Logan Bhamidipaty - 2019 Near Scholar

2018-19 JOHN NEAR GRANT Recipient Plain Language: Henry George, Denis Kearney, and the Anti-Chinese Movement in Nineteenth-Century California Logan Bhamidipaty

Plain Language: Henry George, Denis Kearney, and the Anti-Chinese Movement in NineteenthCentury California

Logan Bhamidipaty 2019 John Near Scholar Mentors: Mr. Byron Stevens, Mrs. Lauri Vaughan April 12, 2019

Bhamidipaty 2 [M]y language is plain— That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

—Bret

Harte, “The Heathen Chinee” 1

The Chinese Exclusion Act was the only federal law in United States history to regulate immigration on the explicit basis of race. The law prohibited people identified as “Chinese laborers” from entering the United States and barred those already in residence from staying and naturalizing. 2 The bill passed Congress in 1882 despite its radical provisions and received an inordinate majority in both legislatures, 202 yeas to 37 nays in the House of Representatives and 32 yeas to 15 nays in the Senate. 3 Although Congress supported the Chinese Exclusion Act, many influential politicians, religious figures, and business owners opposed the anti-Chinese movement. 4 The Chinese Question divided white society along class lines. White people were at once the victims, instigators, and beneficiaries of nineteenth-century Chinese immigration. While white workers faced growing competition from cheap non-white contract labor, white capitalists benefited from falling input costs and racial strike-breaking tactics. Historian Alexander Saxton concludes, “racial identification cut at right angles to class consciousness.” 5 William Deverell

Bret Harte, "Plain Language from Truthful James," Overland Monthly, September 1870, 287; “The Heathen Chinee” was first published under the title “Plain Language from Truthful James.”

1

The Chinese Exclusion Act as cited in Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, updated and revised ed. (1989; repr., Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 111.

2

"House Vote #83 in 1882 (47th Congress)," GovTrack.us, accessed April 12, 2019; "Senate Vote #370 in 1882 (47th Congress)," GovTrack.us, accessed April 12, 2019.

3

Gordan H. Chang, "China and the Pursuit of America's Destiny: Nineteenth-Century Imagining and Why Immigration Restriction Took So Long," Journal of Asian American Studies 15, no. 2 (June 2012): 146-47, 4

Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1971; repr., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 1.

5

Bhamidipaty 3 praises Saxton’s claim: How else to explain Denis Kearney, or, for that matter, Henry George, the man who worried most about the class ramifications of the arriving transcontinental railroad while simultaneously railing, Kearney-like, against the continued presence of the Chinese?

There’s the rub, a complex set of ironies and energies expended that men…[who hoped for racial egalitarianism]…could never surmount. 6 Denis Kearney and Henry George exemplified the diversity of the anti-Chinese movement.

Kearney was a wealthy businessman-turned-demagogue who founded the infamous Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC) and inveighed against Chinese immigration and wealthy industrialists. (See Fig. 1). George was a famous economic thinker who authored Progress and Poverty and denounced Kearney’s invective anti-Chinese platform. Ironically, George also advocated Chinese exclusion.

Figure 1. “California—The Chinese Agitation in San Francisco—A Meeting of the Workingmen’s Party of California on the Sand Lots” by H.A. Roberts, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated (March 1880).

6

William Deverell, foreword to Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, xii-xiii.

Bhamidipaty 4 Although Deverell and Saxton’s comments are correct, they avoid the more salient point of the breadth of anti-Chinese sentiment. Denis Kearney and Henry George shared similar backgrounds and advocated parallel goals, but they superficially disagreed. The presence of antiChinese sentiment in both figures demonstrates not only the paradoxical existence of racism but also the flexibility of its manifestations. Racism existed deeply in nineteenth-century California, but a more interesting conclusion can be reached when studying the situation through the myopia of its time. Understanding Henry George’s hypocritical critique of Kearnyism then not only reveals the subconscious pervasiveness of racism, but also its simultaneous and immediate invisibility, flexibility, and allure.

Chinese Migration in Context When prospectors discovered gold outside Sutter’s Mill in 1848, less than 15,000 nonIndians lived in California. That number reached 200,000 by 1852 and surpassed 360,000 by 1860. 7 Modern estimates vary but most sources agree at least 300,000 came for the Gold Rush.

