Alexander Saxton The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the anti-Chinese movement in California, University of California Press: Los Angeles, CA, 1971 (1975), 293 pp.
[p. 1] Introduction
Having broken from the old circumference in search of new territory, European explorers and entrepreneurs found themselves involved with a quest for labor to work the lands they had laid open. A large segment of the history of the Americas could be bracketed within this context.
The first effort at labor recruitment was the impressment of Indians, an attempt generally unsuccessful north of the Rio Grande. The second effort was the importation of African slaves. The third, beginning as the slave trade tapered off, was the coolie trade from South China. Out of that hungry and overpopulated region, Chinese laborers were carried to the ocean islands, reached the Pacific coasts of North and South America, and passed on across the Isthmus to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. The Chinese were followed-briefly and in much smaller numbers-by Japanese, Hindus, and Filipinos. Immigration of Chinese to the United States, then, from its earliest beginnings during the Gold Rush through flood tide in the early eighties and rapid decline thereafter, formed only one phase of a more extended historical episode.
In another respect also the half century of Chinese labor in the West was contained within a larger historical context. North Americans of European background have experienced three great racial confrontations: with the Indians, with the African, and with the Oriental. Central to each transaction has been a totally one-sided preponderance of power, exerted for the exploitation of nonwhites by the dominant white society. In each case (but, especially in the two that began with systems of enforced labor), white workingmen have played a crucial, yet ambivalent, role. They have been both exploited and exploiters. On the one hand, thrown into competition with nonwhites as enslaved or "cheap" labor, they suffered economically; on the other hand, being white, they benefitted by that very exploitation which was compelling the nonwhite workers to work for low wages, or for nothing. Ideologically they were drawn in opposite directions. Racial identification cut at right angles to class consciousness.
Clearly, the importation of indentured workers from an area of [p. 2] relatively depressed living standards constituted a menace to a society developing, at least after 1865, on the basis of free wage labor. This will be taken for granted. Yet America's hostile reception of Chinese cannot be explained solely by the "cheap" labor argument, although many historians have endeavored to do so. The dominant society responded differently to Irish or Slavic than to Oriental cheap workers, not so much for economic as for ideological and psychological reasons. What happened to Orientals in America, while similar in many ways to what happened to other immigrants, is generally more like what happened to blacks, who were certainly not immigrants in the usual meaning of the term.
The purpose of this study is to examine the Chinese confrontation on the Pacific Coast, as it was experienced and rationalized by the white majority. For reasons which will be evident in what follows, the main body of work (Chapters 3 through 11) will focus on the Democratic party and the labor movement of California through the forty-year period after the Civil War.The two opening chapters turn back to explore aspects of the Jacksonian background which appear crucial to an understanding of what occurred in California. The final chapter looks beyond the turn of the century to trace certain results of the sequence of events in the West for the labor movement as a whole, and to suggest the influence of those events upon the crystallization of an American concept of national identity . . .
Alexander Saxton The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the anti-Chinese movement in California, University of California Press: Los Angeles, CA, 1971 (1975), 293 pp., 1880s, 1870s, 1860s, 1850s
[p. 3] 1. The Labor Force In California
The Chinese
The census of 1870 showed just under fifty thousand Chinese in California. Their number had increased at an accelerating pace since before the Civil War and would continue to rise till after 1880; but the rate of increase was less rapid than that for the population as a whole. In 1860 Chinese had represented slightly more than 9 percent of all Californians; ten years later the proportion had dropped to 8.6 percent and in 1880 to 7.5 percent.
Distribution throughout the state was uneven and shifted with changing occupational patterns. Most Chinese immigrants were laborers. The majority reaching California in the early fifties had joined the rush to the foothills. There they had found themselves in competition with white miners, who frequently resolved their own differences sufficiently to join in evicting Chinese from the camps. Already, however, the golden days were passing; by the end of the decade, as surface deposits were stripped away, most white miners went hunting richer territory elsewhere or drifted into other pursuits. The Chinese then returned to work out low-yield diggings and comb over abandoned tailings. Thus, the census of 1860 for California found more than two-thirds of all Chinese in the mining regions of the Sierra Nevada and Trinity Alps.
[p. 4] But even under Chinese methods of extraction, the placers were finally giving out, and through the sixties a large number of Chinese moved into heavy construction. The Central Pacific Railroad provided the transition for this shift. From 1866 through 1869, the railroad kept some 10,000 Chinese at work boring the Sierra tunnel and driving the line east across the deserts of Nevada and Utah. One result-aside from the golden spike at Promontory-was the assembly of an army of experienced Chinese construction workers. Afterward some stayed with the railroad, which, upon completion of the transcontinental link, began pushing its lines out to the northern and southern extremities of the state. Others moved into agriculture. California ranchers, having come through their pastoral stage, were now demanding enormous supplies of labor for clearing, diking, ditching, draining, irrigating, and harvesting the new crops.
As most of this activity centered in the great valleys, a corresponding shift of Chinese population occurred. By 1870 the mining districts had lost half their Chinese residents of ten years earlier, while the valley counties were showing a rapid increase. In Sacramento, for example, the number of Chinese tripled in the twenty -year period from 1860 to 1880; in San Joaquin their number rose from 139 to almost 2,000; in Santa Clara from 22 to 2,695; in Yolo from 6 to over 600.
While these movements in the interior were under way, a second and more important concentration of Chinese population was developing at San Francisco. Here, until 1860, the resident community had comprised little more than 8 percent of Chinese in the state. By 1870, this percentage had risen to 26 and climbed through the seventies to just under 30 percent. Primary cause of the increase was the growth of manufacture. San Francisco's Alta, in 1877, estimated that there were 18,000 Chinese in the City's factories. Aside from manufacture, there were two other pursuits in which Chinese traditionally engaged: [p. 5] washing and domestic service. Since clothes in need of cleaning and middle class families able to hire servants were probably most plentiful in the metropolis, these also tended to further the urban concentration of Chinese. A police department survey for 1876 reported 5,000 serving as domestics while another 3,000 were employed in washhouses. Wildly inaccurate as these figures apparently are (they add up to more Chinese than the census of 1880 found in the city), they at least warrant a conclusion that large numbers of Chinese actually did follow these lines of work.
Viewing the state as a whole, then, Chinese were found in occupations which required little or no skill, in occupations stigmatized as menial, and in manufacturing. In a general way, the division between Chinese and non-Chinese corresponded to lines of skill or prestige. In the country these lines remained fairly simple, but in the city they became extraordinarily complex. Manufacturing had begun in San Francisco to supply the mining camps; during the Civil War, it flourished under the artificial protection of short supply in the East, lack of transport and high shipping insurance rates. By 1867, however, and even more disastrously after the completion of the railroads in 1869, eastern goods came flooding into the market. The infant manufactories of the Pacific port either went under or found ways of reducing costs; but the only cost that could really be cut was labor cost. Happily for the industrialists, Chinese were available; and Chinese contract labor seemed to provide an answer to the more advanced techniques and cheaper production cost of the East. Meanwhile demobilization and postwar recession, followed by the opening of the railroad, brought a westward migration of workingmen. San Francisco manufacturers, therefore, initiated employment of Chinese under circumstances quite different from those that had prevailed in the hinterland when first the railroad and then the agriculturalists began hiring Chinese. In the country there had been a shortage of labor. In the city, on the contrary, white laborers were seeking [p. 6] work. Because they could not live as cheaply as the Chinese, they were unable to compete directly; but their organizational skills partially compensated for this disability. They had succeeded, by 1867, in mounting a campaign of moral, political, and economic pressure against the employment of Chinese which was proving moderately successful. Employers who could afford to yield generally preferred to do so. The line between those who could afford to yield and those who could not was simply the line between those whose products sold in a market that was locally competitive and those whose products came into competition with wares shipped from the East.
