by
Fred Glass
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WPC leaders told white workers they were being squeezed on two sides: by the very wealthy and by their tool, Chinese workers, who took the available jobs. Thus the racism practiced by the Workingmen’s Party of California was rooted in economic fear. Like all racism, however, it went beyond rational calculation and slid quickly into the shadows of the irrational.
Not all members of the WPC blamed the Chinese for their troubles. Frank Roney argued that the measures being proposed against the Chinese were “brutal and such as no self-respecting people would dream of imposing on any race within their midst.” Despite his experiences with unemployment, he didn’t consider the Chinese the source of his personal misery. He felt that the Chinese workers, if left alone, would gradually improve their economic position like other immigrant groups and cease to undercut the wages of other workers.
But more San Franciscans were swayed by another Irish immigrant. Denis Kearney had arrived in the city in 1868. Within a few years he had saved enough money to buy a small drayage firm. He became a naturalized citizen in 1876. A convincing, if crude, orator, Kearney articulated the resentments of white workers at the decaying economic conditions facing them, even though he had become an employer. He also reflected the fears of small business and property owners that only a thin, weak barrier separated them from financial ruin.
Kearney coined the WPC’s slogan, “The Chinese must go!” He was jailed a number of times for his inflammatory sandlot speeches. In fall of 1877 he led a meeting of several thousand on Nob Hill, across the street from Mark Hopkins’s mansion. He delighted the crowd by promising to lead them “to the City Hall, clean out the police force, hang the Prosecuting Attorney, burn every book that has a particle of law in it, and then enact new laws for the workingmen.” He also said, “If I give an order to hang Crocker, it will be done.”
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.
Railroad magnate Crocker was not alone in seeking to curb the power of white workers and their unions by hiring Chinese laborers. When the first California miners’ union went on strike in 1869 in Grass Valley over the risk to miners’ safety posed by new explosives, the mine owners threatened to replace them with Chinese workers. However, when Chinese railroad workers went on strike in 1867, Crocker investigated replacing them with black workers before realizing it would be simpler and cheaper to starve them out. These complex issues in the background of the Chinese question would not be taken care of by banning Chinese immigration.
The major Los Angeles trade union was the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Local 56. Its founder, Arthur Vinette, raised by his Canadian father to be a ship’s carpenter, came to Los Angeles via New York and Colorado in the early 1880s. He discovered conditions for carpenters deteriorating in the midst of the building boom. Disregarding his complete lack of previous union experience, Vinette decided the remedy was to organize Local 56. Thanks to the voracious need for skilled carpenters, along with Vinette’s persistence, it soon became the largest union in southern California. At its peak in 1887 nearly a thousand members paid dues to the organization.
The People’s Store was a major Times advertiser. The unions pressured the store to withdraw its advertising from Otis. Supporters operated picket lines proclaiming a “secondary boycott” during all store hours, turning sympathizers away from patronizing the place. (A secondary boycott tries to halt commerce with another business that has trade with the original offending business.) From time to time, individuals went in to fill up shopping carts with goods. At the checkout counter they would ask the clerk, “Does this store advertise in the Times?” At that point they would exit, leaving the full shopping cart to be unloaded back on the shelves.
The store owner, his profits eroded by the secondary boycott, was persuaded to try sitting Otis down to talk with the printers. Otis could not afford to ignore one of his main sources of advertising income. He compromised, allowing a few union printers back to work—but as individuals, without a union contract. He also promised to eventually hire more union men. The printers agreed to end the strike and boycott, believing it would only be a matter of time before they could reorganize the Times completely.
sick
In California Debs brought the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe workers out on strike after the companies fired boycotting trainmen. Public support for the striking ARU members was initially high, despite some newspaper coverage—echoing the railroads’ assertions—that portrayed the strikers as violent and obstructing the U.S. mails (which was sent across country by train at that time).
In fact, the ARU had offered to keep the mail flowing, so long as Pullmans were uncoupled from the trains. Notwithstanding the press distortions—particularly by the Los Angeles Times—most people understood it was the companies’ decision to insist on running the Pullmans that was holding up their mail. One prostriker newspaper even scoffed that the lack of train service “was done in the interests of Pullman, so that by inconveniencing the public in a most distressing way sympathy may be withheld from the strikers.” Otis’s paper predictably editorialized that “This is not a dispute between a railroad company and its employees, but between the great masses of law-abiding citizens on the one hand and a small faction of lawless men on the other.”
Following the advice of the GMA, they prevailed upon the Los Angeles district attorney to request permission from U.S. attorney general Richard Olney to prosecute the strikers for conspiracy. Olney, a former railroad lawyer and GMA member, was pleased to grant permission. The companies then persuaded a friendly judge in Los Angeles to do two things. On June 29, he summoned a grand jury to determine whether the striking workers were guilty of conspiracy for obstructing mails and interstate commerce. And the following day he issued an injunction which directed workers to end the strike or resign.
Olney authorized sending federal troops to Los Angeles, despite the nearly complete lack of violence among the highly disciplined strikers. According to one of the soldiers, they were not enthusiastic at their assignment, “this idea of shooting down American citizens simply because they are on a strike for what they consider to be their rights. . . . All of the boys are against it from first to last, and many are in sympathy with the strikers.” The heavily armed troops were deployed to escort strikebreakers, run trains, and intimidate strikers.
Debs and several other national leaders of the ARU had been arrested and charged with conspiracy during the last days of the strike. His conviction, reduced to the single charge of contempt, put him in jail for a few months. Thus it was a shock when a half-dozen local ARU leaders in Los Angeles were found guilty of conspiracy, fined, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison—courtesy of the same judge who had issued the injunction against the strikers.
ah so that's why he was there!
Few workers believed that the strike had represented a “conspiracy” by the ARU. Rather, it had become painfully clear that if a conspiracy existed, it was among the railroads and various branches of government, which combined powers to force the strikers to their knees. Many workers, having believed in the neutrality of the government in conflicts between labor and capital, were disillusioned. They saw that the money and organization of the employers far outweighed democratic principle in the actions of Attorney General Olney, who authorized the conspiracy arrests and trials, and President Grover Cleveland, who ordered federal troops to aid the railroads.
While never a majority of the farm labor workforce in California, Chinese immigrants, for a time, predominated in several important crops and provided the bulk of workers in some counties. Growers praised them for their sober and industrious habits, much as Charles Crocker had for their work on the Central Pacific Railroad, and for doing work that white men preferred not to at wages whites refused to accept. Between 1860 and 1890 Chinese farmworkers assisted in the beginning of many specialty crops, enabling important sectors of California agriculture to get started. They also contributed the hard labor for numerous heavy rural construction projects, and became famous for their tolerable cooking in an occupation better known for its hazard to palate and health alike.
In Sonoma one hundred Chinese were working for pioneering winemaker Agoston Haraszthy as early as 1857, and their role in the development of that county’s wine industry cannot be overestimated. They cleared the land and put hundreds of thousands of grape vines into the ground for their employer. They pruned the plants, picked the grapes, dug wine cellars, constructed press houses, and worked the vats. Haraszthy kept careful notes on their speed at these tasks, and their work rates and wages became the industry standards. Hired by other wine grape growers in the area as well, by 1869 the Chinese had planted most of the area’s 3.2 million vines, in the process helping Sonoma to rival Los Angeles as the state’s premier wine growing center.