The Gold Rush happened during a time of rapidly expanding global migration, not only to the Americas but around the world. New technologies facilitated international transoceanic and transcontinental travel and allowed an incredibly racially diverse group to come to California. 8 The majority came from the United States and included indigenous peoples, white descendants of European colonizers, and free and enslaved blacks. The foreign portion included miners from Ireland, Japan, Italy, Australia, and more. 9 Almost 25,000 from China arrived

7

Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 503.

Adam McKeown, "Global Migration and Regionalization, 1840-1940," University of California, Santa Cruz: Center for Global, International and Regional Studies, Mapping Global Inequality ser., 1.

8

H. William Rice, "California Gold Rush," Immigration to the United States, last modified September 24, 2011, accessed December 18, 2018.

9

Bhamidipaty 5 between 1849 and 1852, 10 and nearly 50,000 more came between 1851 and 1855. 11 Chinese migration rose exponentially after 1848, but this trend was neither new nor especially impactful on the state’s demography. Chinese migration began rising exponentially before the Civil War, and Chinese actually represented a declining percentage of the state population between 1860 and 1880. 12 Since the 1850s generally perceived aesthetic, linguistic, religious and economic differences separated international migrants from other Forty-niners and made them “acutely aware of racial and ethnic distinctions.� 13 White miners from different countries unified to expel Chinese from camps, and special taxes and extralegal organizations targeted Chinese through the end of the century; however, though anti-Chinese sentiment pervaded across the state, it only organized concretely in the countryside until the 1860s.

The ultimate conduit for this shift was the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869 that forced young western companies into competition with their eastern counterparts.

Better economies of scale allowed eastern companies to price gouge against smaller businesses.

To remain competitive, local businesses turned to Chinese contract labor which was commonly cheaper than unskilled white work. Chinese workers were estimated to represent 25 percent of the labor force in 1870, a disproportionately high number given that they were less than 10 percent of the total population according to the census. Conversely, low-skilled white workers

10

Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 504.

11

McKeown, "Global Migration," 21.

12

Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 3.

William Deverell and David Igler, eds., A Companion to California History, Wiley Blackwell Companions to American History (Somerset: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 151, ProQuest Ebook Central.

13

Bhamidipaty 6 faced high urban unemployment following the Panic of 1873. 14 Poor economic conditions in urban centers made it easy for anti-Chinese sentiment to spread to large cities like San Francisco where it became an organized political movement that framed Chinese migrants as symbols of wealth inequality and oppressive industrialism.

The Origin of Modern Racism Around 300 years ago, the word race in most western European languages had more to do with animal pedigree and aristocratic lineage than it did to do with skin color. In fact, the modern idea of a pan-European white race only truly arose in the eighteenth century. Prior to that orthodox Church etiology claimed humans shared “one blood� through Adam and Eve, and mainstream religious intelligentsia denounced theories of polygenesis, which claimed non-whites developed from an inferior third ancestor, as radical heresy. Before the Enlightenment, strong biblical literalism countered the formation of a standardized racist ideology in Europe. 15 But policy and reality often contradicted. Non-whites were seen as ugly and unintelligent even before the Enlightenment. Racism existed before the eighteenth century, but until then it was not a primary means of social organization. Although white people in America and Europe almost certainly viewed themselves as superior to blacks, skin color still generally fell behind considerations of class in the scheme of social hierarchy. 16 George Frederickson summarizes eloquently: “The rejection of hierarchy as the governing principle of social and political organization, and its replacement by the aspiration for equality in this world as well as in the

14

Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 3-18.

15

George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 52-53.

16

Fredrickson, 46.

Bhamidipaty 7 eyes of God, had to occur before racism could come to full flower.” 17 Frederickson also explains that the decline of biblical literalism during the Enlightenment revived polygenesis in the light of pseudo-scientific rationalism. He writes: The scientific thought of the Enlightenment was a precondition for the growth of a modern racism based on physical typology….Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and other eighteenth-century ethnologists opened the way to a secular or scientific racism by considering human beings part of the animal kingdom rather than viewing them as children of God endowed with spiritual capacities denied to other creatures. 18 The dethroning of humans as a spiritually unique species encouraged scientists to classify humans in the same way they had animals. (See Fig. 2). Blumenbach's work influenced how people talked about race for decades beyond his death. Even in the late nineteenth century, American intellectuals like Henry George still relied on the vocabulary that Blumenbach and his contemporaries coined. Consequently, they also imbibed many of that era’s racist assumptions.