Cigar making and building construction offer an example of this separation. Despite the dissimilarity of their products, the two industries had several characteristics in common: small employers predominated in both due to the low threshold of necessary investment; those employers were dependent on skilled craftsmen, yet had work as well for apprentices or unskilled laborers. In cigar making, Chinese took over the trade almost completely. In construction, on the other hand. Chinese were almost totally excluded. The moment of decision in this respect seems to have occurred during the winter of 1887 when some four hundred white workingmen attacked a group of Chinese who were excavating for a street railway. The crowd stoned the Chinese, maimed several, and burned their shanties. Afterward, alleged leaders of the riot were jailed and the Chinese resumed work under armed guard. But the demonstration had made its point. Throughout the long record of anti-Oriental agitation which followed, there appears little if any reference to Chinese construction laborers in San Francisco or its environs. The evidence is negative, but conclusive; had there been Chinese in this line of work their presence would have been stressed rather than minimized.
Thus in the national market industry-cigar making-Chinese took over both skilled and unskilled operations; in the local market industry-building, they were excluded from both. This became the urban pattern. In the country, however, where white workers remained in short supply, white unemployed seldom gathered into crowds large enough to be intimidating or were concentrated in sufficient numbers to exert much voting power. Lines of skill and prestige, in the country, continued to be more decisive than conditions of market competition; consequently, Chinese laborers were able to play a prominent part in [p. 7] agricultural work and heavy construction for another twenty years at least.
[p. 7] In summary, the Chinese during the seventies and early eighties comprised about one-twelfth of the inhabitants both of California and of San Francisco. Having earlier been largely occupied at placer mining, they were moving now into heavy construction and farm labor, and into manufacturing. These changes in occupation caused shifts in concentration of Chinese population from the mountain districts to the great valleys and to the San Francisco Bay area. In the hinterland, Chinese were generally restricted to unskilled positions as agricultural and construction workers; in the city they were generally restricted to "sweated" trades, the products of which entered tightly competitive national markets.
Before turning, however, to the non-Chinese components of the labor force, it may be well to consider two additional factors which deeply affected the relations between Chinese and non-Chinese.
First, while Chinese were only one-twelfth of total population, they comprised a much larger fraction of the labor force. The 1870 census estimated California's gainfully employed as 239,000 in a population of somewhat over 570,000. There were, by the same count, slightly fewer than 50,000 Chinese, almost all of whom must, as a necessary condition of their coming to California, have been gainfully employed. If we exclude Chinese women (one in every thirteen), we find that Chinese males constituted approximately one-fifth of the total number of persons gainfully employed. But even this number is too small. The census category included entrepreneurs, independent farmers, supervisors, businessmen-and these we can assume to have been more numerous among non-Chinese than among the Chinese. If then our concern is primarily with wage workers, it would probably not be far wrong to estimate that one-quarter of all available for hire in the early seventies must have been Chinese.
The second factor is that the large contingent of Chinese within the labor force was tightly and exclusively organized. All accounts seem to agree that the Chinese came to California in organized groups; that they were received by the Six Companies in San Francisco and housed, fed, and sent off to their various places of employment. At the [p. 8] bottom of this organizational structure were the laborer. Above them were an assortment of gang foremen, agents and interpreters. At the top were Chinese merchants and businessmen in China. The resident merchants in San Francisco dealt, more or less on a basis of equality, with American interests desirous of securing contract labor. Most spectacular of such recruitments were those undertaken for the western railroad beginning with the Central Pacific; but an extraordinary variety of employers-including San Francisco factory owners, California farmers, land improvement companies, Southern planters, railroad promoters in Southern states, even a shoe manufacturer in North Adams, Massachusetts, and a laundry operator in New Jersey-entered into similar arrangements.
Essential to such a system of recruitment and employment was strict internal discipline. Contracts had to be honored and advance of passage money repaid. Yet any legal machinery for the enforcement of labor contracts was lacking. The Chinese organization, therefore enforced its own regulations, adjudicated disputes, punished transgressors. While all this was, in terms of American laws, not only extra legal but illegal, the American courts and police authorities actually served as bulwarks for the entire structure. For many years the Six Companies kept a special Chinatown contingent of San Francisco policemen on their payroll. They also retained competent lawyers who were frequently in court seeking the apprehension of runaway laborers or sing-song girls on complaints of petty theft which would later be withdrawn. As final capstone to this structure, the Six Companies maintained an unwritten protocol with shipping lines to the effect that no Chinese would be booked passage out of California unless he carried a clearance from the Six Companies. It was a tight system.
But had the sole function been that of requiring obedience, the apparatus probably would not have lasted long in America. Actually it conveyed many positive benefits. It served as insurance society and bank. It made the years of labor in exile tolerable by providing a social club, companionship, recreation, women occasionally, familiar food, a link with the homeland. It offered protection against the menace from outside. When four Chinese woodcutters were shot to death near [p. 9] Chico in 1877, the Six Companies offered a reward for the names of the killers and sent a private detective into the area, who, with the assistance of Colonel Frederick A. Bee, the Companies' attorney, played a leading part in the arrest and conviction of the murderers. Bee, in addition to frequent rounds in court, appeared for the Chinese before various governmental agencies and was appointed Chinese consul in San Francisco. From top to bottom, the Chinese establishment in America had something in it for everyone. To the Cantonese peasant it offered escape from a depressed and hopelessly overcrowded countryside-and always the distant chance of coming home again with enough California gold to redeem all the lost promises of youth. As one ascended the levels of the apparatus, benefits became less promissory and more tangible, till at the highest level the merchant entrepreneurs on both sides of the Pacific seem to have been impounding vey real profits indeed.
Essentially this structure was vertical. Stressing the common heritage of language and culture, it linked individual members from top to bottom across class lines. Yet clearly the prime purpose of the entire apparatus was the exploitation of cheap labor in a high-priced labor market. One would expect, therefore, to find horizontal fault lines in the vertical structure; and there were in fact hints of such fissures. During construction of the Central Pacific, for example, Chinese laborers conducted a brief strike which Charles Crocker ascribed to paid agitators sent in by the rival railroad, the Union Pacific. San Francisco's Daily Alta in the summer of 1873 reported a successful strike by Chinese crewmen on steamers of the Pacific Mail Line. Both these cases involved conflicts with white employers; yet given the nature of the contract system, a dispute with the white employer would be likely to lead to a collision between Chinese workingmen and the Chinese labor contractor.
This seems to have been the situation that brought on a "bloody fight" one March [1876] afternoon in Dupont Street, when the Chinatown police detail had to send for reinforcements and later for an express wagon to carry away the wounded. A Chinese trading company, which doubled as a labor contractor, had agreed to place some 750 men in the shoe factories of Einstein Brothers and of Buckingham, Hecht, and Company. As a guarantee of performance, the shoe manufacturer required a sizable deposit, which the contractor in turn extracted from [p. 10] his laborers in sums ranging from twenty-five to one hundred dollars apiece. Afterward, in the opinion at least of the laborers, Einstein Brothers and Buckingham, Hecht reneged on the terms of the agreement. The laborers struck the jobs, then attempted to recover their deposits. Neither the manufacturers nor the labor contractor would return the money. Apparently this dispute had been carried to higher tribunals within the Chinese establishment, but without resolution. The laborers finally armed themselves and attempted settlement by direct action.
[p. 10] . . . Meanwhile on all sides, the non-Chinese contingents of the labor force were organizing along horizontal lines; that is they were setting up trade unions and political bodies which rallied workingmen as opposed to employees . . .
