[On September 20th, 1873, the New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days, a key moment in the developing economic crisis that came to be known as the Panic of 1873. So for the 150th anniversary of that moment this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Panic contexts, leading up to a weekend post on 2023 echoes of those histories!]
On the
Panic’s key role in three stages of the era’s evolving anti-Chinese movement.
[NB. For a lot more on all of this, keep an eye out for my
next book!]
1)
The
Workingmen’s Party of California: While the Panic of 1873 and the resulting
Long Depression affected all Americans, as I discussed in yesterday’s post it
hit railroad workers especially hard; many of those railroad workers were in
the Western U.S., and so workers in states like California felt the effects particularly
acutely. In 1877, a group of labor leaders in that state formed a third party,
the Workingmen’s Party of California (sometimes known as the Workingmen’s Party
of the United States), in an effort to stand up for the rights of working
Californians—or rather, of white working Californians, as their platform
(hyperlinked above) directly targeted and attacked Chinese American workers as
a principal source of their woes. Indeed, this prejudice wasn’t just a
component of their platform—“The Chinese Must Go!” became the party’s
constantly repeated slogan. This labor-linked political party could have
chosen to fight for all laborers, but instead made attacks on Chinese American
workers an essential element of its identity and goals.
2)
The
San Francisco Massacre (often called a race riot, but you know my feelings
on that): As American history has demonstrated time and time (and time and
time) again, such prejudiced and hateful propaganda always results in violence,
and this rising anti-Chinese narrative was no exception. In late July 1877, the
Daily Alta California newspaper ran
an article on the evolving Great Railroad Strike, and the Workingmen’s Party
called for a July 23rd
rally at the space near San Francisco’s City Hall known as the Sandlot.
While the rally’s first speakers sought to downplay anti-Chinese sentiments in
favor of broader labor activism, the audience was primed by the Party and
movement’s overall messages and repeatedly chanted “Talk about the Chinamen”
and “Give us the coolie business.” When a Chinese American man happened to walk
by, the crowd attacked him, and the hate crime exploded into a multi-day
orgy of violence targeting the city’s longstanding (indeed, pre-United
States in origin) Chinatown neighborhood. By the massacre’s end on July 25th,
much of that community had been burned to the crowd, with substantial
casualties as well as widespread destruction that permanently altered this
neighborhood, city, and American community.
3)
Denis Kearney’s Speeches: Denis Kearney, the
Irish immigrant and San Francisco business leader turned labor activist and
eventual national face of the anti-Chinese movement, took a circuitous path into the
movement, as I will discuss at much greater length in my book. But by
September 1877, Kearney was giving his own speeches at the Sandlot, and the heart of those speeches
(which made Kearney a hugely prominent and influential figure on the national
stage) was a thoroughly interconnected critique of capitalist bigwigs and
Chinese Americans. To quote the final two paragraphs of his most famous stump speech: “We
are men, and propose to live like men in this free land, without the
contamination of slave labor…California must be all American, or all Chinese. We
are resolved that it shall be all American, and are prepared to make it so.”
This Kearneyism, which became the most significant factor in the passage of the
nation’s first federal immigration law, stemmed entirely from the
intersection of the Long Depression and anti-Chinese prejudice and hate.
2023
connections this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment