Tank Kee is coming, Tank Kee is coming!
In the late 19th century, headlines in local newspapers across the United States heralded the arrival of Tank Kee. A lecturer and entertainer, Kee traveled through small towns in middle America, rhapsodizing about the wonders and greatness of China, especially its history, culture, and people.
But Tank Kee’s real name was George Bailey. When Kee arrived, audiences were surprised to discover he was white. Regardless, onlookers were soon dazzled by Kee’s presentations, filled with fun facts, curious outfits, and a collection of rare Chinese items. One reviewer declared, “He can talk faster than a man can hear…nothing but a roaring blizzard can stop him.” Another dubbed Kee a “master of the stage.”1
George Bailey’s story may sound like little more than another story of cultural appropriation. After all, he invented and inhabited an Asian persona, right down to the clothes he wore, and used it for personal profit. But the nature of Bailey’s performance as Tank Kee was different from that of other white performers at the time who claimed to showcase Asian culture. Unlike these other popular performers, Bailey did not perform in yellowface or pander to white audiences by trafficking in cheap stereotypes. Instead, he used his lectures to push back against rising anti-Chinese racism across the United States, believing that anti-immigrant sentiments stemmed from ignorance. His lectures aimed to educate his audiences on Chinese history and culture in order to change their minds about Chinese immigration, a political message Bailey made explicit both in his public lectures and in frequent newspaper articles defending Chinese people against attacks on their morality and character.2 Even so, Bailey’s success as Tank Kee highlights the central contradiction of white supremacy, the contradiction that drove the anti-Chinese racism Bailey believed he was addressing. To white Americans, depictions of non-white people, whether positive or negative, rooted in historical evidence or the crassest stereotypes, were most valid and “authentic” when they were created by white people.
Chinese railroad workers in the snow, 1860s
Bailey’s rise as a performer coincided with a period of considerable economic distress. After the Panic of 1873, the U.S. economy sank into a deep depression, with many native-born Americans blaming the economic downturn on Chinese immigrants. In San Francisco, the Irish immigrant and California labor activist Dennis Kearney gained prominence through his denouncements of capitalists and politicians. He formed the Workingmen’s Party of California and demanded white workers “take charge of the government, dispose gilded fraud, and put honest toil in power.” Kearney argued that Chinese immigrants were the problem, exclaiming “The Chinese Must Go!”3
Hop Alley in St. Louis, 1910
But the west coast was not the only site of anti-Chinese vitriol. Cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul also experienced large influxes of Chinese workers. These immigrants had worked for a variety of railroad companies before settling down in the Midwest, and though they quickly put down roots, becoming owners of restaurants, markets, and laundry services, white residents viewed them with suspicion and treated them accordingly. Local news stories of the era reveal city officials who viewed small Chinese communities as hotbeds of crime, drug addiction, and prostitution. Law enforcement’s presence was constant and immigrant communities were frequent targets of police harassment and violence.4
George Bailey donated the Tank Kee Library Collection (which had accompanied his lectures and tours) to Chicago’s Newberry Library in 1896 after a drawn-out conflict between the Freemasons and the University of Texas.
Though George Bailey was only adopting a Chinese persona, he did have a history with China, albeit an unconventional one. Bailey’s family was originally from Philadelphia and moved to China in the 1840s. Bailey claimed that his parents went there as missionaries; his friend William Payne, however, said Bailey’s father was actually a businessman who operated in the southern port city of Guangzhou. Tragedy soon struck the family, though, when young George’s parents contracted cholera and died during the epidemics of the late 1840s. As his story went, he remained in China, where he grew up and eventually began a military career.5 While it is difficult to verify all of Bailey’s claims, there was indeed a George Bailey enlisted in the Shanghai Foreign Arms Corps during the 1860s and the Taiping Rebellion; he later served as an artillery soldier and a messenger between American and British mercenaries and the Qing army.6
By the early 1870s, George Bailey had started a traveling lecture career in the United States, calling himself Tank Kee, as if he were part of the growing Chinese diaspora. For the next twenty years, he would travel across western, midwestern, and southern states speaking to audiences about China. During his lectures, he implored listeners to protest against anti-immigrant legislation like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The law not only blocked Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States, but also reclassified already-settled Chinese immigrants as permanent aliens, denying them the possibility of U.S. citizenship. Ten years later, Congressman Thomas Geary sponsored an extension to the Exclusion Act that added even more onerous requirements. Dubbed the Geary Law, it required Chinese residents to carry resident permits at all times or be sentenced to hard labor, and forbade Chinese residents from serving as witnesses in court. Bailey believed this anti-Chinese mood was simply the result of ignorance. “If the American people understood the Chinese question more thoroughly,” he argued, “there would be no Geary law on the statute books.”7 He believed his work could help correct that ignorance.