The Non-Chinese
If one-quarter of California's wage workers were Chinese, who were the other three-quarters? Again we are reduced to rather rough estimates. Excluding Chinese, approximately 28 percent of the inhabitants of the state in 1870 were foreign-born--one-third of these being Irish, one-fifth German or Austrian, and another fifth of generally Anglo-Scotch extraction. But the proportion of foreign-born (still leaving aside Chinese) would certainly have been higher among wage earners than for the general population. This would apply with particular force to the Irish, who being latecomers had less opportunity than others to move out of the working class by acquiring farms or businesses.
[p. 11] Saxton estimates the composition of the workforce in 1870 California as follows:
English, Scotch, Welsh, Anglo-Canadian . . . 6%
But in this context place of birth is less significant than linguistic and ethnic background. The category of native American included some children of immigrant parents. Especially this must have been true for those from New England and central Atlantic areas where immigration had been heaviest.
[Considered in this fashion, over half of California's working population may have been immigrant or first-generation immigrants, remarkably diverse, yet with probably much shared experience . . .]
Irish-Americans, aged forty-five in 1870, would have been twenty at the time of the potato famine . . .
For Germans the pattern was much the same . . . a peasant population subsisting on fractional holdings, dependent on the potato, also struck by the blight in the 1840ties . . .
[p. 12] The immigrants' experiences were uprooting, unsettling, a succession of shattering shocks. A great many died in transit. A great many did, in fact, survive it. The total foreign-born in the population of the United States rose from two and a quarter million in 1850 to more than 4 million at the start of the Civil War . . .
[Beside those shared experiences] . . . it was not all. Nothing provokes man's inhumanity to his fellow men as their misfortunes. Native Americans regarded the influx of foreigners first with anxiety, then with hatred. Throughout three decades prior to the Civil War a barrage of sermons, books, newspaper articles, made known to immigrants that their religion, their language, their food and dress, their very existence as willing wage earners were objects of offense and contempt. Propaganda of the word was generally salted with propaganda of the deed. A mob in the summer of 1834 destroyed the Ursuline School and convent at Charlestown, Massachusetts. Ten years later native Philadelphians were burning down Catholic churches and blocks of houses in the Irish suburbs. Through the mid-fifties, Americans in Ohio and Indiana raided German picnics, stormed meeting halls, fought pitched battles with Germans in the streets. These were only the notorious episodes; the background of petty violence, endlessly condoned and renewed, became one of the circumstances of urban life in the cities of the eastern seaboard and midwest. For the immigrants, after their bad luck in the old country, and after having read or at least heard the rumor that in America, [p. 13] all men could engage equally in the pursuit of happiness, it came inevitably as a crowning shock to find themselves among the pursued rather than the pursuers.
[p. 13] Old stock Americans also traveling to California (where they would furnish, as noted earlier, between one-quarter and one-third of the non-Chinese labor force); so that the tension between immigrant and old stock became part of the western scene as it had been of the eastern. Yet California seems to have exerted a curiously cosmopolitan effect on these newcomers. Superficially at least the tension was muted, and this permitted what was shared by all in common to make itself felt. What was shared was the sense of displacement and victimization. For the fact was that any native American still working for wages in California in 1870 had already suffered a displacement, albeit less violent than that of the immigrants.
Of the old stock from rural backgrounds, most would have come from that portion which had been rolling westward through several generations, in flight from constant encroachment of a more complex and commercialized community. Displacement had been turned into a way of life, each man's sons moving out to the adjacent counties at the western fringe till they made the final jump, which was California. But Agriculture in California was already more complex and commercialized than anything they had left behind. For many of them, failure was foreordained.
Those who came from the cities were likely to have been displaced by industrialization. The expansion of markets which followed the successive transportation revolutions of the forties and fifties had demanded reorganization of small-scale shop work into mass production. Reorganization led into technological change; and these together wiped out many established skills and pushed great segments of the production process into the hands of unskilled workers . . .
In less dramatic form, many other industries . . . metal trades, typesetting . . . the unskilled labor market, [p. 14] during earlier years, had been largely supplied by the children of already established urban workers and by the flow of young people from the country into the city. But in the forties and fifties, the market was invaded by immigrants, especially the Irish, who in their desperation had no choice but to underbid any going wage level. The results was that the old stock had faced a double squeeze. If skilled. they frequently found their skills rendered obsolete by technological change; if unskilled, they were forced to compete with an evergrowing army of hungry foreigners. Here was the economic basis of nativist hostility to the European immigrant.
[p. 14] Yet in California, where even the nativist was a stranger and newcomer, these hostilities were transferred and largely focused upon other objects.
Since the white population of the state had increased by 88 percent between 1860 and 1870, it would seem reasonable to suppose that most of the non-Chinese labor force, as of the early seventies, must have come west during or after the Civil War. But there remained a portion which had come earlier and which was perhaps more influential than its numbers would imply; the forty-niners. Actually the significance is not the year of arrival. but in the experience of that brief arcadian interlude, the first surface mining of the foothills. The moment itself was gone in a flash, say by 1854; but the men who took part in it were marked. What became of them? Some gave up and went home. A few (among them, for example, Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker) emerged as prosperous businessmen. Others got out of mining early enough to acquire handsome tracts of California land. As easy pickings dwindled in the foothills, a large number moved on, searching for new bonanzas in Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Finally, there was a residue that failed to get out, or perhaps crossed the mountains with the first backwash to try their luck on the Comstock and failed to get out there. for these men the only path was the descent from the status of gold hunters-independent entrepreneurs-to that of wage workers.
After the exhaustion of California's surface diggings, mining had shifted to deep quartz operations or to fluming and hydraulicking. Capital investment necessary for these processes was far beyond the [p. 15] capability of individual miners or even such partnerships as had been customary during the pan and placer period. In San Francisco enormous sums were raised for excavation and timbering, for setting up quartz mills, for building water systems. The heyday of the joint stock company was beginning; within less than two decades the capitalists from the city had taken over the mines in the mountains. For the miners this descent was like the fall of Adam. The garden would appear to him in the remembered images of California as it had been in the early fifties:
[p. 15[] "After prospecting a little we soon found a spot on the bank of a stream which we judged would yield us a pretty fair pay of our labor . . . (Borthwick-Gold Hunters)
To twenty years later:
"The morning shift goes on at seven o'clock. Before descending the shaft the men go to the office of the time-keeper . . . De Quille (William Wright), The Big Bonanza)
[p. 15] It is impossible to describe this transition without oversimplifying it. Different strands of experience merge and interact. For the hard-rock miner, checking his time-card, working his shift, collecting his weekly [p. 16] wage, the sense of the earlier period was still present . . . Afterward . . . it was not so much the gold . . . it was the freedom of movement, the newness, the magnificent bounty and opportunity. Illusions though these may have been, their vanishing left a taste of tragedy.
In 1870 almost every adult in California had come on a journey to get there . . . In a psychological sense, a journey is a moratorium; as long as the journey continues the traveler may reasonably believe something new or a great deal better will happen . . . but once arrived, he is brought face to face with his real situation. He must either make the best of it, whatever it is, or keep on traveling. For most Californians, however, there was no place further to go. Literally and symbolically, San Francisco was the end of the line . . . as San Francisco grew into a city, and the great valleys developed into agricultural empires, as the routines of factory and farm became the norm; and as, after the war and completion of the railroad, hard times settled over the state, frustration replaced euphoria. Small farmers and workingmen especially, were embittered because they felt themselves once already displaced and deprived.
