History Carnival

Walter Crane's
portrait of May Day's martyrs.

Since 1890, workers around the world have taken May 1st off for parading, celebrating, and demonstrating - first in support of the eight hour day, and still in support of fair conditions for working people. May 1st was chosen to commemorate the conviction of eight men accused of throwing a bomb at a May 1886 Chicago rally for the eight hour workday. (A reasonably good history of the affair can be found here.) This May Day if you're here in the San Francisco Bay Area, you're invited to celebrate with your fellow workers (and students) by joining the International Longshore Workers Union who are shutting down 29 West Coast ports in protest of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or by joining the immigrant rights marches and rallies happening in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and elsewhere. If your boss won't give you the day off, call in sick! And when you get home from all those marches please take a look at the rest of this post:

I'm please to present this month's History Carnival. A blog carnival is a collection of posts aggregated into one and rotated periodically among various blogs. I'm hosting this month and you can check out the next one at Progressive Historians on June 1st.

I'm opening this carnival with the music history posts I've been feeling: Comb and Razor introduces guitarist and producer Jake Sollo, a major figure in 80s Nigerian pop music, crud crud gives a brief history of bootlegs, and Soul Detective seems to have closed the case of Six James Duncan.

Moving on, here are my overall favorite history posts this month:

Axis of Evel Knievel posts about the Civil War era bread riots, when a crowd of women armed with clubs, rocks and guns took to the streets of the Confederate capital and demanded “bread or blood".

Zenobia: Empress of the East presents an eye opening portrait of the 19th Century lesbian sculptor Harriet Hosmer, complete with a cool photo of Hosmer made miniature in contrast to one of her enormous sculptures.

On Military History and Warfare you can read about the bloody incursion of Mongol armies into Europe during the mid-1200s. The key pull quote here is: After the battle, the Mongols cut off an ear from every fallen Christian warrior to make an accurate body count. Nine bags of ears were eventually sent to Batu as tribute.

Edge of the West revisits a horrific massacre of Apaches in 1871 and explores how even contemporary non-Indian historians fail to acknowledge the bloody history of manifest destiny.

Undercover Black Man posts a series of audio and video clips showing period reaction to the Martin Luther King assassination: Robert Kennedy's speech, Walter Cronkite's report, Jesse Jackson's reaction (when interviewed about the murder in 1976), and James Brown's April 5th, 1968 show which purportedly helped cool the rage in Boston's black communities.

Some of this month's other very readable history posts include:

Yonkerman's amazing Tuberculosis cure wasn't amazing nor was it a cure, but it did come with some aggressive and impressive marketing. Read about it on the Virtual Dime Museum.

Abnormal Diversity has begun translating Hans Asperger's 1944 description of autism and finds some of herself in his descriptions.

In his post, The Goddess of Mount Tai, The China Beat explores a transformation in popular Chinese spiritually 1,000 years ago.

Rustbelt Intellectual theorizes that the mostly unrecognized history of working class feminism might explain why working class white women gravitate towards Hillary Clinton. And while you're on the subject, find an illuminating if depressing breakdown of how Bill Clinton's administration ended the Democratic Party as we knew it at Progressive Historians. And don't miss Part II.

Peripherally connected, Tenured Radical reviews WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an exhibit of visual art borne from the women's movement and on exhibit in Long Island City until May 12th.

The execution of Alexander Arbuthnot and Richard Ambrister as ordered by general and future president Andrew Jackson is recounted at executed today. Arbuthnot and Ambrister, a Scotsman and an Englishman, were accused of collaborating with Creek and Seminole fighters and were executed without much of a trial. Sounds familiar.

History is Elementary discovers some history beneath the Augusta National Golf Tournament: and to think this ground has been lying here all these years waiting for someone to come along and lay a golf course upon it.

The Picket Line presents a history of Quaker war tax resistance, excerpting from Isaac Sharpless’s 1898 book A Quaker Experiment in Government. But April 15th is not just for taxes: trivial, yet historical events also transpired on this day as you can see at Our Great Southern Land.

If you thought the Great Exhibition of 1851 (housed in London's incomparable Crystal Palace) was cool, you should check out the competition at the Victorian Peeper. A much more recent bit of the English experience is described at Scandalous Women where you can read about a notorious British sex scandal.

Rwarrr!! Lycanthropy on Providentia.

View a pictoral history of computer data storage from pingdom. (I liked the enormous 10 kb drum memory machine!) And metafilter links to a history of recording technologies.

Also geeky in the best sense, Language Log introduces us to Dr. Syntax and in a totally different vein, Appalachian History has a short and sweet post about Hobo Nickels.

So what? you ask? Easily Distracted suggests some historians' answers.


Thanks for all your submissions folks and also thanks to Sharon Howard for keeping this project together. Submit your history posts for next month's carnival here.

