Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

Chinaman always have something to eat, and he like young
white girl, He! He!"* A woman's magazine warned their
readers to never leave little white girls alone with Chinese
servants. The settler public was solemnly alerted that the
Chinese plot was to steal white workers' job and thus force
the starving wives to become their concubines. The most
telling sign of the decision to destroy the Chinese community
was the settler realization that these Chinese looked
jOst like Afrikans in "women's garments"!
The ten years after the passage of the Exclusion
Act saw the successful annexation of the Chinese economy
on the West Coast. Tacoma and Seattle forced out their
entire Chinese populations at gunpoint. In 1885 the infamous
Rock Springs, Wyoming massacre took place,
where over 20 Chinese miners were killed by a storm of
rifle-fire as European miners enforced their take-over of
all mining. Similar events happened all over the West. In
1886 some 35 California towns reported that they had
totally eliminated their Chinese populations.
On the coast Italian immigrants burned Chinese
ships and villages to take over most of the fishing industry
by 1890. By that same year most of the Chinese workers in
the vineyards had been replaced by Europeans. By 1894 the
bulk of Chinese labor on the wheat and vegetable farms
had been forced out. Step by step, as fast as they could be
replaced, the Chinese who once built the foundation of the
region's economy were being driven out.
Who took part in this infamous campaign? Virtually
the whole of the Euro-Amerikan labor movement in
the U.S., including "socialists" and "Marxists". Both of
the two great nationwide union federations of the 19th
Century, the National Labor Union and the later Knights
of Labor, played an active role.(37) The Socialist Labor
Party was involved. The leading independent white labor
newspaper, the Workingman's Advocate of Chicago, was
edited by A. C. Cameron. He was a leader of the National
Labor Union, a respected printing trades unionist, and the
delegate from the N.L.U. to the 1869 Switzerland conference
of the Communist First International. His paper
regularly printed speeches and theoretical articles by Karl
Marx and other European Communists. Yet he loudly called
in his newspaper for attacks on the immigrant
"Chinamen, Japanese, Malays, and Monkeys" from Asia.
Even most "Marxists" who deplored the crude violence of
the labor mobs, such as Adolph Doubai (one of the leading
German Communist immigrants), agreed that the Chinese
had to be removed from the U.S.(38) It is easy to predict
that if even European "Marxists" were so strongly pulled
along by the lynch mobs, the bourgeois trade union leaders
had to be running like dogs at the head of the hunt. Andrew
Furuseth, the founder of the Seafarers Internation
Union, AFL-CIO, Pat McCarthy, leader of the San Francisco
Building Trades Council, Sam Gompers, leader of
the cigarmakers union and later founder of the American
Federation of Labor (AFL), were just a few of the many
who openly led and incited the settler terror.(39)
When we say that the petit-bourgeois consciousness
of European immigrant labor showed that it
was a degraded stratum seeking extra-proletarian
privileges, we aren't talking about a few nickels and dimes;
the issue was genocide, carrying out the dirty work of the
capitalists in order to reap some of the bloody fruits of national
oppression. It is significant that the organizational
focus of the early anti-Chinese campaign was the so-called
Working Men's Party of California, which was organized
by an Irish immigrant confidence-man named Dennis
Kearney. Kearney was the usual corrupt, phrase-making
demagogue that the white masses love so well ("I am the
voice of the people. I am the dictator.. . I owe the people
nothing, but they owe me a great deal.")*
This sleazy party, built on the platform of wiping
out Chinese labor and federal reforms to aid white workers
and farmers, attracted thousands of European
workers-including most of the European "socialists" in
California. Before falling apart from corruption, thugism
and factionism, Kearney's party captured seats in the State
Assembly, the mayoralty in Sacramento, and controlled
the Constitutional Convention which reformed the
California Constitution. Even today settler historians.
while deploring Kearney's racism, speak respectfully of the
party's role in liberal reforms! Even revisionist CPUSA
historians apparently feel no shame in praising this gang of
de@nerates for "arousing public support for a number of
important labor demands.. .forcing old established parties
to listen more attentively to the demands of the common
people."(40) What this shows is that if the "respectable"
Euro-Amerikan trade-unionists and "Maruiqtq"
were
scrabbling on their knees before the bourgeoisie along with
known criminals such as Kearney, then they must have had
much in common (is it so different today?).
The monopoly on desirable jobs that European
labor had won in the West was continually "defended" by
new white supremacist assaults. The campaign against
Chinese was continued long into the 20th century, particularly
so that its momentum could be used against
*Similar "news" stories are very popular today, reminding
the white masses about all the runaway white teenagers
who become "captives" of Afrikan "pimps and dope
dealers". When we see such themes being pushed in the
bourgeois media, we should know what's behind it. 36
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*Unfortunately, we have Kearneys of our own.