"The land is fast passing into the hands of the rich few; great money monopolies control congress, purchase the state legislatures, and have perverted the great republic of our fathers into a den of dishonest manipulators. This concentration and control of wealth has impoverished the people, producing crime and discontent."
--From a resolution adopted by the first California state convention of the Workingman's Party of California, January 24, 1878.
[p. 17] Boundaries of Consensus
[p. 17] Displacement then, and deprivation whether real or fancied, and the psychological pitch of the westward journey and its ensuing frustration-these were common denominators underlying the multiplicity of the non-Chinese labor force. Men who could not understand each other's talk . . . all shared these elements of experience.
But so did the Chinese . . . Yet they were not included in the developing unity of the California labor force. Why?
One reason lay within the Chinese themselves. They viewed their journey as a round trip. Most Chinese were birds of passage, "sojourners" in America . . . They were also more organized within the vertical hierarchy of the Chinese establishment . . .
There was no shared understanding between the Chinese and non-Chinese . . . The absence was not solely due to language and cultural differences . . . nor simply to economic rivalry.
[p. 17] What lay beneath all these rationalizations was a psychological barrier which foreclosed any exchange of experience. The barrier resulted from a concept of fundamental differences [p. 18] . . . the concept, later to be gigantically reinforced, was present from the earliest days . . . Colville's Gazeteer of San Francisco (1856) described the Chinese as "unique" . . . The writer had apparently not yet made up his mind whether Chinese were or were not of the human condition, but they were different and "degraded."
[p. 18] Among workingmen especially this proposition became self-evident. The outstanding common characteristic of all these disparate elements which composed the non-Chinese labor force was that they were not Chinese. Aspirant leaders engaged in a search for facts or fictions to express the values of non-Chineseness. Christianity would be stressed . . . Assimilabilty was on the point of being discoverd-that mysterious substance which resided in the circulatory systems of persons having certain ancestors and which rendered them desirable as neighbors, sons-in-law, fellow workers, even as voters. The words assiminable, white, and the pseudo-scientific term, caucasian, just then coming into fashion, would be taken as equivalents. Before the decade of the seventies was out, there would be California workingmen, styling themselves brothers in the Order of Caucasians, who would undertake the systematic killing of Chinese in order to preserve their assimilable fellow toilers from total ruin.
Chapter 2 Ideological Baggage
[p. 19] "Uniqueness"can rapidly become racial inferiority. Hinton Helper, the North Carolina yeoman soon to become a chief Republican polemicist against slavery wrote of the Chinese he saw on the Pacific Coast in 1852 . . . "semibarbarians" . . . soon to be subject to the will of the Anglo-Americans . . . It is so with the Negros in the South; it is so with the Irish in the the North; it is so with the Indians in New England; and it will be so with the Chinese in California . . . "I should not wonder at all if the copper of the Pacific yet becomes as great a subject of discord and dissension as the ebony of the Atlantic." [Saxton speculates that Helper is replaying older scripts, largely shaped by previous responses to Indians, to immigrants, and especially to Negros and Negro slaves.] The numerous expulsions of Chinese from mine camps and the anti-Chinese ordinances written into the code of local mining districts duplicated the actions already taken against blacks . . . Black codes of midwestern states were widely discussed in California, at least since the debates over slavery and Negro exclusion in [p. 20] in the Constitutional Convention of 1849 . . .
Deeply enmeshed in traditional value systems and behavioral patterns, the social experience underlying these identifications, formed part of the enormous ideological baggage of Jacksonian America. It would be convenient if the contents of this baggage could be sorted in accordance with some useful classification of the men who carried it. What could be most helpful, of course, in order to round out the examination undertaken in the last chapter of conflict and consensus within the California labor force, would be a classification by economic status. Unfortunately, this seems impractical. There was too much upward and downward mobility, and moreover there was nothing in America, or in California, in those years that could be described as the exclusive outlook of a particular class. Some patterns of behavior and some sets of ideas would spread more widely than the labor force, others would be restricted to smaller groups within it. Since the subject under consideration centrally involves political ideas and activities, it seems reasonable to begin by arranging the major and minor tendencies which comprised this ideological baggage in terms of political affinities. [It seems to me, KR, that this is a way to avoid saying who did what to whom, under which influences and under whose thumbs.]
"Americans of all classes," wrote the English traveler, Borthwick, who visited California in 1852, "are particularly au fait at the ordinary routine of public meetings." Impressed by what seemed to him the remarkable ability of miners at improvising parliamentary pro- [p. 21] cedure and drawing up codes to govern everything from horse stealing to riparian rights, Borthwick speculated on how they came by so much political know-how: "They are trained to it from their youth in their innumerable, and to a foreigner, unintelligible, caucus meetings, committees and conventions, and so forth, by means of which they bring about the election of every officer in the State." . . . Politics was a language in which most Americans were fluent and in which they were accustomed to express their economics, their ethics, their emotions, even their religions.
[p. 21] The Major Traditions: Democratic
In 1869 most Californians were Democrats or Republicans. The Democrats belonged to an older party which took Thomas Jefferson as "a father figure," and the Declaration of Independence "as revelation." "What was revealed was necessarily self-evident, and this included the proposition that nature's reasonable and benevolent deity had created all men equal-not in every respect, but in the moral sense, as human beings. Consequently all men were endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Did the all include "blacks?" Jefferson had waffled, yet he had not written any exclusion on the point, and the mandate stood at All. Independent small farmers would constitute the bulk of the Republic . . . being incorruptible would serve as value carriers, as champions against the constant encroachment of urban wealth and special privilege.
As the Republic aged, it seemed necessary to expand the notion of value carrier to all producers-"the productive and burthen-bearing classes" [p. 22] in the words of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the great Missouri agrarian. Lumped with the enemy, the urban wealth and special interests, were most bankers and all monopolists-"those masters of great, moneyed corporations against which the bone and sinew of our country must wage relentless warfare." Benton was addressing a convention in Mississippi in 1834.
The Jacksonian turn began to include urban populations and workers . . . local unions and worker's parties advocated higher wages, shorter work days, free public education, mechanic's lien laws, abolition of debt imprisonment and prison labor contracting; removal of property qualifications from the suffrage, and free land. The main flux, drawn by the bank war, by hard money slogans, by the crusade against monopoly, became part of the Democratic Party. . . [p. 23]
[p. 23] The tone of the Democrats was egalitarian . . . and politically successful.
By the 1850s the concept of the producers battling against monopolies was firmly planted in the midwest, and was making its way westward in every covered wagon crossing the plains.
"In human affairs, however, there seems to be a law of the dissipation of principle according to which the daily life of any established organization tends to erode its declaratory faith. By the time California entered the Union, the Democratic party was getting old. The evolution into a Southern wing and a northern wing assured winning national elections but made it more difficult to rationalize slavery, especially within the context of the Jeffersonian Declaration of Independence egalitarian mandate, and the demotion of the Negro from full humaness.
[p. 24] Abolitionists arose in the Northern wing of the party, but the party had to defend slavery to preserve its coalition. One of the earliest presentations of this position was James K. Paulding, Slavery in the United States, 1836. Paulding was a federal employee and office holder from 1815 until the end of Van Buren's administration. "Paulding shifted from the southern emphasis on the plantation as a system of benevolent social control to a direct evocation of racial anxiety. Enemies of the Republic, he warned, were at work throughout the North, fanatics who spoke in grand moral terms against slavery yet were really intent upon destroying the white race through amalgamation with blacks. "That there are such men, and -shame on the sex-such women, is but too evident . . . They are traitors to the white skin, influenced by mad-brained fanaticism, or the victims of licentious, ungovernable passions, perverted into an unnatural taste by their own indulgence . . . no beneficial consequences to any class of mankind or to the whole universe, can counterbalance the evils that will result to the people of the United States from the dissolution of the Union." This was the message of the Democratic Party, and in 1838, Van Buren appointed Paulding secretary of the Navy.
