A Mere Mass of Error
James A. Garfield, c. 1880. Photograph by Napoleon Sarony. [National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution]
On October 22, 1880, the front page of Truth, a tiny and previously obscure New York City newspaper, was dominated by a story that threatened to doom the presidential hopes of Republican candidate James Garfield. Splashed across the front page was a large photograph (still a rarity in newspapers then) of a handwritten letter in which Garfield appeared to secretly promise to oppose efforts to ban Chinese immigration in order to protect the supply of cheap labor for industrialists. Never mind that Garfield’s Republicans had, like their Democratic rivals, already adopted Chinese exclusion in their campaign platform. A quickly convened court hearing provided expert and investigative evidence that the “Chinese letter” was a forgery and the whole affair a ginned-up illusion, only to be countered with competing experts and alternative facts extending the hearings and keeping the controversy in the news. Word of this muddied debunking chased the lie down the channels of the 19th-century information networks — telegraph and railroad lines — but initially did little to quench outrage among the nearly all-white electorate of the Western states upon which the election now hinged.
Before Garfield and the Republicans could mount an effective response, the photographic image of the “Chinese letter” had spread across the entire nation. Flyers and posters of the images, often labeled as “Garfield’s Political Death Warrant,” were “being scattered throughout every [New York] county and school district”; being handed out to Chicago children “at the doors of the public schools” to bring home to their parents; becoming “the sole topic of conversation” in Toledo, Ohio, and in Nevada mining towns; and, as one member of the Democratic National Committee gloated, being “scattered all over the Pacific slope,” making “the Chinese problem” all at once “the foremost argument in the campaign.” The Los Angeles Herald declared: “The election of Garfield would be the signal for the discharge of all white men from employment by manufacturers and corporations and substitution of Chinese coolies.” (“Coolie” was a derogatory term for Asian laborers adopted from British colonial culture).
Nowhere did the arrival of this lie cause more mayhem and misery than in Colorado, where news of the Garfield letter set the match to an explosive anti-Chinese climate stoked for months by the local Democratic Party-aligned press. News of the letter’s claim was being flogged in Denver papers within a day of its publication in New York City, followed within days by photo-lithographic printing plates shipped by train that brought the photographic proof to Denver whites. Soon enough, on Sunday, October 31, a barroom assault on a handful of Chinese pool players erupted into a racial pogrom against the city’s Chinese population. Dozens of Chinese homes and businesses were burned, scores of Chinese immigrants badly beaten, and 28-year-old Lu Yang (Look Young) was dead.
This devastating “October Surprise” was rendered all the more potent by Garfield’s five-day delay in issuing an official denial. He privately assured Republican Party leaders that the letter was “a base forgery,” but, refusing their increasingly desperate pleas, told them that he “hoped to answer all my accusers by silence.” In accordance with the contemporary norm that it was unseemly for candidates to campaign for themselves, Garfield would agree only to have a surrogate, Republican National Committee chairman Marshall Jewell, denounce the letter as a forgery. There was more to Garfield’s delay than propriety, however. Without yet having seen a photograph of the letter, the candidate wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t written it, or rather that a member of his staff hadn’t perhaps done so and signed it on Garfield’s behalf, as was sometimes the practice with minor correspondence. Without sharing his uncertainties with his party leadership, Garfield, away from Washington, DC, quietly sent his secretary “to search our files which had been carefully indexed to see if they contained any such letter.”
In the meantime, the “Chinese letter” scandal metastasized, feeding on the uncertainty created by Garfield’s silence. Republicans responded first with moral outrage. “That there has been a most deliberate conspiracy, carried out in all its parts with foresight, with malign and infamous intent to destroy the name of James A. Garfield,” thundered celebrity preacher Henry Ward Beecher from his Brooklyn pulpit, denouncing the unseen wirepullers “who undertook, by lies, by forgery … to blight a fair fame,” and predicted that “the people [will] be the voice of God, come to judge such” men.
In the end, James Garfield won the 1880 presidential election, if just barely. The “Chinese letter” hoax seems to have cost him California and Nevada, and resulted in the slimmest popular vote margin in U.S. history (two thousand ballots out of nine million). While the hoax failed in its immediate aim of winning the White House for Democrats in 1880, it arguably contributed more to a successful and tragically consequential sleight-of-hand: convincing white workers to focus on nonwhite immigrants as the greatest threat to their prosperity rather than the white businessmen who set wages, hours, and working conditions.
