The Kearney Agitation in California
Henry George
[1880]
Although something has been done toward the scientific treatment of
history and of the larger facts of sociology, the conception of the
reign of law amid human actions lags far behind the recognition of law
in the material universe, and the disposition to ascribe social
phenomena to special causes is yet almost as common as it is in the
infancy of knowledge so to explain phenomena.
We no longer attribute an eclipse to a malevolent dragon; when a
blight falls on our vines, or a murrian on our cattle, we set to work
with microscope and chemical tests, instead of imputing it to the
anger of a supernatural power; we have begun to trace the winds and
foretell the weather, instead of seeing in their changes the designs
of Providence or the work of witch or warlock. Yet as to social
phenomena, infantile explanations similar to those we have thus
discarded still largely suffice. One has but to read our newspapers,
to attend political meetings, or to listen to common talk, to see that
very many people, who have in large measure risen to scientific
conceptions of the linked sequence of the material universe, have not
yet, in their views of social facts and movements, got past the idea
of the little child who, if shown a picture of battle or siege, will
insist on being told which are the gold and which the bad men.
As the conductors of this magazine evidently realize the importance
of popularizing in their applications to social questions the
scientific spirit and scientific method, which in other departments
have achieved such wonders, I propose in this paper to say something
of a series of events in California that has attracted much attention.
In an article such as this, I can, however, do little more than
correct some misapprehensions and put the main facts in such relations
that their bearing may be seen. Much that would conduce to complete
intelligibility must, from the limit of space, be omitted.
What seems to be the general idea of these events is well suggested
by one of [Thomas] Nasts cartoonsa hideous figure, girt
with revolver and sword, broadly badged as communists,
brandishing in one hand the torch of anarchy, and in the other
exhibiting a scroll on which is inscribed: Mob Law. The New
Constitution of California. Kearneyism. Other peoples homes,
savings, land, property, lives, capital and honest labor, all common
stock in the universal coöperative brotherhood. In the
distance a group of workmen stand idle and cowering, while underneath
is the device, Constant Vigilance (Committee) is the price of
liberty in San Francisco.
While such ideas are but exaggerated reflections of the utterances of
San Francisco papers, they are wide of the truth. There has not been
in San Francisco any outbreak of foreign communism, nor
yet has there been in the workingmans movement, or in its
results, anything socialistic or agrarian. This movement has in
reality been inspired by ordinary political aims, and what has been
going on in California derives its real interest from its relation to
general facts and its illustration of general tendencies.
While there has been much in these events to recall to the cool
observer the saying of Carlyle, There are twenty-eight millions
of people in Great Britain, mostly fools, it is yet a mistake to
regard California as a community widely differing from more Eastern
States. I am, in fact, inclined rather to look upon California as a
typical American State, and San Francisco as a typical American city.
It would be difficult to name any State that in resources, climate,
and industries comes nearer to representing the whole Union, while, as
all the other states have contributed to her population in something
like relative proportions, general American characteristics remain, as
local peculiarities are in the attrition worn off.
There is, of course, a greater mobility of society than in older
communities, and this may give rise to certain excitability and
fickleness. But, everywhere, the mobility of population increases with
the relative growth of cities and increases the facilities of
movement. And, in fact, the newness and plasticity of society in such
a State as California permits general tendencies to show themselves
more quickly than in older sections, just as in the younger and more
flexible parts of the tree the direction of the wind is most easily
seen.
Though yet comparatively a small city, San Francisco is in character
more metropolitan than any other American city except New York, and
is, to the territory and population of which she is in the commercial,
industrial, financial, and political center, even more of a center
than is New York. San Francisco has no rival. For long distances her
bay is spoken of as the bay, and she is not merely the
greatest city, but the city.