General Strike Heads Up

The Davis Radio Theater will be premiering a new radio play about the Oakland General Strike on KDVS tonight at six. You can stream it live from the KDVS site. Enjoy!

Rosie the Riveter Memorial Park

I told the kids I was taking them to the Rosie the Riveter Park, which they seemed very excited about it despite the fact they've never heard of Rosie the Riveter. The concept of Rosie the Riveter is confusing because the idea that there was a time when women weren't allowed to work the same jobs as men is foreign to them. I mean, their parents are lesbians – in their world, women do everything including fixing cars, washing dishes, and rolling children up in their blankets like human burritos; why shouldn't women rivet? And what the hell is a rivet anyway? On the way to the park I gave them my now classic lecture (most recently used when discussing Martin Luther King Jr.) about how Sometimes People Have Ideas That Aren't True, and It's Important to Tell Those People That ANYONE Can Be a Riveter (or that anyone should be able to ride in the front of the bus, depending on which lecture I'm giving). (I restrained myself from giving a lecture on war profiteering, which might have been more appropriate for this memorial – more on that in a minute.)

I hadn't been to Richmond in a while, and when I got off the freeway, I was completely confused by the impenetrable wall of condos. This isn't the Richmond I'm familiar with, and if it is part of Richmond now, what is the city doing with all the new property taxes? Please, someone with some real Richmond knowledge fill me in. In any case, I got lost in condo land and finally ended up at an upscale mini-mart where I asked the proprietor for directions to Rosie the Riveter Park. He looked over his glasses at me and chuckled (I'm not exaggerating - he really chuckled!), "Your expectations are too high," and directed me back to a patch of grass next to a parking lot I'd just passed.

The kids and I got out at the Rosie Memorial, a little exhibit about women homefront workers that was commissioned by the City of Richmond, and designed by artist Susan Schwartzenberg (Susan, why don't you have a website?) and landscape architect Cheryl Barton. Given, I'm a nerd, but I really liked it. The memorial runs the length of a Liberty Ship, and as you walk along the path spanning the ships distance, you can read a mini labor history of WWII, with a focus on people of color and women. Also interspersed are quotes from women shipyard workers, and these, along with photos posted at the site, are the most affecting part of the exhibit.

The memorial is planted on the former site of Kaiser Shipyard number 2, where steel magnate Henry J. Kaiser employed many thousands of workers to build ships for WWII.

Richmond's history is inseparably linked with Kaiser's factories and with the war. Richmond became a largely African-American city (36% of the population according to the latest census) as a result of migration related to the war industries. And the poverty that many Richmond residents confront now is directly linked with the city's failure to create adequate housing and infrastructure for its many new residents during the war, and the sudden disappearance of jobs that occurred when the war was over.

In 1940, Richmond had a small town feeling and a population of around 23,000. By 1950, the population was more than 99,000. Workers came in carloads and trainloads, brought by the more than 170 recruiters that Kaiser employed around the state and around the country to power the shipbuilding empire that he had centered in Richmond. So desperate was Kaiser for workers that at one point, LA recruiters instituted a "work for drunks" program where judges issued suspended sentences to 'vagrants' in exchange for an agreement to come work in the Richmond yards. That program didn't last long, but even for the average newly arrived worker, (if you can say that there was an 'average' since folks came from all over the state, from all regions of the country, and represented dozens of ethnic groups) the attrition rate was high. Once workers arrived they found limited housing, working conditions that were both stressful and tedious, and the loneliness of leaving home. The many new African-American workers transplanted from the South found themselves subject to the same Jim Crow racist hiring and housing practices they were familiar with from back home. War industry work crews were racially segregated, Black workers were rarely promoted to supervisory positions, and Black workers were refused membership in the major unions and instead relegated to auxiliary 'negro' unions where members were expected to pay dues but received little or no protection. (White women faced job discrimination as well, receiving significantly lower pay for jobs that white male workers got more for). While many protested these conditions, for example, in the Sausalito shipyards nearly all the Black employees walked out in protest of racist conditions in 1943, government agencies, white labor leaders, and industrialist business-owners were less than sympathetic. Outside of the factory, public housing built during the war was segregated in Richmond, as it was in Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay Area. (According to The Second Gold Rush, details on that book below, Berkeley community leader Byron Rumford started a petition drive protesting public housing segregation which finally lead to federally mandated integration of Berkeley/Albany public housing in 1946.) Basic workplace rights and decent housing were a struggle for Richmond's many new Black residents. For their part, newly arrived white Southern workers tended to complain about 'having to' work side-by-side with African-Americans.

Who was Henry J. Kaiser? He was your basic guy-out-to-make-a-buck, all-American, success story. He got his big start running a road-paving business, and ended his life turning Honolulu into the tourist sink that it is today. He was successful to say the least – his company, along with another Bay Area local, Bechtel and four other companies managed the construction of the Hoover Dam. During the war, Kaiser employees in Richmond (and his three other factories along the West Coast) were building a whole war ship in about a month (the record was set when workers constructed an entire ship in just over four days). His name also lives on in the Kaiser Permanente HMO, which was created because Kaiser needed to provide some basic health services to his thousands of employees, and who can afford that kind of expense (while maintaining a millionaire lifestyle)?

