Introduction

The long history of Chinese immigrant and Chinese American workers organizing in guilds and labor unions--in California, from the Gold Rush to the building of the transcontinental railroad and onwards--has been obscured in the decades following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This complex law, the United States' first major immigration legislation, was explicitly designed to reduce the number of people of Chinese descent in the U.S., and to disenfranchise as many as possible through measures such as removing the right to naturalization. (1) By the late 1880s, in the wake of this new law, many labor unions began to agitate against workers of Chinese descent and for "white labor only." While workers like shoemaker and Irish immigrant Patrick J. Healy and union leader Sigismund Danielewicz made strong stands against exclusion, the labor leaders who became most powerful, like Knights of Labor president Terrence V. Powderly, expelled Chinese workers from unions. (2) Many mainstream white business and political leaders showed support for barring Chinese workers from unions. Among them was California's former Exclusion Governor, George C. Perkins, now a powerful U.S. Senator, who warned that organized Chinese laborers posed a threat to business: "If [the Chinese] were firmly entrenched here, there would be introduced a trades-union system compared with which the American system is child's play," he wrote in his 1906 "Reasons for Continued Chinese Exclusion" (North American Review). Government officials also showed their support in other ways; after he expelled the Chinese members of the Knight of Labor, Powderly would later be appointed the U.S. Commissioner-General of Immigration.