Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The San Francisco Riot of 1877

WYTS: San Francisco 49ers. Original post here.

Okay, we’ve covered all kinds of bigotries so far, everything from Anti-Black to Anti-Polish. Who is next…? Hmm… Ah, we’re in California again, and you know what that means! Severe racism towards Chinese immigrants! ...I should not have such a peppy tone about this, it's really bad. This is the San Francisco Riot of 1877.

Our story begins in Qing China in the 1800s, which was… having a rough time of it, let’s say. Thanks to overpopulation, outside imperialism, ethnic strife, and deep calcified corruption in a royal court so backwards it made the Romanovs look like Maoists, China went from being the mightiest empire on the planet to nearly carved up by the European powers in the span of just a century. Some of the wars happening within China in this era are not well-known but also are amongst the bloodiest in history, such as the Taiping Rebellion.

For America, the ethnic civil wars between Cantonese and Hakka peoples within the Guangdong region around Hong Kong are important. Over a million people died in this war that even I had never heard of before researching this. (This is all very complicated and well outside my knowledge base.) A large population of the Pearl River Delta left to settle around the world starting in the 1850s, one of those destinations being California. Most immigrants spoke a dialect called Hoisanese/Taishanese, which is distinct from Mandarin or Cantonese. That was still the main lingua franca of American Chinese communities until the mid-20th century.

Speaking of that century, things got much worse for China in the 20th century, ho boy, the Century of Humiliation is a loooong one. But that’s another story.

California in the 1800s was a big wonderful land of opportunity. Almost as soon as we conquered it from Mexico, we discovered gold there. If you were a 49er heading from the East of the US, your routes were not easy. The overland mountain wilderness or sailing around South America were roughly as comfortable a journey as going across the entire Pacific. Chinese migrants arrived slowly at first. There were a few in 1849, less than 1,000 before 1851. But after 1852, these numbers quickly jump to 20,000. Then around a hundred thousand by the mid-1870s. As the Gold Rush tapered down, many of these new immigrants found work on the Transcontinental Railroad.

California was a state by 1850, and only eight years later it was trying to ban all people “of the Chinese or Mongolian races” from entry. The State Supreme Court pointed out that California actually did not have the power to decide what happened at the federal government’s international border, and that was struck down. (Red States have been trying similar tactics lately.) But the fact the law happened at all, and stood in place for four years, even if poorly-enforced, shows us that there’s already a problem.

At first, Chinese migrants were welcomed with relative decency. As they began to arrive in vast numbers, the novelty turned to xenophobia. Yellow Peril was rampant in the 19th century – these newcomers had everything going against them, being as foreign as any human being could have been to their white neighbors. There had been very little direct contact between European and Chinese cultures prior to the Opium Wars. They weren’t Christian, they spoke a language nobody knew, nobody knew or cared about their history, and they were from a very poor, war-ravaged region of the world. Also, most of the migrants were male, like 20:1 or more disparities in the Californian Chinese migration. If you've ever seen Deadwood, you'd remember that white guys were throwing around all kinds of now-adorable-seeming antiquated slurs.

In San Francisco, the ethnic enclave neighborhood of Chinatown is almost as old as the city itself. The first mayor, John Geary, welcomed 300 Chinese people to the city personally on August 28th, 1850. Many of these pioneers left to work as miners or on railroads, but many stayed put and became shopkeepers and laborers. This is where American Chinese food was invented. Many also worked in another industry with a low barrier to entry: laundries.

One major issue is that Chinese immigrants were prone to all the issues of a single gender area: crime, prostitution, drug use, general dirtiness. Frontier life, basically. But while many white woman followed the men to California, turning it "respectable", that did not change for the Chinese community. There was even a brief Bubonic Plague epidemic in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1900. By the late 1800s, the neighborhood was already a tourist destination for people to go look at the exotic crime-ridden area. (Similar to New York’s Five Points earlier in the century.) In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, which in theory was to stop the "yellow slavery" of prostitution rings, but in effect simply banned all Chinese women from entering the country.

Now racism doesn't need a justification, but would you have guessed that there was a major labor rights element to all of this? Chinese workers were stereotyped as industrious and also very cheap. They were at the very bottom of Californian society, roughly on par with African Americans, so would they take wages nobody else would. Californians had grumbled for decades, but this would become a national issue. In 1870, a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts was the center of a labor strike, which was broken when the managers imported 75 Chinese laborers. Suddenly Chinese "coolies" were now seen as a semi-human race of scabs and the burgeoning labor rights movement turned very hostile to them.

In 1876, a reported 20,000 people in San Francisco gathered in a vast Anti-Chinese rally. All through the decade the newspapers were writing fearful Yellow Peril headlines. The Chronicle had a story entitled "The Chinese Invasion! They Are Coming, 900,000 Strong!" You might remember that earlier in the century, the Know-Nothings had a similar panicabout Catholic immigrants. Well, the Anti-Chinese movement was considerably more successful.