And, though the European element is largely represented in San
Francisco, it is, I am inclined to think, more thoroughly Americanized
than in the Eastern cities. The reason I take to be, not merely that
is drawn from the more activity and intelligent of the immigration
that sets upon the Atlantic shore, and has generally only reached
California after a longer or shorter sojourn in more Eastern States,
but also that the American population having been drawn from all
sections of the country, and from the early days the whole immigration
having been rather of individuals than of colonies or families, the
admixture has been more thorough, and except as to the Chinese, that
polarization which divides a mixed population into distinct
communities has not so readily taken place.
Contrary, too, to the reputation which she seems to have got, San
Francisco is really an orderly city. Although the police force has
been doubled within the past two years, it still bears a smaller
proportion to population than in other large cities. Chinamen go about
the streets with far more security than I imagine they will go about
any Eastern city when they become proportionately numerous; and, after
all said of hoodlumism, there is little obtrusive rowdyism and few
street fightsa fact which may in part result from the once
universal practice of carrying arms.
Nor has communism or socialism (understanding by these terms the
desire for fundamental social changes) made, up to this time, much
progress in California, for the presence of the Chinese has largely
engrossed the attention of the laboring classes, offering what has
seemed to make a sufficient explanation of the fall of wages and the
difficulty of finding employment. Only the more thoughtful have heeded
the fact that in other parts of the world where there are no Chinamen
the condition of the laboring classes is even worse in California.
With the masses the obvious evils of Chinese competition have excluded
all thought of anything else. And in this anti-Chinese feeling there
is, of course, nothing that can properly be deemed socialistic or
communistic. On the contrary, socialists and communists are more
tolerant of the Chinese than any other class of those who feel or are
threatened by their competition. For not only is there, at the bottom
of what is called socialism and communism, the great idea of equality
and brotherhood of men, but they who look to changes in the
fundamental institutions of society as the only means of improving the
condition of the masses necessarily regard Chinese immigration as a
minor evil, if in a proper social state it could be any evil at all.
Nor is there in this anti-Chinese feeling anything essentially
foreign. Those who talk about opposition to the Chinese being
anti-American shut their eyes to a great many facts if they mean
anything more than that it
ought to be anti-American.
In short, I am unable to see, in the conditions from which this
agitation sprang, anything really peculiar to California. I can not
regard the anti-Chinese sentiment as really peculiar, because it must
soon arise in the East should Chinese immigration continue; and
because in connection in which we are considering it, its nature and
effects do not materially differ from those which elsewhere are
aroused by other causes. The main fact which underlies all this
agitation is popular discontent; and, where there is popular
discontent, if there is not one Jonah, another will be found. Thus,
over and over again, popular discontent has fixed upon the Jews, and
among ourselves there is a large class who make the ignorant
foreigner the same sort of a scapegoat for all political
demoralization and corruption.
There has been in California growing social and political discontent,
but the main causes of this do not materially differ from those which
elsewhere exist. Some of the factors of discontent may have attained
greater development in California than in older sections, but I am
inclined to think this is merely because in the newer States general
tendencies are quicker seen. For instance, the concentration of the
whole railroad system in the hands of one close corporation is
remarkable in California, but there is clearly a general tendency to
such concentration, which is year by year steadily uniting railroad
management all over the country.
The grand culture of machine-worked fields, which calls
for large gangs of men at certain seasons, setting them adrift when
the crop is gathered, and which is so largely instrumental in filling
San Francisco every winter with unemployed men, is certainly the form
to which American agriculture generally tends, and is developing in
the new Northwest even more rapidly than in California.
Nor yet am I sure that the characteristics of the press, to which San
Franciscans largely attribute this agitation, are not characteristics
to which the newspaper press generally tends. Certain it is that the
development of the newspaper is in a direction which makes it less and
less the exponent of ideas and advocate of principles, and more and
more a machine for money-making.