Figure 2. Plate IV from the 3rd ed. of De generis humani varietate nativa [On the natural varieties of mankind] (1795) depicts Blumenbach’s five races (Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans, and Malays) National Center for Biotechnology Information.

17

Frederickson, Racism, 47.

18

Frederickson, 56-57.

Bhamidipaty 8 Early Enlightenment racial classifications primarily emphasized physical rather than mental characteristics and rarely refuted the theory of common ancestry, nevertheless scholars like Christopher Meiners quickly extrapolated upon Caucasian’s assumed superior physical beauty and made correlative claims about their relative intelligence and capability. 19 Even famous critics of slavery like Voltaire contributed to the air of racism. In fact, Frederickson claims that Voltaire typifies the contradictory Zeitgeist of the Enlightenment: “Its simultaneous challenge to hierarchies based on faith, superstition, and prejudice and the temptation it presented to create new ones allegedly based on reason, science, and history.” 20 Late nineteenth-century American discourse around Chinese migration followed the tropes of Enlightenment racism. Contemporary theories about race appeared modern, scientific, convincing, and objective. Racist ideas found themselves in foot-noted dissertations, economics articles, and scholarly journals. It was the vanguard of human thinking and it was treated as such.

Though people disagreed on the exact nature of the “Chinaman,” most never disputed the premise that a unique “Chinese race” actually existed. Denis Kearney and Henry George, both at points purported defenders and opponents of Chinese immigration, accepted racist delineations throughout their careers. As Barbara Trepagnier notes, “racism operates on a continuum, not in discrete categories and, more important, not in binary, oppositional categories.” 21 The Rise of Denis Kearney Denis Kearney was born in rural Ireland near the height of the Great Irish Famine.

Orphaned as a child, Kearney decided to leave his homeland to become a cabin boy at age 19

Frederickson, Racism, 59.

20

Frederickson, 69.

Barbara Trepagnier, "Deconstructing Categories: The Exposure of Silent Racism," Symbolic Interaction 24, no. 2 (2001): 141.

21

Bhamidipaty 9 eleven. He arrived in San Francisco for the first time in 1868 while serving as first mate aboard the clipper ship Shooting Star. 22 A nineteenth-century log of American clipper ship trade routes indicates that the vessel likely shuttled goods between the United States and ports in China. 23 Kearney likely met a broad array of Chinese people before he settled in San Francisco, and his time working on clipper ships almost certainly gave him more face-to-face experience with Chinese people than Henry George.

Kearney worked for several years along the Californian coast before he moved to San Francisco. He married a woman from Boston in 1870 and acquired United States citizenship in 1876. Kearney eventually became a successful businessman, and although he received no formal education, he studied sedulously to compensate. He read widely, exchanged ideas with newspaper offices, and frequented a public forum called the Sunday Lyceum for Self-Culture. 24 “In the proletarian sense,” Saxton argues, “Kearney was no workingman at all.” 25 Kearney’s wealth and international background helps explain why he initially favored Chinese immigration. According to Henry George, Kearney “defended Chinese immigration” at Lyceum meetings and denounced high wages and lazy workingmen “with all the vehemence with which he has since inveighed against ‘thieving capitalists’ and ‘lecherous bondholders.’” 26 While George prided himself on his intellectual objectivity, his words should be read with a

22

Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 117.

Octavius T. Howe and Frederick C. Matthews, American Clipper Ships: 1833-1858 (Brattleboro, VT: E.L. Hildreth, 1927), 2:490.

23

Frank Michael Fahey, "Denis Kearney: A Study in Demagoguery" (working paper, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, June 1956), 46.

24

25

Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 117.

26

Henry George, "Kearney Agitation in California," The Popular Science Monthly, August 1880.

