1971 (1970) (1972) (1960-1970) (1970-1980) Table of Contents
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971 (1976), 256 pp., 1976, 1971, 1964, 1960s, 1955, 1949, 1930s, 1925, 1923, 1919, 1910, 1906, 1905, 1890s, 1885, 1870s, 1860s, 1848, 1850-1800 See Text
Dana Goodyear The Enthusiast, The New Yorker, September 24, 2007 (2007a), pp. 84-127 See Text
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1977, 1923, 1900, 1882, 1875 See Text
The Mt. Alverno Review: A Quick Anthology of West Coast Verse (ed. Michael C. Ford), Licorice Paper, 1971, 1969, 1962, 1972, See Text
Amanda Schacter (ed.) Santa Monica Landmarks Santa Monica Landmarks Commission, 1990.
Horst Schmidt-Brümmer Venice, California: An Urban Fantasy, Grossman Publishers: NY, (English trans., Feelie Lee) 1973 (Original German Text Verlag Ernst Wasmuth: Tubingen, 1972), 108pp., 1971 See Text
Debby Woodroofe American Feminism 1848-1920 International Socialist Review, March 1971, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 21-42, See Text
Note:
"Los Angeles, the capital of dream production, has never had room, however, for unprofitable dreams. Thus, the outbreak of reconstruction marks the end of a series of disillusionments Venice has continuously faced in its relationship to Los Angeles. The demarcation line separating Los Angeles and its suburb Venice . . . resembles a battle zone where vision and business, dreams and profits clash." Schmidt-Brummer, 1973
Documents
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp., 1976, 1971, 1885, 1860s, 1848
[The author] aimed . . . to present the architecture . . . within the topographical and historical context of the total artifact that constitutes Greater Los Angeles, because it is this double context that binds the polymorphous . . .
" . . . One can . . . begin by learning the local language; and the language . . . in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality . . . and the city will never be understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture . . . p. 23
" . . . no city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture . . . p. 24
" . . . because the Southern Californians came . . . overland to Los Angeles."
"They brought with them-and still bring-the prejudices, motivations, and ambitions of the central heartland of the USA. The first major wave of immigration came from Kansas City on excursion tickets after 1885; later they came in second-hand cars out of the dustbowl -not for nothing is Mayor Yorty known (behind his back) as the Last of the Okies, and Long Beach as the Main Seaport of Iowa! In one unnervingly true sense, Los Angeles is the Middle West raised to flash-point, the authoritarian dogmas of the Bible Belt and the perennial revolts against them colliding at critical mass under the palm trees. . .
" . . . Miraculously the city's extremes include an excessive tolerance. Partly this is that indifference which is Los Angeles's most publicized vice, but it is also a heritage from the extraordinary cultural mixture with which the city began. If Los Angeles is not a monolithic Protestant moral tyranny-and it notoriously is not- it is because the Mid-western agrarian culture underwent a profound transformation as it hit the coast, a sun-change that pervades moral postures, political attitudes, ethnic groups, and individual psychologies. . . ." p. 25
". . . Where water was available, Mediterranean crops made better sense and profit, olives, vines and -above all-citrus fruits, the first great source of wealth in Southern California after land itself. . .
"The basic plants and crops for this transformed rural culture were already established on the land before the Mid-westerners and North Europeans arrived, for the great wave of westward migration broke across the backwash of a receding wave from the south-the collapsing Mexican regime that was in itself the successor to the original Spanish colonization of California. The two currents swirled together around some very substantial Hispanic relics: the Missions, where the fathers had introduced the grape, olive, and orange as well as Christianity, the military communication line of the Camino Real and the Presidio forts, the very Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles de Porcinuncula.
"And about all, a system of ranching whose large scale, open-handedness and al fresco style were infectious, and whose pattern of land-holding still gives the ultimate title to practically every piece of land in Greater Los Angeles. Most of the original titles granted by the kings of Spain and by the Mexican governors were confirmed by patents granted by the US after 1848 (often a long while after; land-grant litigation became almost a national sport in California) and thus bequeathed to the area a pattern of property lines, administrative boundaries, and place-names that guarantee a kind of cultural immortality to the Hispanic tradition.*
"So the predominantly Anglo-Saxon culture of Los Angeles ('Built by the British, financed by the Canadians') is deeply entangled with remnants of Spain, . . . the periodical outbursts of pantiled roofs, adobe construction, arcaded courtyards . . . the elusive but ever-present Spanish Colonial Revival style . . ." p. 27
*[Page 28 and 29 Map of Spanish and Mexican Ranchos show the boundaries of Boca de Santa Monica, San Vicente y Santa Monica and La Ballona.]
"Whatever man has done subsequently to the climate and environment of Southern California, it remains one of the ecological wonders of the habitable world. Given water to pour on its light and otherwise almost desert soil, it can be made to produce a reasonable facsimile of Eden. Some of the world's most spectacular gardens are in Los Angeles, where the southern palm will literally grow next to northern conifers, and it was this promise of an ecological miracle that was the area's first really saleable product--the 'land of perpetual spring.'
"But to produce instant Paradise you have to add water-and keep on adding it. Once the scant local sources had been tapped, wasted, and spoiled, the politics of hydrology became a pressing concern, even a deciding factor in fixing the political boundaries of Los Angeles. The City annexed the San Fernando Valley, murdered the Owens Valley in its first great raid on hinterland waters under William Mulholland, and its hydrological frontier is now on the Colorado River. Yet fertile watered soil is no use if it is inaccessible; transportation was to be the next great shaper of Los Angeles after land and water. From the laying of the first railway down to the port at Wilmington just over a century ago, transport has been an obsession that grew into a way of life." p. 31
{Pages 32 and 33's Map of the first five railways out of the pueblo, and the water-distribution grid isn't all that specific but does show the 1875 railroad line to Santa Monica.}
"In the decades on either side of 1900 the economic basis of Angeleno life was transformed. While land and field-produce remained the established basis of wealth, and important new primary industry was added- oil. . . . commercial working did not begin until the mid-nineties and large-scale exploitation grew throughout the first quarter of the present century . . . p. 34
{At the same time, these inter-urban commuter lines had been conglomerated into the Pacific Electric Railway, sketching the Los Angeles to be.}
" . . . Los Angeles also acquired a major secondary industry and a most remarkable tertiary. The secondary was its port. There had always been harbour facilities on its coast, but the building of the Point Fermin breakwater to enclose the harbour at Wilmington/San Pedro from 1899 onwards was in good time to catch the greatly expanded trade promoted by the opening of the short sea-route . . . through the Panama Canal after 1914." p. 34
{Is there any sense of how important "recreation" or "amusement" was as an industry?}
". . . The movies [1910] seem to have been the great imponderable in the history of the area; their economic consequences were undoubtedly great, but it was mad money that the film industry brought in, and in any case it is the cultural consequences that now seem most important. Hollywood brought to Los Angeles an unprecedented and unrepeatable population of genius, neurosis, skill, charlatanry, beauty, vice, talent, and plain old eccentricity, and it brought that population in little over two decades, not the long centuries that most metropolitan cities have required to accumulate a cultured and leisured class . . ." p. 35
[Much of the "talent" might be home-grown if Ocean Park history is to be believed.]
"The motor age, from the mid-twenties onward, again tended to confirm the going pattern, and the freeway network that now traverses the city, conspicuously parallels the five first railway out of the pueblo. Indeed the freeways seem to have fixed Los Angeles in canonical and monumental form . . ." p. 35
" . . . this giant city, which has grown almost simultaneously all over, is that all its parts are equal and equally accessible from all other parts at once. Everyday commuting tends less and less to move by the classic systole and diastole in and out of downtotwn, more and more to move by an almost random . . . motion over the whole area. " p. 36
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp.
2. Ecology I: Surfurbia
"The Beaches are what other metropolises should envy in Los Angeles, more than any other aspect of the city. From Malibu to Balboa almost continuous white sand beach runs for seventy-odd miles, nearly all of it open to public access, much less of it encroached upon by industry {although} . . . the sea is too handy a dumping ground for cost-cutting industries and public 'services.' . . . Los Angeles is the greatest City-on-the-Shore in the world; its only notable rival . . . is Rio de Janeiro . . .
"In the long view of geological time, Los Angels has only recently emerged from the ocean; most of what is now the Greater Los Angeles basin was below sea-level in Jurassic times, and has been hoisted into the sunshine by a prolonged geological lifting process . . . p.37
"But Los Angeles . . . was an inland foundation that suddenly began to leap-frog to the sea in the railway age, establishing on the shoreline sub-cities that initiated its peculiar pattern of many-centered growth. Angelenos (and others) hurried down to the beaches for health and recreation, then decided to stay when they discovered the railways had made it possible to commute . . .
"'My brother, who is in the piano-business, tells me that Santa Monica uses more pianos than any other city of its size in the County. That means that Santa Monica has indeed become a home city, and is no longer simply a summer or winter pleasure resort,' wrote Marshall Breeden in 1925 of the prototype of all Angeleno beach cities, . . .
"But an air of health and pleasure still attaches to the beaches, partly for good physiological reasons, and partly because the cultivation and cult of the physical man (and woman) is obviously a deeply ingrained trait in the psychology of Southern California. Sun, sand, and surf are held to be ultimate and transcendental values, beyond mere physical goods: . . . The culture of the beach is . . . a symbolic rejection of the values of the consumer society, . ." p. 38
{Once pointed out, this situation was quickly corrected.}
"There is a sense in which the beach is the only place in Los Angeles where all men are equal and on common ground. There appears to be (and to a varying degree there really is) a real alternative to the tendency of life to compartmentalize in this freemasonry of the beaches, and although certain high schools allegedly maintain a 'turf' system that recognizes certain beaches as the private territories of particular schools, it is roughly speaking possible for a man in beach trunks and a girl in a bikini to go to almost any beach unmolested-even private ones if they can muster the nerve to walk in. One way and another, the beach is what life is all about in Los Angeles.
{This neglects the history of segregated beaches. Was the Venice black ghetto a function of oil leased lands?}
" . . . the beach runs from the Malibu strip at the western extremity to the Balboa peninsula in the south, . . . Craig Ellwood's Hunt house of 1955 at Malibu and Rudolph Schiindler's epoch-making Lovell house of thirty years earlier at Newport Beach, . . . Between the two the beach varies in structure, format, orientation, social status, age of development, and whatnot, but remains continuously The Beach." p. 39
{The map on pp. 42 and 43 show the beaches.}
" . . . the importance of Santa Monica Canyon is that it is the point where Los Angeles first came to the Beaches. From the garden of Charles {and Rae} Eames's house in Pacific Palisades, one can look down on a collection of roofs and roads that cover the old camp-site to which Angelenos started to come for long weekend picnics under canvas from the beginning of the 1870s. The journey from downtown could take two days, so it was not an excursion to lightly undertaken, but there was soon enough traffic to justify a regular stage-run, and a semi-permanent big tent that served as a dance -hall and could sleep thirty people overnight. . ." p.44 and 45.
". . . Within a few years of the discovery of the canyon mouth as a picnic beach, the railway had hit the shore at Santa Monica, but on the southern side of the flat-topped mesa on which most of the present Santa Monica stands. Along the top of the bluff where the mesa meets the sea is the splendid cliff-top park of Santa Monica Palisades, and behind it there have always been high-class hotels as long as there has been a Santa Monica. pp. 45 and 46.
{pp. 44 and 45 have photos of c. 1870 SM Canyon and the View from the Eames House.}
" The most senior of the beach cities, 'San Mo' has probably the most distinctive civic atmosphere . . . Partly it is the generous planning of the street-widths, partly it is the provision of a very good municipal bus service, but chiefly it is having been on the ground long enough to develop an independent personality. The railway that failed to make it a great port nevertheless got it started as a resort city well before most of the others were even a twinkle in a realtor's eye." p. 46
"South along the beaches, the immediately succeeding cities are much less stylish. Venice, intended to be the most stylish of the lot, was overrun by oil drilling and is now a long uncertain strip of frame houses of varying ages, vacant lots, oil-pumps, and sad gravel scrub. It has the charm of decay, but this will almost certainly disappear in the redevelopments that must follow the creation of the Yacht Harbor inland behind Venice. . . ' p. 47
{Santa Monica Pier photo, p. 53, described as having been rebuilt in 1921, features the Santa Monica Seafood Company}
" . . . The reputations of the piers are understandably functional, rather than architectural, but the whole class of piers must be saluted here as the most characteristic structures in Surfurbia. The beaches are uncommonly well provided with public piers, whether commercially or municipally operated - Malibu, Santa Monica, Pacific Ocean Park, Venice . . ." p. 53
" . . . Santa Monica, by contrast, is rich and complex and blatantly commercial, a little Luna Park, complete with off-shore parking lots, shops, restaurants and a famous enclosed carousel with apartments for rent in it corner turrets, and Charlie Chaplin used to eat at a famous restaurant near the end of the pier in his early Hollywood days. . . And if anyone sought a major monument to the heartbreak that ends the Angeleno dream, there was always Pacific Ocean Park, a recent fantasy in stucco and every known style of architecture and human ecology (including a giant artificial rock at the seaward end), a magnificent set of rides and diversions, now demolished after years of bankruptcy . . ." p. 54
{The p. 55 photo "Dereliction at Pacific Ocean Park."}
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971(1976),256 pp.
"Gill {moved} towards a simplified clean-edged architecture . . . The use of skinny metal mullions and frames in Gill's windows, like the advanced tilt-slab technique for pouring concrete walls, never seems to imply a desire to prove a point about the Machine Age . . . p. 64.
" . . . the delicious Horatio West apartments in Santa Monica of 1919. Like the earlier Lewis Courts in Sierra Madre, this is a patio scheme, but unlike the broad central court at Sierra Madre, the internal space at San Mo, broken into by arcades on either side, is so narrow that one could easily mistake it for an automobile drive-way. In any case, the great feature of the design is its upstairs living rooms , glazed around three sides to command views of sea and mountains that must have been well worth the rental when it was first built." pp. 65 and 66.
{p. 65 photo of the Horatio West Apartments}
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp.
" . . . Los Angeles has no urban form at all in the commonly accepted sense. But the automobile is not responsible for that situation . . . The freeway system is the the third or fourth transportation diagram drawn on a map that is a deep palimpsest of earlier methods of moving about the basin.
"In the beginning was the Camino Real, . . . wandering with seasonal variations across the present Los Angeles area from south-east to north-west . . ." p. 75 "By the time the Yankees moved in, or very soon after, there must have been a well established track running down to San Pedro . . . and by the end of the {18}sixties there began to be a well-beaten track branching off the Camino Real to go down to Santa Monica, and so forth. But movement was painfully slow; two days to Santa Monica . . . "
" . . . However much the pioneer railroad down to the harbour at San Pedro may have served the private ends of its chief promoter, Phineas Banning, owner of the rancho-land where the new port would be built, the railway was financed with public money-bond -issues by the City of Los Angeles and the County. The line began operation in 1869, connecting the business communty in the city with deep-water anchorages at Wilmington/San Pedro . . .
"Yet it now appears that the true importance of the Wilmington line was less in its inherent usefulness than as a negotiable property . . . in the railroad deals of the next decade*. . . p.76
". . . Wilmington line was part of the king's ransom the Southern Pacific extracted from Los Angeles . . .
" . . . in 1874 . . . Senator J.P. Jones of Nevada floated a rival company to build a line from the pueblo to deep water at Santa Monica, to be connected with the {Southern Pacific}'s competitors, the Union Pacific . . . Jones's thwarted plan gave Los Angeles the Santa Monica Line.