[p. 25] . . .
Paulding's handling of the slavery question remained in substance the official party dogma until the secession of the southern states. Even George Bancroft, the New England Brahmin, who certainly outranked Paulding as a Jacksonian ideologist, never took issue with him on this matter. Bancroft, to judge by his earlier writings, had at first been negatively disposed toward the peculiar institution. About 1834, however, he fell discreetly silent and stayed so throughout the next twenty years. Meanwhile he became party boss of Massachusetts, helped to engineer the nomination of James K. Polk, served as secretary of the navy during the first part of the Mexican War, and was later appointed ambassador to England.
Although Ralph Waldo Emerson opposed the Democrats on slavery, he did approve of their stand on free trade, wide suffrage, abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and facilitating the access of the young and poor to the sources of wealth and power. And . . . it was Bancroft who helped devise that sequence of devious maneuvers which ended with American occupation of California. Paulding and Bancroft were pilgrims of manifest destiny. The 1830s and 1840s had been decades of expansion for the United States and of national revolution in Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic these movements were accompanied by crescendoes of romantic nationalisms.
The Democratic party not only had preached the egalitarian gospel [p. 26] of equal access for the "young and the poor" to "sources of wealth and power," it had sought to open up for the benefit of every citizen that potential wealth which lay waiting in the West. Democrats had fashioned the Texas Policy, the Oregon Policy, the war against Mexico; they appeared to champion the cause of individual opportunity.
. . .
[p. 26] " . . . By the mid-fifties, it had become not only possible but easy for an American, from the North or South, to assert [p. 27] that he believed in the Declaration of Independence, in the teachings of Christianity, and in the inferiority of colored races. All three statements carried the same sort of authority; they were self-evident . . . the will to believe these tended to be stronger among the Democrats precisely because their party was so deeply enmeshed in the defense of slavery.
[p. 27] Moreover, for northern workingmen, attracted as a great many were by the egalitarianism and nationalism of the Democrats, this will to believe sanctioned and reinforced powerful preexisting factors of racial antagonism. Workingmen alone of the northern white population came into direct competition with free Negroes, and as anti-slavery agitation increased so did their fear of such competition. They had, in several industries, their first encounter with blacks in their role of imported strikebreakers. Workingmen frequently regarded the antislavery cause as a stalking horse put forward by their class enemies . . .
[p. 27] Immigrants and children of immigrants (who together comprised a majority of the white labor force in California) were particularly vulnerable to the compulsions of race hostility. Every aspect of the immigrants laborer's situations converged at this focal point: Democrats had been more hospitable [p. 28] to foreigners and Catholics than were Whigs or Know-Nothings. He could, in turn, respond enthusiastically to the Jacksonian message . . . his contacts were personal, and then his hopes depended on the success of the larger "white republic." . . .
Pressure on the Irish . . . became doubly severe. Of all the immigrant groups, they were the most poverty ridden, the most pathetically unequipped with salable skills . . . the vast majority had been landless, agricultural laborers or cotters on worked out, overpopulated, rentals . . . Having neither knowledge nor money for a start in farming, the Irish in America were confined to cities and unskilled and casual occupations. The contrast is with the second largest group of immigrants, the Germans, who moved in large numbers, for example, into the agricultural Northwest, financing themselves . . . The German migration also included craftsmen. . . . "and from as early as the 1860s in the East (a decade later in California) one finds references to all-German local unions of skilled workingmen. On the other hand an all-Irish craftsmen's local was virtually unheard of. The Irish, for three decades prior to the Civil War, furnished a disproportionate share of that unskilled and partially [p. 29] surplus army which was endlessly expendable in the rise of American industry.
[p. 29] Although Irish immigrants during the early years were not much found in labor unions, they were by no means without organization. Their organizations were vertical rather than horizontal and in this respect resembled the Chinese in the West. Visible Irish organizations were of three types: the church; immigrant aid societies, of which the Ancient Order of Hibernians, was the outstanding example; and nationalist clubs, notably the Fenians. Within these, occasional groups gathered in the tradition of secret societies like the Ribbonmen and the Molly Maguires, which in the old country had carried on the battle against landlords and Protestants . . . In America there were sporadic warfare with nativist and Protestant groups; there were strongarm tactics of political factions in big cities. It was easy to raise Irish mobs against abolitionists, the New York draft riots, the Molly Maguires . . .
[p. 30] Inevitably, in America, this line of secret violence became linked to hatred for the Negro; and the same line, when it reached California, would be woven into the anti-chinese web.
[p. 30] The Major Traditions: Republican
The Republican tradition was more complex than the Democratic. It sprang from the same origins, Locke through Jefferson, in this case becoming the Whig party which set great store by property qualifications for public office and exercise of the franchise. They did not abandon the Declaration of Independence. Hamilton put it that life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, inalienable rights thought they might be were worthless without stable government, which depended on stakeholders, i.e. men of property .
. . . Throughout the fifties, the dying Whigs, the divided Democrats, the nouveaux Republicans were all Jacksonians . . . "representing " the productive and burthen-bearing classes." . . . [p. 31] The Democratic dominance . . . ending with the election of Lincoln in 1860.
[p. 31] Along with the Whig component, were nativism, and anti-slavery, which had three threads: abolition, unionism and free-soil.
[p. 31] The championship of the property concept of responisble governments struck a common harmonic with fear of foreign immigration . . . subsequently antiforeign , anti-Catholic agitation . . . An early manifestation in northern and western states took the form of temperance law crusades in which the use of alcoholic beverages and sabbath-breaking were seen as expressions of the evil that inhered in foreignness and Catholicism . . . Nativism flared up in the mid-forties, peaking between 1852 and 1856, the Know-Nothing party winning control of Massachusetts, Maryland, and California. . . . By 1860 most of the nativists had become Republicans and threw the nomination from Seward to Lincoln.
Nativism, unlike other elements of the Republican coalition, appealed to some groups of workingmen. This attraction did not necessarily diminish as immigrants and their children increased the urban population. Once arrived immigrants were as menaced by further immigration (especially perhaps their children)[p. 32] economic hostility was reinforced by the longing for security and acceptance. The nativist line carried with it a pattern of organized violence and complemented that of the immigrants.
Secret societies under patriotic titles-like the Order of United Americans, United American Mechanics (with membership limited to American-born laborers), and Order of the Star Spangled Banner-sprouted during the two decades prior to the Ciivil War. These with their widely read newspapers and magazines, "convinced many workingmen that . . . property depended on restricted immigration" and "played a prominent part in creating the anti-Catholic, anti-foreign sentiments upon which the Know-Nothing Party was nurtured." Disruption and violence, ranging all the way from petty heckling to riot and arson, provided a continual counterpoint to the antiforeign agitation. In larger cities violence actually became institutionalized into the political structure. Armed clubs of workingmen and native American Know-Nothings, on the one hand, and Democrats, largely immigrants, on the other. fought for control of the registration machinery and the polling places . . .
[p. 32] Republican doctrine's for abolition was essentially religious. To those who accepted the authority of scripture, its argument was unassailable; it might be ignored or forgotten, but never refuted.