Bhamidipaty 10 degree of skepticism given his record of losing elections to Kearneyites. Though George’s analysis might have been hyperbolic, the basics are probably true since several other contemporary sources corroborate George’s claim that Kearney once defended Chinese immigration before becoming a public figure. 27 Many modern and contemporary theories provide explanations for how Kearney’s racist beliefs, and racists beliefs in general, developed. Modern scholarship on the latter is diverse and confused by conceptual overlap between terms. 28 It could have been genetics, upbringing, social climate, politicking, or a traitorous butterfly in Asia, and as Michael Adas points out: “The fact that there is little evidence of a linkage between racist theories claiming scientific backing and the growth of social racism...[also] indicates that popular racism can arise with little or no validation from the writings of social theorists and other intellectuals.” 29 Although Kearney was a wealthy man, the political movement he rose on railed against the upper class. (See Fig. 3). Many modern and contemporary theories have attempted to explain Kearney’s change in heart. James Bryce, a contemporary of Kearney, suggested that the stock market crash of 1877 fueled Kearney’s transformation. His sudden decline in fortune triggered a dramatic revolution of sentiments. 30 The Chronicle, a nineteenth-century San Francisco-based newspaper, offered another explanation: Kearney, who gained his wealth in the drayage industry, became frustrated by growing government corruption in the San Francisco drayage market and turned to politics after direct mediation failed. Frank Fahey, a modern scholar, also

27

Fahey, “Denis Kearney,”’46-48.

John Baldwin, "Culture, Prejudice, Racism, and Discrimination," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, January 2017.

28

Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 291.

29

30

Fahey, “Denis Kearney,” 47.

Bhamidipaty 11 acknowledges a third opinion. Kearney’s one-eighty could simply have been a result of a genuine change in heart. 31 Whatever the reason, Saxton notes that Kearney’s devolution appears uncannily similar to that of George’s descent to racism. He describes best in his book: The legend of Paul on the road to Damascus was being reenacted on all sides during these years; and there seems a curious parallel between Kearney’s revelation, whatever it may have been, and the experience of Henry George on the slum street of New York. Kearney too sprang to defend the oppressed; and like George, the first blow he struck was against the Chinese. 32

Figure 3. “The Ides of March: Don’t Put Him Out of His Misery” by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly (March 20, 1880) 31

Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 117-18.

32

Saxton, 117.

Bhamidipaty 12 The Rise of Henry George While Kearney’s racial prejudice arose as a reaction to change, Henry George’s racial prejudice built from internal reasoning and his desire to appeal to public sentiment. George’s prejudices manifested more gradually and less overtly compared to Kearney. His ideological reasoning developed from a false premise and expanded rationally. George’s prejudice was somewhat like an inherited disease: It was something he acquired from the tropes of Enlightenment-era science. Enlightenment assumptions about racial distinctions and superiorities became a false axiom for George that grew in the iron ring of Democratic politics. The antiChinese ethos of San Francisco validated the plinth on which George built his reasoning.

But what of the heterogeneity of the Enlightenment? Some Enlightenment scholars like Voltaire, heavily influenced by Jesuit missionary reporting on China, praised Chinese people for their morality, hard work, and acceptance of a just government authority. Then again, social thinkers like Captain George Anson were more influential than Voltaire in shaping the West’s perception of China. 33 George, in “The Chinese in California,” even recycled Anson’s idea that Chinese immorality resulted from a history of oppressive government.

Another explanation is political loyalty. George wrote Progress and Poverty at least partially under the patronage of the Democratic Party and was a proactive cadre within the organization 34 Yet the main function of Progress and Poverty was not disparaging Chinese immigrants, Takaki writes that the book was the “culmination of ten years of research and reflection” as well as deep mulling over issues that had been “intellectually agitating George in

33

Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 88-92.

34

Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 92.

Bhamidipaty 13 his analysis of the ‘Chinese question’—land, labor, and industrialization.” 35 Saxton makes a similar claim and states that George’s arguments had a “Platonic construction” and that the final arguments made clear in Progress and Poverty could be traced through his earlier works; however, he makes an exception. To Saxton, George’s “The Chinese in California” does not fit into the trend, 36 but Takaki disagrees and claims the fact that George made several visits to the Chinese quarter proves that his reasoning was not completely hypothetical. 37 Regardless, George seemed to consciously try to popularize his writings by the 1870s. In fact, George himself suggested that intellectuals somehow pander to the desires of the public: It is the necessity of the time—the vital, pressing necessity—that these phenomena receive the careful, conscientious attention of thoughtful men, who will trace them to their source and popularize the remedy. It will not do to leave them to the ignorant poor and the ignorant rich, to politicians and demagogues. They require the scientific spirit and the scientific method; they demand the thought of those who can think, and those opinions carry weight. 38 In 1878, George was unwilling to act on his own advice and appeal to the “selfish instincts” and racism of the masses, but by 1882 he was successfully integrating Kearney’s invective style into a simplified version of his ideas. 39 George’s initial anti-Chinese sentiment rose subconsciously as a byproduct of

35

Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 109.

