Chinese Among Others by Kuhn Philip A.;

Author:Kuhn, Philip A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2009-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

Labor, Capital, and the Chinese

The goldfields were a crucible in which broad issues of class, ethnicity, and ideology were fired and fused. By 1855, a miners’ convention declared that if Chinese “are excluded from the mines, our own laboring classes will for a long series of years have the advantage of capitalists.”29 Whether skilled or unskilled, the white laborer (particularly the immigrant) had good reason to fear that industrial capitalism would grind him ruthlessly into servile status. Because capital would turn to the cheapest available labor, Chinese (like freed blacks in the East and Midwest) seemed formidable competitors against whom free white labor could hardly sustain itself. Joining ethnicity firmly to class, the “slave” label was quickly pinned on the Chinese, whose low wage expectations, frugality, alien ways, and skin color were sure signs of bondage.

The decades of the 1870s and 1880s, during which the anti-Chinese movement was at its height, were years of economic depression, labor unionization, and waves of strikes against the great capitalist employers in the industrial eastern and midwestern cities. Hostility to Chinese in this period must be linked to a general turn toward employer ruthlessness, particularly by the railroads. In California, the association of the “Chinese problem” with unemployment, shrinking wages, strikebreaking, and other grievances of the working class gave anticoolyism a respectable, indeed a heroic, appearance. Testimony in the state and federal exclusion hearings offered apocalyptic scenarios in which capitalist nabobs would rule supreme with the backing of nonwhite slaves. The effect of Chinese immigration ultimately would be “a community composed of the very rich and the very poor” such as in British India, where “the few white men who are there ride in palanquins, and are waited on by dozens of servants, while all the work is performed by an inferior class.”30

“Anticoolyism” was at the center of California labor activism in this period of intense competition for jobs. No matter that many Chinese were shown to be employed in jobs that no white workers would consent to take (notably the rough and dangerous work of building a railway over the Sierra Nevada and the muddy toil of diking and reclaiming the mosquito-infested swampland of the Sacramento delta). To the white worker without a job, it was apparent just where the Chinese were working. In manufacturing, Chinese were prominent in the cigar and garment industries, among many others. Especially were they to be found in companies that competed in the national economy, those particularly vulnerable to competition by big eastern firms and so particularly sensitive to labor costs. They were active also in farm labor and in fishing. As renters of farmland from white owners of large tracts, they hired labor from within their own dialect groups through brotherhood connections. Until about 1920, thousands of Chinese were settled in rural areas working on the large California fruit and vegetable farms.31

Facing wage competition and Chinese labor-recruitment practices, white workers felt threatened. The sinister allegations of capitalist schemes to force down wages by inundating the region

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