"These five lines radiating from the pueblo towards San Fernando, San Bernardino, Anaheim, Wilmington, and Santa Monica constitute the bones of the skeleton on which Greater Los Angeles was to be built . . . now duplicated by a freeway . . . they {also} brought the flesh. Subdivision of adjoining land proceeded as fast as the laying of rails-construction of the Santa Monica line began in January 1875, and land sales began in Santa Monica itself in July the same year . . . " p. 78
". . . given a railway system it was as convenient to live in San Bernardino or Santa Monica as on the outer fringes of the central city . . . Spring and Sixth Street line . . . horse-drawn street-cars in 1874 . . . and in the next fifteen years other street-car lines opened in Pasadena, Pomona, Santa Monica, San Bernardino and Ontario . . . by 1887 . . . George Howland's Pico Street line was operating out of downtown to serve the 'Electric Railway Homestead Association Tract' . . . p.79
{Map of 1923 Pacific Electric Railway at its greatest extension on pages 80 and 81}
" . . . the Pico line was the true beginning of {making every piece of land in the Los Angeles basin conveniently accessible and thus profitably exploitable} not only because it was directly linked to a subdividing company, but because it also formed the basis of the early speculations of Sherman and Clark, pioneers of the get-rich-quick electric railway . . . lines were built . . . out through Hollywood to Santa Monica with an extension to Ocean Park in 1896-perhaps the most important of all their ventures since it provided the transportation infrastructure for an area of land that was to contribute much to the present character of the city." p. 81
"But Sherman and Clark were small fry compared to the next generation of electric railway promoters, especially Henry Edmunds Huntington, son [nephew] of Collis P. Huntington of Southern Pacific fame. In fifteen years of wheeling, dealing, buying-out the Santa Monica network, beating off rivals (including, confusingly enough, the Southern Pacific from time to time), consolidations and reorganizations, culminating in the 'great merger' he gave the city the Pacific Electric Railway (and, out of the proceeds, his palace in San Marino as the Huntington Museum and Library). The {Pacific Electric}'s 'Big Red Cars', so called to distinguish them from the narrow-gauge street railways operated by the associated Los Angeles Railway Co., operated over standard-gauge tracks that ran, for much of their lengths, over private rights-of-way, avoiding the congestion of the streets, though they had to become street railways when they entered already well-developed areas, running in central or lateral reservations.
" . . . Services ran down the coast to Balboa and along the foot of the Palisades to the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon . . . Not only did the [Pacific Electric] outline the present form of Los Angeles, it also filled in much of it's internal topography, since its activities were everywhere involved-directly or otherwise-with real estate." p. 82
". . . As subdivision and building promoted profitably increased traffic, they also produced more intersections and grade crossings where trains could be held up and schedules disrupted, so that the service began to deteriorate and street accidents began, in the twenties, to give the Big Red Cars a bad name . . . " p. 83
{Is it possible that this privatization resulted in poor planning? This account also leaves out the role, or myth, of the automobile companies in the demise.}
" . . . Further west, the stretch of the {Wilshire} Boulevard was regularized as part of Wilbur Cook's plan of 1906, and the continuation to the sea at Santa Monica was completed in 1919 . . . " p. 84
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp.
"Both Hollywood's marketable commercial fantasies, and those private ones . . . have left their marks on the Angel City, but Hollywood brought something that all other fantasists needed-technical skill and resources in converting fantastic ideas into physical realities . . . much of Shangri-la had to be built in three dimensions, the spiral ramps of the production numbers of Busby Berkeley musical spectaculars had to support the weight of a hundred girls in silver top hats . . . pp. 124 and 125
"This business of showing the plant to visitors as a tourist attraction has spread beyond the movie industry . . . p. 127
{Don't the Amusement Piers predate the movie lots? Weren't they fantasies of work and travel before the movie lot?}
". . . All the skill, cunning, salesmanship, and technical proficiency are there.
"They are also at diametrical variance with the special brand of 'innocence' that underlies the purely personal fantasies of Los Angeles. Innocence is a word to use cautiously in this context, because it must be understood as not comprising either simplicity or ingenuousness. Deeply imbued with standard myths of the Natural Man and the Noble Savage, as in other parts of the US, this innocence grows and flourishes as an assumed right in the Southern California sun, an ingenious and technically proficient cult of private and harmless gratifications that is symbolized by the surfer's secret smile of intense concentration and the immensely sophisticated and highly decorated plastic surf-board he needs to conduct his private communion with the sea.
"This fantasy of innocence has one totally self-absorbed and perfected monument in Los Angeles, so apt, so true and so imaginative that it has gained the world-wide fame it undoubtedly deserves: Simon Rodia's clustered towers in Watts. Alone of the buildings of Los Angeles they are almost too well know to need description, tapering traceries of coloured pottery shards bedded in cement on frames of scrap steel and baling wire. They are unlike anything else in the world-especially unlike all the various prototypes that have been proposed for them by historians who have never seen them in physical fact . . .
"And in the thirty-three years of absorbed labour he devoted to their construction, and in his uninhibited ingenuity in exploiting the by-products of an affluent technology, and in his determination to 'do something big', and in his ability to walk away when they were finished in 1954, Rodia was very much at one with the surfers, hot-rodders, sky-divers, and scuba-divers who personify the tradition of private, mechanistic satori-seeking in California . . ." p. 129
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971 (1976), 256 pp.
"Planning in Los Angeles? . . . for this has always been a planned city; Lieutenant Ord's survey map of 1849 is also a plan for further development, and . . . a historical report to the Mayor in 1964. . . .
". . . the proposal that the city shall develop much as it has . . . clusters of towers in a sea of single family dwellings." p. 137
"(1910) an appropriation of $100 . . . for the Planning Committee; . .
" . . . planning . . . is one of those admired facets of the the established Liberal approach to urban problems that has never struck root in the libertarian, but illiberal, atmosphere of Los Angeles (whatever pockets of conventional good planning may have been created by local pockets of conventional liberal thinking)." pp. 138-139
"Conventional standards of planning do not work in Los Angeles, . . . effective planning to the mechanisms that have already given the city its present character: the infrastructure to giant agencies like the Division of Highways and the Metropolitan Water District and their like; the intermediate levels of management to the subdivision and zoning ordinances; the detail decisions to local and private initiatives; with ad hoc interventions by city, State and pressure-groups formed to agitate over matters of clear and present need . . . " p. 139
"This is not to claim that any of these mechanisms is any more perfect than any other human institution, or works more than averagely well. . . . Bending the zoning regulations is reckoned to be a bigger area of graft than the vice industry, since changes in zoning directly affect land-values and thus impinge on the oldest Angeleno method of turning a fast buck. . .
"Outside the administrative area of the City of Los Angeles itself, the other communities . . . have their own views on the meaning and purpose of zoning practices, and in some cases they have drafted them, and employed them, to reinforce local town planning {in order to} remain exclusive . . . " p. 141
"So recreational living tends to become another synonym for the social 'turf' system of closed communities; systematic planning remains the creation of privileged enclaves. Less frequently it has meant the creation of underprivileged enclaves, since much of the residential planning of the late thirties, for instance, was intended to create tidy places to dispose of socially untidy people, the lower working classes as understood in the political dogma of the time. . . . Within a couple more years, with the war about to break out, this kind of residential planning became a matter of urgency to house the influx of new industrial workers. pp. 145 and 146.
" . . . mention of Spanish Colonial Revival fantasies calls to mind two planned communities . . . One is Naples, east of Long Beach, . . . Subdivided by A. M. Parsons in 1903 . . .
"The other is romantically blighted Venice. Decreed by Abbott Kinney in 1905, it created a dream city of gondolas, bridges, and lagoons out of the squaggy sands and marshes south of Santa Monica. The overall layout was the work of Norman and Robert Marsh, who also designed public structures like the ornate canal bridges, and some uninhibited private houses. It must have been a splendid vision-but in 1927 oil was struck there and fantasy had to give way to fact.
"When I first saw it, bridges wrapped in barbed wire (because they were dangerous) spanned a single slimy canal among abandoned oil machinery and nodding pumps that were still at work. Desolation was everywhere, except where a narrow strip of houses still straggled down the ocean beach, and where two or three blocks of the original arcaded shopping street still survived on Windward Avenue. Those arcaded fragments are among the most affecting . . . The district is run-down still, something between a ghetto and a hippie haven . . . pp. 157, 158, 159 and 160.
" . . . this undistinguished townscape and its underlying flat topography were quite essential in producing the distinctively Angeleno ecologies that surround it on every side. In a sense it is a great service area feeding and supplying the foothills and beaches-across its flatness of instant track-laying ballast, the first five arms of the railroad system were spread with as little difficulty as toy trains on the living room carpet, and later the Pacific Electric inter-urban lines, and later still the freeways. The very first railroad of all in the area, the Wilmington line, ran down across the plains to the harbour, but it was the Long Beach line of the Pacific Electric with its spurs to Redondo and San Pedro and its entanglements with the Los Angeles Pacific (which it bought out in 1906) which really began the great internal network that used the plains to link downtown, the foothills, and the beaches into a single comprehensible whole.
"Watts was the very centre of all this action, a key junction and interchange between the long distance trunk routes, the inter-urbans and the street railways . . . " p. 173
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp. 1976, 1971, 1906
" . . . the basic Los Angeles Dingbat' was probably invented by Francis Ventre during the year he taught at UCLA and lived in a prime example . . . p. 175
"It is normally a two storey walk-up apartment-block developed back over the full depth of the site, built of wood and stuccoed over. These are the materials that Rudolf Schindler and others used to build the first modern architecture in Los Angeles, and the dingbat, left to its own devices, often exhibits the basic characteristics of a primitive modern architecture. Round the back, away from the public gaze, they display simple rectangular forms and flush smooth surfaces, skinny steel columns and simple boxed balconies, and extensive overhangs to shelter four or five cars . . . " p. 175
"The dingbat . . . is the true symptom of Los Angeles . . . trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living . . . " p. 177
" . . . I discovered Charles Eames's house {1949} in an American magazine. . . . the Eames house has had a profound effect on many of the architects of my generation in Britain and Europe . . . For most of two decades it has shared with Rodia's towers in Watts the distinction of being the best known and most illustrated building in Los Angeles . . ." p. 223
[Eames house photo, page 224]
" . . . The houses and the automobiles are equal figments of a great dream, the dream of the urban homestead, the dream of a good life outside the squalors of the European type of city, and thus a dream that runs back not only into the Victorian railway suburbs of earlier cities, but also to the country-house culture of the fathers of the US Constitution, or the whig squirarchs whose spiritual heirs they sometimes were, and beyond them to the villegiatura of Palladio's patrons, or the Medicis' Poggio a Caiano. Los Angeles cradles and embodies the most potent current version of the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside . . . " p. 238
" . . . It is the dream that appears in Le Corbusier's equation: un rêve X 1,000,000= chaos . . . not in Los Angeles, where seven million adepts . . . can find their way around without confusion. . . . p. 239.
"The neon-violet sunset light that disquieted the sensibilities of [Nathanael] West's [Day of the Locust] hero by making the Hollywood Hills almost beautiful, is also the light in which I personally delight to drive down the last leg of Wilshire towards the sea, watching the fluorescence of the electric signs mingling with the cheap but invariably emotive colours of the Santa Monica sunset. It is also the light which bathes Bradbury's Martian evenings. The lithe, brown-skinned Martians, with their 'gold-coin eyes,'in Bradburys's vision are to be seen on the surfing beaches and even more frequently on the high desert . . .
" . . . there are the canals by which the crystal pavilions stand, as they were meant to stand in the dream-fulfilment city of Venice; above all, there are the dry preserved remains of the cities of an earlier Martian culture, like abandoned Indian pueblos or the forgotten sets of famous movies long ago . . ." p. 240
Dana Goodyear The Enthusiast, The New Yorker, September 24, 2007, pp. 84-127
"After two year at Washington University, Hastreiter transferred to an experimental art school in Nova Scotia, and then to CalArts, where she studied with John Baldessari,* making geometric paintings using colored metallic powder, and collaborating on conceptual art videos. (Baldessari* arranged for me [Dana Goodyear]to see one of the movies he made using some of his students as actors. In it, Hastreiter appears in grainy green light, reciting Norma Desmond's "No one ever leaves a star" lines from Sunset Boulevard.) She lived in Santa Monica, and met Joey Arias, who is still one of her closest friends. Arias-a singer and performance artist who is Thierry Mugler's muse and also appears with Cirque du Soleil, in Las Vegas-remembers their first encounter on a corner in West Hollywood . . . they drove cross-country to New York in 1976."
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1977, 1923, 1900, 1882, 1875
Ocean Park
41. Former First Methodist Episcopal Church Building, 2621 Second Street. Now a private residence, the north portion of this building was originally built in 1875 at the southwest corner of Sixth and Arizona and may be the oldest standing wood-frame building in the city. In 1882 it was moved to the southwest corner of Fourth and Arizona, then in 1900 to Ocean Park, where it became the Ocean Park Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1923 the church built a new brick structure and the old church became a meeting hall known as Patriotic Hall. It was purchassed by the Stephen Jackson Women's Relief Corps No. 124 of the Grand Army of the Republic Auxiliary and used as a meeting hall until 1971, when it was sold and became a residence. It was designated a Santa Monica City Landmark in 1977."
The Mt. Alverno Review: A Quick Anthology of West Coast Verse (ed. Michael C. Ford), Licorice Paper, 1971, 1969, 1962
Santa Monica Planning Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour, 2003.
"A simplified variation of a Gothic Revival style, the building was the first church erected in Santa Monica. The site was donated by the Santa Monica Land Company of City founder John P. Jones. Located originally at Sixth and Arizona, the church was moved to Hill and Lake Streets in 1899 and occupied by the Ocean Park Methodist-Episcopal Church. Lake Street became Washington Boulevard, and is now Second Street.
"In 1923, the old church was sold to the Stephen Jackson Women's Relief Corps, No. 124 and was renamed "Patriotic Hall." In 1971, it became a private residence." p. 20
Alexander Saxton The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the anti-Chinese movement in California, University of California Press: Los Angeles, CA, 1971 (1975), 293 pp.
[p. 1] Introduction
Having broken from the old circumference in search of new territory, European explorers and entrepreneurs found themselves involved with a quest for labor to work the lands they had laid open. A large segment of the history of the Americas could be bracketed within this context.
The first effort at labor recruitment was the impressment of Indians, an attempt generally unsuccessful north of the Rio Grande. The second effort was the importation of African slaves. The third, beginning as the slave trade tapered off, was the coolie trade from South China. Out of that hungry and overpopulated region, Chinese laborers were carried to the ocean islands, reached the Pacific coasts of North and South America, and passed on across the Isthmus to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. The Chinese were followed-briefly and in much smaller numbers-by Japanese, Hindus, and Filipinos. Immigration of Chinese to the United States, then, from its earliest beginnings during the Gold Rush through flood tide in the early eighties and rapid decline thereafter, formed only one phase of a more extended historical episode.