36

Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 99.

37

Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 108.

38

Henry George, "Kearney Agitation in California."

39

Fahey, "Denis Kearney, A Study in Demagoguery,” 58-9.

Bhamidipaty 14 Enlightenment pollution of the public sphere and grew via an obligation to the Democratic Party and was finally accepted as George began to understand to advertise a message.

Henry George: “What the Railroad Will Bring Us” (1868) Henry George mulled the Chinese question in private journal entries as early as 1865, 40 but he did not write on the subject publicly until 1868. Ronald Takaki summarizes the “What the Railroad Will Bring Us” eloquently: He predicted that the transcontinental railroad would enable American to convert the wilderness into a ‘populous empire.’ But it would also bring population into the West and boost land values. While the owners of land would become wealthy, the workers would be forced to compete for low wages. Class division would deepen within white society.

Much of this transformation, George noted could already be seen in the mining business, where the ‘honest miner’ had passed away, succeeded by the ‘millowner’ with his ‘Chinese’ workforce. 41 Henry George: “The Chinese in California” (1869) Henry George’s first work that exclusively focused on Chinese immigration was “The Chinese in California.” It was published a year after “What the Railroad Will Bring Us” on the front page of the New-York Tribune. In the article, George argued for the restriction of Chinese immigration and claimed the United States would collapse unless the flow was stemmed: “[P]lain to the eye of him who chooses to see, are dragons’ teeth enough for the sowing of our new soil—to germinate and bear ere long to their bitter fruit of social disease, political weakness,

40

Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 108.

41

Takaki, 108-09.

Bhamidipaty 15 agitation, and bloodshed.” 42 George’s claim used historical, economic, and moral arguments that were each embedded with racist logic that he could not see. Though George railed against the mistreatment of Chinese in his article, he did not distinguish his fundamentally racist arguments from the ideal of objective scholarship. In short, though George recognized and denounced extreme forms of racism in others, he could not recognize that the same racism pervaded his own thinking.

George opened the article like he does many of his others, with a retelling of history. He claimed “the Chinese” (note that George used “Chinaman,” “Mongolian,” “long-tailed barbarian,” and several other terms interchangeably to describe Chinese migrants) were once militarily, technologically, and culturally superior to “the painted savages of the British Isles,” though he believed that period was long past by the time of his writing. 43 His treatment of European progenitors as inferiors lends truth to the claim that George was not writing this to appeal to the masses. It also further proves that this article can be read as an attempt by George to make an objective argument. His account of history denies the continuity of European superiority and ran counter to the dominant Zeitgeist.

The second prong of George’s argument was about the nature of Chinese migrants.

George described them as timid, unaggressive, weak, industrious, shrewd, stubborn, immoral, duplicitous, patient, unassimilable and so on. 44 Ironically, he also claims that they were victimized by abusive white “rascals.” 45 The racist elements of his second prong were similarly disguised in the language of intellectual objectivity and praise: 42

Henry George, "The Chinese in California," New-York Tribune, May 1, 1869.

43

George, “The Chinese in California.”

44

George, “The Chinese in California.”

45

George, “The Chinese in California.”

Bhamidipaty 16 The great characteristics of the Chinese as laborers are patience and economy—the first makes them efficient laborers, the second cheap laborers….Chinamen of course, as other people, like luxuries, and indulge in them as far as they can, but their standard of comfort is very much lower than that of our own people….this fact enables them to underbid all competitors...thus in every case in which Chinese comes into fair competition with white labor, the whites must either retire from the field or come down to the Chinese standard of living. 46 Though obviously racist to modern readers, it did not appear as bombastic as Eastern United States media coverage of movement suggested to contemporary readers. In this way, he fell victim to tropes and unoriginal academic thinking. Though Takaki notes that George bolstered his claims with in-person observations of China town, as Adas notes, “racist slurs about Chinese cowardice and entrenched conservatism…were becoming more and more common in the popular press and European writings in the early nineteenth century.” 47 In short, racism was an invisible specter that haunted the vanguard of nineteenth-century thought and that intrinsically manifested through contemporaries.

Henry George on “The Kearney Agitation” (1880) By the late 1800s, hyperbolic eastern American media coverage of the anti-Chinese movement saw the rise of popular opposition to Kearney’s movement. (See Fig. 4). Seeking to portray the anti-Chinese movement in California more realistically and possibly to enact revenge upon Kearneyites who defeated him in an election two years prior, George published “The

46

George, “The Chinese in California.”

