necessity of loosening my own purse strings.
The place is now more often called Hawaii, but the English people kept that absurd name for the place going as long as they could. Rightly, that magnificent collection of sea-surrounded mountain tops—the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean—should be named The Rainbow Islands, but wherever the British can stick a name so that it shall glorify anything pertaining to England, such as the Earl of Sandwich, there they stick it.
Anyway, I had an idea that news of the islands would be of interest to the reading public, and so I arranged with the Sacramento Union to send me there and pay my expenses in return for a series of letters about the islands.
I gathered enough interesting information, and embellished it as I could, so that by the time I reluctantly returned to San Francisco, I had material enough to create a public lecture.
EDITOR’S NOTES: In Twain’s sketch Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy, he recounts the unfair and even brutal treatment of Chinese people, in particular, by residents of San Francisco, often including the police themselves. He wrote therein that at the time he lived in that city, at least, “one of the principal recreations of the police … was to look on with tranquil enjoyment while the butchers of Brannan Street set their dogs on unoffending Chinamen, and make them flee for their lives.”
Twain went on to relate that this was not an isolated incident. He wrote:
I have many such memories in my mind, but am thinking just at present of one particular one, where the Brannan Street butchers set their dogs on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket of clothes on his head, and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the hilarity of the occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman’s teeth down his throat with half a brick. This incident sticks in my memory with a more malevolent tenacity, perhaps, on account of the fact that I was in the employ of a San Francisco journal at the time, and was not allowed to publish it because it might offend some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the paper.
Twain’s tale Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again, written in late 1870 and early 1871, relates the treatment the Chinese got in San Francisco from the standpoint of a naive and trusting emigrant, Ah Song Hi, who only slowly realizes the true state of affairs, namely that San Francisco is rife with police brutality, political corruption, greed, hypocrisy, and all sorts of vice.
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In The Treaty with China: It's Provisions Explained, written in the summer of 1868, Twain wrote:
It affords me infinite satisfaction to call particular attention to this Consul clause, and think of the howl that will go up from the cooks, the railroad graders, and the cobble-stone artists of California, when they read it. They can never beat and bang and set the dogs on the Chinamen any more. These pastimes are lost to them forever. In San Francisco, a large part of the most interesting local news in the daily papers consists of gorgeous compliments to the “able and efficient” Officer This and That for arresting Ah Foo, or Ching Wang, or Song Hi for stealing a chicken; but when some white brute breaks an unoffending Chinaman's head with a brick, the paper does not compliment any officer for arresting the assaulter, for the simple reason that the officer does not make the arrest; the shedding of Chinese blood only makes him laugh; he considers it fun of the most entertaining description. I have seen dogs almost tear helpless Chinamen to pieces in broad daylight in San Francisco, and I have seen hod-carriers who help to make Presidents stand around and enjoy the sport. I have seen troops of boys assault a Chinaman with stones when he was walking quietly along about his business, and send him bruised and bleeding home. I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature, but I never saw a policeman interfere in the matter and I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done him. The California laws do not allow Chinamen to testify against white men. California is one of the most liberal and progressive States in the Union, and the best and worthiest of her citizens will be glad to know that the days of persecuting Chinamen are over, in California.
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In a letter written in early 1868 to a San Francisco newspaper (The Alta California) designed to incite interest in his lecture on the place, Twain wrote the following about Hawaii:
You never hear of an Englishman speak of the Hawaiian Islands—no, he calls them the Sandwich Islands; Cook discovered them second-hand, by following a Spanish chart three hundred years old, which is still in the British Museum, and named them for some one-horse Earl of Sandwich, that nobody had heard of before, and hasn’t since—a man that probably never achieved any work that was really gorgeous during his earthly mission, excepting his invention for confining a slice of ham between two slices of bread in such a manner as to enable even the least gifted of our race to eat bread and meat at the same time, without being bewildered by too elaborate a conjunction of ideas.
I suppose, if the real truth were known, some foreigner invented the Sandwich, but England gave it a name, in her usual cheerful fashion. They never even speak of the whale that swallowed Jonah merely as a whale, but as the Prince of Wales. They think it suggests that he was an English whale. If he was that, that is sufficient. That covers up any probable flaws in his character. It is nothing to them that he went about gobbling up the prophets wherever he found them; it is nothing that he interfered with their business—nothing that he put them to infinite delay, discomfort and annoyance; it is nothing that he disgorged prophets in such a condition, as to personal appearance, that they might well feel a delicacy about preaching in a strange city. No—being an English whale was sufficient to make this infamous conduct excusable.
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