In 1877 the same long Panic that had gripped the East finally made its way to the West, economic depressions taking a lot longer to move around back then. San Francisco had gone through a few boom and bust cycles, as mining industries rose and fell. In 1877, the city had a population well above 200,000 people, roughly 10% Chinese. 20% of all men were out of work. And so the various other laborers despised their Chinese competition. You see, destroying an entire group of rival workers could indeed be seen as a pro-labor action, it has a ruthless supply and demand logic - this bizarre mixture of blue collar and racist concerns is a potent brew even today.

On July 23rd, an early socialist party, the Workingmen's Party, planned a rally at the sandy lots in front of SF City Hall. (All this is gone now, burnt down in the 1906 earthquake disaster.) They were responding to reports that Pittsburgh had erupted into chaos as the Great Railroad Strike was attacked by Tom Scott's militia... you might remember this story if you're reading along. The Workingmen's Party organizers tried to keep things on topic, but much of the crowd were bored and hecklers yelled: "Talk about the Chinamen; Give us the Coolie business!" By the evening the socialist rally was a dud, but the crowd had turned, seemingly on their own, into an angry mob marching towards Chinatown.

For the next two days, San Francisco endured waves of anti-Chinese pogroms. The mobs would rise up, burn several Chinese businesses, especially laundries, and then be dispersed by the police and volunteer forces. They'd gather to attack local white-owned businesses like the lumber yard or the steamship company or the mill, anywhere that had been employing too much Chinese labor. Actually, SF did rather well in response to this ethnic assault. The local municipal government did everything it could to repress the violence. The mayor, Andrew Jackson Bryant, a political opponent of Chinese immigration, formed a Committee of Safety. That sounds very French Revolution-y to me, but it was an ad hoc militia that beat back the rioters with hickory pickax handles and baseball bats. (Like the opposite of Ax Handle Saturday's mobs.)

By the 27th, most of the violence had cooled down, only one more Chinese laundry burnt down, progress! There was a threat that this might spill over to Oakland or nearby cities, but major riots did not occur. A couple old Civil War warships entered the harbor on the mayor's invitation to try to dissuade any further violence. 4 people were killed in total, including a Chinese business owner who suffocated inside his own burning building. A further fourteen people were injured, and quite a lot of property had been damaged.

Now while the pogrom was not a brilliant success in terms of destroying San Francisco's Chinese population, it was the curtain rising on a new wave of Sinophobia. There would be Anti-Chinese riots all across the US for the next decade, mostly in California, but there was a major one in Denver in 1880 and even a small one as far away as Milwaukee in 1889. The California branch of the Workingman's Party pivoted hard towards Anti-Chinese racism. A new leader, Denis Kearney, would make fiery demagogic speeches at the same sand lot outside City Hall, ending them all with his catchphrase: "And whatever happens, the Chinese must go!" Kearney would end up, of all things, a stock broker guy, making a random fortune before his death. He had lost whatever anti-capitalist roots he had in his hatred and racism. Maybe there’s a lesson there.

Meanwhile, across politics, the Anti-Chinese movement would have triumphant successes. In San Francisco, they tried to ban Chinese laundries with an explicitly discriminatory ordinance banning wooden laundries. In a surprise twist for a very conservative Gilded Age Supreme Court, that was struck down in the case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins in 1886 as a violation of the 14th Amendment. Meanwhile on the national political level, the federal government had to toe a line between racist populism and geopolitical ambitions with China. In 1882, we have the infamous Chinese-Exclusion Act, ironically passed just as the Statue of Liberty was being constructed. It was the first major barrier to immigration enacted by the US government. That was supposed to just last for ten years, but was extended in 1892, and the US banned nearly all Chinese immigration to the country until the 1950s.

The Chinese Court did not protest too heavily. They needed whatever friends they could get while Russia and Japan were trying to tear the Empire apart limb by limb.

The Chinese Exclusion Act is how you get such lovely federal organizations like the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, and was the predecessor to ICE. Forty years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 was a glorious victory for the anti-immigration forces. Now the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people whose only barrier to entry was a boat ticket and not having typhus can complain online about foreign hordes raping Lady Liberty. Millions of Jews in Europe had nowhere to escape to, and would be marched off to the gas chambers while America stayed "pure".

Many Chinese communities suffered demographic issues in the late-1800s with mostly male populations, limited immigration, and low birth rates. Denver’s Chinatown, for example, was down to just 110 people by 1940 and was torn down. Others survived and are among the most famous parts of their cities today. San Francisco’s Chinatown was destroyed in the fire of 1906. Despite attempts by the city to push them out, maybe move the whole ethnic group to Oakland, it was rebuilt on the spot. It’s still there today, it is a must-see place if you're visiting.