How Ye viewed the social and economic relationship that he entered into with the Curtis family is impossible to determine with any certainty. His most immediate actions must be understood in the context of his need to plot for his survival as a nine-year-old boy apparently living alone in San Francisco. Accepting an arrangement that made him a dependent of the Curtises would have been an obvious move in the absence of kin or other Chinese immigrants willing to protect him. Orphans of all backgrounds were fostered out and brokered as labor, in order to relieve whatever costs that governments and social welfare institutions might otherwise have to assume for their care. As Ye aged, he seems to have developed a genuine belief in the Presbyterian faith that the Curtises exposed him to, to the extent that he was willing to identify with white restrictionists’ goals for limiting “heathen” and unassimilable Chinese laborers. Then again, if he was indeed the son of more affluent Chinese immigrants, he may have been predisposed to such views anyway. Since he died when he was only eighteen, it is hard to forecast what the future might have held for him. It was not uncommon for Chinese servants to use white missionaries and Christianity, whether they were believers or not, to advance their own interests. Missionaries overwhelmingly belonged to the middle class and were valuable allies to Chinese servants who wished to open laundries, restaurants, or other businesses that allowed them to transition from household service to service work where they controlled the means of production. Whether he went on to pursue a career in the ministry or another vocation, it is doubtful that Ye would have remained a devoted servant for the remainder of his life. If the Curtises indeed saw him as a son, would they have wanted him to?
* * *
When I visited Ye’s grave site in March 2014, it beckoned both as a monument to the historical subjects whose lives had already commanded my focus for years, and as a figurative portal through which to explore the larger issues and questions that Brokering Servitude addresses. At its broadest level, this book explores how different actors and institutions in the United States, between 1850 and 1924, brokered the placement of migrants in household positions, and what they hoped to accomplish economically, politically, and socially through these transactions. Although this book is concerned with how race, gender, and nationality informed the day-to-day experiences of servants and how workers socialized off the job, worshipped, and participated in the cultural activities and practices of their communities, it is most interested in how these categories governed how workers were commodified and managed in respect to their purported capacity to serve. Brokering Servitude builds bridges between subjects that typically get studied in isolation. Household service defied conventional divisions between free and unfree labor, coercion and contract, protection and exploitation, and domesticity and work. Brokering Servitude delves into both sides of the often neglected commodity chains that households and migrant laborers participated in and were governed through. This book asserts that the study of the political economy of reproductive labor, usually confined to the static space of the home, cannot be properly understood without attention to labor migrations, and especially migrations of workers that were assisted, compelled, or contracted. Brokers tried to marshal opportunities that transatlantic, transpacific, and internal labor migrations posed. Their interventions responded to household employers who were eager to compare the merits of different labor sources, and to reinforce presumed differences by pitting workers against each other.
Brokers
Matching supply to demand has always required intermediaries. In household service, brokers were responsible for identifying and making available supplies of domestic labor within their spheres of influence. They were also motivated to identify possibilities for transactions—through the promotion of migration—that did not yet exist. The “production of difference,” historians Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger contend, has long been the key innovative force in American labor management, and, at the same time, a “contradiction,” since “managers pretend to possess a knowledge of race and of human behavior that they could never have had.”13 Race is an imagined social and cultural construct. It is not a mechanical feature that can be found in workers and engineered for efficiency and maximum output. Brokers interpreted how race and gender were valued by employers, and constructed labor markets that produced racial difference anew. The robust and transatlantic free market economy that emerged around the sale and purchase of domestic labor in the 1850s ushered in the end of customary and fixed wages for servants performing general housework. Women could increasingly find work in manufacturing sectors of the economy, namely in the needle trades and in textile mills, and could move more easily between labor markets. Households with more disposable income and a willingness to pay more for servants with certain ethnic characteristics, or with skill and experience, also contributed to a competitive market.14 From 1850 to 1870, the number of servants employed in the United States, not counting enslaved workers, nearly tripled from 350,000 to one million, outpacing the overall growth in population from roughly 23 to 40 million.15 The emergence of an active and virtually unregulated market for domestic wage laborers in the mid-nineteenth century encouraged an environment where brokers and workers saw ethnicity, race, and religion as elements of character and identity that could be advertised. Whether a servant was black, white, Chinese, Catholic, Protestant, Irish, English, or German was a characteristic that employers factored into how they evaluated the potential benefits of a transaction and a trait brokers and laborers marketed. Writing in 1857, one woman diarist described her excitement upon learning that a German Protestant “girl” living on Carmine Street in Manhattan had posted notice, in English, that she was available for domestic work. Despite calling on her immediately, however, twenty-seven other women made it there before her, and the woman was already contracted to the highest bidder.16
When it came to placing individuals in household labor situations, the list of who functioned as brokers was capacious. Anglo-Irish gentry, Union army officers, abolitionists, commercial employment agents, steamship ticket agents, Protestant missionaries in China and the American West, ethnic community leaders, and immigration officials—to offer an incomplete inventory—all took part in brokering domestic servants. A broker could be someone like Curtis, who produced a servant from a Chinese boy he “discovered” on the streets of San Francisco, or the federal government itself. Nonprofit brokers were linked by the fact that they all strived and hustled to establish their worth and authority as intermediaries, and to prove the superior value of the exchanges they vowed to arrange. They championed their ability to identify potential migrants who could be reliably consumed due to the exigent or precarious circumstances under which they entered the labor market. Brokers promised to satisfy household employers’ want for servants who were dependents, and whose lack of alternative options meant that they could be disciplined above and beyond what could be exacted through wage controls alone.
By the mid-nineteenth century, as political scientist Aristide Zolberg contends, “the massive procurement of foreign labor from a diversity of sources came to be firmly acknowledged as an essential feature of the country’s maturing industrial capitalism, and hence an ‘affair of the state.’ ”17 During the Civil War and Reconstruction, how to deploy emancipated black labor generated similar calculations. The state was concerned not only with ensuring adequate supplies of labor, but also with keeping migrant laborers off of public assistance. For various government officials and private actors, the goal of keeping migrants off relief was often inseparable from the goal of provisioning servants to household employers.
Brokers of migrant servants not associated with the state—and, in the case of the Freedmen’s Bureau, representatives of the state itself—had to contend with accusations that they were contributing to malevolent forms of trafficking, intentionally or otherwise. Trafficking, unlike assisted migration, carried sinister connotations and was presented as the unequivocal enemy of both free labor and free migration. In the 1850s, commentators focused on how trafficking preyed on new forms of transatlantic free migration and posed special dangers to single, unaccompanied white women vulnerable to recruitment as sex workers—a racial concern that would persist well into the twentieth century. From the 1860s onward, concerns about trafficking grew to encompass Chinese immigrants labeled “coolies,” whom anti-immigrant activists accused of being unfree by virtue of being bound by debt and racial subservience to the commands of transnational