47

Adas, Machines as the Measures of Men, 291.

Bhamidipaty 17 Kearney Agitation” in an 1880 edition of The Popular Science Monthly and denounced both flamboyant media coverage of the WPC and Denis Kearney.

Figure 4. “Social Science Solved” by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly (April 10, 1880) Fine Art Museums of San Francisco.

Bhamidipaty 18 George indirectly attacked the WPC through Kearney and the anti-Chinese movement, criticizing the anti-Chinese movement as superstitious and unscientific: We no longer attribute an eclipse to a malevolent dragon; when a blight falls on our vines, or a murrain on our cattle, we set to work with microscope and chemical tests, instead of imputing it to the anger of a supernatural power….Yet as to social phenomena, infantile explanations similar to those we have thus discarded still largely suffice...very many people, who have in large measure risen to scientific conceptions of the linked sequence of the material universe, have not yet, in their views of social facts and movements, got past the idea of the little child who, if shown a picture of battle or siege, will insist on being told which are the gold and which the bad men. 48 George’s choice of comparison is almost comedic: Little more than a decade before, George used the same metaphor of dragon’s teeth to highlight the destructive potential of Chinese immigration, yet in 1880 he used the same language to denounce that very claim.

He also refuted the idea that Kearnyism was the product of imported “foreign communism” and the unique Californian ethos. He wrote: In this anti-Chinese feeling there is, of course, nothing that can properly be deemed socialistic or communistic. On the contrary, socialists and communists are more tolerant of the Chinese than any other class of those who feel or are threatened by their competition. For not only is there, at the bottom of what is called socialism and communism, the great idea of equality and brotherhood of men, but they who look to changes in the fundamental institutions of society as the only means of improving the

48

George, “Kearney Agitation in California.”

Bhamidipaty 19 condition of the masses necessarily regard Chinese immigration as a minor evil, if in a proper social state it could be any evil at all. 49 In the same vein, George also painted Chinese migrants as the unlucky scapegoats of preexisting social discontent rather than objects inherently worthy of scorn: I [cannot] regard the anti-Chinese sentiment as really peculiar, because it must soon arise in the East should Chinese immigration continue; and because in connection in which we are considering it, its nature and effects do not materially differ from those which elsewhere are aroused by other causes. The main fact which underlies all this agitation is popular discontent; and, where there is popular discontent, if there is not one Jonah, another will be found. Thus, over and over again, popular discontent has fixed upon the Jews, and among ourselves there is a large class who make the “ignorant foreigner” the same sort of a scapegoat for all political demoralization and corruption. 50 George’s rhetoric appears lofty and cloaked in obscure proscriptions of evil and equality. He highlighted egalitarianism in a positive light and indirectly attacks Kearney’s movement. The ideal society, George implied, was one of equality in which Chinese immigration would be permissible. Here George succumbed to the same trap that Bret Harte did when he wrote “The Heathen Chinee.” Though both of their intentions were positive, the actuality of their racism outshined their beneficent intentions and actually serviced to further the cause of the people they mocked and opposed. The fundamental, invisible racism that Trepagnier described hid in George’s mind ultimately sabotaged his attempt to effectively critique Kearney.

49

George, “Kearney Agitation in California.”

50

George, “Kearney Agitation in California.”

Bhamidipaty 20 Lessons from George and Kearney Towards the end of the nineteenth century, anti-Chinese sentiment in California was neither a new phenomenon nor a fully-subconscious bias. Within the debate about Chinese immigration existed a meta-discourse about its own relevance, logic, and validity. No more clearly does this hypocrisy manifest than in Henry George and Denis Kearney. More than a hundred years later, analysis of their meta-discourse reveals that racist assumptions pervaded not only across politics, class, and background, but also across criticism itself. In other words, even contemporary criticism of the anti-Chinese movement succumbed to racist argumentation that it could not perceive, standardize, or resist.

Bhamidipaty 21 Bibliography Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. 2nd ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.

Dr. Michael Adas is a professor of U.S. history at Rutgers University. His book chronicles the interplay between technology and the perception of race throughout European history. Dr. Adas' work contextualizes the origin of modern racism and its discordant genesis during the Enlightenment. The paper also extrapolates on Dr. Adas' coverage of British perspectives on race in India and the role of contemporary intelligentsia in the formation of lived racism as it manifests in individual encounters.

