The most distinctive feature of the figure at the center of Keller’s design is his hair, which unfurls high above his left shoulder, curving through the air like a snake through sand. This is a queue: the long, braided, black ponytail that had been mandated by China’s Qing government for men of Han ethnicity since the seventeenth century. During the nineteenth century, most Chinese immigrants to the United States were Han men who wore queues. By the time this cartoon appeared in the San Francisco Wasp, the queue had become the subject of white Americans’ fascination, disgust, and even regulation: for example, an 1876 San Francisco law, which required all men sent to the county jail to have their hair shorn to a length of one inch, was overturned three years later by a federal circuit court. Despite its purportedly race-neutral language, the law so transparently targeted Chinese men that, the court ruled, it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. By the 1880s, the queue had become not just synonymous with Chinese people in America, but — like the Statue of Liberty herself — symbolic of broader conversations about American citizenship and belonging.
“A Statue for Our Harbor”, illustration by George Frederick Keller published in the November 11, 1881 issue of The Wasp. The beams of light emanating from behind the statue’s head read, from right to left: FILTH, IMMORALITY, DISEASES, RUIN TO WHITE LABOR. The figure holds an opium pipe in its left hand — Source.
What was it about the queue that made it not merely a curiosity but also a body part capable of carrying such significant political meaning? It wasn’t the queue’s color or styling that mattered to white Americans: it was its length. In fact, when Keller drew a statue for The Wasp with hair so long that it stretched more than half the length of his body, Keller was building on a two-hundred-fifty-year tradition of European-descended religious leaders, political elites, government officials, scientists, labor organizers, newspaper editors, and other cultural authorities being baffled, bedeviled, impassioned, and enraged by long hair on men — including both the hair that grew from their heads and false hairpieces worn on top.
During the first century of English colonization of North America, English colonists’ perspective on long hair was grounded in a worldview, informed by humoralism, in which hairstyles were the most important evidence of a person’s identity in their community. Many European-descended, African-descended, and Indigenous men (and most women) wore their hair long past their ears or shoulders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, colonial elites, especially New England’s Puritan leadership, condemned men who wore this hairstyle because they believed it communicated their indifference or even hostility to Christian faith; citing Biblical mandates that categorized long hair as a sign of women’s subjugation to men, Puritan leaders criticized men whose hairstyles suggested unmanly subjugation. Starting in the eighteenth century, hair’s biological qualities — such as texture and color — started to become very important to the way European-descended people understood the meaning of hair, and, in particular, hair’s role as an index of racial and gender difference.