There is, however, a peculiar local factor which I am persuaded has
not been without importance. This is an intangible thinga mere
memory. But such intangible things are often most potent. Just as the
memory of previous revolutions has disposed the discontented Parisian
to think of barricades and the march to the Hôtel de Ville, so
has the memory of the Vigilance Committee accustomed San Franciscans
to think of extra-legal associations and methods as the last but
sovereign resort. These ideas have been current among a different
class from that which mans the Paris barricades.
The Vigilance Committee of 1856, as most of the other California
Vigilance Committees, was organized and led by the mercantile class,
and in that class its memories have survived. The wild talk of the sand-lot
about hanging official thieves and renegade representatives, and the
armed organizations of workingmen, which have seemed at the East like
the importations of foreign communism, are in large measures but
reflections and exaggerations of ideas current in San Francisco
counting-rooms and bank parlors. And it must be remembered, in
estimating the influence of this idea, that the Vigilance Committee of
1856 was not merely successful in its immediate purposes, but gave
birth to a political organization that for many years thereafter
managed the local government and disposed of all its large prizes.
Yet, acting with and running through this, has been, I think, a wider
and more generally diffused feelingthe disposition toward sharp
repressive measures which is aroused among the wealthy classes by
symptoms of dissatisfaction and aggression among the poor. That this
feeling has of late years been growing throughout the Union many
indications show.
Be all this as it may, the impulse that began these California
agitations came from the East. For the genesis of Kearneyism, or
rather for the shock that set in motion forces that social and
political discontent had been generating, we must look to Pittsburgh
and to the great railroad strikes of 1877.
In California, where a similar strike was about beginningfor
the railroad company had given notice of a like reduction in wagesthese
strikes excited an interest that became intense when the telegraph
told of the burning and fighting in Pittsburgh. The railroad magnates,
becoming alarmed, rescinded their notice, but in the mean time a
meeting to express sympathy with the Eastern strikers had been called
for the sand-lot in front of the new City Hall. This meeting was
called in response to a request of Eastern labor papers, but happened
to fall amid the excitement caused by the Pittsburgh riot. The
over-zealous authorities, catching, perhaps, the alarm that had
induced the railroad managers to rescind their reduction, arrested men
who were carrying placards advertising the meeting. In the excitement,
wild reports flew through the city that an incendiary meeting was to
be held, and an attempt made to burn the Pacific Mail Docks and
Chinese quarter.
The meeting was held, for the authorities soon saw that there was no
reason for preventing it. There was no talk of lawlessness or allusion
to the Chinese on the part of the promoters of the meeting or their
speakers, but the excitement showed itself by the raising, on the
outskirts of the immense crowd, of the cry, To Chinatown!
a movement promptly stopped by the police; and in remoter districts
some Chinese wash-houses were raided by gangs of boys. The paperssensational
to the last degreemade the most of this the next morning, and in
the excitement that the Eastern news had created, a meeting was held
in the rooms of the Chamber of Commerce, organized a Committee of
Public Safety, with the President of the Vigilance Committee of 1856
[William Tell Coleman] at its head, the hint being probably given by a
telegram that the citizens of Pittsburgh had restored order by
organizing a force armed with base-ball bats. In San Francisco the
pick-handle was chose instead, and for some days a large number of men
so armed perambulated the streets.
Space will not permit, nor is it necessary, to tell the story of this
battle of kegs. Ridiculous in some of its aspects, it was
serious in others. There was not the slightest necessity for this
extra-legal organization and parade; but, while San Francisco was
represented to the world as a city on the verge of riot and anarchy, a
strong feeling of class irritation was engendered.
Among those who carried a pick-handle in this pick-handle
brigade, as it was christened, was an Irish drayman, who has
since become famous. [Denis] Kearney, a man of strict temperance in
all except speech, had built up a good business in draying for
mercantile houses, and accumulated, besides his horses and drays, a
comfortable little property. Up to this time he had taken no part in
politics, except to parade in torch light processions as a Hayes
Invincible, but for some two years had been a constant attendant
at a sort of free debating club, held on Sunday afternoons, and styled
the Lyceum of Self-Culture, where he had gradually learned to speak in
public, though the temperance which he practiced and preached as to
liquor and tobacco did not extend to opinions or their expression. He
was noticeable not merely for the bitter vulgarity of his attacks upon
all forms of religion, especially that in which he had been reared,
the Catholic, but for the venom with which he abused the working
classes, and took on every occasion what passed for the capitalistic
side.
With all the vehemence with which he has since inveighed against thieving
capitalists and lecherous bondholders, he denounced
the laziness and extravagance of workingmen, declared that wages were
far too high, and defended Chinese immigration. Whether, with the
suddenness not unnatural to such extremists, Kearney really changed
his opinions while carrying his pick-handle, the change being hastened
by some recent losses in stocks, or whether he merely realized what
political possibilities lay in the general feeling of discontent and
irritation, and how easily in times of excitement men may be
organized, makes little difference. He laid down his pick-handle, to
put his drays in charge of a brother, and go into politics.
His first appearance in his new vocation attracted no attention. The
Safety Committee excitement passed immediately into the excitement of
the impending legislative and municipal election. Besides the regular
parties, a number of independent organizations or side-shows
were in the field, many of them consisting only of a high-sounding
name and an Executive Committee, who found their account in nominating
candidates from the principal tickets and assessing them for election
expenses, candidates who were spending money heavily, preferring to
pay something to get on even the most insignificant ticket rather than
risk the loss of the few votes that might determine their election.
Amid all these parties, and councils, and clubs,
the organization of a Workingmens Trade and Labor Union,
with one J.G. Day as president and one D. Kearney as secretary,
attracted no attention.
This new organization, which besides a president and secretary,
boasted also a treasurer, stretched out a canvas bearing its name, and
resoluted upon the necessity of patriotism and
integrity in the public offices from the lowest to the highest,
calling upon the laboring classes to unite to elect candidates
in whom they could put their trust, and who are above suspicion.
This being done, the new organization, by its president and secretary,
proceeded in the usual way to ascertain which of the principal
candidates were most above suspicion; but it printed no ticket, this
particular movement to secure patriotism and integrity in the
public offices winding up on the night before election in a row
in which the treasurer and sergeant-at-arms vainly endeavored to make
the president and secretary come to a divide on the amount
collected, which they charged was between one and two thousand
dollars.
But the master spirit of the ephemeral organization that thus
unnoticed closed its life of weeks was no ordinary price club
man, who when one election is over retires from politics until
the next approaches. The knot of men who had called the meeting of
sympathy with the Eastern strikers had afterward organized a
workingmans party and run a few candidates with a view to the
future, but their intentions were brought to naught by the more
energetic and audacious Kearney, who went to work without delay. On
the Sunday after the election he again attended, for the last time,
the Lyceum of Self-Culture, and, to the astonishment and amusement of
the men whose ideas about the rights and wrongs of the working classes
he had been berating, told them that they were a set of fools and
blatherskites, and that he now proposed to start in with the demand of
bread or blood, and organize a party that would amount to
something.
The first move was a meeting to consider the Chinese question, at
which a speech was made by a highly respected and prominent citizen;
but when Kearney, who officiated as secretary, got the stand, he dealt
out some more highly seasoned mental stimulant by reading a
description of the burning of Moscow as a suggestion of what might be
in store for San Francisco. Then appropriating the name of the
Workingmans party, Day and Kearney took to the sand-lot,
enlisting some other speakers. Though violent, these harangues would
have attracted little attention, and in fact the movement might have
been choked in infancy (for several rival factions started up, and
opposition platforms were erected within a few feet of each other),
but for a powerful ally of just the kind needed.