When the war ended, Kaiser moved on to new projects. He even (briefly) got into the auto industry. For the thousands of factory workers who had moved to the Bay Area, many full of patriotism and hope for the future, life wasn't quite as easy as Kaiser's. The jobs disappeared almost immediately. Soldiers came home and were given priority for the few jobs that remained. Women and men of color found themselves fired or demoted to make way for white men who were prioritized by employers. Today Richmond is still full of art, culture, and hard work, but undeniably, Richmond has been scarred by the poverty that is a legacy of the war industry here. The Rosie Memorial is just a little thing, but I loved getting to learn more about why things happened the way they did here. I was glad to come. I confess that the kids liked the nearby boats a lot more than that exhibit, but what can they do, they're a captive audience.

This entry barely scratches the surface of what can be said about the long-term impact of WWII industry on race, gender, and economics here. If you want to learn more, there are a bunch of other sources I'd recommend:

Marilynn S. Johnson's The Second Gold Rush provided a bunch of references for this post. It's factually dense but it maintains a readable narrative. I don't think you have to be as obsessive as I am to enjoy it, which is unusual for this kind of regional history book.

Fight or Be Slaves also has tons of information about this period.

Robert Self discusses issues related to changing racial dynamics in the East Bay after WWII in American Babylon. Unfortunately, I got about 50 pages into this book last summer, and then accidentally left it at Feather River Family Camp, so I can't tell you for sure if it's worth reading, but my friend Jess was just saying good things about it, so on his recommendation, I'll say, go for it.

I thought this Bay Crossings article had some interesting history about water travel related to Richmond.

Finally, I was inspired to check out the Rosie park after reading a nice article about it in the San Francisco Bayview. The article originally appeared on Black Commentator, but I'm including the Bayview link because of some additional notes at the end of their version.

Hey, if you want to learn more, Here's a whole pile of relevant sources.

I'll send you out with this video by historian Betty Soskin on African-Americans in the Richmond war industries. You can read some details about the content of the video here.

Locke, CA

Little Rutabaga and I left my folks' house in Sacramento on Sunday, and drove along the levee road, watching the river, and listening to an audio tape of Stuart Little, which probably doesn't need any advertising, but, in my opinion, should be regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th century fiction. Little Stuart is as complex as any literary hero: he's gutsy and self-assured enough to win a toy sailboat race in his first time at 'sea', but also so proud that he misses his chance with the first woman he meets who shares his diminutive stature. At first I thought Stuart's predicament – as the mouse child of human parents – was a metaphor for homosexuality. Stuart is a bit of a dandy, meticulous in his grooming and manners, carrying a small cane within his first few weeks of life, and with none of the loud, messy habits of his 'normal' older brother, but I gave up that theory at the point in the story when he falls for the bewitching songbird, Margalo. Stuart's status as an outsider is a classic theme, subject to a number of interpretations, but I shouldn't try to make his story mean too much. I enjoyed it more when I was just enjoying the understated, dry storytelling of E.B. White. Please, no one tell me if he had some horrible skeletons in his closet because he was really super writer.

Photo © 2005 David Monniaux

The tape ended (in a wonderfully ambiguous conclusion) just as Ru and I got to Locke, a small town in the Sacramento Delta that is still entirely made up of the wooden homes and businesses that were constructed there in the early 1900's. Some of the old buildings haven't been maintained much in the last 30 or 50 years, but most are still habited in one way or another. There are a lot of art galleries now, Al the Wop's bar (full of bikers) seems to be doing well, and the Locke Garden restaurant was very busy. Even though Locke is completely authentic in its original construction, it's not a tourist version of an oldentymestown. There are no Locke t-shirts for sale, no saltwater taffies, no spinning rainbow windsocks. For a few dozen people, Locke is just home.

Houses facing the levee were built high to avoid the periodic flooding from the Sacramento River.

I lived in Sacramento for 6 years, but I'd never been to Locke or any of the other agricultural towns in the Sacramento Delta. I'd never even driven through, and it's only about an extra half hour to get back to Oakland that way, along 160, the levee road, to Highway 24. At Dai Loy, now a museum but once one of a number of casinos in Locke, the attendant told me that she hears that all the time. Even folks who drive along 160 to Antioch don't stop much.

Of course, there's not so much to see while you're there. Locke is literally two streets and even though my parents warned me that it was tiny, I was still surprised. The houses and businesses are built neatly and closely in two small rows, maybe because in 1914 when Locke was founded, Chinese-Americans weren't allowed to own land, and the town founders had to lease their little chunk of property from George Locke, a white farmer who owned the land.