In another respect also the half century of Chinese labor in the West was contained within a larger historical context. North Americans of European background have experienced three great racial confrontations: with the Indians, with the African, and with the Oriental. Central to each transaction has been a totally one-sided preponderance of power, exerted for the exploitation of nonwhites by the dominant white society. In each case (but, especially in the two that began with systems of enforced labor), white workingmen have played a crucial, yet ambivalent, role. They have been both exploited and exploiters. On the one hand, thrown into competition with nonwhites as enslaved or "cheap" labor, they suffered economically; on the other hand, being white, they benefitted by that very exploitation which was compelling the nonwhite workers to work for low wages, or for nothing. Ideologically they were drawn in opposite directions. Racial identification cut at right angles to class consciousness.
Clearly, the importation of indentured workers from an area of [p. 2] relatively depressed living standards constituted a menace to a society developing, at least after 1865, on the basis of free wage labor. This will be taken for granted. Yet Ameica's hostile reception of Chinese cannot be explained solely by the "cheap" labor argument, although many historians have endeavored to do so. The dominent society responded differently to Irish or Slavic than to Oriental cheap workers, not so much for economic as for ideological and psychological reasons. What happened to Orientals in America, while similar in many ways to what happened to other immigrants, is generally more like what happened to blacks, who were certainly not immigrants in the ususal meaning of the term.
The purpose of this study is to examine the Chinese confrontation on the Pacific Coast, as it was experienced and rationalized by the white majority. For reasons which will be evident in what follows, the main body of work (Chapters 3 through 11) will focus on the Democratic party and the labor movement of California through the forty-year period after the Civil War.The two opening chapters turn back to explore aspects of the Jacksonian background which appear crucial to an understanding of what occurred in California. The final chapter looks beyond the turn of the century to trace certain results of the sequence of events in the West for the labor movement as a whole, and to suggest the influence of those events upon the crystallization of an American concept of national identity . . .
Alexander Saxton The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the anti-Chinese movement in California, University of California Press: Los Angeles, CA, 1971 (1975), 293 pp., 1880s, 1870s, 1860s, 1850s
[p. 3] 1. The Labor Force In California
The Chinese
The census of 1870 showed just under fifty thousand Chinese in California. Their number had increased at an accelerating pace since before the Civil War and would continue to rise till after 1880; but the rate of increase was less rapid than that for the population as a whole. In 1860 Chinese had represented slightly more than 9 percent of all Californians; ten years later the proportion had dropped to 8.6 percent and in 1880 to 7.5 percent;.
Distribution throughout the state was uneven and shifted with changing occupational patterns. Most Chinese immigrants were laborers. The majority reaching California in the early fifties had joined the rush to the foothills. There thay had found themselves in competition with white miners, who frequently resolved their own differences sufficiently to join in evicting Chinese from the camps. Already, however, the golden days were passing; by the end of the decade, as surface deposits were stripped away, most white miners went hunting richer territory elsewhere or drifted into other pursuits. The Chinese then returned to work out low-yield diggings and comb over abandoned tailings. Thus, the census of 1860 for California found more than two-thirds of all Chinese in the mining regions of the Sierra Nevada and Trinity Alps.
[p. 4] But even under Chinese methods of extraction, the placers were finally giving out, and through the sixties a large number of Chinese moved into heavy construction. The Central Pacific Railroad provided the transition for this shift. From 1866 through 1869, the railroad kept some 10,000 Chinese at work boring the Sierra tunnel and driving the line east across the deserts of Nevada and Utah. One result-aside from the golden spike at Promontory-was the assembly of an army of experienced Chinese construction workers. Afterward some stayed with the railroad, which, upon completion of the transcontinental link, began pushing its lines out to the northern and southern extremities of the state. Others moved into agriculture. California ranchers, having come through their pastoral stage, were now demanding enormous supplies of labor for clearing, diking, ditching, draining, irrigating, and harvesting the new crops.
As most of this activity centered in the great valleys, a corresponding shift of Chinese population occurred. By 1870 the mining districts had lost half their Chinese residents of ten years earlier, while the valley counties were showing a rapid increase. In Sacramento, for example, the number of Chinese tripled in the twenty -year period from 1860 to 1880; in San Joaquin their number rose from 139 to almost 2,000; in Santa Clara from 22 to 2,695; in Yolo from 6 to over 600.
While these movements in the interior were under way, a second and more important concentration of Chinese population was developing at San Francisco. Here, until 1860, the resident community had comprised little more than 8 percent of Chinese in the state. By 1870, this percentage had risen to 26 and climbedf through the seventies to just under 30 percent. Primary cause of the increase was the growth of manufacture. San Francisco's Alta, in 1877, estimated that there were 18,000 Chinese in the City's factories. Aside from manufacture, there were two other pursuits in which Chinese traditionally engaged.: [p. 5] washing and domestic service. Since clothes in need of cleaning and middle class families able to hire servants were probably most plentiful in the metropolis, these also tended to further the urban concentration of Chinese. A police departtment survey for 1876 reported 5,000 serving as domestics while another 3,000 were employed in washhouses. Wildly inaccurate as these figures apparently are (they add up to more Chinese than the census of 1880 found in the city), they at least warrent a conclusion that large numbers of Chinese actually did follow these lines of work.
Viewing the state as a whole, then, Chinese were found in occupations which required little or no skill, in occupations stigmatized as menial, and in manufacturing. In a general way, the division betwen Chinese and non-Chinese corresponded to lines of skill or prestige. In the country these lines remained fairly simple, but in the city they became extraordinarily complex. Manufacturing had begun in San Francisco to supply the mining camps; during the Civil War, it flourished under the artificial protection of short supply in the East, lack of transport and high shipping insurance rates. By 1867, however, and even more disastrously after the completion of the railroads in 1869, eastern goods came flooding into the market. The infant manufactories of the Pacific port either went under or found ways of reducing costs; but the only cost that could really be cut was labor cost. Happily for the industrialists, Chinese were available; and Chinese contract labor seemed to provide an answer to the more advanced techniques and cheaper production cost of the East. Meanwhile demobilization and postwar recession, followoed by the opening of the railroad, brought a westward migration of workingmen. San Francisco manufacturers, therefore, initiated employment of Chinese under circumstances quite different from those that had prevailed in the hinterland when first the railroad and then the agriculturalists began hiring Chinese. In the country there had been a shortage of labor. In the city, on the contrary, white laborers were seeking [p. 6] work. Because they could not live as cheaply as the Chinese, they were unable to compete directly; but their organizational skills partially compensated for this disability. They had succeeded, by 1867, in mounting a campaign of moral, political, and ecomic pressure against the employment of Chinese which was proving moderately successful. Employers who could afford to yield generally preferred to do so. The line between those who could afford to yield and those who could not was simply the line between those whose products sold in a market that was locally competitive and those whose products came into competition with wares shipped from the East.
Cigar making and building construction offer an example of this separation. Despite the dissimilarity of their products, the two industries had several characteristics in common: small employers predominated in both due to the low threshold of necessary investment; those employers were dependent on skillled craftsmen, yet had work as well for apprentices or unskilled laborers. In cigar making , Chinese took over the trade almost completely. In consstruction, on the other hand. Chinese were almost totally excluded. The moment of decision in this respect seems to have ocurred during the winter of 1887 when some four hundred white workingmen attacked a group of Chinese who were excavating for a street railway. The crowd stoned the Chinese, maimed several, and burned their shanties. Afterward, alleged leaders of the riot were jailed and the Chinese resumed work under armed guard. But the demonstration had made its point. Throughout the long record of anti-Oriental agitation which followed, there appears little if any reference to Chinese construction laborers in San Francisco or its environs. The evidence is negative, but conclusive; had there been Chinese in this line of work their presense would have been stressed rather than minimized.
Thus in the national market industry-cigar making-Chinese took over both skilled and unskilled operations; in the local market industry-building. they were excluded from both. This became the urban pattern. In the country, however, where white workers remained in short supply, white unemployed seldom gathered into crowds large enough to be intimidating or were concentrated in sufficient numbers to exert much voting power. Lines of skill and prestige, in the country, continued more decisive than conditions of market competition; consequently, Chinese laborers were able to play a prominent part in [p. 7] agricultural work and heavy construction for another twenty years at least.
[p. 7] In summary, the Chinese during the seventies and early eighties comprised about one-twelfth of the inhabitants both of California and of San Francisco. Having earlier been largely occupied at placer mining, they were moving now into heavy construction and farm labor, and into manufacturing. These changes in occupation caused shifts in concentration of Chinese population from the mountain district to the great valleys and to the San Francisco Bay area. In the hinterland, Chinese were generally restricted to unskilled positions as agricultural and construction workers; in the city they were generally restricted to "sweated" trades, the products of which entered tightly competitive national markets.
Before turning, however, to the non-Chinese components of the labor force, it may be well to consider two additional factors which deeply affected the relations betweenh Chinese and non-Chinese.
First, while Chinese were only one-twelfth of total population, they comprised a much larger fraction of the labor force. The 1870 census estimated California's gainfully employed as 239,000 in a population of somwhat over 57,000. There were, by the same count, slightly fewer than 50,000 Chinese, almost all of whom must, as a necessary condition of their coming to California, have been gainfully employed. If we exclude Chinese women (one in every thirteen), we find that Chinese males constituted approximately one-fifth of the total number of persons gainfully employed . But even this number is too small. The census category included entrepreneurs, independent farmers, supervisors, businessmen-and these we can assume to have been more numerous among non-Chinese than among the Chinese. If then our concern is primarily with wage workers, it would probably not be far wrong to estimate that one-quarter of all available for hire in the early seventies must have been Chinese.
The second factor is that the large contingent of Chinese within the labor force was tightly and exclusively organized. All accounts seem to agree that the Chinese came to California in organized groups; that they were received by the Six Companies in San Francisco and housed, fed, and sent off to their various places of employment. At the [p. 8] bottom of this organizational structure were the laborer. Above them were an assortment of gang foremen, agents and interpreters. At the top were Chinese merchants and businessment in China. The resident merchants in San Francisco dealt, more or less on a basis of equality, with American interests desirous of securing contract labor. Most spectacular of such recruitments were those undertaken for the western railroad beginning with the Central Pacific; but an extraordinary variety of employers-including San Francisco factory owners, California farmers, land improvement companies, Southern planters, railroad promoters in Southern states, even a shoe manufacturer in North Adams, Massachusetts, and a laundry operator in New Jersey-entered into similar arrangements.
Essential to such a system of recruitment and employment was strict internal discipline. Contracts had to be honored and advance of passage money repaid. Yet any legal machinery for the enforcement of labor contracts was lacking. The Chineses organization, therefore enforced its own regulations, adjudicated disputes, punished transgressors. While all this was, in terms of American laws, not only extra legal but illegal, the American courts and police authorities actually served as bulwarks for the entire structure. For many years the Six Companies kept a special Chinatown contingent of San Francisco policemen on their payroll. They also retained competent lawyers who were frequently in court seeking the apprehension of runaway laborers or sing-song girls on complaints of petty theft which would later be withdrawn. As final capstone to this structure, the Six Companies maintained an unwritten protocol with shipping lines to the effect that no Chinese would be booked passage out of California unless he carried a clearance from the Six Companies. It was a tight system.
But had the sole function been that of requiring obedience, the apparatus probably would not have lasted long in America. Actually it conveyed many postitive benefits. It served as insurance society and bank. It made the years of labor in exile tolerable by providing a social club, companionship, recreation, women occasionally, familiar food, a link with the homeland. It offered protection against the menace from outside. When four Chinese woodcutters were shot to death near [p. 9] Chico in 1877, the Six Companies offered a reward for the names of the killers and sent a private detectiive into the area, who, with the assistance of Colonel Frederick A. Bee, the Companies' attorney, played a leading part in the arrest and conviction of the murderers. Bee, in addition to frequent rounds in court, appeared for the Chinese before various governmental agencies and was appointed Chinese consul in San Francisco. From top to bottom, the Chinese establishment in America had something in it for everyone. To the Cantonese peasant it offered escape from a depressed and hopelessly overcrowded countryside-and always the distant chance of coming home again with enough California gold to redeem all the lost promises of youth. As one ascended the levels of the apparatus, benefits became less promisory and more tangible, till at the highest level the merchant entrepreneurs on both sides of the Pacific seem to have been impounding vey real profits indeed.
Essentially this structure was vertical. Stressing the common heritage of languaage and culture, it linked individual members from top to bottom across class lines. Yet clearly the prime purpose of the entire apparatus was the exploitation of cheap labor in a high-priced labor market. One would expect, therefore, to find horizontal fault lines in the vertical structure; and there were in fact hints of such fissures. During construction of the Central Pacific, for example, Chinese laborers conducted a brief strike which Charles Crocker ascribed to paid agitators sent in by the rival railroad, the Union Pacific. San Francisco's Daily Alta in the suumer of 1873 reported a successful strike by Chineses crewmen on steamers of the Pacific Mail Line. Both these cases involved conflicts with white employers; yet given the nature of the contract system, a dispute with the white employer would be likely to lead to a collision between Chinese workingmen and the Chinese labor contractor.
This seems to have been the situation that brought on a "bloody fight" one March [1876] afternoon in Dupont Street, when the Chinatown police detail had to send for reinforcements and later for an express wagon to carry away the wounded. A Chinese trading company, which doubled as a labor contractor, had agreed to place some 750 men in the shoe factories of Einstein Brothers and of Buckingham, Hecht, and Company. As a guarantee of performance, the shoe manufacturer required a sizable deposit, which the contractor in turn extracted from [p. 10] his laborers in sums ranging from twenty-five to one hundred dollars apiece. Afterward, in the opinion at least of the laborers, Einstein Brothers and Buckingham, Hecht reneged on the terms of the agreement. The laborers struck the jobs, then attempted to recover their deposits. Neither the manufacturers nor the labor contractor would return the money. Apparently this dispute had been carried to higher tribunals within the Chinese establishment, but without resolution. The laborers finally armed themselves and attempted settlement by direct action.
[p. 10] . . . Meanwhile on all sides, the non-Chinese contingents of the labor force were organizing along horizontal lines; that is they were setting up trade unions and political bodies which ralled workingmen as opposed to employees . . .
The Non-Chinese
If one-quarter of California's wage workers were Chinese, who were the other three-quarters? Again we are reduced to rather rough estimates. Excluding Chinese, approximately 28 percent of the inhabitants of the state in 1870 were foreign-born-one-third of these being Irish, one-fifth German or Austrian, and another fifth of generally Anglo-Scotch extraction. But the proportion of foreign-born (still leaving aside Chinese) would certainly have been higher among wage earners than for the general population. This would apply with particular force to the Irish, who being latecomers had less opportunity than others to move out of the working class by acquiring farms or businesses.
[p. 11] Saxton estimates the composition of the workforce in 1870 California as follows:
- Native American . . . 40%
- Chinese . . . 25%
- Irish . . . 15%
- German (or Austrian) . . . 6%
- English, Scotch, Welsh, Anglo-Canadian . . . 6%
- Other foreign-born . . . 8%
But in this context place of birth is less significant than linguistic and ethnic background. The category of native American included some children of immigrant parents. Especially this must have been true for those from New England and central Atlantic areas where immigration had been heaviest.
[Considered in this fashion, over half of California's working population may have been immigrant or first-generation immigrants, remarkably diverse, yet with probably much shared experience . . .]
Irish-Americans, aged forty-five in 1870, would have been twenty at the time of the potato famine . . .
For Germans the pattern was much the same . . . a peasant population subsisting on fractional holdings, dependent on the potato, also struck by the blight in the 1840ties . . .
[p. 12] The immigrants' experiences were uprooting, unsettling, a succession of shattering shocks. A great many died in transit. "A great many did, in fact, survive it. The total foreign-born in the population of the United States rose form two and a quarter million in 1850 to more than 4 million at the start of the Civil War . . .
[Beside those shared experiences . . .] . . . it was not all. Nothing provokes man's inhumanity to his fellow men as their misfortunes. Native Americans regarded the influx of foreigners first with anxiety, then with hatred. Throughout three decades prior to the Civil War a barrage of sermons, books, newspaper articles, made known to immigrants that their religion, their language, their food and dress, their very existence as willing wage earners were objects of offense and contempt. Propaganda of the word was generally salted with propaganda of the deed. A mob in the summer of 1834 destroyed the Ursuline School and convent at Charlestown, Massachusetts. Ten years later native Philadelphians wer burning down Catholic churches and blocks of houses in the Irish suburbs. Through the mid-fifties, Ameicans in Ohio and Indiana raided German piicnics, stormed meeting halls, fought pitched battles with Germans in the streets. These were only the notorious episodes; the background of petty violence, endlessly condoned and renewed, became one of the circumstances of urban life in the cities of the eastern seaboard and midwest. For the immigrants, after their bad luck in the old country, and after having read or at least heard the rumor that in America, [p. 13] all men could engage equally in the pursuit of happiness, it came inevitably as a crowning shock to find themselves among the pursued rather than the pursuers.
[p. 13] Old stock Americans also traveling to California (where they would furnish, as noted earlier, between one-quarter and one-third of the non-Chinese labor force); so that the tension between immigrant and old stock became part of the western scene as it had been of the eastern. Yet California seems to have exerted a curiously cosmopolitan effect on these newcomers. Superficially at least the tension was muted, and this permitted what was shared by all in common to make itself felt. What was shared was the sense of displacement and victimization. For the fact was that any native American still working for wages in California in 1870 had already suffered a displacement, albeit less violent than that of the immigrants.
Of the old stock from rural backgrounds, most would have come from that portion which had been rolling westward through several generations, in flight from constant encroachment of a more complex and commercialized community. Displacement had been turned into a way of life, each man's sons moving out to the adjacent counties at the western fringe till they made the final jump, which was California. But Agriculture in California was already more complex and commercialized than anything they had left behind. For many of them, failure was foreordained.
Those who came from the cities were likely to have been displaced by industrialization. The expansion of markets which followed the successive transportation revolutions of the forties and fifties had demanded reorganization of small-scale shop work into mass production. Reorganization led into technological change; and these together wiped out many established skills and pushed great segments of the production process into the hands of unskilled workers. . . .
In less dramatic form, many other industries . . . metal trades, typesetting . . . the unskilled labor market, [p. 14] during earlier years, had been largely supplied by the children of already established urban workers and by the flow of young people from the country into the city. But in the forties and fifties, the market was invaded by immigrants, especially the Irish, who in their desperation had no choice but to underbid any going wage level. The results was that the old stock had faced a double squeeze. If skilled. they frequently found their skills rendered obsolete by technological change; if unskilled, they were forced to compete with an evergrowing army of hungry foreigners. Here was the economic basis of nativist hostility to the European immigrant.
[p. 14] Yet in California, where even the nativist was a stranger and newcomer, these hostilities were transferred and largely focussed upon other objects.
Since the white population of the state had increased by 88 percent between 1860 and 1870, it would seem reasonable to suppose tha most of the non-Chinese labor force, as of the early seventies, must have come west during or after the Civil War. But there remained a portion which had come earlier and which was perhaps more influential than its numbers would imply; the forty-niners. Actually the significance is not the year of arrival. but in the experience of that brief arcadian interlude, the first surface mining of the foothills. The moment itself was gone in a flash, say by 1854; but the men who took part in it were marked. What became of them? Some gave up and went home. A few (among them, for example, Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker) emerged as prosperous businessmen. Others got out of mining early enogh to acquire handsome tracts of California land. As easy pickings dwindled in the foothills, a large number moved on, searching for new bonanzas in Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Finally, there was a residue that failed to get out, or perhaps crossed the mountains with the first backwash to try their luck on the Comstock and failed to get out there. for these men the only path was the descent from the status of gold hunters-independent entrepreneurs-to that of wage workers.
After the exhaustion of California's surface diggings, mining had shifted to deep quartz operations or to fluming and hydraulicking. Captial investment necessary for these processes was far beyond the [p. 15] capability of individual miners or even such partnerships as had been customary during the pan and placer period. In San Francisco enormous sums were raised for excavation and timbering, for setting up quartz mills, for building water systems. The heyday of the joint stock company was beginning; within less than two decades the capitalists from the city had taken over the mines in the mountains. For the miners this descent was like the fall of Adam. The garden would appear to him in the remembered images of California as it had been in the early fifties:
[p. 15[] " After prospecting a little we soon found a spot on the bank of a stream which we judged would yield us a pretty fair pay of our labor . . . (Borthwick-Gold Hunters)
To twenty years later:
"The morning shift goes on at seven o'clock. Before descending the shaft the men go to the office of the time-keeper . . . De Quille (William Wright), The Big Bonanza)
[p. 15] It is impossible to describe this transition without oversimplifying it. Different strands of experience merge and interact. For the hard-rock miner, checking his time-card, working his shift, collecting his weekly [p. 16] wage, the sense of the earlier period was still present . . . Afterward . . . it was not so much the gold . . . it was the freedom of movement, the newness, the magnificent bounty and opportunity. Illusions though these may have been, their vanishing left a taste of tragedy.
In 1870 almost every adult in California had come on a journey to get there . . . In a psychological sense, a journey is a moratorium; as long as the journey continues the traveler may reasonably believe something new or a great deal better will happen . . . but once arrived, he is brought face to face with his real situation. He must either make the best of it, whatever it is, or keep on traveling. For most Californians, howerver, there was no place further to go. Literally and symbolically, San Francisco was the end of the line . . . . as San Francisco grew into a city, and the great valleys developed into agricultural empires, as the routines of factory and farm became the norm; and as, after the war and completion of the railroad, hard times settled over the state, frustration replaced euphoria. Small farmers and workingment especially, were embittered because they felt themselves once already displaced and deprived.
"The land is fast passing into the hands of the rich few; great money monopolies control congress, purchase the state legislatures, and have perverted the great republic of our fathers into a den of dishonest manipulators. This concentration and control of wealth has impoverished the people, producing crime and discontent."
--From a resolution adopted by the first California state convention of the Workingman's Party of California, January 24, 1878.
[p. 17] Boundaries of Consensus
{p. 17] Displacement then, and deprivation whether real or fancied, and the psychological ptich of the westward journey and its ensuing frustration-these were common denominators underlying the multiplicity of the non-Chinese labor force. Men who could not understand each other's talk . . . all shared these elements of experience.
But so did the Chinese . . . Yet they were not included in the developing unity of the California labor force. Why?
One reason lay within the Chinese themselves. They viewed their journey as a round trip. Most Chinese were birds of passage, "sojourners" in America . . . They were also more organized within the vertical hierarchy of the Chinese establishment . . .
There was no shared understanding between the Chinese and non-Chinese . . . The absence was not solely due to language and cultural differences . . . nor simply to economic rivalry.
[p. 17] What lay beneath all these rationalizations was a psychologial barrier which foreclosed any exchange of experience. The barrier resulted from a concept of fundamental differences [p. 18] . . . the concept, later to be gigantically reinforced, was present from the earliest days . . . Colville's Gazeteer of San Francisco (1856) described the Chinese as "unique" . . . The writer had apparently not yet made up his mind whether Chinese were or were not of the human condition, but they were different and "degraded."
[p. 18] Among workingmen especially this proposition became self-evident. The outstanding common characteristic of all these disparate elements which composed the non-Chinese labor force was that they were not Chinese. Aspirant leaders engaged in a search for facts or fictions to express the values of non-Chineseness. Christianity would be stressed . . . Assimilabilty was on the point of being discoverd-that mysterious substance which resided in the circulatory systems of persons haiving certain ancestors and which rendered them desirable as neighbors, sons-in-law, fellow workers, even as voters. The words assiminable, white, and the pseudo-scientific term, caucasian, just then coming into fashion, would be taken as equivalents. Before the decade of the seventies was out, there would be California workingmen, styling themselves brothers in the Order of Caucasianns, who would undertake the systematic killing of Chinese in order to preseve their assimilable fellow toilers from total ruin.
Chapter 2 Ideological Baggage
[p. 19] "Uniqueness"can rapidly become racial inferiority. Hinton Helper, the North Carolina yeoman soon to become a chief Republican polemicist against slavery wrote of the Chinese he saw on the Pacific Coast in 1852 . . . "semibarbarians" . . . soon to be subject to the will of the Anglo-Americans . . . It is so with the Negros in the South; it is so with the Irish in the the North; it is so with the Indians in New England; and it will be so with the Chinese in California . . . " I should not wonder at all if the copper of the Pacific yet becomes as great a subject of discord and dissension as the ebony of the Atlantic." Saxton speculates that Helper is replaying older scripts, largely shaped by previous responses to Indians, to immigrants, and especially to Negros and Negro slaves. The numerous expulsions of Chinese from mine camps and the anti-Chinese ordinances written into the code of local mining districts duplicated the actions already taken against blacks . . . Black codes of midwestern states were widely discussed in California, at least since the debates over slavery and Negro exxclusion in [p. 20] in the Constitutional Convention of 1849 . . .
Deeply enmeshed in traditional value systems and behavioral patterns, the social experience underlying these identifications, formed part of the enormous ideological baggage of Jacksonian America. It would be convenient if the contents of this baggage could be sorted in accordance with some useful classification of the men who carried it. What could be most helpful, of course, in order to round out the examination undertaken in the last chapter of conflict and consensus within the California labor force, would be a classification by economic status. Unfortunately, this seems impractical. There was too much upward and downward mobility, and moreover there was nothing in America, or in California, in those years that could be described as the exclusive outlook of a particular class. Some patterns of behavior and some sets of ideas would spread more widely than the labor force, others would be restricted to smaller groups within it. Since the subject under consideration centrally involves political ideas and activities, it seems reasonable to begtin by arranging the major and minor tendencies which comprised this ideological baggage in terms of political affinities. [It seems to me, KR, that this is a way to avoid saying who did what to whom, under which influences and under whose thumbs.]
"Americans of all classes," wrote the English traveler, Borthwick, who visited California in 1852, "are particularly au fait at the ordinary routine of public meetings." Impressed by what seemed to him the remarkable ability of miners at improvising parliamentary pro- [p. 21] cedure and drawing up codes to govern everything from horse stealing to riparian rights, Borthwick speculated on how they came by so much political know-how: "They are trained to it from their youth in their innumerable, and to a foreigner, unintelligible, caucus meetings, committees and conventions, and so forth, by means of which they bring about the election of every officer in the State." . . . Politics was a language in which most Americans were fluent and in which they were accustomed to express their economics, their ethics, their emotions, even their religions.
[p. 21] The Major Traditions: Democratic
In 1869 most Californians were Democrats or Republicans. The Democrats belonged to an older party which took Thomas Jefferson as "a father figure," and the Declaration of Independence "as revelation." "What was revealed was necessarily self-evident, and this included the proposition that nature's reasonable and benevolent deity had created all men equal-not in every respect, but in the moral sense, as human beings. Consequently all men were endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Did the all include "blacls?" Jefferson had waffled, yet he had not written any exclusion on the point, and the mandate stood at All. Independent small farmers would constitute the bulk of the Republic . . . being incorruptible would serve as value carriers, as champions against the constant encroachment of urban wealth and special privilege.
As the Republic aged, it seemed necessary to expand the notion of value carrier to all producers-"the productive and burthen-bearing classes" [p. 22] in the words of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the great Missour agrarian. Lumped with the enemy, the urban wealth and special interests, were most bankers and all monopolists-"those masters of great, moneyed corporations against which the bone and sinew of our country must wage relentless warfare." Benton was addressing a convention in Mississippi in 1834.
The Jacksonian turn began to include urban populations and workers . . . local unions and worker's parties advocated higher wages, shorter work days, free public education, mechanic's lien laws, abolition of debt imprisonment and prison labor contracting; removal of property qualifications from the suffrage, and free land. The main flux, drawn by the bank war, by hard money slogans, by the crusade against monopoly, became part of the Democratic Party. . . [p. 23]
[p. 23] The tone of the Democrats was egalitarian . . . and politically successful.
By the 1850s the concept of the producers battling against monopolies was firmly planted in the midwest, and was making its way westward in every covered wagon crossing the plains.
"In human affairs, however, there seems to be a law of the dissipation of principle according to which the daily life of any established organization tends to erode its declaratory faith. By the time California entered the Union, the Democratic party" was getting old. The evolution into a Southern wing and a northern wing assured winning national elections but made it more difficult to rationalize slavery, especially within the context of the Jeffersonian Declaration of Indenpence egalitarian mandate, and the demotion of the Negro from full humaness.
[p. 24] Abolitionists arose in the Northern wing of the party, but the party had to defend slavery to preserve its coalition. One of the earliest presentations of this position was James K. Paulding, Slavery in the United States, 1836. Paulding was a federal employee and office holder from 1815 until the end of Van Buren's administration. "Paulding shifted from the southern emphasis on the plantation as a system of benevolent social control to a direct evocation of racial anxiety. Enemies of the Republic, he warned, were at work throughout the North, fanatics who spoke in grand moral terms against slavery yet were really intent upon destroying the white race through amalgamation with blacks. "That there are such men, and -shame on the sex-such women, is but too evident . . . They are traiters to the white skin, influenced by mad-brained fanaticism, or the victims of licentious, ungovernable passions, perverted into an unnatural taste by their own indulgence . . . "no beneficial consequences to any class of mankind or to the whole universe, can counterbalance the evils that will result to the people of the United States from the dissolution of the Union." This was the message of the Democratic Party, and in 1838, Van Buren appointed Paulding secretary of the Navy.
[p. 25] . . .
Paulding's handling of the slavery question remained in substance the official party dogma until the secession of the southern states. Even George Bancroft, the New Engtland Brahmin, who certainly outranked Paulding as a Jacksonian ideologist, never took issue with him on this matter. Bancroft, to judge by his earlier writings, had at first been negaitvely disposed toward the peculiar institution. About 1834, however, he fell discreetly silent and stayed so throughout the next twenty years. Meanwhile he became party boss of Massachusetts, helped to engineer the nomination of James K. Polk, served as secretary of the navy during the first part of the Mexican War, and was later appointed ambassador to England.
Although Ralph Waldo Emerson opposed the Democrats on slavery, he did approve of their stand on free trade, wide suffrage, abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and facilitating the access of the young and poor to the sources of wealth and power. And . . . it was Bancroft who helped devise that sequence of devious maneuvers which ended with American occupation of C alifornia. Paulding and Bancroft wre pilgrims of manifest destiny. The 1830s and 1840s had been decades of expansion for the United States and of national revolution in Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic these movements wre accompanied by crescendoes of romantic nationalisms.
The Democratic party not only had preached the egalitarian gospel [p. 26] of equal asccess for the "young and the poor" to "sources of wealth and power," it had sought to open up for the benefit of every citizen that potential wealth which lay waiting in the West. Democrats had fashioned the Texas Policy, the Oregon Policy, the war against Mexico; they appeared to champion the cause of individual opportunity.
. . .
[p. 26] " . . . By the mid-fifties, it had beome not only possible but easy for an American, from the North or South, to assert [p. 27] that he believed in the Declaration of Independence, in the teachings of Christianity, and in the inferiority of colored races. All three statements carried the same sort of authority; they were self-evident . . . the will to believe these tended to be stronger among the Democrats precisely because their party was so deeply enmeshed in the defense of slavery.
[p. 27] Moreover, for northern workingmen, attracted as a great many were by the egalitarianism and nationalism of the Democrats, this will to believe sanctioned and reinforced powerful preexisting factors of racial antagonism. Workingmen alone of the northern white population came into direct competition with free Negroes, and as anti-salvery agitation increased so did their fear of such competition. They had, in several industries, their first encounter with blackes in their role of imported strikebreakers. Workingmen frequently regarded the anitslavery cause as a stalking horse put forward by their class enemies . . .
[p. 27] Immigrants and children of immigrants (who together comprised a majority of the white labor force in California) were particularly vulnerable to the compulsions of race hostility. Every aspect of the immigrants laborer's situations converged at this focal point: Democrats had been more hospitable [p. 28] to foreigners and Catholics than were Whigs or Know-Nothings. He could, in turn, respond enthusiastically to the Jacksonian message . . . his contacts were personal, and then his hopes depended on the success of the larger "white republic." . . .
Pressure on the Irish . . . became doubly severe. Of all the immigrtant groups, they were the most poverty ridden, the most pathetically unequipped with saleable skills . . . the vast majority had been landless, agricultural laborers or cotters on worked out, overpopulated, rentals . . . Having neither knowledge nor money for a start in farming, the Irish in America wer confined to cities and unskilled and casual occupation. The contrast is with the second largest group of immigrants, the Germans, who moved in large numbers, for example, into the agricultural Northwest, financing themselves . . . The German migration also included craftsmen. . . . "and from as early as the 1860s in the East (a decade later in Califronia) one finds references to all-German local unions of skilled workingmen. On the other hand an all-Irish craftsmen's local was virtually unheard of. The Irish, for three decades prior to the Civil War, furnished a disproportionate share of that unskilled and partially [p. 29] surplus army which was endlessly expendable in the rise of American industry.
[p. 29] Although Irish immigrants during the early years were not much found in labor unions, they were by no means without organization. Their organizations were vertical rather than horizontal and in this respect resembled the Chinese in the West. Visible Irish organizations were of three types: the church; immigrant aid societies, of which the Ancient Order of Hibernians, was the outstanding example; and nationalist clubs, notably the Fenians. Within these, occasional groups gathered in the tradition of secret societies like the Ribbonmen and the Molly Maguires, which in the old country had carried on the battle against landlords and Protestants. . . . In America there were sporadic warfare with nativist and Protestant groups; there were strongarm tactics of political factions in big cities. It was easy to raise Irish mobs against abolitionists, the New York draft riots, the Molly Maguires . . .
[p. 30] Inevitably, in America, this line of secret violence became linked to hatred for the Negro; and the same line, when it reached California, would be woven into the ani-Chinese web."
[p. 30] The Major Traditions: Republican
The Republican tradition was more complex than the Democratic. It sprang from the same origins, Locke through Jefferson, iin this case becoming the Whig party which set great store by property qualifications for public office and exerciise of the franchise. They did not abandon the Declaration of Independence. Hamilton put it that life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, inalienable rights thought they might be were worthless without stable government, which depended on stakeholders, i.e. men of property .
. . . Throughout the fifties, the dying Whigs, the divided Democrats, the nouveaux Republicans were all Jacksonians . . . "representing " the productive and burthen-bearing classes." . . . [p. 31] The Democratic dominance . . . ending with the election of Lincoln in 1860.
[p. 31] Along with the Whig compnent, were nativism, and anti-slavery, which had three threads: abolition, unionism and free-soil.
[p. 31] The championship of the property concept of responisble governments struck a common harmonic with fear of foreign immigration . . . subsequently antiforeign , anti-Catholic agitation . . . An early manifestation in northern and western states took the form of temperance law crusades in which the use of alcoholic beverages and sabbath-breaking were seen as expressions of the evil that inhered in foreignness and Catholicism . . . Nativism flared up in the mid-forties, peaking between 1852 and 1856, the Know-Nothing party winning control of Massachusetts, Maryland, and California. . . . By 1860 most of the nativists had become Republicans and threw the nomination from Seward to Lincoln.
Nativism, unlike other elements of the Republican coalition, appealed to some groups of workingmen. This attraction did not necessarily diminish as immigrans and their children increased the urban population. Once arrived immigrants were as menaced by further immigration (especially perhaps their children)[p. 32] economic hostility was reinforced by the longing for security and acceptance. The nativist line carried with it a pattern of organized violence and complemented that of the immigrants.
Secret societies under patriotic titles-like the Order of United Americans, United American Mechanics (with membership limited to American-born laborers), and Order of the Star Spangled Banner-sprouted during the two decades prior to the Ciivil War. These with their widely read newspapers and magazines, "convinced many workingmen that . . . property depended on restricted immigration" and "played a prominent part in creating the anti-Catholic, anti-foreign sentiments upon which the Know-Nothing Party was nurtured." Disruption and violence, ranging all the way from petty heckling to riot and arson, provided a continual counterpoint to the antiforeign agitation. In larger cities violence actually became institutionalized into the political structure. Armed clubs of workingmen and native American Know-Nothings, on the one hand, and Democrats, largely immigrants, on the other. fought for control of the registration machinery and the polling places . . .
[p. 32] Republican doctrine's for abolition was essentially religious. To those who accepted the authority of scripture, its argument was unassailable; it might be ignored or forgotten, but never refuted.
Dwight Dumond, in his study of anti-slavery, selected a New England Congregational sermon as a keynote for a abolitionist message: "God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth," preached on the hoiday celebrating the Missouri Compromise of 1820:
[p. 33] "This passage not only teaches us that mankind have a common origin and are united by a common nature, but suggests that they are originally equal . . . Mankind are equal in respect to their immortality . . . Mankind are natually equal in respect to their moral characters . . . Mankind are equal in respect to their native rights. As they are united by a common nature and are all memebers of the same great family, each individual possesses certain rights that others are bound to respect. In reference to these, superiority is unknown. Every person has a perfect right to his life, to his liberty, to the property which he lawfully acquires, and to whatever happiness he may enjoy without injuring himself or others."
Here in religious terms was the counterpart to the mandate of the Declaration of Independence. It permitted no compromiise, left little room for politics . . . and while few in number the abolitionists became very influential in national affairs . . . Their influence was minimal among working people who were Democrats.
More inclusive was the free-soil impulse . . . The impulse was to open the frontiers for development by non-slave holding settlers-an objective virtually identical wtih that of the homestead and freeland schemes which had been proposed in the thirties and forties . . . [p. 34]
. . . to prevent the extension of slavery, especially in the Midwest and on the Pacific coast . . .
. . . was in considerable measure of Democratic orgin, its effect on Democrats, who came under its influence, was to move them out their own party and into the Union-Republican coalition . . . By the late fifties, the South was seen to be blocking development of the nation's western lands. Free soil therefore took on an aura of nationalism which it had lacked in the earlier period, and so merged with the largest component of anti-slavery, unionism.
[p. 34] During the decade that followed the Compromise of 1850, the Democratic party, while it continued to win presidential elections. was separating into a national party and a southern wing. The South became more and more aggressively sectional. Step by step through the debates over California and the Mexican cession territories, over Kansaa-Nebraska and homesteads, and over the transcontinental railroad, southern leaders assumed (in the eyes at least of many northerners and westerners) a disruptive role with respect to continental development. From haveing been an essential ingrediaent of national unity, the defense of slavery became tantamount to the advocacy of separation. The result was that nationalist sentiment, which had earlier drawn laborers along with the vast number of others to the party of manifest destiny, would now work in the opposite direction and push them into the Republican (or Union-Republican) party. A case in point is the political career of Walt Whitman. The son of a carpenter, Whitman [p. 35] himself became a journeyman printer and editor of a Democratic party newspaper.-a post from which he was expelled in 1848 because of his free-soil proclivities. yet as late as 1860 (and a good deal later, too), Whitman was still uttering the rhetoric of the old spread-eagle Democracy:
- "Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian.
- Foremost! century marches Libertad! masses!
- For you a program of chants.
- Chants of the prairies,
- Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down
- to the Mexican sea . . .
Indeed it was precisely this vision which bound him to the Repulblican Lincoln:
"O powerful western fallen star! . . . O western orb sailing the heaven . . . the sweetest wisest soul of all my days and lands."
. . .
[p. 35] Of the three elements of antislavery, only the first (abolition) involved an assertion that all mankind was created equal. Neither the second nor third (free soil and unionism) required acceptance of the first. Yet an alliance of these two with abolition had proved expedient. The reason was that the crises of war, buring out the middle ground, had driven men to seek refuge on heights of fundamental conviction, even though such convictions were not alway their own. Lincoln, previously hostile to abolition, became one in 1863. And by 1865, in the Second Inaugural, his tone resembled that of John Brown's final message five years earlier. It may be that the ironsides [p. 36] spirit of aboliton was indispensible in saving the Union. But afterward it seemed equally necessary for preservation of the Republican partry. In the complicated politics of Reconstruction, Republican control of the national government seemed to depend on enfranchiisement of black freedmen in the South. This was a step for which the expedient antislavery of the free-soilers and unionists was totally unprepared. . . .
[p. 36] As for Republicans, as soon as they dared, give way, their retreat from their forward position was precipitate. Long before the collapse of Reconstruction, the fate of blacks in the South was foreshadowed by the first full-dress debate on the status of Chinese in the West . . . In the Immigration Act of 1870, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had moved to amend it by deleting the adjective "white" when ever it occurred . . . the only way to be consistent with the original Declaration of Independene, Sumner declared. . . .
[p. 37] . . . In the Republican Senate of 1870 Sumner was defeated 30 to 14.
[p. 37] Ideology Within the Labor Force
. . . .
German immigrants brought socialism with them . . .
[p. 39] . . . It was clear that republicanism with the lower case r would find scant shelter in the party of Jefferson and Jackson. Probably a majority of Germans . . . went with Karl Schurz into the Republican party. But a substantial number, who were workingmen, turned to socialism.
To be more precise, they had brought socialism with them. Yet socialism was not confined to Germans, nor to immigrants. Although its spread was slow among native American workmen, it seems to have appealed primarily to the most active, or else to have activated those to whom it most appealed. At all events, socialism as a tendency within the labor force took on considerable importance not only in California but in the nation at large during the decades of industrial conflict which followed the war. [1864-1875]
Frank Roney was an Irish immigrant who became one of the pioneers of union organization in California . . . iron molder . . . reached New York in 1868 . . . Republican . . . California . . . Socialism and labor organization.
[p. 40] Roney . . . expressed an important trend of working-class radicalism, which linked abolitionism, republicanism, and socialism. Each proclaimed the equality of man; for each it was forbidden to include racial accounts of its constituents . ..
But socialism and republicanism, though strongly held, were narrowly held. The major tendency in the labor force, nationally and in California, was the line that descended through the Democratic party and especially through its radical wing. Central to this tendency was the concept of the producer ethic which had informed the labor politics of the 1830s, the cooperative experiences of the 1840s and the beginnings of labor union organization in the fifties. After the Civil War, it continued dominent. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, required the master workman of each local assembly to initiate new memers into the sanctuary of mankind . . . Farmers, unskilled laborers, women, Negros, all as producers, were invited into the local assemblies. Only at accepting Chinese did the Knights generally draw the line. The National Labor Union, established in 1866, set forth as its guiding principles that the interests of labor are one: there should be no distinction of race or nationality, no classification of Jew or Gentile, Christian or Infidel. [p. 41]there is but one dividing line-that which separates mankind into two great classes, the class that labors and the class that lives by others' labors . . . "If these general principles be correct, we must seek the cooperation of the African race in America."
It appears, then, with respect to the three tendencies of labor-force ideology so far discussed-the producer ethic, socialism, and republicanism-that their messages were in certain respects similiar, but by no means identical. What they agreed on was the republican assertion of the equality of mankind, morally as human beings. The producer ethic went beyond this to designate the "productive and burthern-bearing classes" as the value carriers of society, but then assumed that political egalitarianism adequately insure equal opportunity for these producers. Socialism stressed the necessity of economic egalitarianism as well, through the sharing of property. The more rigorous view of Marixian socialists further narrowed the definition that would bridge racial and natioonal differences. There was, in addditon, one other tendency within the labor force which has not been dealt with This was trade unionism.
During the period immedialtely followint the Civil War, trade imionism seemed a minor trend. It would not emerge as the main form of American labor organization until twenty years afterward. But already a number of national unions had established themselves. They concentrated on defending the economic interest of their members who wre the skilled operators of particular trade . . . . [They wouldn;'t develop their ideaology] until the presidency of Samual Gompers, along with John R. Commons and Selig Perlman.] . . .
[p. 42] . . . the process of erosion was underway after the National Labor Union's 1867's assertion about the unity of all mankind, the next convention stalled on the Negro question. . . .
[p. 43] The timing of this debate was crucial-1868. The war was over; slavery was ended; Radical Reconstruction with its declared goal of converting the black freedman into an independent producer and voting citizen was at high tide. Older leaders, devoted to the producer ethic saw no alternative to seeking the cooperation of the African race. The younger men from the trade locals . . . claimed the right to judge every question in terms of their own local membership . . .
[p. 43] . . . It was the younger men who won. The matter was tabled in 1868. . . . Negros were allowed to go unorganized or to form their own associations . . . in 1869 a National Colored Labor Convention sent a plea to Congress: "The exclusion of colored men, and apprentices, from the right to labor in any department of industry or workshops, in any of the states or territories of the United States, by what is known as "trade unions" is an insult to God, injury to us, and disgrace to humanity." The congressional sessison to which this appeal was directed was the same that defeated Charles Sumner in his Fourth of Ju;y argument for the naturalization of Chinese.
[p. 43] Yet the quotation of memorials to Congress and minutes of long-forgotten conventions scarecely touches the heart of the matter. In 1863 the first federal conscription act roused widespread opposition. Aside from being a Republican measure aimed at hastenig the defeat of the Confederacy, the draft law was patently unfair. It permitted rich men to buy out of military service or hire substitutes, thus throwing the burden of sacrifice unequally on the poor, and especially on workingmen. These were good Jeffersonian and Jacksonian reasons for objections to the measure, and workingmen and others did object very strenuously in demonstrations that cropped out from New York to the Middle Border and south to the fringes of the Confederacy in Indiana and in the Pennsylvannia anthracite fields. The New York de- [p. 44] monstation turned into a four-day battle bloodier than many engagements in the war itself . . . what had begun, somewhat in the tradition of the Boston Tea Patty, as a protest against the unequal application of governmental power, went on in the burning of a Negro orphanage and the torture and murder of Negros in the streets. Such were the new meaings added by half a centruy of social habituation to the self-evident truths of the produicer ethic.
[p. 44] Resources to Draw On
Each of the ideological tendencies which might be supposed to have shaped the thoughts of white Californians, and especially of those included within the labor force during the early seventies, contained an assertion of the equality ot all mankind. In socialism and republicanism these assertions remained central, and there had as yet been little opportunity for erosion. But they were minor trends.
The two major trends were those that came down through the Republican and Democratic parties. Both acknowledged a rather distant allegiance to the original mandate of the Declaration. The Demoratic tradition had translated this mandate into the producer ethic and had thereby won lasting popular support, both urban and rural. Then, first through its defense of slavery and second through its efforts to stage a comeback after the Civil War, the Democracy had stressed a concept of race superiority which excluded Africans-and by implication other colored races as well-from the meaning of the Declaration.
The Republican tradition was less influential with labor than the Democratic. Of the various elements in the Republican tradition, one only, abolition, had strongly reasserted a belief in human equality. But abolition had elicited scant enthusiasm from organizations of working people. The Republican's party broadest and most successful appeal was the plea for national untiy. Although this had led to the circumscription and finally abolition of salvery, it was by no means inconsistent with hostility to blacks.
[p. 45] A small number of workingmen had encountered direct competition from Negros prior to or during the war; a great many more had learned to fear such competition. The newly developing trade unions, although they might frequently honor the producer ethic in words, in practice generally sanctioned exclusion of blacks from their trades.
These were the resources of ideology and previous experience which the various components of California's labor force had to draw on. Underneath, tending to unify these components (and to separate them from the Chinese) was an intense shared conviction of displacement and deprivation. And there were, finally, ingrained patterns of organized violence, carried on the one hand by nativist groups, largely Republicans, and on the other by immigrant groups, largely Democratic. Each had reinforced and reactivated the other; but, in California, as the antagonism between old stock and European immigrant subsided, they would tend to coalesce.
[p. 46] Chapter 3 Mines and Railroads
The Mines
As the survey of labor force undertaken in the first chapter suggests, California mining camps rapidly developed forms of social organization withihn which were areas of consensus and lines of conflict. Along those lines occurrd the first confrontations with Chinese. But the whole matter of miners' organization has been silted over with layers of poetry and legend which convert any exploration of these early communities into something of a mining operation in itself. And here it is not sufficient simply to uncover what lies beneath; for the layers of legend and poetry have themselves becoime hisorical factors. Certainly the first step is to sink some kind of shaft through this accumulated mystique.
One of the most mystical among miner's historians was Charles Howard Shinn, whos book, Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government, first published in 1884 . . . "Nowhere in the mines was there any planning ahead; men were too busy and time too precious for that. The result was a degree and quality of unhampered, untroubled freedom to which it is hard to find a historical parallel."
[p. 47] Written ten years before Frederick Jackson Turner's essay on the frontier in American history, Shinn quickly arrives at some of the same logical difficulties that Turner would. Among these was the problem of the origtin of new values. Did they reside in the virgin land? How then could they be transmitted into the frontier settlements? Or did they reside in the state of primitiveness? In that case the values ought to be found in their highest form among Indians or mountain men, which obviously they were not. The only other alternative-aside from spontaneous generation which might as well have occurred anywhere-was that somehow these values were brought along by the frontiersman. But this lead to a contradiction with the original concept.
Shinn discovered his solution to the dilemma in a set of ideas . . . in the Teutonic theory of history. At the newly formed Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, these ideas were very much in vogue; and Shinn now past thirty, enrolled there to take his A.B. degree. He completed his work on mining camps while a student at Johns Hopkins. What the Teutonic theory revealed to Shinn was a much earlier frontiier, deep in the primeval German forest. Democracy, perhaps mystically, had come to birth there; an and the ancestors of most forty-niners, and of the Shinns and of all Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, and Scandinavians, had practised self-governenment based on individualism tempered by a reasonable willingness to compromise. Of all this, no direct record remained. But there were the indirect evidence of such Anglo-Saxon triumph as the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and the Constitution of the United States. Moreover Johns Hopkin scholarship was disclosing that the land tenure . . .[p, 48] system of early New England towns repeated the pattern of ancient Anglo-Saxon villages, and that the New England town meeting was in fact a reincarnation of the primitive German tribal council. Thus the "instinct" of self-government was racially transmitted.
"It was from the miner's court, that our Norse and Saxon ancestors, could they have risen from burial mounds like Beowulf's "on the steep, seen by sea-goers from afar, " reared there by the "battle-brave companions of the dead," would undoubtedly have recognized as akin to those folk-moots held of old in primeval German and Scandanavian forests. In both alike were the right of free speech for all freemen, the right of unhampered discussion, the visible earnestness, the solemn judgement." Shinn, 1884
Oddly, at almost the same time that Shinn was trying to fortify his frontier concpt by means of Teutonic theory, Frederick Jackson Turner, who completed his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1890, was trying to break away from Teutonic theory (which he considered too oriented toward Europe) and to establish a nationally autonomous interpretation of American history . . . [Shinn and Turner actually] complemented each other . . . The frontier thesis, aside from the old romantic adulation of primitivism, lacked any explanation for the origin of values until the Teutonic theory furnished one; while the Teutonic theory, to be servicable in America, needed precisely the certificate of naturalization which the frontier provided.
[p. 49] Meanwhile, however, Shinn was encountering a formidable critic in the person of another Californian who had grown up not only during the afterglow of the gold rush, but in the very heart of the gold rush country. This was Josiah Royce, born in Grass Valley. Royce like Shinn a product of the University of California, had also journyed eastward in pursuit of scholarship. After a pilgramage to Germany in philosophy and literature, he returned to take his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1878; and by 1880 was ensconced at Harvard as a protege of William James. Royce published an essay on California subtitled, A Study in Character.
The admirable aspects of American character, for Royce, resided in the fabric of habit, education, and shared responsibility-that outer and inner garment which the Pilgrims called civility . . . Royce ignoredd the mystique of the German forest . . . he angrily rejected the the frontier mystique. All that was worst in California sprang from the frontier. Irresponsibility . . . freed of all social responsibility, except for the serch for gold; . . . Such a totally individual focus became immoral and disastrous. One result was license for the criminal elements to run wild, since it was no man's obligation to control them. A second result was license for the vicious and irrational proclivities existing even in honest men, and of which, in California, the chief satisfaction was brutal treatment of foreigners.
[p. 50] [Royce acknowledged all the evidence [Shinn had presented] but argued that circumstances themselves (winters)had caused the town meetings to run smoothly.] A miner's court might conduct a splendid fair and earnest trial. Then having convicted the accused, say of theft, the court could either hang him which was immoral or whip him and turn him loose which was also immoral. [There was no time to build jails . . .] Social irresponsibility led inevitably to social immorality.
As for attacks against foreigners, the situation became worse yet. In some cases the entire community participated in criminal action. In other cases the law-abiding citizens sanctioned bgy their noninterference the acts of a criminal minority which most likely they had themselves helped to incite: "Ours were the crimes of a community consisting largely of honest but cruelly bigoted men, who encouraged the ruffians of their own nation to ill-treat the wanderers of another, to the frequent destruction of peace and good order. We were favored of heaven with the instinct of organization; and so here we organized brutality and, so to speak, asked God's blessing upon it." Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee: A Study of American Character (Boston: 1891)
Strikes, Labor Actions, Massacres, boycotts
During construciton of the Central Pacific Chinese laborers conducted a brief strike which Charles Crocker ascribed to paid agitators sent in by the rival railroad, the Union Pacific.
During the winter of 1887 when some four hundred white workingmen attacked a group of Chinese who were excavating for a street railway. The crowd stoned the Chinese, maimed several, and burned their shanties. Afterward, alleged leaders of the riot were jailed and the Chinese resumed work under armed guard. But the demonstration had made its point. Throughout the long record of anti-Oriental agitation which followed, there appears little if any reference to Chinese construction laborers in San Francisco or its environs.
Alexander Saxton The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the anti-Chinese movement in California, University of California Press: Los Angeles, CA, 1971 (1975), 293 pp.
Alexander Saxton The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the anti-Chinese movement in California, University of California Press: Los Angeles, CA, 1971 (1975), 293 pp.
. . .
12 A Forward Glance (1975, 1971)
. . .
[p. 280] A key point at issue in the far-flung debate over restrictions of entry was a racial definition of American-ness. California's curious apostle of militarism, Homer Lea, estimated in 1909 that "the foreign non-Anglo-Saxon element in this country had increased from one-twelfth of the population in 1860 to almost one half in 1900." "Since that time the declination of primitive Americanism has gone on at even greater speed." The outcome, if this trend continued, could only be disastrous for "a nation may be kept intact only so long as the ruling element remains homogeneous." [43. Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance, NY, 1909, pp. 124-125] To define implies a ruling out or circumscription. One says what one is by declaring what one is not. Thus [p. 48] Jack London, who had grown up at the fringes of the San Francisco labor movement, imagined a hard-fisted union teamster learning the facts of life . . .
Just as in Strong's formulation, a limiited degree of mixing ("not Dagoes and Japs") seems to have been recognized as acceptable. The act of exclusion would then sanctify the status of the insiders. Once safely within the gates, even a new American-taking himself (as Gompers had already implied) for an Anglo-Saxon, ex officio or by adoption-could not subscribe more or less wholeheartedly to the Reverend Strong's Proclamation of the Coming Kingdom:
"It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world's future . . . Then will the world enter upon a new stage of history-the final composition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled . . . The mightly centrifugal tendency, inherent in this stock, and strengthened in the United States, will reassert itself. Then this race of unequalled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it-the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization-having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. If I read not amiss, this powerful race will move down to Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond.'Josiah Strong Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, New York, 1885
[p. 281] [Footnote 45 . . . Among many renderings of this same theme were Homer Lea's secular vision: "The endless extension of the Republic, the maintenance of its ideals and the consummation, in a world wide sense, of the aspiration of its founders, constitutes the only pure patriotism to which an American can lay claim or, in defense of, lay down his life." Or Jack London's Nietzchean variation: " . . . perishing, yet mastering and commanding like our fathers before us . . . Ah well, ours is a lordly history, and though we may be doomed to pass, in our time we shall have trod on the faces of all people, disciplined to obedience, taught them government." (1914)
[p. 282] Here, the spread-eagle Jacksonian rhetoric has been unleashed again. and, in one sense this search for national definition continued the Jacksonian pursuit of the American oversoul.
"Seest thou not God's purpose from the first?"
Whitman had written in 1868:
- The earth to be spann'd, connected by network . . .
- Tying the Eastern to the Western Sea,
- The road between Europe and Asia,
- (Ah Genoese, thy dream! thy dream!
- Centuries after thou are laid in thy grave,
- The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream.)
- Passage to India . . .
Yet how different a context the intervening years imposed. Whitman had seen the American soul in transit along the great circle route homeward to the universal soul. . . . For Strong, on the other hand, as for the imperialistic Homer Lea and Jack London, the Socialist, passage to India marked a rooting out of the last vestiages of the twin mandates of equality. "Can anyone doubt," Stong insisted, "that the result of this competition will be the "survival of the fittest."
Rather a large number . . . doubted the inevitability of the outcome or wondered who . . . might prove fittest. Depression, and unemployment in the early nineties, while forcing leaders of the American Federation of Labor to agree with Josiah Strong as to the urgency of immigration restriction, reinforced those anxieties roused by industrialization which were already causing many Americans to reject the kind of exuberant optimism expressed by Strong. Were not the monopolists firmly in the saddle? And had not inferior races alway served as tools of tyannical power? . . . Brooks Adams was drawing heavily on recent events on the Pacific Coast (1895) . . .
"In the seventh century Asiatic competition devoured the Europeans in the Levant, as three hundred years before it had devoured the husbandmen o0f Italy; and this was a disease which isolation alone could cure. But isolation of the center of exchanges was impossible, for the vital principle of an economic age is competitions. . . Competition did its work with relentless rapidity . . . The population sand fast, and by 717 the western blood had run so low that an Asiatic dynasty reigned supreme. [49. Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (New York, 1959) (first published in London, 1895, and in New York the following year.) For an earlier West Coast statement of the same theme, P.W. Dooner, Last Days of the Republic (San Francisco, 1880). Lea in the Valor of Ignorance (1909)echoed many concepts that had appeared in Adam's work.]
[p. 283] . . .
Brooks Adams' conception was precisely the opposite of Josiah Strong's. Instead of riding the Darwinian wave of the future to world supremacy, the white American might find himself hard pressed building dikes high and strong enough to keep from being engulfed. Nor was this somber view expressive simply of status anxiety among vanishing Brahmins. It was widely shared. Ignatius Donnelly, midwestern Populist Leader and son of Irish immigrant parents, warned in his novel, Caesar's Column Anon., 1890], of the impending destruction of America between the upper and nether millstones of a Jewish oligarchy and a debased and Orientalized proletariat. Caesar's Column, that tower of corpses encased in concrete, became the tombstone for the American nation. In the final chapter Donnelly left his hero with a group of old stock Americans, refugees from the debacle, who have barricaded themselves into a mountain valley of central Africa, and there live by tilling the soil in the old-fashioned way-while with dynamite and [p. 284] Gatling Guns they defend their alpine passes against the barbarian hordes of the world beyond.
[p. 284] . . .
There were, then, in general circulation at the turn of the century two opposite forecasts of the national destiny. Not altogether lightly, these might be described as a Populist and a Progressive apocalypse. Though contradictory, they shared several elements in common. Both were molded by the long sequence of racial proscription and justification of proscription. Both took for granted a racial definition of nationality. Both, by reasserting that definition, attempted to fill in the gaps which erosian of the twin mandates of equality had left in the old ideologies.
Amanda Schacter (ed.) Santa Monica Landmarks Santa Monica Landmarks Commission, 1990.
"This building, a simplified variation of a Gothic Revival style, was the first church building erected in Santa Monica. The site was donated by the Santa Monica Land Company, the development company of Santa Monica founder John P. Jones. Located originally at Sixth and Arizona, in 1883 it was moved two blocks west to the southwest corner of Fourth and Arizona. At that time a bell tower was added. In 1899, the church was moved to Hill and Lake Streets and occupied by the Ocean Park Methodist-Episcopal Church. Lake Street became Washington Boulevard, and is now Second Street. In 1923, the old church was sold to the Stephen Jackson Women's Relief Corps, No. 124 and was called Patriotic Hall. In 1971, it became a private residence."
Horst Schmidt-Brümmer Venice, California: An Urban Fantasy, Grossman Publishers: NY, (English trans., Feelie Lee) 1973 (Original German Text Verlag Ernst Wasmuth: Tubingen, 1972), 108pp., 1971
"The idea for this book was precipitated by a chance visit to Venice while I was teaching at U.C.L.A. From this initial encounter grew my interest in and fascination for the Venice community and, as a result, I spent the first half of 1971 taking pictures"
" . . .
"This has become an official fact. On June 15, 1971, the City Council voted in favor of the costly renewal. It is only a question of time as to when the city's second eyesore (the first is the Watts ghetto) will be removed, when the lif of a community will be replace by the life-style of a luxury resort.
"To a large degree Venice belongs in the hands of absentee landowners. By the time of the final City Hall hearings, many small homeowners had already sold their property because of the exorbitant assessments. Those who finally opposed the Master Plan were overwhelmingly renters, who represent approximately 70% of the Venice inhabitants. They cam not to defend property rights but to claim their rights to remain a people, a community."
" . . .
Venice as Visual Text
" . . . The visible fact that the people respond to their environment b y their particular, personalized, and original additions and changes creates an environment which, in turn, stimulates further responses; this fact illustrates the dynamic interaction that exists between the environment and its people. This sense of participation, of the possiblitity of writing on the evironmental text, becomes more visually evident by contrast to the determined, noninvitational, and restrictive character of the new Venice.