The two San Francisco papers of largest circulation are the Call
and Chronicle, between whom intense rivalry has long
existed. The Call has the greater circulation and more
profitable business, drawn largely from the working classes. It is a
good newspaper, but its editorial management is timorous to a
ridiculous degree. The Chronicle, whose principal
proprietor [Charles De Young] recently lost his life in a tragedy
growing out of these occurrences, is best described as a live
paper of the most vigorous and unscrupulous kind. As though a
tacit partnership had been formed, Kearney began to call upon
workingmen to stop the Call and take the Chronicle,
while the Chronicle on its part advertised the meetings in
the highest style of the art, giving Kearney the greatest prominence
and detailing its best reporters to the manufacture and dress up his
speeches. Thus advertised, the meetings began to draw.
California Street Hill is crowned by the palaces of the railroad
nabobsmen who a few years ago were selling coal-oil or retailing
dry goods, but who now count their wealth by the scores of millions.
To complete the block which one of these had selected for his palace,
an undertakers homestead was necessary. The undertaker wanted
more than the nabob was willing to give, and the latter cut short the
negotiation by inclosing the undertakers house on three sides
with an immense board fence, probably the highest on the Pacific
coast, if not in the world. This veritable coffin, which shuts out
view and sun from the undertakers little home, and with the
common law, now abrogated in California by the code, would not have
been permitted, is one of the most striking features of the hill.
When, with the assistance of the Chronicle, the meetings
had begun to draw crowds, largely composed of unemployed men, who
after the harvest begin to collect in San Francisco, and of a class
that of late years has become numerous, the professional beggars or
strikers, a meeting was called for the top of the California Street
Hill, where the nabobs were regaled by the cheers of a surging crowd,
when it was proposed by one of the speakersa pamphleteer and
newspaper writer well known in California for many years, but neither
before nor since took any part in the agitationto celebrate
Thanksgiving by pulling down the big fence, if not removed by that
time. This was too much: the railroad magnates were frightenedeven
the Chronicle demanded the arrest of the agitators; a
sudden energy was infused into the authorities, and they, with the
proposer of the fence-destruction, were arrested on charges of riot.
That these arrests were ill advised the sequel proves. And it is to
be remarked that in all Kearneys wild declamation there has been
no direct incitement to violence. He has talked about wading through
blood, hanging official thieves, burning the Chinese quarter, and
generally raising Cain, but it has always been with an if.
He has never come any nearer to actually proposing any of these things
than Daniel OConnell did to proposing armed resistance to the
English Government. Nor yet is it easy to point to anything which
Kearney has said that is really more violence or incendiary than
things said before with impunity. It was not [Denis] Kearney, but a
republican leader, a man of wealth, ability, and influence, who has
held high position, and was this year a prominent member of the
National Republican Convention, who first proposed that the Pacific
Mail steamers should be burned at their docks if they did not cease to
bring Chinese; it was a bitter opponent of Kearneyism who, amid
thunders of applause, in the largest hall of the city, first suggested
that the Chinese quarter should be purified with fire and planted with
grass; while as to bitter denunciations of parties, classes, and
individuals, and prognostications of violence and calamity if this,
that, or the other was or was not done, there is probably nothing that
Kearney or his fellows have said that could not be matched from
previous political speeches or newspaper articles. That dangers may
sometimes arise from an abuse of the liberty of speech may be true,
but it is so exceedingly delicate a thing to attempt to draw any line
short of the direct incitement to specific illegal action, that the
only course consistent with the genius of our institutions is to leave
such abuses to their own natural remedy.
It is only where restrictions are imposed that mere words become
dangerous to social order, just as it only when gunpowder is confined
that it becomes explosive. Had the energy of the authorities been
reserved for any lawless act, and these agitators been left to agitate
to their full content, except so far as they might interfere with the
free use of the thoroughfares, any momentary interest or excitement
would have soon died out, and the contempt which follows swelling
words without action would soon have left them powerless. But the
timidity which attaches to great wealth gained by questionable means,
and at once arrogant in its power and keenly sensitive of the jealousy
with which it is regarded, renders is possessors, surrounded as they
must be by sycophantic advisers, insensible to reason in moments of
excitement. The thief doth fear each bush an officer. And
the man who from the windows of a two-million-dollar mansion looks
down upon his fellow citizens begging for the chance to work for a
dollar a day can not fail to have at times some idea of the essential
injustice of this state of things break though his complacency, while
murmurings of discontent assume vague shapes of menace against which
fear urges him to strike, though reason and prudence would hold back a
blow which can only irritate.
