The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [56]
Against this background of greed, the frustration of the American worker mounted. Those who had loyally risked life and limb to fight in the Union armies were cast adrift after the war. Returning to crumbling, disease-ridden tenements in the cities, they had to compete with thousands of others for work, including even more desperate European immigrants—men and women willing to endure unhealthy and even dangerous conditions in factories for minimal wages. Others seeking work were farmers forced off the land when they found that they could afford neither the expensive equipment required to make agriculture profitable, nor the exorbitant shipping rates charged by powerful railroad monopolies. There were riots in the coal mines, strikes in mills and factories, accompanied by literal starvation in the streets. In an effort to defend themselves against their corporate employers, white employees started to organize unions to fight for decent working conditions and fair wages.
A new method of control had to be found quickly, a new source of labor that would demonstrate that union members were expendable, and eastern industrialists began to consider the Chinese as that source. In 1870 at North Adams, Massachusetts, the workers of a ladies’ boot and shoe factory went on strike, demanding an eight-hour day, a wage increase, and the right to review the company’s account ledgers. The owner, Calvin Sampson, fired them, but since the strikers belonged to the Secret Order of the Knights of Saint Crispin, the largest and possibly the most powerful union in the country, he was unable to hire replacement white workers. Still, Sampson rejected the demands of his workers, and after reading a newspaper article praising the efficiency of Chinese workers in a San Francisco shoe factory, he signed a three-year contract with the emigration firm of Kwong, Chong, Wing & Company under which seventy-five Chinese laborers would be sent east from the West Coast. Sampson was the first manufacturer in American history to transport Asians east of the Rockies to end a strike.
A crowd gathered at the North Adams train depot to gape at the arriving strikebreakers. Some spectators came out of sheer curiosity, as most New Englanders had never before seen an Asian person, but many were there to harass and even intimidate the Chinese. “A large and hostile crowd met them at the depot, hooted them, hustled them somewhat, and threw stones at them,” The Nation wrote. Thirty police officers escorted the Chinese to the factory dormitories, where they were protected by locked gates and guards. Later, someone scrawled “No scabs or rats admitted here” on the factory wall, but no violence broke out.
Sampson’s decision to hire Chinese labor proved a success. Harper’s New Monthly reported that “there can be nowhere a busier, more orderly group of workmen.” Within a few months, the Chinese were outperforming the Crispins, producing shoes at a brisker rate than the more experienced strikers had done. Scribner’s Monthly pointed out that the Chinese “labored regularly and constantly, losing no blue Mondays on account of Sunday’s dissipations nor wasting hours on idle holidays.” The magazine estimated that the Chinese had saved Sampson $840 a week, or almost $44,000 annually, which, if applied to the rest of the shoemaking industry, would result in national savings of $3.5 million a year.
Widely reported in the press, the North Adams experiment inspired other East Coast capitalists to try Chinese labor. Three months after Sampson imported his Chinese workers, James B. Hervey, owner of the Passaic Steam Laundry in Belleville, New Jersey, brought Chinese laborers from San Francisco to replace his Irish female employees, whose frequent strikes were cutting into his profits. The arrival of these Chinese laborers panicked white workers throughout the eastern states. James Hervey received several threatening letters, one warning that he would be murdered if he did not fire his Chinese employees.