by
Fred Glass
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Momentum grew until the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a law establishing the eight-hour day in all city and county employment. Finally in February 1868 an eight-hour-day law for all California workers was passed by the state assembly and state senate, and signed by the governor. A huge torchlight procession in San Francisco celebrated passage of the law, the second statewide eight-hour law in the country (after Illinois the previous year). Far from perfect—the law lacked effective enforcement mechanisms—it nonetheless marked a high-water point for the struggle for a shorter workday.
More than a century after the deaths of Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, and Mark Hopkins, their continuing presence in the state remains impressive. Their names are still memorialized on cities, streets, banks, hotels, libraries, parks, beaches, schools, and universities. They had failed at gold mining, succeeded in retail businesses supplying miners, and converted their modest storekeeping fortunes into the seed money for the Central Pacific. Yet, how accurate is it to describe them, as standard histories do, as “the men who built the railroad” across the Sierras?
In June 1867, several thousand Chinese workers had had enough. They went on strike near Cisco, proclaiming “Eight hours a day good for white men, all the same good for Chinamen.” They wanted forty dollars a month, up from thirty. The Central Pacific, perhaps unwilling to imagine its “pets” might think for themselves, told the newspapers that the strike must have been the result of agitation by Union Pacific representatives. The company wanted to maintain the public impression that it treated its workers well and that only external meddling might have induced the workers to take such drastic action. When the laborers refused a Central Pacific offer to raise their wages to thirty-five dollars, the company surrounded their camps with armed guards, choking off food supplies. After a week, the workers were forced to return to their jobs with no improvements in hours or pay. Nonetheless, an interesting event had occurred: the largest job action yet seen in California and by a group of workers believed to be strike-proof.
A handful of men made large fortunes through their positions atop the Comstock mining companies and its web of financial interests. The silver kings, as they were called, joined with the Big Four railroad owners to employ the most skilled building craftsmen to raise enormous mansions on Nob Hill. No costs were spared. Their ornate homes featured some of the finest furnishings pillaged from European cultural history. Charles Crocker’s 12,500 square foot house boasted a seventy-six foot tower and a theater. Mark Hopkins’s garish wooden castle included an oak-paneled dining room with seats for sixty. Silver mining engineer and capitalist George Hearst had a mansion built a block away from Crocker’s. His son, William Randolph, later to become owner of the nation’s most extensive media empire, drew inspiration for his San Simeon castle from memories of the neighborhood of his youth.
Most of the Chinese who journeyed to Gam Saan (Golden Mountain) in California were unskilled or semiskilled contract laborers. An American or Chinese company would pay for their transport in return for a number of years of work. Out of their earnings the ticket price would be deducted. (Despite charges that the Chinese immigrant workers were “coolies”—the term designates a slave trade in poor Chinese prevalent in other parts of the world—few if any Chinese workers in California came over by that method. The term literally meant “bitter strength.”)
The trip took eight or nine weeks across the Pacific, often under horrendous conditions. Shipwrecks were common, but greater problems were poor sanitation and overcrowding, and on occasion deliberate cruelty by the crew. Perhaps the most extreme voyage was that of the Libertad in 1854, which pulled into San Francisco with one-fifth of its five hundred passengers dead.
Initially the majority of Chinese passed through San Francisco and immediately went to the Sierras to mine gold. As the Chinese grew into the most numerous minority in the diggings, laws like the Foreign Miners’ Act of 1850 became merely part of a wide range of racist, exclusionary actions taken against them in the state. The law was repealed and reinstated a number of times, and finally declared unconstitutional in 1870.
By then better than one in eight workers in San Francisco were Chinese. Cloistered in the crowded Chinatown, their unfamiliar cultural behaviors became the basis for speculation and prejudice. [...]
Such prejudices were curious, given the parallels between Chinese and Irish immigrant histories: flight from persecution or famine in their home countries; bad treatment when they arrived in the United States; suffering ridicule for their curious languages or accents, clothing, and cultural customs; and taking unskilled jobs. Despite these similarities there was one crucial difference: the Irish were white and the Chinese were not. In American culture of the nineteenth century, this difference cannot be overstated. Racism and economics had been at the center of the recently fought Civil War. Despite the emancipation of the slaves, the relationship between these issues had not been resolved. What happened to the California Indians after statehood was one illustration of how exploitation of people of color was conveniently perceived as part of the “natural order of things.”
As early as 1869 Chinese workers were hired as strikebreakers by San Francisco shoe manufacturers Buckingham, Hecht and Company when white workers at the company put down their tools. By the mid-1870s Chinese workers comprised slightly over half of the boot and shoe industry, and a larger majority of cigar makers. Yet unions in these industries refused to include Chinese workers. Instead they created “white workers labels” to distinguish their goods from those produced by Chinese labor. The Knights of Saint Crispin, a union representing shoemakers, in 1870 had two locals in San Francisco, one for men and one for women. It called for and enforced boycotts against Chinese-produced goods. (A “boycott” means refusing to patronize a business or its products. The term came from the landlord’s name in a famous rent strike in Ireland, although the practice predated the word.)
In 1876, the U.S. Congress established a Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration. It held hearings in San Francisco, interviewing workers and business owners. One of those who testified was Anna Ferry Smith, who described herself as “a general working woman.” Smith, like Frank Roney, had arrived in San Francisco in 1875.
Born in New York in 1833, Smith went to work while still a child in domestic service. Moving slowly west, she worked in a succession of jobs and industries: in a shoe factory, as a janitor in girls’ schools, as a nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War, as a washerwoman, and ironing in laundries. She married a disabled war veteran, who was fired from his job with the Pennsylvania Railroad because of his disability. He died in Missouri. Anna with his child went to Denver.
Although she never received any formal education, part of her compensation while employed as a janitor was permission to attend classes. Apparently she did so and became an enthusiastic reader.
In California, at first she cooked and kept house on ranches. At last she arrived in San Francisco, putting a roof over her head as a seamstress, broken up by periods of unemployment. Her young son worked more than she did.
Smith was reported in a San Francisco newspaper as “well informed on matters connected with the labor question.” Her testimony on Chinese immigration before the congressional committee backed up that opinion; the transcripts show her to be intelligent, articulate, and able to hold her own in exchanges with U.S. senators. When one senator tried to get her to say that Chinese workers were the cause of the wretched condition of working women in San Francisco, she responded with a question of her own. She politely inquired as to “why the condition of the working people in the East, where there are no Chinamen, is worse than it is here?”
The Workingmen’s Party speakers called for an end to government subsidies of the railroads and for an eight-hour day for all workers. But at the end of the rally, the crowd was joined by members of an “anti-coolie” club. The anti-Chinese agitators found ready listeners when they blamed the Chinese for high levels of unemployment among white workers. Despite efforts of the Workingmen’s Party to stop them, a portion of the crowd marched to Chinatown and burnt down two dozen Chinese laundries, a few other Chinese-owned businesses, and a church.
Ten weeks later appeared a new organization, the Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC). It is probable that at least some of its activists came from the ranks of the rioters, and certainly a great many of its supporters were unemployed. A large percentage were Irish immigrants. It was dedicated to the belief that the democratic traditions of the American Revolution had been subverted by great wealth amassed in the hands of the robber barons, who respected no laws, particularly laws that protected common people. Despite its name, it was open to small businesspeople as well as workers. In that respect the party’s ideas resembled those of other late nineteenth-century workers’ movements, which tended to define Americans as either useful “producers” or parasitical “exploiters.”