Bailey’s lectures ranged from one-night events to engagements that stretched over four or five evenings. His presentations covered a range of topics including Chinese history, geography, science, and culture. Some of his most popular segments were those featuring his collections of props and illustrations. Bailey would display and lecture on authentic Chinese items like statues, coins, and woodwork, and don a variety of costumes to show the differences in Chinese social classes. One reviewer, admiring a rainbow-colored dress with fine needlework, remarked, “the dresses are marvelous and would throw any woman in ecstasies.”8
Men like Henry Stanley, famed not only for his “discovery” of Dr. Livingstone but also for his efforts to locate the origins of the Nile, were popular on the North American lecture circuit.
Bailey’s lectures, which mixed education and entertainment, were a perfect fit for the lyceum movement, a mid-19th century effort to make these sorts of programs available to the general public. By the time Bailey started lecturing, the lyceum and public lecture circuit were fixtures of American popular culture. Initially conceived as an institution for cultivating civic life, the lyceum movement also gave authors and public intellectuals a regular platform to discuss and disseminate their ideas. Famous writers like Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain were highly sought-after, and used their tours to connect with their audiences in person. But these lectures were not just for the celebrities of the age. They also served as contact zones of a sort, where engaged and interested rural communities learned about unfamiliar places and people, usually from white archaeologists, travelers, and explorers who were tacitly engaged in the work of colonization—if not explicitly so. Bailey, speaking as Tank Kee, took a different approach, using his platform to both inform his audiences about China and change their minds about immigration legislation.9
Dennis Kearney began his campaign against Chinese immigration in 1878, and as his writings were syndicated in newspapers throughout the U.S., quickly gaining him a national audience. Soon after Kearney’s slogan “The Chinese Must Go” appeared in the Midwest, Bailey, as Tank Kee, wrote a stinging rebuke. He argued that China was under great population pressure and facing a serious food and land crisis. In order to seek better lives, Chinese immigrants had a right to travel to other countries and make their own living: “If it is fair for your people to go to China, it is but right for us to live in yours.”10
By the 1880s, more congressmen were calling for limitations on Chinese immigration in response to Kearney and growing anti-Chinese sentiment across America. Bailey became even more critical of these views from his platform. Over the course of the 1880s and 1890s, various reviewers noted the way that Bailey brought politics onto the stage. The audience might enjoying a story about Chinese history or culture when Bailey would take the opportunity to comment on unfair generalizations about Chinese immigrants—generalizations that those listening might well have subscribed to. After Congress passed the Geary Act in 1892, Bailey explicitly denounced the law and called for its repeal.11
Such outspoken opinions led to some nasty confrontations, especially when Bailey criticized other varieties of American racism. During the southern leg of his 1897 tour, he wrote a series of travel reports for an Iowa newspaper. These pieces criticized Jim Crow laws, as well as Southern society more generally, and caught the attention of William Cowper Brann, the Texas newspaper editor, infamous in his own time for his virulent racism and naked xenophobia. Brann used Bailey’s Tank Kee persona against him to discount his criticisms: “The writer is too grossly ignorant and hopelessly imbecile to concoct a falsehood to deceive a diapered pickaninny.” Brann blamed Tank Kee’s Southern “screeds” on his assumed opium habit and concluded, “It is my impression that he’s a half-breed of some kind…One thing is cock-sure—Tank Kee had best keep out of Texas.” Where the condemnations of a white man like George Bailey might bear weight, the criticisms of a “Chinese” man like Tank Kee could be disregarded.12
Assessing the historical impact and legacy of a figure like George Bailey is challenging. In an era of rising anti-Chinese sentiment, he publicly advocated on behalf of Chinese immigrants. As his popularity as a lecturer and entertainer grew, he did not dial back his disgust at anti-Chinese legislation to please audiences. Instead, he ratcheted it up and used his platform to explicitly challenge his audiences.
