Working on the Railroad
It was Charles Crocker, one of the members of the Big Four, who first experimented with Chinese construction workers on the transcontinental railroad. The experiment was so successful that railroad agents soon were recruiting Chinese workers by the thousands. "Come over and help!" said the recruiting posters in China. "We have money to spend, but no one to earn it."
At the peak of construction, the Central Pacific employed more than 10,000 Chinese laborers. "They are equal to the best white men," Crocker said proudly of his new labor force. "They are very trusty, they are intelligent, and they live up to their contracts."
The Chinese worked under incredibly dangerous conditions--for a dollar a day--to overcome some of the world's most extraordinary obstacles to the building of a railroad. Workers were suspended in wicker baskets over nearly vertical cliffs in the Sierra Nevada, chipping away with hammers and chisels to make a ledge for the track. In unknown numbers, Chinese workers were swept away in avalanches and rock slides. "The snowslides carried away our camps and we lost a good many men in these slides," reported one railroad official. "Many of them we did not find until the next season when the snow melted."
Chinese rail workers made one brief attempt to strike. Near Cisco, in Placer County, thirty-five hundred workers in July 1867 demanded forty dollars a month and a ten-hour work day. They gave up even these modest demands when the Central Pacific cut off the food supply and threatened to discharge the strikers.
Thousands of Chinese rail workers were laid off following the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Most drifted back to crowd the already glutted labor market in California. Thousands of additional Chinese immigrants arrived each year during the next decade as California entered a period of hard times. Unemployment rose sharply and many businesses failed during "the terrible seventies."
White Californians often blamed the Chinese for the depressed economic conditions. Anti-Chinese riots broke out in cities and towns throughout the state, in places like Auburn, Petaluma, Roseville, Chico, and Santa Barbara. The worst anti-Chinese riot occurred in Los Angeles. On the evening of October 24, 1871, an angry mob looted and burned the local Chinatown, leaving fifteen Chinese immigrants hanging from makeshift gallows.
Many California cities also passed laws to harass the Chinese. San Francisco, for instance, passed an ordinance in 1870 that prohibited anyone form occupying a sleeping room with less than 500 cubic feet of breathing space per person. This "health law" allowed the police to make raids on crowded tenements in Chinatown and roust out any sleeping Chinese residents who were violating the ordinance while they slept. The law was vigorously enforced and soon the jails of San Francisco were so overcrowded that the city itself was in gross violation of its own ordinance.
Many white Californians blamed the Chinese immigrants for the hard times of the 1870s. Groups of unemployed whites gathered on the "sand lots" of San Francisco to denounce the Chinese and to castigate the railroad company that had employed so many of them. Such meetings occasionally erupted into violence, leaving Chinese businesses looted and burned.
Unemployed San Franciscans and their allies in 1877 formed a new political party that would represent their views. A fiery young Irish American named Denis Kearney emerged as the leader of the Workingmen's Party of California. Kearney acquired a large following mainly through his emotional and melodramatic style of oratory. On one occasion, he shouted to a crowd that "every workingman should have a musket."
Fearing that Kearney's speeches would lead to more violence, the city government adopted a ordinance that restricted public speaking that advocated violence. Kearney was arrested but acquitted because no violence had actually resulted from his speeches. Whatever his speeches may have advocated, one thing was clear: the leader of the Workingmen's Party won thunderous applause from his followers whenever he shouted "And whatever happens, the Chinese must go!"