Forty years before the “Chinese letter” hoax rocked the 1880 presidential election, a hoax involving the 1840 U.S. Census used the nascent authority of the new science of statistics to promulgate false evidence that the mental health of African Americans collapsed outside of slavery. Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, the infamous advocate of slavery responsible for the census, argued that emancipation “would indeed, to [the enslaved], be a curse rather than a blessing.” Calhoun deployed convenient census errors to inhibit abolitionist efforts to stop the spread of slavery to new U.S. states. The false conclusions drawn from the 1840 census became the first major dataset in what would become the massive edifice of American scientific racism that propped up U.S. white supremacy into the second half of the 20th century.
“Who would believe without the fact black and white before his eyes,” marveled a letter in the New York Observer, that “there is an awful prevalence of idiocy and insanity among the free blacks [and] … slaves?” Startling as it was, this conclusion was “obvious,” the writer explained, “from the following schedule,” referring to columns of data reproduced from the 1840 U.S. Census. This letter and its accompanying excerpt from the census were themselves quickly reproduced without analysis or comment in the American Journal of Insanity and other medical journals around the country, perpetuating the “fact” that, as one appalled white Northerner observed, “lunacy was … about eleven times more frequent for the African in freedom as in slavery” and that “more strange than this,” the mental health of free African Americans worsened still further the farther north from the Slave South they lived. The unexpected conclusion that freedom was unhealthy for “Africans” delighted slavery’s defenders and confounded their opponents in the antislavery movement. The conclusion was seemingly irrefutable, however, bearing as it did the authority of both the federal government and the new science of statistics.
Calhoun’s longtime adversary John Quincy Adams — the 77-year-old former president (upon whom Calhoun had been disagreeably foisted as vice president 20 years before), currently Massachusetts congressman, and, three years earlier, defender of the Amistad slave ship rebels before the U.S. Supreme Court — was leading a call for the results of the 1840 census to be publicly retracted. According to Adams, some Massachusetts country doctor had reportedly “discovered that the whole of the [census] statements in reference to the disorders of the colored race were a mere mass of error, and totally unworthy of credit,” rendering the 1840 census “worthless, at best utterly botched and at worst maliciously falsified.” Adams would later claim that he had already convinced Calhoun’s predecessor of the falseness of the census data a week before the man’s unfortunate and dramatic demise. Calhoun now found it politically impossible to completely ignore Adams’ repeated accusations in Congress that “atrocious misrepresentations had been made” by the census of which existed “such proof as no man would be able to contradict,” and that the nation had, thanks to Calhoun, been “placed in a condition very short of war with Great Britain as well as Mexico on the foundation of these errors.” Adams demanded that the secretary of state reveal “whether any gross errors have been discovered in the printed Sixth Census … and if so, how those errors originated, what they are, and what, if any, measures have been taken to rectify them.”
Calhoun agreed to “give the subject a thorough and impartial investigation.” Adams savored watching Calhoun “writhe … like a trodden rattle on the exposure of his false” assurances regarding the accuracy of the census and grumble that “there were so many errors they balanced one another, and led to the same conclusion as if they were correct,” imagining (naïvely it turned out) that the exposure of the errors would end the spread of the census’ false conclusions.
Ultimately while Congress conceded that “in nearly every department of the late census errors have crept in, which go very far to destroy confidence in the accuracy of its results,” they declined to incur the “great expense” of commencing a new corrective census, and shrugged off the offending inaccuracies, concluding regarding the 1840 census that “it’s near approximation to the truth is all that can be hoped for.” The false claims about African American intelligence and sanity would stand. It was at this moment that the 1840 U.S. Census data became a species of hoax rather than simply a fiasco.
Indeed, the 1840 census was still a potent enough cultural force over a decade later that it was the only element of American racism that Harriet Beecher Stowe thought merited its own extended appendix in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854), her documentation of the truth behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her blockbuster 1852 antislavery novel. “In order to gain capital for the extension of slave territory,” Stowe fumed, “the most important statistical document of the United States has been boldly, grossly, and perseveringly falsified, and stands falsified to this day. Query: If state documents are falsified in support of slavery, what confidence can be placed in any representations that are made upon the subject?”
What did accrue significant public confidence in the United States after the 1840 census, however, was the notion that science could be used to confirm racial equality and defend racist institutions and laws while evading accusations of racial bias. American culture threw itself into the production of scientific racism with gusto for the next hundred years, justifying everything from slavery and segregation to racist immigration, marriage, citizenship, and sterilization laws.
This excerpt originally appeared in The Great White Hoax: Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