Yet even as Bailey sought to educate and change American minds, he profited from the fact that white audiences were more inclined to listen to a white man pretending to be a Chinese immigrant than an actual Chinese immigrant. His success as a performer, the thing that allowed him to reach so many small-town Americans, was in many ways dependent on the notions of white supremacy he claimed to be fighting. His story challenges us to think about the line between allyship and appropriation in supporting and centering the voices of oppressed people.
- Grand Forks (N.D.) Daily Herald, Dec. 19, 1901; Hartford (Conn.) Dayspring, Dec. 18, 1880.
- Sioux City (Iowa) Journal, Dec. 20, 1894; Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Jim Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, the “Marvelous Chinese Conjurer” (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005).
- Dennis Kearney and H. L. Knight, “Appeal from California. The Chinese Invasion. Workingmen’s Address,” Indianapolis Times, Feb. 28, 1878; John Soennichsen, The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood Press, 2011).
- Huping Ling, Chinese Chicago: Race, Transnational Migration, and Community Since 1870 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012); Harry Ying Cheng Kiang, Chicago’s Chinatown (Lincolnwood, Ill.: Institute of China Studies, 1992); Huping Ling, Chinese St. Louis: From Enclave to Cultural Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004); Sarah Refo Mason, “Liang May Seen and the Early Chinese Community in Minneapolis,” Minnesota History 54 (Spring 1995): 223–33. For a typical example of both anti-immigrant news coverage and police harassment, see “To Root Out Chicago ‘Hop Dens,”” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 7, 1894.
- “The Romance of a Lecturer That Ended in a Prosaic Drunk,” Dallas Daily Herald, May 3, 1884, p. 5; “His Erratic Career,” Marshalltown (Iowa) Evening Times-Republican, Dec. 18, 1902, p. 2.
- Gordon Papers, Add. MSS. 52394, Bell Collection, British Library, London; A. Egmont Hake, Events in the Taeping Rebellion: Being Reports of MSS. Copied by General Gordon, C.B., in His Own Handwriting (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1891), 391–92, 430, 445–46, 450, 459, 464–65, 474; Andrew Wilson, The “Ever-Victorious Army”: A History of the Chinese Campaign under Lt.-Col. C. G. Gordon, C.B. R.E., and of the Suppression of the Tai-ping Rebellion (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1868), 200–201, 209–10, 227, 235–36; Harry Parkes to Frederick Bruce, June 6, 1864, F.O. 228/367, British Consular and Embassy Archives, The National Archives, London; Stephen R. Platt, “British Intervention in the Taiping Rebellion,” in Robert Bickers and Jonathan J. Howlett, eds., Britain and China, 1840–1970: Empire, Finance and War (London: Routledge, 2015), 41–57
- “Stands up for John,” Wichita Daily Eagle, Dec 19, 1897, p. 5.
- Ibid.
- Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005); Peter Cherches, Star Course: Nineteenth-Century Lecture Tours and the Consolidation of Modern Celebrity (Rotterdam: Sense, 2017); Amanda Adams, Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014); Tom F. Wright, ed., The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).
- Milwaukee Sentinel, Nov. 14, 1878.
- Hartford Dayspring, Dec. 25, 1880; Grand Forks Daily Herald, Dec. 19, 1901.
- [William Cowper Brann], The Complete Works of Brann the Iconoclast (12 vols.; New York: Brann, 1919), 10:137–39; Fort Worth Register, May 22, 1897; Charles Carver, Brann and the Iconoclast (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957).
