The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [64]
In the 1870s, when America slid into a nationwide depression, the Chinese became that scapegoat, especially in regions where they clustered in the greatest numbers. During an earlier era of prosperity, some Chinese might have been lulled into a false feeling of security when they moved into white neighborhoods or signed contracts with white businessmen. But when the prosperity vanished, the Chinese had to face just how resented, even loathed, they were by their white neighbors and competitors.
Nowhere was that resentment greater than in the state of California, where all the ingredients for racial unrest came together. The gold disappeared and with it all those businesses that supported mining and prospecting. The railroad was complete and the men who had built it found themselves out of work. Thousands of ex-miners and discharged track laborers, white and Chinese, roamed the region in search of jobs. Even if the local economy been able to absorb these shocks, with the end of the Civil War came the end of the national manpower shortage. Now, former Union and Confederate soldiers were back home, eagerly looking for work, and some headed west, to the Golden State of California.
Before the war, the expense and inconvenience of intercontinental travel would have deterred all but the most resolute from reaching the West Coast, but the new railroad made it easy for job-seekers to come, disgorging a steady stream not only of Civil War veterans from the East and South, but of newly arrived immigrants from Europe. Even though cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles were growing rapidly, they did not have enough work for them all.
Worse, the transcontinental railroad did not bring the prosperity that many in California had hoped it would. While it did open eastern markets to western manufactured goods and some agricultural products, it also allowed shipment of inexpensive eastern products into California, which hurt local industries. The new factories in San Francisco were no match for the older, more established factories on the East Coast, and those who had traveled west to escape eastern sweatshops and mill towns, to seize new opportunities and build new lives, found instead mass unemployment and ruthless competition for jobs. Many of the competitors for these jobs were Chinese, and by the end of 1870 there were one Chinese and two whites for every job in San Francisco.
As would be expected, many California businessmen, eager to cut costs in hard times, hired the Chinese because they were usually willing to work longer hours for less than half the pay. Further exacerbating racial tensions, some businessmen also used the Chinese as strikebreakers, just as had been done on the East Coast. In 1870, a traveler reported, “In the factories of San Francisco they had none but Irish, paying them three dollars a day in gold. They struck, and demanded four dollars. Immediately their places, numbering three hundred, were supplied by Chinamen at one dollar a day.”
For struggling Irish workers engaged in a strike to secure decent wages for themselves, it must have been galling to witness the sheer number of Chinese willing to serve as scabs. Of course, most Chinese were likely unfamiliar with the concept “scab,” and in addition owed no allegiance