The dangers to social order that arise from the glaring inequalities
of wealth come as much from this direction as from the discontent of
the less fortunate classes. It was this feeling that, organizing the pick-handle
brigade, prepared the way and gave the hint for agitation; it
was this feeling that, now striking blindly through the authorities,
gave to an agitation dignity and power.
More efficient means to provoke a public sentiment in favor of the
agitators could not have been taken. Not only were the speakers arrest
on charges which would not bear legal authority, but new warrants were
sworn out as quickly as bail was offered. A pledge made by the
agitators in prison, to hold no more outdoor meetings and use no more
incendiary language if the charges against them were dismissed, was
refused, and special counsel were employed to prosecute. Outside the
prison the same drunken spirit of arbitrary repression showed itself,
not only by driving crowds from the streets, but by breaking up indoor
meetings and installing captains of police as censors.
The reaction was swift and strong, but it was not at first heeded.
The charges against the agitators were dismissed by the judge before
whom they were brought, but fresh charges were made, which were
dismissed by juries. An ordinance was rushed through the Board of
Supervisors, under which it has never dared to bring an action; a
ridiculously oppressive law was hurried through the Legislature, which
was similarly a dead letter, and which at the next session was
repealed without a dissenting voice and hardly a dissenting vote.
These impotent attempts at repression produced their natural result.
The new party was fairly started, brought into prominence and
importance by the intemperance which had sought to crush it.
The feeling on the Chinese question has long been so strong in
California as to give certain victory to any party that could fully
utilize it. But the difficulty in the way of making political capital
of this feeling has been to get resistance, since all parties were
willing to take the strongest anti-Chinese ground. But the fear that
the agitators had evidently inspired, the effort to put them down,
served as such resistance; and, though all parties were anti-Chinese,
the party they were endeavoring to start became at once the anti-Chinese
party in the eyes of those who were bitterest and strongly in their
feeling, while it at the same time became an expression, though rudely
and vaguely, of all sorts of discontent. It was evident that it would
be a political power for at least one election. The lower strata of
ward politicians were rushing into it as a good chance for office; the
Chronicle, which, at the first symptom of reaction, had
redoubled its service, placarded the State with resolutions of the new
party asking workingmen to stop the Call. That paper,
losing heavily in subscribers, quietly began to outdo the Chronicle
in its reports and its puffery. Other papers, recognized as organs of
interests popularly regarded with dislike, did their utmost by
denunciation to keep Kearney in the foreground. Republican politicians
saw in the movement a division of the Democratic vote worth fostering;
Democratic politicians saw in it an element of future success, on the
right side of which the political wise men would keep; the municipal
authorities, remembering coming elections, passed from persecution to
obsequiousness; while the great railroad interest either came to a
tacit understanding, or had its agents install themselves in the new
organization, using it to help their friends and keep out their
enemies, as they aim to use, and generally succeed in using, all
parties, and men of high social standing did not hesitate, when it
served their purpose, to furnish points and matter for sand-lot
harangues, or to speak at meetings which Kearney and his gang had
captured; for, until they met a very warm reception at a Democratic
meeting, they arrogated to themselves the right to interrupt and bull-doze
any meeting that did not suit them. (There have been no more meetings
on Nob Hill, or denunciation of the railroad magnates or great bonanza
firm. On the contrary, all the officials elected by the workingmen
seem to have been either employees or friends of the railroad, or
people who could not harm them, while a confidential attorney of large
moneyed interests has been the reputed confidential advisor of
Kearney.)
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