Dwight Dumond, in his study of anti-slavery, selected a New England Congregational sermon as a keynote for a abolitionist message: "God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth," preached on the holiday celebrating the Missouri Compromise of 1820:
[p. 33] "This passage not only teaches us that mankind have a common origin and are united by a common nature, but suggests that they are originally equal . . . Mankind are equal in respect to their immortality . . . Mankind are naturally equal in respect to their moral characters . . . Mankind are equal in respect to their native rights. As they are united by a common nature and are all members of the same great family, each individual possesses certain rights that others are bound to respect. In reference to these, superiority is unknown. Every person has a perfect right to his life, to his liberty, to the property which he lawfully acquires, and to whatever happiness he may enjoy without injuring himself or others."
Here in religious terms was the counterpart to the mandate of the Declaration of Independence. It permitted no compromise, left little room for politics . . . and while few in number the abolitionists became very influential in national affairs . . . Their influence was minimal among working people who were Democrats.
More inclusive was the free-soil impulse . . . The impulse was to open the frontiers for development by non-slave holding settlers-an objective virtually identical with that of the homestead and free land schemes which had been proposed in the thirties and forties . . . [p. 34]
. . . to prevent the extension of slavery, especially in the Midwest and on the Pacific coast . . .
. . . was in considerable measure of Democratic origin, its effect on Democrats, who came under its influence, was to move them out of their own party and into the Union-Republican coalition . . . By the late fifties, the South was seen to be blocking development of the nation's western lands. Free soil therefore took on an aura of nationalism which it had lacked in the earlier period, and so merged with the largest component of anti-slavery, unionism.
[p. 34] During the decade that followed the Compromise of 1850, the Democratic party, while it continued to win presidential elections. was separating into a national party and a southern wing. The South became more and more aggressively sectional. Step by step through the debates over California and the Mexican cession territories, over Kansas-Nebraska and homesteads, and over the transcontinental railroad, southern leaders assumed (in the eyes at least of many northerners and westerners) a disruptive role with respect to continental development. From having been an essential ingredient of national unity, the defense of slavery became tantamount to the advocacy of separation. The result was that nationalist sentiment, which had earlier drawn laborers along with the vast number of others to the party of manifest destiny, would now work in the opposite direction and push them into the Republican (or Union-Republican) party. A case in point is the political career of Walt Whitman. The son of a carpenter, Whitman [p. 35] himself became a journeyman printer and editor of a Democratic party newspaper-a post from which he was expelled in 1848 because of his free-soil proclivities- yet as late as 1860 (and a good deal later, too), Whitman was still uttering the rhetoric of the old spread-eagle Democracy:
"Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian.
Foremost! century marches Libertad! masses!
For you a program of chants.
Chants of the prairies,
Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down
to the Mexican sea . . .
Indeed it was precisely this vision which bound him to the Republican Lincoln:
"O powerful western fallen star! . . . O western orb sailing the heaven . . . the sweetest wisest soul of all my days and lands."
. . .
[p. 35] Of the three elements of antislavery, only the first (abolition) involved an assertion that all mankind was created equal. Neither the second nor third (free soil and unionism) required acceptance of the first. Yet an alliance of these two with abolition had proved expedient. The reason was that the crises of war, burning out the middle ground, had driven men to seek refuge on heights of fundamental conviction, even though such convictions were not alway their own. Lincoln, previously hostile to abolition, became one in 1863. And by 1865, in the Second Inaugural, his tone resembled that of John Brown's final message five years earlier. It may be that the ironsides [p. 36] spirit of abolition was indispensable in saving the Union. But afterward it seemed equally necessary for preservation of the Republican party. In the complicated politics of Reconstruction, Republican control of the national government seemed to depend on enfranchisement of black freedmen in the South. This was a step for which the expedient antislavery of the free-soilers and unionists was totally unprepared . . .
[p. 36] As for Republicans, as soon as they dared, give way, their retreat from their forward position was precipitate. Long before the collapse of Reconstruction, the fate of blacks in the South was foreshadowed by the first full-dress debate on the status of Chinese in the West . . . In the Immigration Act of 1870, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had moved to amend it by deleting the adjective "white" when ever it occurred . . . the only way to be consistent with the original Declaration of Independence, Sumner declared. . . .
[p. 37] . . . In the Republican Senate of 1870 Sumner was defeated 30 to 14.
[p. 37] Ideology Within the Labor Force
. . . .
German immigrants brought socialism with them . . .
[p. 39] . . . It was clear that republicanism with the lower case r would find scant shelter in the party of Jefferson and Jackson. Probably a majority of Germans . . . went with Karl Schurz into the Republican party. But a substantial number, who were workingmen, turned to socialism.
To be more precise, they had brought socialism with them. Yet socialism was not confined to Germans, nor to immigrants. Although its spread was slow among native American workmen, it seems to have appealed primarily to the most active, or else to have activated those to whom it most appealed. At all events, socialism as a tendency within the labor force took on considerable importance not only in California but in the nation at large during the decades of industrial conflict which followed the war. [1864-1875]
Frank Roney was an Irish immigrant who became one of the pioneers of union organization in California . . . iron molder . . . reached New York in 1868 . . . Republican . . . California . . . Socialism and labor organization.
[p. 40] Roney . . . expressed an important trend of working-class radicalism, which linked abolitionism, republicanism, and socialism. Each proclaimed the equality of man; for each it was forbidden to include racial accounts of its constituents . . .
But socialism and republicanism, though strongly held, were narrowly held. The major tendency in the labor force, nationally and in California, was the line that descended through the Democratic party and especially through its radical wing. Central to this tendency was the concept of the producer ethic which had informed the labor politics of the 1830s, the cooperative experiences of the 1840s and the beginnings of labor union organization in the fifties. After the Civil War, it continued dominent. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, required the master workman of each local assembly to initiate new members into the sanctuary of mankind . . . Farmers, unskilled laborers, women, Negros, all as producers, were invited into the local assemblies. Only at accepting Chinese did the Knights generally draw the line. The National Labor Union, established in 1866, set forth as its guiding principles that the interests of labor are one: there should be no distinction of race or nationality, no classification of Jew or Gentile, Christian or Infidel. [p. 41]there is but one dividing line-that which separates mankind into two great classes, the class that labors and the class that lives by others' labors . . . "If these general principles be correct, we must seek the cooperation of the African race in America."
It appears, then, with respect to the three tendencies of labor-force ideology so far discussed-the producer ethic, socialism, and republicanism-that their messages were in certain respects similar, but by no means identical. What they agreed on was the republican assertion of the equality of mankind, morally as human beings. The producer ethic went beyond this to designate the "productive and burthern-bearing classes" as the value carriers of society, but then assumed that political egalitarianism adequately insured equal opportunity for these producers. Socialism stressed the necessity of economic egalitarianism as well, through the sharing of property. The more rigorous view of Marxian socialists further narrowed the definition that would bridge racial and national differences. There was, in addition, one other tendency within the labor force which has not been dealt with This was trade unionism.
During the period immediately following the Civil War, trade unionism seemed a minor trend. It would not emerge as the main form of American labor organization until twenty years afterward. But already a number of national unions had established themselves. They concentrated on defending the economic interest of their members who were the skilled operators of particular trade . . . . [They wouldn't develop their ideology] until the presidency of Samuel Gompers, along with John R. Commons and Selig Perlman.] . . .
[p. 42] . . . the process of erosion was underway after the National Labor Union's 1867's assertion about the unity of all mankind, the next convention stalled on the Negro question . . .
[p. 43] The timing of this debate was crucial-1868. The war was over; slavery was ended; Radical Reconstruction with its declared goal of converting the black freedman into an independent producer and voting citizen was at high tide. Older leaders, devoted to the producer ethic saw no alternative to seeking the cooperation of the African race. The younger men from the trade locals . . . claimed the right to judge every question in terms of their own local membership . . .
