Two Asian Laundry Cases David E. Bernstein* In Yick Wo v. Hopkins,1 the Supreme Court held that a facially neutral laundry licensing regulation was an unconstitutional violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendmentbecause the regulation was only enforced against Chinese laundrymen. Even casual students ofAmerican constitutional history are likely to be aware that Yick Wo arose out ofone of many legal challenges launched by Chinese laundrymen against San Francisco ordinances that were intended to drive the Chinese out of the laundry business. Very few people, on the other hand, know that Yick Wo did not end government harassment ofAsian-owned laundries, nor did it end litigation over discriminatory laundry laws before the U.S. Supreme Court. Montana continued its long-term legislative campaign against Chinese laundries, culminating in the 1912 Supreme Court case of Quong Wing v. Kirkendall.2 Over a decade after Yick Wo was decided, meanwhile, San Francisco authorities began to discriminate against the growing number ofJapanese-owned laundries, leading to the 1902 Supreme Court case of Tsukamoto v. Lackman.2 This article discusses Quong Wing and Tsukamoto in their respective historical con texts. The history of these cases demonstrates the persistence ofAsian immigrants in fighting for their constitutional rights, throughboth law suits and civil disobedience. These cases dem onstrate that even after Yick Wo, Asian immi grant entrepreneurs who went into the laundry business were by no means assured that courts would protect their right to earn a living from hostile local governments. Quong Wing v. Kirkendall In the 1860s, migrants, including Chinese, began to settle Montana. By 1870, 1,943 Chi nese resided in Montana, ten percent of the territory’s population.4 Several dozen of the Montana Chinese opened laundries. Running 96 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY a laundry appealed to impoverished Chinese immigrants because it did not require much knowledge ofEnglish or a large capital invest ment—a shack with a stove and a sufficient water supply usually sufficed.5 Also, owning a business was a status symbol in the American Chinese communityand inthe immigrant’s home village, to which the laundry owner generally planned to return.6 Finally, the laundry busi ness was attractive because the Chinese hoped it would notraise the competitive ire ofwhites; few white women and even fewer men wanted to work as launderers, a profession considered arduous and unpleasant. Unfortunately forthe Chinese laundrymen, despite the usefulness oftheir profession, and the fact that they had few white competitors, anti-Chinese forces refused to leave them in peace. As in other Western locales, Chinese laundrymen in Montana quickly became a tar get ofrabble-rousers, demagogues, hooligans, and racists. Anti-Chinese activists charged that the Chinese crowded out widows and other single women from working as launderers, forcing them to turn to prostitution.7 A Helena newspaper complained that “[i]t is hard enough now for a white woman to make a living in the few, branches ofhonest livelihood that are open to them and these avenues of competence are being rapidly filled up with Chinamen, who actually wrest the wash-tub from them, and invade those provinces of labor belonging to women.”8 This propaganda was based on mostly fic titious premises, serving as a pretext for pre existing anti-Chinese sentiment. The women of frontier Helena, like the men, were over whelmingly unattached and interested in mak ing a fast buck, not always through legitimate means. Because of the shortage ofwomen on the frontier, and white men’s refusal to do “women’s work,” laundering was sufficiently lucrative that a few women took in laundry before the Chinese arrived, only to be displaced by Chinese working for more reasonable rates.9 However, the picture drawn by Sinophobes of many virtuous young women and poor wid ows being forced out of the laundry trade in Helena in 1866 “just does not fit.”10 Nevertheless, on January 27,1866, a Hel ena committee placed a notice in the local newspaper complaining about “Mongolian Hordes” driving white women out ofthe laun dry business.11 The committee called on the community to boycott all Chinese launderers.12 The newspaper in which the advertisement appeared editorialized that the committee had its...
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Jan 1, 2012
David Procházka 
Open Access
