The WPC’s success in passing racist exclusion laws did not result in any real gains for workers. This simplistic solution did not challenge the power of the railroad monopoly and landowners over working people’s lives. It failed to address the great changes created by the industrial revolution. By focusing its attention on the divisive side issue of Chinese exclusion, an opportunity to build alliances among all groups of working people was lost.

Chinese workers were often willing to serve as strikebreakers, if that was the only work they could get. But they were also open to collective action, as they demonstrated in the Sierras in 1867, and again in March 1876, when hundreds struck two San Francisco shoe manufacturers. Most of them wanted what most white workers wanted: to pursue the American Dream of economic advancement. Unfortunately, racial prejudices and economic fears blinded white workers to the possibility of unity.