Baldwin, John. "Culture, Prejudice, Racism, and Discrimination." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, January 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.164.

John Baldwin's summarizes the modern discourse on racism and relates it to modern theories about cultural context. An extremely exhaustive account on modern definitions, sub-categories, explanations, and posited-manifestations of racial and gender prejudice.

This paper treat's Baldwin's work as a sort of augmented tertiary source, useful not only for attaining a general idea about modern opinions of racism but also for the arguments Baldwin makes about the imperative role of culture in the development of contracted prejudices.

Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich. Blumenbach's Five Races. 1779. Illustration. Accessed February 1, 2019. http://scihi.org/johann-friedrich-blumenbach-human-race/.

From the National Center for Biotechnology Information, US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. An image of the five races that Blumenbach identified in his 1795 MD thesis shows how early Enlightenment scientists pictured race.

Chang, Gordan H. "China and the Pursuit of America's Destiny: Nineteenth-Century Imagining and Why Immigration Restriction Took So Long." Journal of Asian American Studies 15, no. 2 (June 2012): 145-69. https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2012.0012.

Professor of History at Stanford University Dr. Chang’s paper questions the traditional notion that the anti-Chinese movement was a homogenous force that assured the Chinese Exclusion Act would pass. Chang also details the specific opposition the anti-Chinese movement faced.

Deverell, William. Foreword to The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, by Alexander Saxton, ix-xiii. 1971. Reprint, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.

One of the seminal works that this paper references. Alexander Saxton's book provides an incredibly exhaustive account of labor's interplay with anti-Chinese sentiment in California. Saxton attempts to advance scholarship on anti-Chinese sentiment by discounting uncontextualized, platitudinal claims about the origin of anti-Chinese sentiment. Includes a concise history of the WPC and its internal politics as well as a history of Henry George and his connection to Denis Kearney.

Bhamidipaty 22 Deverell, William, and David Igler, eds. A Companion to California History. Wiley Blackwell Companions to American History. Somerset: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Deverell describes the origin of organized anti-Chinese resistance in white mining communities in the rural foothills of California during the early Gold Rush.

Fahey, Frank Michael. "Denis Kearney: A Study in Demagoguery." Working paper, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, June 1956.

An unpublished dissertation from former Stanford University student provides the most comprehensive scholarship on Denis Kearney out of any work cited in this paper. The paper is useful in understanding his rise, speech tactics, and analyses of his character from both modern and contemporary sources.

Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty!: An American History. 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

Dr. Eric Foner is a professor at Columbia University. Until the 2018-19 school year, the Harker School used this textbook to teach the AP US History course. Chapter thirteen is helpful in gleaning a superficial albeit useful understanding of immigration to California during the early Gold Rush. Foner mainly includes immigration statistics and avoids overt argumentative claims.

Fredrickson, George M. Racism: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Dr. George Frederickson (1934-2008) was an American professor at Stanford University and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982. His work as an extremely digestible history of racism as a concept, term, and organizing ideology in western society. Used primarily to trace and investigate nineteenth-century conceptions of race through the previous several centuries.

George, Henry. "The Chinese in California." New-York Tribune, May 1, 1869, 1-2. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1869-05-01/ed-1/seq-1/.

The first major work that George released that focuses on anti-Chinese sentiment. George uses excessive verbiage and partisan argumentation to sway voters to support his legislation. Useful in understanding how racism became embedded in the working norm.

The article provides a window into contemporary scholarship and the tone of the antiChinese meta-discourse.

———. "Kearney Agitation in California." The Popular Science Monthly, August 1880. http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/hgeorge3.html.

Provided at the courtesy of the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco. Part one of the "Kearney Agitation in California." The second part an also be found on the museum website. The original was published altogether in 1880 after Henry George was in the midst of his popularity, having just released Progress and Poverty. Used to understand George's hypocrisy, subconscious prejudice, and his official opinion of Denis Kearney, the WPC, and social movements.

———. "What the Railroad Will Bring Us." Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, October 1868, 297-306. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/ahj1472.1-01.004/302.

Bhamidipaty 23 The first public work wherein George discussed the "Chinese question." George also prognosticates on the class ramifications of the railroad and predicts massive unrest. A necessary source for understanding the early stages of George's subconscious scientific racism.

Harte, Bret. "Plain Language from Truthful James." Overland Monthly, September 1870, 287-88. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/ahj1472.1-05.003/283.

