Brokering Servitude. Andrew Urban

were lacking, this gendered division of labor kept wages for domestic work in check, and made debates about whether or not certain household services were a luxury commonplace. In addition, this book mainly examines servants working in private homes and not in boarding houses, hotels, or other commercial accommodations.47 Where I depart from this focus it is to illustrate how commentators and policymakers perceived the service economy as an area for governance that extended beyond private homes.

      This book addresses “live-in” servants who occupied the same dwellings as their employers. This reflects on the period it addresses, since “living out” would not really take hold until 1900 onward. Because live-in servants resided under the same roof as their employers, matters such as rooming arrangements and the right to visitors had to be negotiated contractually or, more likely, informally. Unlike factory jobs, where a shift—no matter how long—ended, servants and their employers constantly struggled to dictate when work began and finished. In November 1906, the social scientist Frances Kellor published in the Ladies’ Home Journal a work schedule that a housewife had sent to her, which she announced was the second-place winner in a contest that she had sponsored to publicize the best management of servants’ schedules. Despite being in a situation that Kellor deemed “favorable,” the runner-up’s servant was on call each day until eight in the evening and spent eighty-eight hours each week in service, with seventy-one and a half hours spent in active labor.48 Wages for servants were paid weekly or monthly, not by the hour. Many employers dictated that their servants wear a uniform. They controlled the cleaning and cooking techniques they were permitted to use, and the affectations and mannerisms they were allowed to display. In some cases, employers’ rules extended into other facets of their servants’ lives, over where they could worship, for instance, or whom they were permitted to socialize with when outside the home. Sexual and physical abuse, although documented infrequently, were far more prevalent in domestic service than in other workplaces.49

      In this book, I rely on novels, short stories, and other works of fiction in order to examine how American household employers—who were both the creators and audiences for these texts—interpreted the actions of their servants. Through fiction, authors narrated servants’ choices, decisions, and habits in order to provide “evidence” that backed assessments about how different domestics should be brokered and employed as suppliers of labor. Where possible, I provide alternative explanations as to what servants would have done in practice, based on information gleaned from nonfiction sources. I also explore how representations of servants’ actions did specific forms of damage when they refused to acknowledge workers’ actual agency.

      Why focus on black, Chinese, and Irish servants? Unlike German and Swedish immigrants, whose prominence in domestic work was more regional, Irish servants were employed nationally excepting only the rural South.50 Anglo-American employers considered Irish servants, whom they captured in the stereotype of “Biddy,” to be the primary obstacles to domestic peace and comfort. Irish servants were embraced by both the law and popular opinion as white subjects, but this racial construction did not spare them from attacks that were geared at fixing their place in both household and national hierarchies. Anglo-American household employers viewed Irish servants as members of an undifferentiated mass of poor immigrant labor flooding the United States. When Irish servants began to assert greater power over the domestic labor market, employers in cities like New York responded by presenting “Biddy” as the female prototype of the Irish rebel. In the same ways British imperialists argued that Irish subjects were not fit for self-governance and home rule, Anglo-American employers claimed that Irish servants were equally dangerous when it came to advancing their militant claims to sovereignty over American kitchens, parlors, and bedrooms.51 In California, Irish servants were championed by the anti-Chinese movements that mobilized in the 1870s, as human capital that would drive Chinese immigrants out of domestic and laundry work. At the same time household employers of Chinese servants reviled Irish servants and accused them of using mob violence and populist calls for restriction to drive competitors out and further consolidate their monopoly over the occupation.52 The prominence of Irish servants in the national domestic labor market allowed for these myriad interpretations of their racial, social, and political subjectivity.

      The historiography on black women’s domestic labor in the post–Civil War South and North is rich in detail and has done much to map out these workers’ agency in the face of near constant structural discrimination and violence.53 In this book, I add to this literature by examining how black women, men, and children were governed as displaced persons. I focus on the ways in which Reconstruction-era brokers understood the value that subjects classified as refugees presented to household employers, and how they viewed long-distance transactions of labor as an alternative to government relief. Depending on the context, the Freedmen’s Bureau viewed the value of free black labor as either tainted or enriched by the experience of slavery. Progressive Era sociologists and the white middle-class public debated whether black migrants from the Jim Crow South were beyond the pale when it came to reforms that would bring them in line with how white women desired to see domestic labor transformed as an occupation, or whether this made them all the more exploitable for this very reason. In both instances, brokers’ interventions and designs to capture migrant black laborers as a new commodity to be marketed to northern homes provided the backdrop for these evaluations.

      This book dwells on the political economy of Chinese domestic labor more than it does on the other groups that are also its focus. As historian Mae Ngai asserts: “we know a lot more about what whites thought about Chinese labor than about Chinese labor itself.” The study of Chinese immigration to the United States has consistently been plagued by what she describes as “orientalist historiography.” “Orientalist historiography,” Ngai argues, speaks to how many scholars continue to assume, despite evidence to the contrary, that Chinese workers were “indentured, bound by debt peonage, or otherwise enslaved by ‘custom.’ ” Even though more recent scholarship has moved away from conclusions that conflate “coolieism” with all Chinese labor, misperceptions about Chinese immigrants’ status and agency persist. Allusions to the allegedly sinister and secretive powers that Chinese labor bosses wielded to compel workers beyond the more universal pressures that were placed on individuals and families to satisfy debt obligations have prevailed in the historiography as well.54 I flip these scripts by showing that the actor most responsible for keeping Chinese servants in a state of bondage or employment-based dependency was the U.S. government itself, through the federal policies it enacted.

      The political history of what motivated white laborers and politicians to press for the passage of a Chinese Restriction Act in 1882 has often come at the neglect, historian Erika Lee argues, of “the six decades of the exclusion era itself.”55 This has obscured the sharp conflicts that persisted over how to utilize as servants the Chinese migrants who remained in the United States or continued to arrive as temporarily admitted labor. The extent to which the Bureau of Immigration should have the discretionary authority to determine eligibility for entry, as opposed to vesting this power in federal courts governed by due process standards, was at the center of debates concerning Congress’s plenary power over immigration in the late nineteenth century. The landmark Supreme Court cases of Ekiu v. United States (1892) and Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893) vastly strengthened administrative officers’ sovereign power to determine whether immigrants had the right to be in the country, except in cases where errors in procedure could be clearly demonstrated. These decisions removed for all but a select few the grounds for habeas corpus appeal of their debarment or deportation, unless a blatant miscarriage of justice or “manifest wrong” could be proven.56 With the 1906 Supreme Court ruling in Ju Toy, immigration officials’ power to determine the validity of a potential entrant’s claim to birthright citizenship was upheld, and individual inspectors’ and supervisors’ decisions “in effect became public policy,” as Lee notes. When the bureau took measures to implement procedural uniformity and fairness in how it handled immigrant cases, it did so to preempt external critics who wanted to check the agency’s power.57 Governing the admission of servants created unique modes of governance in which productive forms of inclusion designed to favorably recognize the labor needs and interests of household employers had to be weighed against the threat that those same workers would become public charges, or, in the case of Chinese servants granted temporary admission under contract to a white employer, whether they would escape from the bonds of servitude