Actually 'grown and packed by' Chinese, Japanese, and Philippino laborers paid a dollar and maybe a meal for each day of work.

Locke is the only surviving all-Chinese rural town in the United States. It was built during the depression, after the Chinatown in neighboring Walnut Grove burned down. Unlike many Chinatowns where distinct ethnic groups of Chinese immigrants lived together, speaking different languages (dialects = languages, or at least, the difference between a dialect and a language is arbitrary), sometimes competing for control of various resources, Locke was settled and occupied almost exclusively by immigrants from the Zhongshan region in China. It lacked the tension that, in other communities, sprang up between competing and ethnically separate Tongs. (Kind of like competing mob families, Tongs tended to control the prostitution, gambling, and opium sales in the community.)

Dai Loy, once a casino, now a casino museum. Do I choose the lottery room or the money room?

Gambling was a major part of Locke's economy. At one point there were 3 separate casinos featuring lotteries, various Chinese betting games, and later, Blackjack tables. Locke also had five brothels (at times the only businesses in town owned by white people) and during prohibition, a couple speakeasies.

Despite the vice-filled main street, lots of folks raised their kids in Locke. Most residents lived on the second street, behind the business district. With the river right there, kids had a great time fishing and swimming and playing outdoors. Because they were Chinese, most were forced into the segregated Delta schools (until WWII when the internment of Japanese-Americans reduced the number of students at the Asian schools to the point that they couldn't stay open). In the afternoons, after public school, Locke kids went to the Kao Ming School, where they got instruction in their language and culture. The school went through a couple incarnations, and finally closed permanently in the '80s when there weren't enough Chinese kids around to keep it going.

Martha Esch painting the old Star Theater. She's got a gallery in town and hosts studio painting sessions and other events there.

Rutabaga and I spent a couple hours in Locke, eating Mu Shu vegetables at the Locke Garden Restaurant (housed in the town's oldest building), and checking out the art galleries and bikers. I'm not sure if bikers are a regular feature of the town or of this was just a big rally weekend. Feel free to let me know members of the biker community. The streets were surprisingly full for such a little place, but of course nothing like in its hayday.

At its peak, Locke had hundreds of residents. During pear season, and on certain weekends, more than a thousand people stayed in the rooming houses, gambled in the casinos, ate at the restaurants, and shopped in the markets and dry goods stores. Now, the Chinese populations is around 10. I saw one Chinese-American guy in town, a biker at Al the Wops. Most all of the young people of Locke moved away to bigger cities – many going to college and mainstreaming into the larger culture. The folks who stuck around got older. Most have died.

Rutabaga hides in the shade of a Locke alley.

I just finished reading a lovely oral history of Locke, with photos accompanying the stories of the elderly residents. Written and photographed in the 70's and early 80's by James Motlow, a white guy who had lived in Locke, along with a co-writer Jeff Gillenkirk, and Connie Chan, a Locke native who worked as their interpreter for the project, Bitter Melon presents a range of experiences: the relatively successful men who got work as foremen or ran the local businesses, the women who worked in local canneries and often had to leave their kids to fend for themselves, and the dollar-a-day laborers who never made enough to get married and start families, go back to visit parents in China, or to move out of the little town as it shrank away.

In the 80s, a Historic American Buildings Survey documented the town. The whole report is worth checking out, especially the photo series of the town.

Finally, and I probably should have put this first, you should check Locke's own website. You can see photos of just about every building, and read about the galleries and historic sites that are there now.

The community garden behind the town of Locke, from the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service.

On the way back to our car, Rutabaga and I passed a family trying to resolve some engine trouble outside of their home on Locke's second street. They seemed to be immigrants too, Latin American not Chinese, as Mexican and other Central American immigrants are now the main laborers along the Delta and throughout our country's agricultural sectors. A couple of visiting painters were packing up their little canvases of Locke's scenic buildings and getting ready to drive off too. Ru and I pulled out onto the road. Not north (like Stuart Little), but (like him) I somehow felt I was headed in the right direction.

S.F. Shootout

Isaac Kalloch: S.F. Mayor 1879-1881

I'm glad that I'm not a professional historian because if I were, I might have to find some other way to express this: Dennis Kearney* was an utter ass-wipe. An immigrant himself, Kearney founded California's briefly influential (and highly racist) Workingman's Party. He made a political career out of the thoughtful slogan, "The Chinese Must Go". His fiery speeches were quite radical – he advocated lynching of wealthy business owners – but he wasn't marginal. His political ally, Isaac Kalloch, became San Francisco's mayor in 1879.

That is disturbing, but not surprising. Here's the crazy part: in the 1870s, the founder and editor of the Chronicle, Charles de Young, railed against Kearney and Kalloch (then only a mayoral candidate) in his paper. I haven't read the editorials directly – anyone know of where I can find those archives online?