[p. 43] . . . It was the younger men who won. The matter was tabled in 1868 . . . Negros were allowed to go unorganized or to form their own associations . . . in 1869 a National Colored Labor Convention sent a plea to Congress: "The exclusion of colored men, and apprentices, from the right to labor in any department of industry or workshops, in any of the states or territories of the United States, by what is known as "trade unions" is an insult to God, injury to us, and disgrace to humanity." The congressional session to which this appeal was directed was the same that defeated Charles Sumner in his Fourth of July argument for the naturalization of Chinese.
[p. 43] Yet the quotation of memorials to Congress and minutes of long-forgotten conventions scarcely touches the heart of the matter. In 1863 the first federal conscription act roused widespread opposition. Aside from being a Republican measure aimed at hastening the defeat of the Confederacy, the draft law was patently unfair. It permitted rich men to buy out of military service or hire substitutes, thus throwing the burden of sacrifice unequally on the poor, and especially on workingmen. These were good Jeffersonian and Jacksonian reasons for objections to the measure, and workingmen and others did object very strenuously in demonstrations that cropped out from New York to the Middle Border and south to the fringes of the Confederacy in Indiana and in the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. The New York de- [p. 44] monstation turned into a four-day battle bloodier than many engagements in the war itself . . . what had begun, somewhat in the tradition of the Boston Tea Party, as a protest against the unequal application of governmental power, went on in the burning of a Negro orphanage and the torture and murder of Negros in the streets. Such were the new meanings added by half a century of social habituation to the self-evident truths of the producer ethic.
[p. 44] Resources to Draw On
Each of the ideological tendencies which might be supposed to have shaped the thoughts of white Californians, and especially of those included within the labor force during the early seventies, contained an assertion of the equality of all mankind. In socialism and republicanism these assertions remained central, and there had as yet been little opportunity for erosion. But they were minor trends.
The two major trends were those that came down through the Republican and Democratic parties. Both acknowledged a rather distant allegiance to the original mandate of the Declaration. The Democratic tradition had translated this mandate into the producer ethic and had thereby won lasting popular support, both urban and rural. Then, first through its defense of slavery and second through its efforts to stage a comeback after the Civil War, the Democrats had stressed a concept of race superiority which excluded Africans-and by implication other colored races as well-from the meaning of the Declaration.
The Republican tradition was less influential with labor than the Democratic. Of the various elements in the Republican tradition, one only, abolition, had strongly reasserted a belief in human equality. But abolition had elicited scant enthusiasm from organizations of working people. The Republican's party broadest and most successful appeal was the plea for national unity. Although this had led to the circumscription and finally abolition of slavery, it was by no means inconsistent with hostility to blacks.
[p. 45] A small number of workingmen had encountered direct competition from Negros prior to or during the war; a great many more had learned to fear such competition. The newly developing trade unions, although they might frequently honor the producer ethic in words, in practice generally sanctioned exclusion of blacks from their trades.
These were the resources of ideology and previous experience which the various components of California's labor force had to draw on. Underneath, tending to unify these components (and to separate them from the Chinese) was an intense shared conviction of displacement and deprivation. And there were, finally, ingrained patterns of organized violence, carried on the one hand by nativist groups, largely Republicans, and on the other by immigrant groups, largely Democratic. Each had reinforced and reactivated the other; but, in California, as the antagonism between old stock and European immigrant subsided, they would tend to coalesce.
[p. 46] Chapter 3 Mines and Railroads
The Mines
As the survey of labor force undertaken in the first chapter suggests, California mining camps rapidly developed forms of social organization within which were areas of consensus and lines of conflict. Along those lines occurred the first confrontations with Chinese. But the whole matter of miners' organization has been silted over with layers of poetry and legend which convert any exploration of these early communities into something of a mining operation in itself. And here it is not sufficient simply to uncover what lies beneath; for the layers of legend and poetry have themselves become historical factors. Certainly the first step is to sink some kind of shaft through this accumulated mystique.
One of the most mystical among miner's historians was Charles Howard Shinn, whose book, Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government, first published in 1884 . . . "Nowhere in the mines was there any planning ahead; men were too busy and time too precious for that. The result was a degree and quality of unhampered, untroubled freedom to which it is hard to find a historical parallel."
[p. 47] Written ten years before Frederick Jackson Turner's essay on the frontier in American history, Shinn quickly arrives at some of the same logical difficulties that Turner would. Among these was the problem of the origin of new values. Did they reside in the virgin land? How then could they be transmitted into the frontier settlements? Or did they reside in the state of primitiveness? In that case the values ought to be found in their highest form among Indians or mountain men, which obviously they were not. The only other alternative-aside from spontaneous generation which might as well have occurred anywhere-was that somehow these values were brought along by the frontiersman. But this lead to a contradiction with the original concept.
Shinn discovered his solution to the dilemma in a set of ideas . . . in the Teutonic theory of history. At the newly formed Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, these ideas were very much in vogue; and Shinn now past thirty, enrolled there to take his A.B. degree. He completed his work on mining camps while a student at Johns Hopkins. What the Teutonic theory revealed to Shinn was a much earlier frontier, deep in the primeval German forest. Democracy, perhaps mystically, had come to birth there; and the ancestors of most forty-niners, and of the Shinns and of all Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, and Scandinavians, had practiced self-government based on individualism tempered by a reasonable willingness to compromise. Of all this, no direct record remained. But there were the indirect evidence of such Anglo-Saxon triumph as the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and the Constitution of the United States. Moreover Johns Hopkins scholarship was disclosing that the land tenure [p, 48] system of early New England towns repeated the pattern of ancient Anglo-Saxon villages, and that the New England town meeting was in fact a reincarnation of the primitive German tribal council. Thus the "instinct" of self-government was racially transmitted.
"It was from the miner's court, that our Norse and Saxon ancestors, could they have risen from burial mounds like Beowulf's "on the steep, seen by sea-goers from afar, " reared there by the "battle-brave companions of the dead," would undoubtedly have recognized as akin to those folk-moots held of old in primeval German and Scandinavian forests. In both alike were the right of free speech for all freemen, the right of unhampered discussion, the visible earnestness, the solemn judgement." Shinn, 1884
Oddly, at almost the same time that Shinn was trying to fortify his frontier concept by means of Teutonic theory, Frederick Jackson Turner, who completed his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1890, was trying to break away from Teutonic theory (which he considered too oriented toward Europe) and to establish a nationally autonomous interpretation of American history . . . [Shinn and Turner actually] complemented each other . . . The frontier thesis, aside from the old romantic adulation of primitivism, lacked any explanation for the origin of values until the Teutonic theory furnished one; while the Teutonic theory, to be serviceable in America, needed precisely the certificate of naturalization which the frontier provided.
[p. 49] Meanwhile, however, Shinn was encountering a formidable critic in the person of another Californian who had grown up not only during the afterglow of the gold rush, but in the very heart of the gold rush country. This was Josiah Royce, born in Grass Valley. Royce like Shinn a product of the University of California, had also journeyed eastward in pursuit of scholarship. After a pilgrimage to Germany in philosophy and literature, he returned to take his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1878; and by 1880 was ensconced at Harvard as a protege of William James. Royce published an essay on California subtitled, A Study in Character.
The admirable aspects of American character, for Royce, resided in the fabric of habit, education, and shared responsibility-that outer and inner garment which the Pilgrims called civility . . . Royce ignored the mystique of the German forest . . . he angrily rejected the frontier mystique. All that was worst in California sprang from the frontier. Irresponsibility . . . freed of all social responsibility, except for the search for gold . . . Such a totally individual focus became immoral and disastrous. One result was license for the criminal elements to run wild, since it was no man's obligation to control them. A second result was license for the vicious and irrational proclivities existing even in honest men, and of which, in California, the chief satisfaction was brutal treatment of foreigners.