One of the most famous pieces of the anti-Chinese movement. Harte’s poem provides a model for the unintentional spread of racist values that George falls into.

"House Vote #83 in 1882 (47th Congress)." GovTrack.us. Accessed April 12, 2019. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/47-1/h83.

GovTrack.us provided information on the voting history of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the House of Representatives.

Howe, Octavius T., and Frederick C. Matthews. American Clipper Ships: 1833-1858. Vol. 2.

Brattleboro, VT: E.L. Hildreth, 1927. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009916145.

A record of clipper ship manufactures and routes that was useful in interpreting the impact of Denis Kearney’s career at sea. Data on the Shooting Star was particularly helpful.

McKeown, Adam. "Global Migration and Regionalization, 1840-1940." University of California, Santa Cruz: Center for Global, International and Regional Studies, Mapping Global Inequality ser. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t49t5zq.

McKeown contextualizes the China-United States immigration rate in the context of global migration trends and analyzes the historiography of migration in Eurocentric histories of Asia.

Nast, Thomas. Ides of March. March 20, 1880. Illustration. Accessed February 7, 2019. https://thomasnastcartoons.com/2014/03/16/ides-of-march-20-march-1880/.

Thomas Nast's illustration of Denis Kearney as an existential Brutus depicts a romanticized Kearney against a scene of barbarous others. The image illustrates, especially when contrasted with another one the same year, oscillate between political neutrality and tiredness.

———. Social Change Solved. Illustration. https://art.famsf.org/thomas-nast/social-sciencesolved-harpers-weekly-april-10-1880-cover-page-1963302018.

Thomas Nast’s illustration of Denis Kearney helps establish a timeline of the changing national perception of Kearney and the anti-Chinese movement.

Rice, H. William. "California Gold Rush." Immigration to the United States. Last modified September 24, 2011. Accessed December 18, 2018. http://immigrationtounitedstates.org/399-california-gold-rush.html.

Dr. H. William Rice is a professor of English at Kennesaw State University who has written extensively on American literature and history. Rice’s article details the demography of migrants to California during the Gold Rush and includes a comprehensive list of nationalities.

Bhamidipaty 24

Rodgers, H.A. California—The Chinese Agitation in San Francisco—A Meeting of the Workingmen's Party of California on the Sand Lots. March 1880. Photograph. https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb8n39n9d0/?brand=oac4.

Depicts a portrait of the Sand Lot riots that the Workingmen’s Party of California conducted. Rodgers’ illustration dramatizes the intensity and fervor of the anti-Chinese movement and stands to contrast against Kearney’s economic and social background.

Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. 1971. Reprint, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.

Dr. Alexander Saxton, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, describes the intertwined nature of labor and anti-Chinese sentiment in nineteenth-century California. He argues that Henry George's claim that Chinese immigration accelerates the trend towards monopolies relies more on his racial bias than objective economic thinking.

By comparing the hostile reception of Americans towards Chinese immigrants during the nineteenth-century to black slaves, Saxton refutes the opinion that the anti-Chinese sentiment can be explained through the "cheap labor argument" alone and further posits that the hostile reception of the Chinese accounts more from "psychological reasons" than "economic" ones.

"Senate Vote #370 in 1882 (47th Congress)." GovTrack.us. Accessed April 12, 2019. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/47-1/s370.

GovTrack.us provided information on the voting history of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Takaki, Ronald T. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Updated and Revised ed. 1989. Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998.

Dr. Ronald Takaki (1939-2009) was a Japanese American professor who pioneered ethnic studies and Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Takaki's book is an exhaustive compendium of Asian American history with the scope of an encyclopedia and the depth of a well-researched journal article. Chapter three was particularly helpful in documenting the ideological development of Henry George and for providing a sufficiently-backed second perspective to contrast with Alexander Saxton.

Takaki also does an excellent job curating rare primary sources. Especially helpful were his distillation of George's diaries. Takaki is also an excellent source for understanding how George's views fit in into the Zeitgeist and eventually influenced national antiChinese legislation and discourse.

Trepagnier, Barbara. "Deconstructing Categories: The Exposure of Silent Racism." Symbolic Interaction 24, no. 2 (2001): 141-63. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2001.24.2.141.

A tertiary source useful that discusses racism in the United States beyond the nineteenth century that helps clarify an understanding of racism in American culture.

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