Dennis Kearney: major asshole

But from what I understand, de Young wasn't particularly concerned with Kalloch's racism, but more with his popularity. Trying to undermine the mayoral candidate, he publicly exposed a sex scandal that Kalloch (a Baptist minister) had been involved with in another state. Kalloch ridiculed de Young right back and from the pulpit, calling de Young's mother "whore-mongering", and then in retaliation de Young, the editor of the Chronicle, shot Kalloch, the mayoral candidate!

Kalloch survived, and won the election in part because of the sympathy he garnered for his injury, but a year later his son, defending the family honor, fatally shot de Young. He admitted to the shooting but got off free. Fortunately, Kearney's Workingman's Party faded shortly thereafter, but Kalloch did fine, serving two years as mayor.


*Note that Wikipedia reveals that Kearny Street, which runs right through Chinatown in SF is not actually named after Dennis Kearney. This information comes as a relief, but I wasn't too excited to learn who it was named after: Stephen Kearny, who founded of the US Cavalry and used those troops to expand white US occupation into Native American homelands in the Western part of the continent. He went on to command a number of battalions in the Mexican-American War, winning California for the US of A, which, I imagine, is why he got a street named after him in San Francisco. Related: we can also breathe a sigh of relief that Geary street is named after a former postmaster, not California Congressman Thomas Geary, who wrote an 1892 law extending the Chinese Exclusion Act, and expanding it to require Chinese-Americans to carry permits at all times, or risk deportation or punishment by hard labor. His act also denied habeus corpus to imprisoned Chinese-Americans, removing their rights to ask a judge to review the legality of their detentions. If you want to know who any other SF streets are not named for, look at this site.

Anti-Chinese violence

I’m going to do a few entries about the history Chinese-Americans in the Bay Area, and the relationship between the white labor movement and Chinese workers. It's been pretty disturbing reading about this stuff. I had a sense of some of the racism that was historically directed at Chinese immigrants, but I certainly didn't understand the scale. The most appropriate word to describe what happened to Chinese people here is probably 'pogroms'. I grew up here in California, and I definitely didn't learn about any of this in school. Anyway, here's the first post – about labor:

During the Gold Rush, prospectors, mostly men, flooded into San Francisco from all over the world. Most came from the Eastern United States, but also from outside of the country, especially Chile and China. Chinese gold-seekers made up a significant portion of the new 'settlers', setting up communities in San Francisco and in rural areas too.

This 1852 photo by J. B. Starkweather shows a rare site: Chinese and European Americans working together in a gold mining operation.

Over the next few decades, Chinese immigrants became involved in a wide-range of work: Rurally, Chinese settlers created the fishing industry here, established agriculture in the Central Valley, and worked as laborers building the levee systems on the Delta, almost always living in isolated, Chinese-only communities. By the 1860s, 2/3 of the laborers building the Western portion of the transcontinental railroad were Chinese men.

Chinese rail workers in 1898, from the California Historical Society, San Francisco

In urban settings, Chinese workers took jobs in just about every trade: manufacturing, building, and running small businesses including laundries, restaurants, markets, and repair shops. Around the Bay Area, traveling Chinese peddlers sold fresh produce out of large baskets that they'd carry from house to house, and later from the back of horse-drawn produce carts.

1898 – a produce market. Photo by Roy Graves

Like many immigrants, new arrivals from China tended to stick together in the same neighborhoods, seeking out and forming supportive associations with people who came from their same regions and extended families back home. But the segregation of Chinese men and women into Chinatowns wasn't just a preference of the residents there. It was mandated by law and required for safety.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the level of hostility and violence directed towards Chinese-Americans in the late 19th century. Before I started reading about this a few weeks ago, I had no idea how overwhelming and horrific this bit of history was: white Americans, encouraged by labor leaders and sometimes officially sanctioned by local governments, perpetrated a series of pogroms against Chinese communities throughout the late 1800s. A few examples:
- In 1871 in Los Angeles a brutal race riot left roughly 20 Chinese men dead, after white residents ransacked Chinatown there.
- In 1885, in Wyoming, European immigrant mine workers rioted against Chinese workers (who were paid less than white workers and who had historically been recruited as strikebreakers), killing 28 Chinese miners and destroying 75 of their homes.
- In 1886, virtually every Chinese resident of Seattle was rounded up in an attempt to remove them from the city.
- In 1887, 31 Chinese gold miners were murdered by bandits in Oregon, and no one was prosecuted for the murders.

