At the heart of California’s economic development, railroads were also at the center of America’s hard times during the depression of the 1870s. Over-speculation in railroad stocks coupled with the collapse of a major Philadelphia bank that financed the Northern Pacific Railroad triggered the nationwide business downturn. A great railway strike in 1877 unleashed waves of violence in New York and Chicago that swept across the country to California. As has often been the case in hard times, some segments of the public sought scapegoats, especially among immigrant laborers.
In the fields, mines, and urban workplaces jobs were scarce. Widespread unemployment among white farm - and ranch-hands, aggravated by drought in the winter of 1876, resulted in rural workers occupying abandoned barns for shelter. Comprising half the workforce in the state’s mines in 1870, many Chinese left the diggings for railroad construction jobs, or moved into towns and cities, gaining employment in restaurants and laundries. Often they lived in ethnic enclaves called Chinatowns, scattered from Chico to San Diego. The scarcity of jobs alone would have led to blaming the Chinese for white unemployment; the arrival in 1876 of 22,000 Chinese laborers in San Francisco compounded the job shortage and fed existing anti-Asian prejudice. By then, such workers constituted about one-fourth of the state’s toilers available for hire. Numerous and easily identified, for many Anglos Chinese became what historian Alexander Saxton termed “the indispensable enemy.”
Figure 6.3 The Occidental and Oriental steamer, Doric. This steel-hulled vessel regularly sailed between San Francisco and Hong Kong. According to the July 6, 1902, edition of the New York Times, this steamer had arrived the day before in San Francisco carrying the largest ever shipment of opium (33,210 pounds) and 129,492 chests of tea. © Mystic Seaport, Photography Collection, #1999.175.615.
On October 24, 1871, Los Angeles was the scene of the bloodiest anti-Chinese massacre in the state’s history. Resistance to a police raid and an assault by 500 mainly Anglos and some Hispanics, deputized as members of a posse, sparked the ensuing race riot, resulting in the killing of between 19 and 21 Chinese. Most of the victims were lynched. Competition for jobs was a factor but probably not the most important one causing this outburst of violence.
A combination of statewide anti-Chinese prejudice and the death of a white man in a local feud precipitated the carnage in Los Angeles. Since the early 1850s the Chinese had been depicted as unclean and diseased; their women were commonly viewed as prostitutes. Tongs were characterized as un-American crime syndicates; Chinese religion was treated as paganism; and the foods of these people were often seen as disgusting. To this combustible mix of prejudice and hard times was added the sporadic feuds that set the residents of Los Angeles’ Chinatown against each other. In the resulting crossfire, occasioned by a dispute between two Chinese companies, that is, community organizations, over a woman, a white man - Robert Thompson - was accidently killed and two officers injured. Within hours police and a posse went on a rampage, murdering Chinese indiscriminately, burning their buildings, and looting their stores.
Indicative of the public’s blaming of the city’s Chinese residents for the violence, the justice system failed to imprison even those few who were convicted of wrongdoing. The Los Angeles district attorney’s indictment was so sloppy that it neglected to charge any of the defendants with murder. Eight rioters, who had been sentenced to the state prison at San Quentin, regained their freedom shortly after incarceration when the California supreme court overturned their convictions by lower tribunals. The time had not yet arrived when the state’s Chinese could defend themselves in court against the wrath of lynch mobs and the partiality of local police departments.
As economic conditions worsened nationwide, anti-Chinese violence erupted in Chico, San Francisco, and elsewhere throughout the state and the West in 1877. When a Chico businessman, employing Chinese in his soap factory, leased a slaughterhouse to some Chinese people, the facility was burned and a note sent to the property owner, John Bidwell: “Sir, you are given notice to discharge your Mongolian help within ten days or suffer the consequences.” More incidents like that followed. On March 14 the anti-Chinese rage reached a crescendo. At a ranch just outside of town, five armed men shot four Chinese hired to clear land, and then set their homes ablaze. One of the gunshot victims died. The Chico Enterprise newspaper revealed on March 30, 1877, that members of the Laborers’ Union - connected to a white supremacist group called the Order of Caucasians - were responsible for the terror. Court trials and convictions followed but all those imprisoned were paroled long before their sentences had been served.
