The Pigtail Ordinance was an 1873 law intended to force prisoners in San Francisco, California to have their hair cut within an inch of the scalp. It affected Qing Chinese prisoners in particular, as it meant they would have their queue, a waist-long, braided pigtail, cut off. The proposal passed by a narrow margin through the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1873 but was vetoed by the mayor. An identical version of the law, enacted in 1876, was struck down as unconstitutional in 1879.
Origins
The Pigtail Ordinance was proposed as a solution to the overcrowding of jails due to the 1870 Sanitary Ordinance, which was originally meant to prevent unsafe tenement conditions in San Francisco. When in violation of the Sanitary Ordinance, one could either pay a fine or serve a week or more in jail; for thousands of impoverished Chinese immigrants, free room and board was a welcome punishment. Ostensibly to prevent outbreaks of lice and fleas, the Supervisors began requiring that all prisoners' heads be shaved. Many equal rights advocates, however, claimed the Supervisors' true intent was to stem the tide of willing Chinese convicts. Since the beginning of the Qing Dynasty in 1644, Han men in China had been required adopt Manchu men's hairstyle by wearing the queue and shaving the forehead as a symbol of accepting the Qing dynasty, as Manchu men did. Han Chinese did not object to wearing the queue braid on the back of the head as they traditionally wore all their hair long, but fiercely objected to shaving the forehead so the Qing government exclusively focused on forcing people to shave the forehead rather than wear the braid. Han rebels in the first half of the Qing who objected to Qing hairstyle wore the braid but defied orders to shave the front of the head. One person was executed for refusing to shave the front but he had willingly braided the back of his hair. It was only later westernized revolutionaries, influenced by western hairstyle who began to view the braid as backward and advocated adopting short haired western hairstyles. Han rebels against the Qing like the Taiping even retained their queue braids on the back but the symbol of their rebellion against the Qing was the growing of hair on the front of the head, causing the Qing government to view shaving the front of the head as the primary sign of loyalty to the Qing rather than wearing the braid on the back which did not violate Han customs and which traditional Han did not object to. Koxinga insulted and criticized the Qing hairstyle by referring to the shaven pate looking like a fly. Koxinga and his men objected to shaving when the Qing demanded they shave in exchange for recognizing Koxinga as a feudatory. The Qing demanded that Zheng Jing and his men on Taiwan shave in order to receive recognition as a fiefdom. His men and Ming prince Zhu Shugui fiercely objected to shaving. The majority of Chinese immigrants who moved to America only intended to stay in the United States long enough to make a living and return to China, so they needed to keep their queues to ensure their ability to return. In light of this, the idea behind the institution of the Pigtail Ordinance was that Chinese immigrants would be less likely to ignore the Sanitary Ordinance if such a heavy penalty was the result.
Veto and passage
After passage through the Board of Supervisors, the order was immediately vetoed by mayor William Alvord. In his veto, the mayor stated that "this order, though general in its terms, in substance and effect, is a special and degrading punishment inflicted upon the Chinese residents for slight offenses and solely by reason of their alienage and race." Instead, enforcement of the anti-tenement law was relaxed. On April 3, 1876 the state of California passed their own law to Los Angeles's Sanitary Ordinance. The city no longer had the power to ignore the enforcement of the law, so the board made a second proposal of the Pigtail Ordinance. This time the law passed with a vote of 10-2, and was approved by mayor Andrew Jackson Bryant.
Lawsuit
As a result of the new law, a Chinese immigrant named Ah Kow was arrested for living space violations and had his queue removed at the jail. He sued the sheriff for damages, claiming that the Pigtail Ordinance caused him irreparable harm. On June 14, 1879 United States Supreme Court JusticeStephen Johnson Field, sitting in the local federal court—despite much criticism from the general public—found in favor of the plaintiff; his decision held that it was not within the powers of the Board of Supervisors to set such a discriminatory law and that the ordinance was, in fact, unconstitutional. In particular, he cited the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which guarantees equal protection under the law to all persons within its jurisdiction. See Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan, 12 Fed. Cas. 252.