"Massacre of the Chinese at Rock Springs, Wyoming" From Harper's Weekly housed at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Legal repression of Chinese immigrants escalated dramatically as the years progressed: By 1852, Chinese gold miners were subject to a significant foreigner tax that no other international miners were required to pay. Two years later, the Supreme Court of California extended to Chinese people a ban already in place prohibiting 'Negroes' and 'Indians' from testifying for or against white people. In 1872, Chinese people were barred from owning real estate or business licenses in California. And devastatingly, in 1882, Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring Chinese laborers from entering the country. This ban was generally applied to almost every Chinese person, making it impossible for example for Chinese men already living in the US to bring their families here to join them. (And because the immigrants who came here from China were almost exclusively male, and because the Exclusion Act prohibited anyone else from coming, the Chinese community dwindled as its bachelor class aged without raising children.) The Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't repealed until the 1940s and the severe immigration quotas reserved only for Chinese immigrants weren't ended until 1965. 1965!

Theorists and intellectuals fell over each other advocating for the removal of Chinese people from this country. Here's a fairly typical anti-Chinese screed of the time, devoted to the "Chinese Question". I confess, I didn't read this whole steaming pile of garbage, and instead skipped to the final chapter (starts on 196) titled "One course, and one course only, can stay the Eastward migration of the yellow race, and its gradual conquest of the land." You can guess what course that is. 'Progressive' non-Chinese thinkers tended to advocate for Chinese immigrants solely on the basis that they were willing to do the tedious, humiliating, or back-breaking work that white people were refusing to take. Hmm, sounds familiar.

Government leaders and others in the mainstream were certainly responsible for the legal sanction of racism here, but labor leaders in particular should be held culpable for the anti-Chinese hysteria of that time. By the 1870s, the country was experiencing a post-Civil War economic downturn. Jobs were hard to come by. In California, the gold that so many people had flooded in to find was already mostly gone by the early 1850s. Meanwhile, the monopolistic railway companies (and most other industries), exploited Chinese workers by paying them less than the going wage for white workers. Instead of directing their hatred solely at the Goliath-like industrial giants, white labor turned to a seemingly easier target. A couple quick examples:

Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL, co-authored a paper entitled, "Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive?"

I'm not going to reproduce the most grossly offensive posters, pamphlets, and cartoons I've found that were produced by labor advocates in opposition to the Chinese, but here's a typically racist 1889 poster promoting a boycott of a business that was rumored to have hired Chinese workers: It's from the California Historical Society.

In San Francisco, anti-Chinese sentiment was common. The city's most famous anti-Chinese 'advocate' was Dennis Kearney publicly advocated rioting against both bosses and Chinese people at the old Sand Lot near City Hall.

White labor's anti-Chinese hysteria was horrifying, and it was also a missed opportunity. Directing rage towards immigrants (rather than business owners) didn't change labor conditions, or make workers wealthier. As usual, bigotry trumped solidarity.

Anti-Chinese violence peaked in the 1880s, but it's probably obvious that anti-Chinese sentiment (and legislation) wasn't over. It wasn't until WWII that there were significant improvements in legal and living conditions for Chinese people living here. And of course, racism directed at Chinese-American's is still a major issue. A 2001 phone study indicated that one in four Americans has 'strong negative feelings' towards Chinese Americans.

I'm going to close this out for now. Next week I should have some more on Chinese resistance to racism.

Signing off,

Some self indulgence

My next topic – Chinese-American workers and the relationship of the white labor movement to the Chinese community of the Bay Area is kind of enormous. While I continue my 'research' (mostly late night googling), you can tide yourself over with documentation of my efforts.

Friday afternoon: our intrepid blogger sets off for a research mission.

Damn. Missed my train. Yet, in less time than it takes me to answer my emails, I made it to San Francisco. Near, and yet far from my provincial home in Oak Land. First attraction in SF, the F line.

It's designed for the enjoyment of history nerds like me! And of course to attract tourist dollars. But so what! It's so shiney!

Woo-hoo! Boat train!

OK, time to go to the library. Every time I come to the San Francisco Main branch I play "Where are the books?"

Nope, not here:

Not here either.

None here either. Oh well, who has time for books anyway - time is limited when you've got to think about childcare. I quickly move on to the hallowed grounds of the SF History Center! Here, you must check your bags, sign in at the front desk, and walk silently among the softly-lit shelves.

It's best to speak in hushed tones around the historians - they scare easily. And frankly, I was kind of sweaty and incoherent when I arrived. I cornered a soft-spoken librarian and described my blog project to him in detail. When I was finished he nodded helpfully and then said, "It would be easier if you put your request in the form of a question."

He was able to assist me though by piling a large stack of bibliographies in front of me. Since I've never done academic research of any kind, I'm not sure if that's the best place to start, but at least I now know what to look up when I go back.

I really hit pay dirt with this bibliography about Chinese American's in California. I love picturing the poor soul (or enthusiastic obsessive compulsive) who hand wrote the dewey decimal number for each entry into the margins.

I spent most of the afternoon reading from this congressional report on Chinese Immigration – a nauseating foundation for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

I found out later that the whole ugly thing is digitized. So if I can make it through hundreds of pages of the white men of business and congress falling over each other to present Chinese immigrants as gamblers, prostitutes, and disease vectors, I'll be able to complete it at my leisure.