[p. 50] [Royce acknowledged all the evidence [Shinn had presented] but argued that circumstances themselves (winters) had caused the town meetings to run smoothly.] A miner's court might conduct a splendid fair and earnest trial. Then having convicted the accused, say of theft, the court could either hang him which was immoral or whip him and turn him loose which was also immoral. [There was no time to build jails . . . ] Social irresponsibility led inevitably to social immorality.
As for attacks against foreigners, the situation became worse yet. In some cases the entire community participated in criminal action. In other cases the law-abiding citizens sanctioned by their noninterference the acts of a criminal minority which most likely they had themselves helped to incite: "Ours were the crimes of a community consisting largely of honest but cruelly bigoted men, who encouraged the ruffians of their own nation to ill-treat the wanderers of another, to the frequent destruction of peace and good order. We were favored of heaven with the instinct of organization; and so here we organized brutality and, so to speak, asked God's blessing upon it." Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee: A Study of American Character (Boston: 1891)
Strikes, Labor Actions, Massacres, boycotts
During construction of the Central Pacific Chinese laborers conducted a brief strike which Charles Crocker ascribed to paid agitators sent in by the rival railroad, the Union Pacific.
During the winter of 1887 when some four hundred white workingmen attacked a group of Chinese who were excavating for a street railway. The crowd stoned the Chinese, maimed several, and burned their shanties. Afterward, alleged leaders of the riot were jailed and the Chinese resumed work under armed guard. But the demonstration had made its point. Throughout the long record of anti-Oriental agitation which followed, there appears little if any reference to Chinese construction laborers in San Francisco or its environs.
Alexander Saxton The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the anti-Chinese movement in California, University of California Press: Los Angeles, CA, 1971 (1975), 293 pp.
Alexander Saxton The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the anti-Chinese movement in California, University of California Press: Los Angeles, CA, 1971 (1975), 293 pp.
. . .
12 A Forward Glance (1975, 1971)
. . .
[p. 280] A key point at issue in the far-flung debate over restrictions of entry was a racial definition of American-ness. California's curious apostle of militarism, Homer Lea, estimated in 1909 that "the foreign non-Anglo-Saxon element in this country had increased from one-twelfth of the population in 1860 to almost one half in 1900.""Since that time the declination of primitive Americanism has gone on at even greater speed." The outcome, if this trend continued, could only be disastrous for "a nation may be kept intact only so long as the ruling element remains homogeneous." [43. Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance, NY, 1909, pp. 124-125] To define implies a ruling out or circumscription. One says what one is by declaring what one is not. Thus [p. 48] Jack London, who had grown up at the fringes of the San Francisco labor movement, imagined a hard-fisted union teamster learning the facts of life . . .
Just as in Strong's formulation, a limited degree of mixing ("not Dagoes and Japs") seems to have been recognized as acceptable. The act of exclusion would then sanctify the status of the insiders. Once safely within the gates, even a new American-taking himself (as Gompers had already implied) for an Anglo-Saxon, ex officio or by adoption-could not subscribe more or less wholeheartedly to the Reverend Strong's Proclamation of the Coming Kingdom:
"It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world's future . . . Then will the world enter upon a new stage of history-the final composition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled . . . The mighty centrifugal tendency, inherent in this stock, and strengthened in the United States, will reassert itself. Then this race of unequalled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it-the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization-having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. If I read not amiss, this powerful race will move down to Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond.'
Josiah Strong Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, New York, 1885
[p. 281] [Footnote 45 . . . Among many renderings of this same theme were Homer Lea's secular vision: "The endless extension of the Republic, the maintenance of its ideals and the consummation, in a world wide sense, of the aspiration of its founders, constitutes the only pure patriotism to which an American can lay claim or, in defense of, lay down his life." Or Jack London's Nietzchean variation: " . . . perishing, yet mastering and commanding like our fathers before us . . . Ah well, ours is a lordly history, and though we may be doomed to pass, in our time we shall have trod on the faces of all people, disciplined to obedience, taught them government." (1914)
[p. 282] Here, the spread-eagle Jacksonian rhetoric has been unleashed again. and, in one sense this search for national definition continued the Jacksonian pursuit of the American oversoul.
"Seest thou not God's purpose from the first?"
Whitman had written in 1868:
The earth to be spann'd, connected by network . . .
Tying the Eastern to the Western Sea,
The road between Europe and Asia,
(Ah Genoese, thy dream! thy dream!
Centuries after thou are laid in thy grave,
The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream.)
Passage to India . . .
Yet how different a context the intervening years imposed. Whitman had seen the American soul in transit along the great circle route homeward to the universal soul . . . For Strong, on the other hand, as for the imperialistic Homer Lea and Jack London, the Socialist, passage to India marked a rooting out of the last vestiges of the twin mandates of equality. "Can anyone doubt," Strong insisted, "that the result of this competition will be the "survival of the fittest."
Rather a large number . . . doubted the inevitability of the outcome or wondered who . . . might prove fittest. Depression, and unemployment in the early nineties, while forcing leaders of the American Federation of Labor to agree with Josiah Strong as to the urgency of immigration restriction, reinforced those anxieties roused by industrialization which were already causing many Americans to reject the kind of exuberant optimism expressed by Strong. Were not the monopolists firmly in the saddle? And had not inferior races alway served as tools of tyrannical power? . . . Brooks Adams was drawing heavily on recent events on the Pacific Coast (1895) . . .
"In the seventh century Asiatic competition devoured the Europeans in the Levant, as three hundred years before it had devoured the husbandmen of Italy; and this was a disease which isolation alone could cure. But isolation of the center of exchanges was impossible, for the vital principle of an economic age is competitions . . . Competition did its work with relentless rapidity . . . The population stand fast, and by 717 the western blood had run so low that an Asiatic dynasty reigned supreme. [49. Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (New York, 1959) (first published in London, 1895, and in New York the following year.) For an earlier West Coast statement of the same theme, P.W. Dooner, Last Days of the Republic (San Francisco, 1880). Lea in the Valor of Ignorance (1909) echoed many concepts that had appeared in Adam's work.]
[p. 283] . . .
Brooks Adams' conception was precisely the opposite of Josiah Strong's. Instead of riding the Darwinian wave of the future to world supremacy, the white American might find himself hard pressed building dikes high and strong enough to keep from being engulfed. Nor was this somber view expressive simply of status anxiety among vanishing Brahmins. It was widely shared. Ignatius Donnelly, midwestern Populist Leader and son of Irish immigrant parents, warned in his novel, Caesar's Column, Anon., 1890], of the impending destruction of America between the upper and nether millstones of a Jewish oligarchy and a debased and Orientalized proletariat. Caesar's Column, that tower of corpses encased in concrete, became the tombstone for the American nation. In the final chapter Donnelly left his hero with a group of old stock Americans, refugees from the debacle, who have barricaded themselves into a mountain valley of central Africa, and there live by tilling the soil in the old-fashioned way-while with dynamite and [p. 284] Gatling Guns they defend their alpine passes against the barbarian hordes of the world beyond.
[p. 284] . . .
There were, then, in general circulation at the turn of the century two opposite forecasts of the national destiny. Not altogether lightly, these might be described as a Populist and a Progressive apocalypse. Though contradictory, they shared several elements in common. Both were molded by the long sequence of racial proscription and justification of proscription. Both took for granted a racial definition of nationality. Both, by reasserting that definition, attempted to fill in the gaps which erosion of the twin mandates of equality had left in the old ideologies.