" . . . "
[Norm's Shoe Repairing Sign at Main between Bay and Pico, p. 33, 1971]
[Arthur Mortimer* Portrait at Hart & Neilson, p. 36, 1971]
[Ocean Park Blvd. & Barnard Way, p. 40]
[Bob Dylan? p. 41]
[Portrait p. 44]
[photo of Cottages on Marine between Second and Third, p. 58]
[photo the Shearon Hotel Daily Weekl Month Challenge Fresh Milk Val's Rexall Drugs 1600 Pacific Ave., Ex.2-3937 Property Bay Area Joey Baker Real Estate Rentals-Property Management 1100? Washington Blv. Ex 9-7781]
[Santa Monica Tower, p. 104]
[Venice Fine Arts Squad, (Terry Schoonhaven) Venice Beach Under Snow, Ocean Front Market, p. 37, p. 67]
[Brooks Av., Wash Fluff Dry, Brooks and Pacific, Cover, p. 61, 99]
'Debby Woodroofe American Feminism 1848-1920 International Socialist Review, March 1971, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 21-42.
Woman's suffrage was won through a difficult seventy year struggle. The ruling class has hidden and falsified that history. They do not want us to know that through united struggle, we have won important victories for our sex and can do it again.
[p. 21] In spite of the important victories of the woman's rights movement, it is one of the most ignored and maligned chapters in American history. We grow up mocking our sisters who went before us, taught us to think of them as sexually-frustrated, hawk-faced spinsters who carried hatchets. We learn about Lincoln's self-sacrificing mother, but never about Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Our history has become an anecdote, thrown in for amusement between the lengthy descriptions of men's accomplishments. Morison's Oxford History of the American People, for example. gives the women's suffrage movement a scant few sentences under a section on Bootlegging and other sports."
The very name history has given our sisters-suffragettes-is itself a slander. Suffragettes was what the opponent of woment's rights called them. It was an ephithet, a diminutive of their historical significance. The women called themselves suffragists, except in England where women in the most militant wings of the movement, the Women's Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, called themselves suffragettes so they would not be confused with more moderate groups.
Our history is a weapon of our liberation. Dependent on the oppression of women, the rulers of this country do not want us to know that we have a history. They do not want us to know that through united struggle, we have won important victories for our sex and can do it again.
We must recover our history ourselves. No one else will do it for us. The sources we have been given are full of falsifications which we must correct. And many we learn from, such as the writingsof the early suffragists themselves, have been relegated to obscurity. For example, when several Michigan feminists went to the library in Kalamazoo, where Lucy Stone, once lived, to see if it had any of her papers, they found forty-three boxes of her writings in the library basement, long forgotten. It is up to us to bring our history out of mothballs, up from the dusty cellers and learn from it so we can most effectively continue our struggle our sisters began.
Throughout history, the struggle of women for their liberation, has waxed and waned according to the extent of general political radicalization in the society. the women's rights movemenht of the past century emerged at the height of the abolitionist struggle and ended in the 1920s-a period of deep reaction and conservation during which most radical movements declined. It was not until another period of radicalization, the late 1960s, when young people were propelled into action by the Vietnam war, the oppression of Third World people, the reactionary role of the universites, that the women's movement regained the momentum it had lost fifty years earlier.
The founding members of the women's rights movement were active in the antislavery struggle. In fact, it was at an abolitonist conference in 1840 that the women's movement was given the initial impetus to move into action. A world Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London that year. Several American women, among them Lucretia Mott, had been elected as delegates by their chapters. The convention, however, flatly refused to seat female delegates and relegated all the women to a remote gallery, sealed off from public view by a curtain, where they had to sit as silent spectators.
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met in the gallery and spent many afternoons walking through the streets of London, discussing their treatment at the conference. It was not the first time women had run into male chavinism in the antislavery movement. Many chapters refused to accept female members, forcing women to form [p. 22] their own societies. Mott and Stanton decided that women needed a convention of their own to demand equality and vowed to call one when they returned to the United States.
1848: Senecal Falls Conference
It was not until eight years later, however, when Lucretius Mott visited the Stantons at their home in Seneca Falls, New York, that the two finally began to put into practice whaqt they had discussed in London. They placed an ad in the Seneca Falls Courier calling for a Woman's Rights Convention July 19-20, 1848. Over three hundred men and women from a fifty mile radius traveled in wagons and on foot to this conference which Stanton described as "the first organized protest against the injustice which had brooded for ages over the character and destiny of half the race." A Declaration of Sentiments, which has become the most famous document in the history of Americn feminism, was passed. It stated in part: "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, havinig direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her."
The Declaration was modeled after the Declaration of Independence, and expressed the same demand for certain basic and inalienable rights. It asserted that the democratic freedoms won by the French and the American revolutions should be applied to women also. A list of demands, including equal access to education and the professions, legal rights in marriage, the rights to own property, to control one's own wages, to initiate court suits and to speak in public, were passed unanimously. In fact, the only disagreement was over a demand raised by Stanton-women's right to vote. Suffrage was considered "excessive," "premature." and an issue that would subject the movement to ridicule. This demand was very narrowly approved.
The Seneca Falls Conference did not come about simply as a result of the chance meeting of Mott and Stanton in that London gallery. To understand why that conference took place, we have to look at its historical context. This was a period of eztraordinary social ferment. In 1848 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. In the United States, there emerged a plethora of reform movement. Utopian communities, religious experiments, and a general attack on the laws inherited from England. Freedom for the slaves was the key social issue. In this general upsurge women played a major part. There were some thousands of women's clubs-church auxillaries, missionary societies and cultural discussion groups. The most socially conscious women worked in the abolition movement where they learned to conduct petition campaigns and organize public meetings-skills they would later use in their own interests. In speaking out against slavery, women won the right to speak in public.
It was also a period of expansion of educational opportunity for women. Oberlin College, the first to admit women, graduated the first female in 1843. Lucy Stone entered Oberlin in 1843. A few years before, she had sat at a sewing circle in Massachusetts, painstakingly making shirts to finance male students through theological seminary. She suddenly decided it was foolish for her to spend her energies dutifully earning money for a man who would raise more money for his own education by working a week than she could in a month. One day she left unfinished the shirt she was working on and decided to go to college herself, even if she had to go to Brazil, at that time the only place women could study. When she left Oberlin, she vowed, "Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex." Gradually other colleges opened their doors to women, and many of the "Seven Sisters" women's colleges originated in this period.
Women were also entering industry in growing numbers. The textile mills of New England were among the first factories in the United States. With the invention of the power loom, the clothing industry shifted from the home to the factory, bringing many women with it. "Factory girl life" was packaged and sold to New England farm girls as a glamorous existence where one would live with other girls in a factory-run boartding house and participate in self-improvement, educational and literary pursuits. Some justified the relegation of such menial tedious factory work to women by assuming they would work for just a few years, experienee economic independence and then marry and return to the home. In this way, they felt American industry could avoid the permanent class of wretched wage workers that were developing in England.
Women workers of this period often worked from 4:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., averaging 37.5 cents a day, most of which they paid back to the factory for their room and board. Histories of women in the labor movement, howerver, record a not always docile response to these conditions. Dozens of strikes and walkouts protesting the frequent speedups and wage cuts occurred during the 1830s and 1840s.
As a result of expanding educational opportunity, the entrance of women into industry, and involvement in the ferment for social reform, many women developed a life outside the domestic circle. Expectations of equality were heightened. Women began to see themselves as having an existence independent of their husbands. The Seneca Falls Convention reflected this new consciousness.
In general, however, the Victorian concept of women's role-as a wife and mother-remained unchallenged. Women were looked upon as females who incidently happened to be human. It was taught that God Himself had ordained that men and women have different roles, with men's realm being the world and women's the home. As is still true today, all the attributes of a slave-domesticity, submissiveness, incompetence-were assigned to women and then elevated into virtues. As one man of the day said, "It is her province to adorn social life, to throw a charm over the intercourse of the world by making it lovely and attractive." Man's power over women was taken for granted in much the same way as the divine right of kings once was.
This conception of women as mere ornaments in man's lives was reflected in the law, where women had absolutely no civil status. They were pronounced "civilly dead" when they married, and remained legal minors if they did not marry. When divorced, they wer not given child custody.
[p. 23] Their property legally belonged to their husbands and they did not even own the clothes on their backs. Likewise, wages they earned belonged legally to their husbands. Even if a husband was a drunkard who was not providing for the children, he could take his wife's wages.
This was the context in which the Seneca Falls Convention was held. Considering the ideological and legal barriers against women being autonomous persons, the demands raised there for equality in education, in marriages, in the professions, and under the law were extremely radical. For the first time women saw tht the source of their oppression was outside themselves and demanded of men, as Angeline Grimke said, "that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy."
It is indicative of the disdain this society has for the history of women that the church in Seneca Falls that housed this first organizational emergence of the woman's rights movement has been torn down. This society, which makes monuments out of homes in which Geroge Washington slept, let a gas station be built on the site, leaving only a marker on the sidewalk as a memorial!
Seneca Falls was the first of a series of regional and national conferences which took place yearly between 1848 and 1860. In 1860 in Worcester, Massachusetts, the first National Women's Rights Convention convened. "The time is opportune. Come!" And over one thousand women and men did-Quakers, abolitionists, temperance workers and housewives. Suffrage was rarely discussed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton remained one of its few advocates. Instead, the conventions focussed on questions of poverty, education, employment and abolition of slavery. However, no new national organization came out of the gatherings.
One of the differences between the early women's rights movement and the women's liberation movement of today, which is insisting on the right to all-female meetings where women make all their own decisions about their own movment, is that men were always welcome at these conferences of the 1850s. In fact, male abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison were regarded as leading spokesmen during this early phase of the women's rights movement. The one exception to this practice of welcoming the participation of men was an 1850 conference in Salem, Ohio, where men wer admitted, but not allowed to speak.
One participant reported: "Never did men so suffer. They implored just to say one word-but no-the Prsident was inflexible-no man should be heard. If one meekly arose to make a suggestion, he was at once ruled out of order. For the first time in the world's history, men learned how it felt to sit in silence when questions in which they were interested were under discussion."
The second American revolution-the Civil War-broke out in 1861, putting an end to the steady growth of the women's rights movement. All conventions were suspended. Its activists were drawn into war work, setting up relief camps and hospital services. The few women we do read about in history-Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott-were part of this service work. Other women were spies and some disguised as men, actually fought in the Union Army. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony took another course. They distrusted Lincoln, fearing he might settle for a compromise with the southern slave states. Under their leasdership, the Women's Loyalty League was formed to fight for an unconditional end to slavery as the only way to end the war. The League collected over 400,000 signatures on petitions demanding of Lincoln that the slaves be freed immediately.
At the close of the war, women such as Stanton, Anthony and Lucy Stone decided it was the time to fight for women's suffrage. Suffrage was no longer considered an inopportune demand. The war raised women's confidence in themselves, and they felt that their war services gave them a claim on the nation. They fully expected the young and "enlightened" Republican Party to reward women with the vote simultaneously with extending it to Black men. But that did not happen.
The Republican Party advised female suffragists that it was now "the Negro's hour;" the vote should be granted to Black men first. It threw itself behind the 14th and 15th amendments which freed the slaves and gave Black men the vote, instituting male sufferage as part of the Constitution. The Republicans insisted that to add women's suffrage to the 15th amendment would lead to its defeat, and accused women such as Elizabeth Stanton of selfishly jeopardizing the Black man's claim to citizenship.
Stanton's incisive reply to the implication that somehow the Black's claim to equality was more immediate than that of women was: "May I ask just one question, based on the apparent opposition in which you place the Negro and the woman? Do you believe the African race is so composed entirely of males?" She cited the fact that Black women, such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, had been just as involved in the antislavery movement as their brothers.
Even male abolitionists, who were the suffragist's oldest allies and were certainly conscious of their contributions, joined ranks with the Republican Party in asking women to defer their demand for equality to a later time. In many cases, they went so far as to tell women they [p. 24] did not need the vote; they could rule the world with the glance of an eye.
The controversy over the 15th amendment created much bitterness and confusion in the women's suffrage movement. Stanton, who had paternalistically said in 1864, "For the highest virtues of heroism, let us worship the black man at his feet," made the racist comment one year later, "Are we to stand aside and see Sambo walk into the Kingdom first?"
Susan B. Anthonyy proclaimed: "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I would ever work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman." The bitterness caused by being told to step aside exacerbated the racist attitudes ingrained in white women by the society of that period.
The tension between male abolitionists and woman's suffrage leaders precipitated a split in the women's movement. At an 1869 convention of the American Equal Rights Association, organized after the Civil War to fight for both Black and female freedom, Stanton proposed that her group focus on getting a woman's suffrage amendment added to the Constitution, no matter what its effect on the 15th amendment. Her proposal forced the other women present to clarify their their position on Black male suffrage and on whether or not woman's suffrage should be deferred to it. The result of this debate was the formation of two opposing groups-the National Women's Suffrage Association and the American Woman's Suffrage Association-destined to remain separate for twenty years.
The AWSA, hereafter referred to as the American, was centered in Boston. It made Henry Ward Beecher its president and was led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The American deferred to the Republican and abolitionist plea to delay demanding a woman's suffrage amendment until Black suffrage was passed. Instead, the organization did propaganda work for women's suffrage on a state level. Its attitude toward Black suffrage was summed up by Lucy Stone who said, "I shall be thankful in my soul if anybody can get out of the terrible pit."
The NWSA, or the National, based in New York, was led by Anthony and Stanton. It excluded men from its membership, convinced that it was the misleadership of men who were responsible for the American group postponing its fight for a women's suffrage amendment. The National was not willing to wait any longer for women's rights, and focused its energies on getting a 16th amendment enfranchising women. As Stanton said: "Wendell Phillips says, one idea for a generation, to come up in the order of their importance. First Negro suffrage, then temperance, then the eight-hour movement, then woman's suffrage. So in 1958, three generations hence, thirty years to a generation, Phillips and Providence permitting, women's suffrage will be in order."
A debate has been carried on in historical literature for many years over which group-the American or the National-took the correct p;osition on the dispute over the 15th amendment. It is impossible to choose sides. Each was partially right; both made some mistakes. The National was absolutely correct to reject the concept of "one idea per generation" and to see no reasons why both Blacks and women should not have been given the vote after the Civil War, a war whose ostesible principle had been that all people should be equal under the law. Furthermore, the National rightly understood what we have learned today: women have to depend on themselves and continue to organize against our oppreasion on a day-to-day basis, even when our allies drop away. This was where the American went wrong. By deferring their demnds they gave credence to the notion that woman's suffrage was a secondary issue.
It was wrong, however, for the National to refuse to support suffrage for Black men. The strength of the American position was its understanding that a victory for any oppressed group-the fact that at least someone has been lifted "out of the terrible pit," as Lucy Stone put it-should be welcomed and regarded as laying the basis for other oppressed groups to continue the struggle. as historical developments subseqhently proved, the victory of Black male suffrage strengthened women's demands to equal citizenship.
But to dwell on which group was right or wrong in this dispute is, in a sense, to make criminals out of victims. The real reason that the two wings of the woman's suffrage movement became set against each other over Black male suffrage lies neither with the National nor the American but with the emissaries of capitalism in the two political parties.
The Republicans were ready to grant the vote to Black men after the Civil War to help clinch their hold on the country. They later acquiesced in taking it away in their post-Reconstruction South. But both the Republicans and the Democrats were opposed to the right of women to vote, and counterposed the questions of Black and women's suffrage. Thus the Republicans falsely claimed that to fight for women's suffrage would mean the defeat of Black suffrage. When Stanton once confronted a Republican politician with the fact that all the arguments he was using to gain support for Black male suffrage applied equally to women's suffrage, he replied that he was "not the puppet of logic, but the slave of practical politics."
