The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [69]
Social commentators found it ironic that the most visible spokesman of the anti-Chinese lobby was an Irishman, for only a generation earlier, in the 1840s and 1850s, Irish émigrés had faced the hysteria of the Know-Nothing movement. Help Wanted signs often carried the postscript “NINA,” for “No Irish Need Apply.” “A while ago it was the Irish,” Robert Louis Stevenson observed in The Amateur Emigrant. “Now it is the Chinese who must go.” Nonetheless, Kearney’s antics turned him into an overnight celebrity. His fiery rhetoric and street theater were cathartic for thousands of frustrated laborers in California, many of them Irish, and in 1877 they formed the Workingmen’s Party of California and elected Denis Kearney president.
Some Chinese immigrants had the misfortunate to arrive in San Francisco at the very peak of this hysteria. In an 1877 account, one observer painted a vivid picture of what the Chinese newcomers faced as they stepped off the docks. On their way to Chinatown, he said, the harassment they endured from whites was like “running the gauntlet among the savages of the wilderness”: “They follow the Chinaman through the streets, howling and screaming after him to frighten him. They catch hold of his cue [sic] and pull him from the wagon. They throw brickbats and missiles at him, and so, often these poor heathen, coming to this Christian land under sacred treaty stipulations, reach their quarter of this Christian city covered with wounds and bruises and blood.” During that dark era, Andrew Kan recalled, “When I first came, Chinese treated worse than dog. Oh, it was terrible, terrible... The hoodlums, roughnecks and young boys pull your queue, slap your face, throw all kind of old vegetables and rotten eggs at you.”
The Chinese lived in fear, knowing they could be killed at any moment, quite likely with no punishment for the assailants. “We were simply terrified,” Huie Kin recalled of San Francisco in the 1870s. “We kept indoors after dark for fear of being shot in the back. Children spit upon us as we passed by and called us rats.” Just to walk outdoors was to risk assault. J. S. Look had similar recollections. “I remember as we walked along the street of San Francisco often the small American boys would throw rocks at us,” he said. In the evenings, “all the windows in the Chinese stores had to be covered at night with thick wooden doors or else the boys would break in the glass with rocks.”
The small towns of California were getting to be as dangerous as the cities—perhaps even more so, because of their isolation. Threatened by the inexpensive labor provided by the Chinese, white workers began to burn down Chinese homes in central California and to torch the barns and fields of landowners who refused to discharge their Chinese field hands. On March 13,1877, a group of armed white men broke into a cabin in Chico, California, where they shot to death five Chinese farm workers, then poured oil over the bodies and set them ablaze. One of the killers later confessed that he had acted under orders from the Workingmen’s Party.
In July 1877, the mounting tension exploded into a full-fledged pogrom, perhaps the worst disturbance in the history of San Francisco. Ten thousand agitators gathered in the city to voice their support for an eastern railway strike that had spilled over into a nationwide labor rebellion. The meeting deteriorated into anarchy when an anti-Chinese club took