San Francisco’s outburst of anti-Chinese violence, while not as deadly as that in Los Angeles, was deeply rooted in racial bigotry. The bigotry was fed by the large flow of Cantonese immigrants arriving at San Francisco, the hub of Chinese transpacific voyaging. Between 1848 and 1876, 233,136 Chinese arrived in that city, while 93,273 departed for China from that port. In 1876 alone about 20,000 came. Some Anglos saw the growing numbers of these immigrants as dangerous to public health and morals. In a report issued in 1876-7 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors stated that the Chinese were viewed as “a social, moral and political curse to the community.” Brothels, opium smoking, gambling, and communicable diseases (especially syphilis and leprosy) were attributed to these foreigners, who, additionally, were thought to be inassimilable. Chinatown, according to that report, was “a laboratory of infection,” inhabited by “lying and treacherous” aliens. Jobless, working-class whites resented these newcomers, who offered their services for paltry wages. As employment competition intensified during the depression-ridden mid-1870s, previously simmering anti-Chinese prejudice boiled over. Steamships arriving in San Francisco from China were met by angry, club-wielding mobs that attacked the disembarking Asians. Bloody riots ensued.
To restore order, William T. Coleman, famed vigilante leader, formed a Committee of Safety. With a force of more than 1,000 men, armed with pick handles, the more stable, merchant-class of the city stood ready to exercise a measure of restraint on outraged laborers. Still, some rioting occurred with loss of life; however, conditions remained more volatile in the East, particularly Philadelphia.
San Francisco’s anti-Chinese movement then returned to the political arena, where it had been effective earlier. For example, in 1870 the city had passed a Sidewalk Ordinance outlawing the use of a bamboo pole placed across one’s shoulders, from which loads were
Figure 6.4 A Wasp magazine cartoon showing arrival of Chinese in San Francisco. White laborers blamed the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and its Canadian affiliate for transporting Chinese workers to San Francisco, where the new arrivals established businesses that threatened local white merchants who could not compete with the cheap Asian labor. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
Suspended. This method of conveyance had been customary for the Chinese peasantry. In San Francisco white boys were known to upend the loads for amusement, causing spillage onto the street.
The need for a movement leader was met with the arrival in the city, by clipper ship, of a fiery Irish seaman, later turned wagon master, Denis Kearney. A gifted orator and polemicist, Kearney established the Workingmen’s Party. Organized in early October 1877, the party’s demands included: the eight-hour workday, direct election of U. S. Senators, compulsory education, state regulation of banks and railroads, and a fairer tax system. Capitalists and monopolists were denounced. Uppermost, however, was the demand for ridding California of the Chinese. Kearney’s inflammatory speeches, often delivered to huge outdoor audiences gathered at a sandlot across from the city hall, ended with such phrases as “The Chinese must go” and “Every workingman should get a musket.” “Are you ready to march down to the wharf and stop the leprous Chinamen from landing?” Kearney roared to one throng. Five days after haranguing a crowd of 2,000 near Charles Crocker’s Nob Hill mansion, Kearney and five of his accomplices were arrested and jailed for two weeks. After
Being released, the mantle of the martyr added even more effect to his resumed antiChinese rhetoric. He was repeatedly arrested for inciting riots, and each freeing brought him more popularity. On the occasion of one of his prison releases, 7,000 workingmen celebrated by parading through the city.
Tension mounted in January 1878 as 1,500 unemployed workers demonstrated for “work, bread, or a place in the county jail.” At another such gathering men threatened to destroy the wharves and vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and bomb Chinatown. Coleman again called out his law and order forces, and the U. S. Navy sent a warship to defend federal mail docks.
Amid this backdrop of unease and terrorist threats, the Workingmen’s Party held its first convention on January 28, 1878. Speakers scorned “capitalists and their willing instruments” in government. With its base energized, the party’s political clout grew. The following year it elected a mayor of San Francisco, several state supreme court justices, 11 senators, and 16 assemblymen. Despite these results, the party collapsed nearly as rapidly as it had formed. Its demise was due to internal strife and suspicion that Kearney had taken bribes from the railroad. Though withering and suffering from dissension within its ranks, the Workingmen’s Party had drawn considerable attention to the need for reform and managed to seat 51 delegates, a sizable minority, at the upcoming state constitutional convention.
World History
