Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

is a historic engineering achievement, every mile paid for in
blood of the Chinese who died from exposure and avalanches.
The reputation earned by Chinese workers led them
to be hired to build rail lines not only in the West, but in
the Midwest and South as well. This Transcontinental rail
link enabled the minerals and farm produce of the West to
be swiftly shipped back East, while giving Eastern industry
ready access to Pacific markets, not only of the West Coast
but all df Asia via the port of San Francisco.
The time-distance across the continent was now
cut to two weeks, and cheap railroad tickets brought a
flood of European workers to the West. There was, of
course, an established settler traditon of terrorism towards
Chinese. The Shasta Republican complained in its Dec. 12,
1856 issue that: "Hundreds of Chinamen have beer,
slaughtered in cold blood in the last 5years ... the murder of
Chinamen was of almost daily occurrence. " Now the new
legions of immigrant European workers demanded a
qualitative increase in the terroristic assaults, and the
1870's and 1880's were decades of mass bloodshed.
The issue was very clear-cut-jobs. By 1870, some
42% of the whites in California were European immigrants.
With their dreams of finding gold boulders lying
in the streams having faded before reality, these new
crowds of Europeans demanded the jobs that Chinese
labor had created.(34) More than demanded, they were
determined to "annex", to seize by force of conquest, all
that Chinese workers had in the West. In imitation of the
bourgeoisie they went aboilt plundering with bullets and
fire. In mining camps and towns from Colorado to
Washington, Chinese communities came under attack.
Many Chinese were shot down, beaten, their homes and
stores set afire and gutted. In Los Angeles Chinese were
burned alive by the European vigilantes, who also shot and
tortured many others.
In perverse fashion, the traditional weapons of
trade unionism were turned against the Chinese workers in
this struggle. Many manufacturers who employed Chinese
were warned that henceforth all desirable jobs must be filled
by European immigrants. Boycotts were threatened,
and in some industries (such as wineries and cigar factories)
the new white unions invented the now-famous
"union label 9 '-printed tags which guaranteed that the
specific product was produced solely by European unions.
In 1884, when one San Francisco cigar manufacturer
began replacing Chinese workers (who then made up
80-85% of the industry there) with European immigrants,
the Chinese cigarmakers went on strike. Swiftly, the San
Francisco white labor movement united to help the
capitalists break the strike. Scabbing was praised, and the
Knights of Labor and other European workers' organizations
led a successful boycott of all cigar companies that
employed Chinese workers. Boycotts were widely used in
industry after industry to seize Chinese jobs.(35)
In the political arena a multitude of
"Anti-Coolie" laws were passed on all levels of settler
government. Special taxes and "license fees" on Chinese
workers and tradesmen were used both to discourage them
and to support settler government at their expense.
Chinese who carried laundry deliveries on their backs in
San Francisco had to pay the city a sixty-dollar "license