Several hours later, my childcare was about to run out. I collected my backpack from the quiet librarian, and as I left, he mentioned that perhaps I should check the Chinese Center on the third floor. WTF?! I should have been there in the first place!

Still, I was in a good mood – a history junkie happily fixed – the whole way home. I even stopped to say hello to the folks painting a new mural on the Ella Baker Center. Good luck muralists! Way to represent for Oakland!

Oakland General Strike Part II

Read Part I

Striking department store clerks, photo from the Oakland Museum of California.

In the first few days of December 1946, retail workers at Hastings' and Kahn's department stores, across the street from each other where Broadway meets Telegraph, had been on strike for more than a month. Most of the workers were women. Their pay was shitty, less than $16 a week, and worse, they were subjected to an absurd procedure where they had to show up to work first thing in the morning, and then wait in the basement (unpaid), until they were called to the floor to work. A clerk could easily be stuck in the basement all morning, or even all day.

The Teamsters local had supported the retail workers strike from the beginning. They refused to deliver anything to the struck stores. (When I was at the Labor Archives, I even saw minutes from the Teamsters Local 70 meeting showing a member being expelled for trying to deliver to Kahn's in November.) The local NAACP and National Negro Congress publicly supported the striking workers. And union laborers had stopped painting and construction of a new elevator at Kahn's in solidarity.

On the business side, the Oakland Tribune, then run by republican powerhouse Joe Knowland, advocated a citywide ban of pickets. According to Albert Lannon's Fight or Be Slaves, right-wing city council members were publicly objecting to the use of the word 'scab'. Most detrimentally, the city agreed to send out the police force to escort delivery trucks to the stores, so they could keep stock for the Christmas shopping season.

OPD escorting delivery trucks from the notoriously anti-union company G.I. Trucking. From the Oakland Museum of California.

That move was too much for the local labor council. The night of December 1st, a Saturday, Teamsters patrolled every roadway into Oakland to keep the delivery trucks away, and the labor council organized members to use their cars to block the parking spaces surrounding the effected stores. Several hundred picketers came out in the middle of the night to keep the scabs out.

Cops block the street to keep strikers out. From the Oakland Museum of California

At 4 in the morning the cops started towing the strikers cars and blocking off sections of Broadway, Telegraph, and San Pablo. When they waved the streetcars through their police line at 6:30 Sunday morning, a driver told the cops that he'd never crossed a picket line, got out of the car and removed its control box, causing an immovable backup along the streetcar line. The general strike was on, although it was another day before the whole city was out.

Tribune clipping from the Oakland History Room.

At a long and fevered meeting of various local AFL union leaders Sunday afternoon (the clerks were affiliated with the AFL), Teamsters pledged that because of the strikebreaking deliveries, they would shut down work in the East Bay starting Monday. Every other union but the milk truck drivers' agreed, and the milk truck drivers only insisted on working in order to get milk to local hospitals. Labor leaders went on the radio to declare Monday a 'work holiday' and to call everyone downtown, to the center of the strike, to show their support.

From the Oakland Museum of California.

At the peak, as many as 30,000 people were packed into the rainy downtown streets. The mood was excited to say the least. Bars were allowed to stay open, but they were only allowed to serve beer, and were told to turn their jukeboxes out to face the street, where people were literally dancing. All AFL building trades were shut down. All East Bay newspapers were shut down. Buses, streetcars, greyhounds, taxis, and trucking were stopped. Gas stations were closed too. Hotels, movie theaters, and larger restaurants and grocery stores were shut.

The picture's pretty blurry, but can you make out those huge grins? From the Oakland Museum again.

I've read conflicting stories on this, but from what I understand, the CIO, the second-largest umbrella union organization in Oakland, had offered their support the night before the strike. They were patently turned down. AFL leaders didn't want to be associated with the CIO whose on-the-ground organizers were largely communist. Robert Ash, the head of the labor council was quite progressive, but balked at working together, imagining headlines in the paper saying "Reds cause Anarchy Downtown" and so forth. Besides the communist associations, the AFL and CIO were rivals not comrades. Working directly with the CIO would have brought about ugly repercussions from national AFL leadership. The CIO honored picket lines anyway, and finally, on the third day of the strike, called for a general meeting to vote on whether to walk out themselves. A CIO walkout would have cut off gas and electricity to most of the city. At this suggestion, Oakland's city manager was ready to settle.

But the unions had lost the upper hand. The national vice president of the Teamsters, Dave Beck, told the local to withdraw from the general strike. He didn't support revolution, and apparently, the strike was developing that flavor. Rumors circulated that Governor Earl Warren was going to send in the National Guard, and the mayor had declared a state of emergency.

