‘the Chinese Must Go’


On July 23, 1877, the trigger on violence was pulled by news from the East. Between July 14 and 26 striking rail workers had clashed with militia in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Chicago, and Martinsburg, West Virginia. At least seventy people had been murdered in the tumult. A meeting in support of the strikers was called in an empty downtown sandlot in San Francisco by sympathizers associated with the ten-year-old Marxist International Association of Workingmen. The crowd shouted its approval of anticapitalist resolutions. Then, inevitably, someone cried, “On to Chinatown,” and the mob boiled out to look for victims. Twenty laundries were burned that night. On the next, there was an attack on a woolen mill employing many Chinese workers. At that the city fathers, alarmed about threats to property, formed a Committee of Safety and called out the militia. On the third night the rioters attacked the docks of the Pacific Steamship Company and set fire to a lumberyard. Police charged their ranks; four rioters were killed and fourteen wounded. That was the end of the collective violence.

But not of the anti-Chinese revolt. Two months later the crowd found a leader in a thirty-year-old Irish-born small businessman named Denis Kearney. Self-made and self-educated, Kearney was the guiding spirit in creating a new organization, the Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC). Night after night he held forth to sandlot crowds in speeches full of political brimstone, like his pronouncement that “the dignity of labor must be sustained, even if we have to kill every wretch that opposes it.” He frightened the city fathers enough to have him arrested in November, but since his threats were always vaguely conditional rather than immediate, he was acquitted. Actually, he mainly urged his audiences to vote for delegates to a forthcoming state constitutional convention that he hoped would empower “the people” by tightly regulating corporations and their lobbyists and subsidies. But his most powerful attention-getter was a demand for an end to the immigration and hiring of Chinese. “We intend to try and vote the Chinamen out, to frighten him out, and if this won’t do, to kill him out…. The heathen slaves must leave this coast.” He boiled it down to a sledgehammer four-word cry: “The Chinese must go!”

The evil that Denis Kearney’s anti-Chinese movement did lived after him. The virus of xenophobia is never really extinguished.

Kearney touched on worker anxieties with his hints of a scheme by the rich to bring feudalism to the United States through the replacement of American workingmen with “coolies” who would neither expect nor receive a living wage or democratic rights.

He enjoyed fleeting political success. The Workingmen’s Party of California won many local and state offices in 1878 and named fifty-two delegates to the convention, which did include some of their proposals in the new Constitution of 1879. But the antibusiness strictures were gradually eviscerated by the courts and by lack of implementation, and the WPC faded away, though Kearney himself lived on until 1907. Kearney’s legislative influence was brief, but the evil that he did to the Chinese lived after him.

That was because “The Chinese must go” had more than local impact. It struck powerful echoes in a time of social Darwinist racism. The Chinese were almost universally disdained by the “advanced” Americans. The newspaper baron James Gordon Bennett discouraged their immigration with the comment that only “on the Caucasian element can we hope to build up such an empire as the world has never seen.” Other opinion makers, lumping all classes and conditions of Chinese together, labeled them “ignorant of civilized life” or “listless, stagnant [and] unprogressive.” In the popular image they were criminals, gamblers, prostitutes, and opium smokers. In Far Western towns Chinese storekeepers were often beaten and robbed by drunken miners and cowboys, or at a minimum tormented by teen-age hoodlums. And in 1885 twenty-eight Chinese were massacred in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Therefore, legal exclusion was easily enacted. California in 1880 virtually shut the door on the importation and use of Chinese labor. The Congress of the United States followed suit with the Exclusion Act of 1882, barring all Chinese immigration for ten years. Renewed and renewed, the exclusion policy remained in force until World War II, when it began to be modified gradually until it was finally dropped, after eighty-six years, in a 1968 overhaul of immigration legislation.

It would be possible and pleasant to conclude this column on an upbeat note. Anti-Asian prejudice in the United States is only a glimmer of its former self, and the Chinese are even considered a “model minority,” held up for others’ emulation. That is certainly a credit to American pluralism. But the virus of xenophobia is never really extinguished in any multiethnic body politic. It merely becomes temporarily inactive. And as for racism —enough said. Human beings have an inextinguishable capacity to be cruel to one another, particularly in groups. It takes constant self-reminders of how bad things can get to keep alive the energy to make them better.