Instead of holding their ground, the union negotiated with Oakland's city manager only for an agreement that police would not be used to break strikes. There was no settlement for the department store clerks (who stayed on strike for eight more months, and then had to settle for a weak contract before they finally negotiated a better deal and a closed union shop in May of '47). There was certainly no attempt to make structural change in the city. Robert Ash from the Labor Council admitted later, in retrospect, that had they held out, they could have had more. Maybe they could have gotten the whole right-wing city leadership to resign.

But even that laudable goal suffers from a failure of imagination. Workers owned the city for those three days. They could have done anything. On the other hand, what can you do when you suddenly control your own world? When you have the power to rearrange everything, if only you can agree with tens of thousands of others who share that power? Who knew what to do with complete worker control of a city?

A year later that kind of question hardly mattered anyway. In 1947, congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act outlawing secondary boycotts (boycotts of union companies that do business with a struck company), removing government protection for wildcat (unofficial) strikers, and allowing the president to force workers back to their jobs if he feels that their strike "imperils the national health". The phenomenon of the General Strike came to an abrupt end.

In the aftermath, the Teamsters local withdrew from the central labor council (and not long after, the national Teamsters withdrew from the AFL). Voters elected a labor slate of candidates for the City Council in '47, but not enough to get a majority, and the winners didn't work very well as a team, and were voted out a few years later. Oakland changed dramatically after the war, demographics changed, the beginnings of civil right struggles emerged, but worker control was not on the agenda.

Found at the Oakland History Room.

If you're interested in the Oakland general strike, I'd recommend Chris Rhomberg's No There There. Online you can listen to a nice KPFA documentary on the strike that features interviews with participants and more on the historical context that led to the strike. Also, check out longshoreman and publisher Stan Weir's account of the strike at the very cool libcom.org or Dick Meister's summery on ZNet.

THIS IS A STRIKE support our CAUSE - The Oakland General Strike

General Strike! The photo at right shows police milling around an injured shopper in front of a struck Oakland department store. Headline at left refers to a nationwide coal miners strike. This clipping is from the Labor Archives and Research Center at SFSU.

Someone with my politics (anarchist, idealist) tends to think of the general strike as a kind of labor-movement Excalibur, whose ass-kicking powers were so great that it could blind King Arthur's enemies simply by being drawn from its scabbard. (In this problematic analogy, King Arthur = The People.)

A general strike is the ultimate exercise of worker solidarity and worker power and basically, it happens like this: everyone (well, almost everyone), in every industry, stops working until their collective demands are met. One hopes that their demands go beyond asking for better pay or other simple benefits, and begin to address the big problems that go with a society where a few people own everything and do nothing, and others own nothing and do all the work.

And if that is your idea of the purpose and potential of general strikes, then it's clear that they haven't been very successful. Part of the problem though might be that there isn't always a clear purpose, even if there is a lot of potential. In the case of Oakland's 1946 general strike, we had an unbelievable potential power. I'm not so clear on the purpose.

I have so much to say about the Oakland strike, I'm going to split this into a few entries. Here's part 1, the context:

The Bay Area had gained half a million people between 1940 and 1945, when immigrants from around the country flooded in to find work in the war industries (mostly shipbuilding) centered here. The East Bay was so packed, there was nowhere to put everyone. I love the image in Marilyn S. Johnson's book The Second Gold Rush, a quote from an Oakland police captain saying in 1942, "Hundreds of men, women, and children [are] sleeping nightly on outdoor benches in public parks, in chairs in all night restaurants, in theatres, in halls of rooming houses, in automobiles, even in the City Hall corridors." Even with so many people, there were labor shortages. Between the shipyards and the businesses that supported them, there was an almost insatiable need for workers.

But a year after WWII ended, Oakland's economy had already started to wobble. Soldiers came back to a new and newly crowded Bay Area looking for jobs just as the war industries were beginning to contract. And the population boom and economic stressors weren't the only pressures. The need for labor had overruled some long standing social and political rules here and everywhere, most obviously, many more women, including for the first time middle class women, started working in factories and other industries. And Black immigrants to the Bay started to integrate the segregated neighborhoods and jobs here. Returning soldiers too had been transformed by their battlefield experiences. Maybe they expected to be able to make changes that hadn't seemed possible before.

Working conditions hadn't been great during the war, but most unions had signed patriotic No Strike pledges. After the war, business leaders and government officials found it impossible to stuff a broadening political agenda back into a box. In '46, a massive strike wave spread around the country (and internationally). The rail and coal mining industries were debilitated by strikes that year, and a number of cities held general strikes.

I found a newsreel that nicely captures the panic that industrialists felt about the rail strike at archive.org.

In this context, of a country and world that was changing by the second, where worker power seemed possible and real, and let's face it, where communists were all over the place, the idea of shutting down a city wasn't just a fantasy. At least, that's what I understand from what I've read.

Next time I'll post about the strike itself. I've got some links to original accounts and a nice documentary too. Stay tuned.