The Democrats responded no less opportunistically. Some of them spoke in favor of a woman's suffrage amendment, but their motives for doing so was that they thought they could defeat the 15th amendment by linking it with women's suffrage. Thus, the capitalist parties did everything they could to divide the Black and women's struggle, and to play the one off against the other.
Women today must still depend upon themselves to win their liberation, and not on the Democrats and Republicans. These parties betrayed us too many times during our seventy year struggle for the elementary right to vote-granting it only when suffrage demonstrations became so massive and public opinion so outraged that to continue to deny it became more costly to them than to grant it-for us not to learn from our history the necessity of political independence from the capitialst parties.
Most suffragists felt it was best to avoid discussion of the split in the movement and gave the breach little [p. 25] comment in their writings. Most historians explain the split as the result of tactical disagreements over Black suffrage and the Republican Party. Although this was certainly the issue around which the differences were precipitated, there were indications that the split also involved other very major disagreements, which had been brewing for a long time, over the source of female oppression. That is, those who joined the American wing tended to view women's subordinate status as based mainly on the fact that she was disenfranchised, while supporters of the National held the institution of marriage responsible for female oppression.
[p. 25] The National saw women's rights as a broad question involving, as Susan B. Anthony said, "the emancipation from all political, industrial, social and religious subjection." Suffrage was supported, not as the magic wand that would erase women's inequality, but as a basic democratic right they should have as citizens. Nevertheless, they were conscious that as long as woman remained tied to the home, she would remain a second-class citizen. As the National's stated:
"The ballot is not even half the loaf; it is only a crust, a crumb. The ballot touches only those interests, either of women or men, which take their root in political questions. But women's chief discontent is not with her political, but with her social and particularly her marital bondage. The solemn and profound question of marriage . . . is of more vital consequence to women's welfare and reaches down to a deeper depth in woman's heart and more thoroughly constitutes the core of the women's movenent, than any such superficial and fragmentary questions as women's suffrage."
The strengths of the National-that is, their understanding of the necessity for women to struggle day by day for control over their lives-laid the basis for its development into the most consistently radical, vocal suffrage group in history. Under the leadership of Anthony and Stanton, the Natioal was the first (and only) group of the period to challenge the family institution. Feeling strongly that her place was with her sisters, and that her energies belonged to them and should not be exhausted through marriage, Anthony chose to remain single. In a letter to Lydia Mott in 1859, Anthony bemoaned the fact that:
"There is not one woman left who may be relied on; all have "first to please their husbands," after which there is but little time left to spend in any other direction . . . The twain become one flesh, the woman "we"; henceforth she has no separate work . . . In the depths of my soul, there is a continual denial of the self-annihilating spiritual or legal union of two human beings. Such union, in the very nature of things, must bring an end to the free action of one or the other."
And she realized that this one was always the woman. She wrote later: "Marriage has always been a one-sided matter, resting most unequally on the sexes. By it man gains all; women loses all; tyrant law and lust reign supreme with him; meek submission and ready obedience alone benefit her . . . Woman has nver been thought of other than as a piece of property, to be disposed of at the will and pleasure of man."
In addition to the women of the National, several individual women challenged the family institution. Charlotte Perkins Gilman carried the challenge further than did the National. Although she identified with the women's rights movement, and often spoke for it, Gilman was more a theoretician than an activist. Writing during a period of ever increasing employment of women, she protested that they had to put in another day's work in the home after the day's work at the factories. She favored putting private housekeeping "into the archives of past history," and advocated communal kitchens, public housekeeping services, and child care centers. she attacked "a family untiy which is bound together with a tablecloth" as being of questinable value. And of motherhood, still considered sacred by her society, Gilman said, "Anybody can be a mother. An oyster can be a mother. The difficult thing is to be a person."
Gilman saw that the cult of the home oppressed all its members. stunted women "with the aspirations of an affectionate guinea pig," and was a phenomenon which would be utterly unnecessary in a society where the family was no longer a productive unit. She wrote:
"Among the splendid activites of our age [the home] lingers on, inert and blind, like a clam in a horse race. . . it hinders, by keeping women a social idiot, by keeping the modern child under a tutelage of the primeval mother, by keeping the social conscience of man crippled and stultified in the clinging grip of the domesticity of the women. It hinders by making the physical details of daily life a heavy burden to mankind. Whereas in our stage of civilization, they should have been long since reduced to a minor incident."
Gilman's articles appeared in The Revolution, the newspaper of the National, as did similarly iconoclastic ideas. The Revolution claimed to speak in the interests of the most wretched of all women, and focused extensively on the double degradation of working women.
It also had the policy of taking the woman's side in controversial issues of the time-something no one else was doing. The Victoria Woodhull case was an example of this. Woodhull was a stockbroker on Wall Street, as [p. 26] well as an advocate of sexual freedom, faith healing and woman's suffrage, who tended to operate as an individualists. When she annouced her intention to run for Presidcnt in the 1872 elections, she was ridiculed from all sides as a "free-love candidate," (and attacked for living in the same house with both her current and former husbands.) Only the National defended her right to run for office. Concerning the scandal men tried to make of Woodhull's ideas on sexual freedoms, Stanton wrote in The Revolution:
"We have had enough women sacrificed to this sentimental, hypocritical prating about purity . . . This is one of man's most effective engines for our division and subjugation. He createss the public sentiment, builds the gallows, and then makes us hangmen for our sex. We have crucified his Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, the George Sands, the Fanny Kermbles of all ages . . . Let us end this ignoble record . . . If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait the crown of thorns."
The Revolution, based on the motto "Men, their rights and nothing more; Women, their rights and nothing less," was one of the most important contributions of the National. Like many of the feminist journals of today, it provided a forum for debate, gave the movement direction, and was key to reaching out and winning over new allies. Otherwise sympathetic supporters of the National repeatedly urged Stanton to give the paper a more moderate name, but she stood firm, saying: "The establishing of woman on her rightful throne is the greatest of revolutions . . . A journal called The Rose-bud might answer for those who came with kid gloves and perfumes to lay immortelle wreaths on the monuments which in sweat and tears we have hewn and built; but for us, and that great blacksmith of ours who forges such red-hot thunderbolts for Pharisees, hypocrites and sinners, there is not name but The Revolution."
After the Civil War, the situation of women workers changed dramatically. Production of the equipment required to wage the war had stimulated industrial development in the North. Many women, whose husbands had been killed or crippled in the war, were forced to go to work, and, out of desperation, accepted low wages and sweatshop conditions. The range of jobs available to women as a source of cheap labor expanded far beyond employment in textile industry. The typewriter, originally considered too mechanically complex for women to operate, began to be demonstrated by womenin store windows in the 1870s and gradually became our domain. The invention of the telephone opened up jobs as switchboard operators.
Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, countless attempts to form their own unions were made by female laundresses, sales workers, tailors, textile workers, printers and many others. By 1886, the Knights of Labor had chartered 113 Women's assemblies.
All these attempts to raise women's wages and upgrade their working conditions, however, proved short-lived and sporadic. Women were not sure of how to organize against their economic oppression, did not have money for strike funds and publicity, and were not supported by male workers.
The National was actively involved in the struggle of working women. Anthony organized many Working Women's Associations and was an invited speaker at some trade-union conventions. The trade-union movemnet's appreciation of the National's role came to an end, however, when Anthony began encouraging women to break strikes. She claimed scabbing was the only way women would ever learn skilled trades. Anthony was pushed to this decision by the AFL, which had a formal position against sexual discrimination in employment, yet systematically denied women access to skilled jobs or to training programs, viewing them as "temporary" workers in the labor force between pregnancies. Anthony's stand, combined with the disclosure that The Revolution was being printed in a "rat" office paying below union-scale wages, brought the wrath of the trade-union movement down on the suffragists.
One cause of this controversy was that neither the feminists nor the trade unionists fully understood the double nature of woman's oppression-that is, both as a female and as an exploited worker. The feminists did not grasp the necessity for the working class to assert its power through weapons such as strikes, and labor ignored the fact that women are a spcecially oppressed sector of the working class.
Between 1870 and 1910, 480 campaigns in 33 states were undertaken for woman's suffrage. Both the American and the National focussed on the frontier states, feeling that equality would be more readily grasped by pioneers who, by necessity, did not consider women helpless creatures with weak nervous systems. Few of us today can imagine the tortuous journeys the suffragists made through the frontier, travelling on sleighs, stage coaches, open wagons and on foot, and speaking from both stages and tree stumps to countless backwoods meetings that were often mobbed by antisuffragists.
Women such as Susan B. Anthony traveled door to door, trying to rouse women to a sense of their political rights as citizens and to get them to sign suffrage petitions. In many cases, housewives slammed doors in the faces of the suffrage workers, informing them they had all the rights they needed, or that their husbands would provide for them. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, the campaigning suffragiost was often treated "with as much contempt as if she was asking for alms for herself." Other women were more responsive, and it was the pennies and the dimes from these women that kept the women's rights movement alive. Petitions, the only way the disenfranchised could be heard, were espeially important, but more often than not, the petitions were merely laughted out of state assemblies.
1890: Suffrage won in Wyoming
It was on the frontier that the first victories for women's suffrage were won. Both Wyoming and Utah gave women the vote while they were still territories. There was a severe shortage of women on the frontier, and it has been speculated that Wyoming passed women's [p. 27] suffrage to encourage a migration of women. There is evidence that the Mormonas passed suffrage in Utah to increase the voting weight of their religion. Wyoming became a state in 1890, vowing, "We will stay out of the Union a hundred years rather than come without women's suffrage." Colorado and Idaho were the next two victories, in 1893 and 1896, but between 1896 and 1910, no further states were won over.
[p. 27] Anthony and Stanton were behind those victories. As Stanton wrote in her memoirs, "Night after night by an old-fashioned fireplace we plotted and planned the coming agitation, how, when and where each entering wedge could be driven. Every right achieved . . . was contended for inch by ionch." Stanton continues with a description of her working relationship with Anthony:
"In thought and in sympathy we were one, and in the division of labor, we exactly complemented each other. In writing, we did better work than either could alone. While she is slow and analyhtical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer, she the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics. I the philosophy and rhetoric, and together, we have made arguments that have stood unshaken through the storms of long years; arguments that no one has answered."
During the day, each would take her turn watching Stanton's five children, while the other wrote. Their relationship was one of deep sisterhood. Unsympathetic historians have been unable to understand the sisterly feelingts of suffragists such as Stanton and Anthony and cannot refrain from speculating that this pro-woman impulse must have passed over into lesbianism. They refer to Stanton as a "spouse surrogate" to the unmarried Anthony. Despite the arrogance of the male historian, feminists today are rediscovering sisterhood with other women-something that has been denied to us by the warped ideology such historians reflect that attempts to isolate women from each other and makes closeness into scandal.
The growing strength of the woman's movement, and its steady steps toward suffrage, forced its opponents (referred to simply as "antis") to make explicit the era's notion of woman's place. At the root of their arguments was the belief that women are by nature infantile and irrational. A minister of the day expressed this: "The excessive development of the emotional in her nervous system ingrafts on the female organization a neurotic or hysterical condition which is the source of much of the female charm when it is kept within due restraint. In movments of excitement, it is liable to explode in violent paroxysms. Every woman therefore carries this power of irregular, illogical and incongruous action and no one can foretell when the explosion will come."
Suffragist Anna Howard Shaw responded to this attack:
"Women are supposed to be unfit to vote because they are hysterical and emotional . . . I had heard so much about our emotionalism that I went to the last Democratic National Convention to observe the calm response of the male politicians . . . I saw men jump unpon the seat and throw their hats in the air and shout "What's the matter with Champ Clark?" Then, when these hats came down, other men would kick them back in the air, shouting at the top of their voices, "He's all right." Then I heard others howling for "Underwood, first, last and all the time." No hysteria about it-just patriotic loyalty, splendid manly devotion to principle. And so they went on until 5 in the morning-the whole night long,"
The family was seen as a miniature political unit. the man supposedly cast his vote as a political representative of his family, expressing his wife's opinion for her, and acting as her link to the outside world. It was felt that woman was too delicate for the turbulence of the mire of politics, and that she should be above it, not in it. As a rationalization for her inequality, woman was told that she was the higher form of life, more refined and sensitive than man. For her to invade man's sphere of politics would be retrogressive.
As men came to realize that woman's suffrage would have repercussions beyond women simply dropping the ballot in the box once a year-that it would involve a reassessment of woman's role-they launched a slanderous campaign predicting the dire results of suffrage. They projected women buttonholing strange men on the streets, urging the to vote for "the handsome candidate." They predicted that if women became poitically informed in order to cast their vote, political disageements between husbands and wives would result, and the divorce rate would skyrocket. They predicted that suffrage would [p. 27] lead to child neglect as a woman became politically involved and this in turn would create juvenile delinquency.
[p. 28] The pioneering days of the woman's rights movement ended around 1890. A new generation of women emerged who were already benefitting from the gains in status that their older sisters had won. By 1890, there were 2,500 women with college degrees. Although they still earned only half of what men earned, women reached 17.5 per cent of the labor force, and constituted 36 per cent of all professional workers. this figure had only gone up to 40 per cent sixty years later.
Rapid industrialization in the United States crowded more and more people, including a huge number of immigrants, into urban centers and created widespread poverty. Many women, alarmed by this trend, became active in combatting such problems as sanitation and disease in the urban slums, child labor, and in support of labor's right to organize, of prison reform and of women's legal rights.
The women's Christian Temperance Union, the largest group of the period, had been grossly misrepresented . Rather than being a vehicle for wild-eyed, hatchet-wielding fanatics as it is depicted, the WCTU tackled a problem especially crucial to working-class women. Alcoholism was one of the many social problems generated by slum life. An alcoholic husband could take a woman's wages away from her, leaving her with no means of feeding the family, since in many states a woman's wages were legally her husband's property. Since with the ballot women could vote the saloons out of business, the WCTU worked closely with suffrage forces.
In 1890, the National and the American healed their twenty year breach and reunited as the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA), marking a new stage in the women's rights movement. The demand for suffrage became its focus. To both groups it was clear that the contradiction between the Victorian morality which insisted that women were happy slaves and the increased expectations of women because of their deepening social and economic independence, had reached a point where masses of women were convinced they deserved the right to vote.
The period following 1890 was one of great contradictions. United States imperialism was on the rise and began to spread throughout Latin America and the Far East. In order to justify the brutal exploitation of both the working class at home and of the colonial peoples, the ruling class whipped up a campaign of racism that permeated all aspects of American life. The right to vote was forcibly taken from many of the recently franchised Black men. JimCrow policies were savagely instituted throughout the South and racist policies intensified in the North.
The growing number of strikes made labor a target for governmental attack. Union organizing attempts during this period were branded as "anarchist plots"and strikers were brutally attacked.
The depth and all-pervasive character of the racist campaign had a conservatizing effect on all the radical and labor organizations of this period. Progressivism was in vogue, posing legislative reform as the means of curing all ills. The task of the time was to patch up capitalism to weed out corruption, but not to challenge capitalism in any basic way. The women's suffrage movement was an integral part of this reformist movement, sharing its strengths and its weaknesses.
During this period the Comstock Act was passed. Anthony Comstock was president of the New Yori Society for the Suppression of Vice and his act allowed the post office to refuse to mail "morally offensive literature." This was consrued to mean all literature that attacked marriage and the family. The birth control pioneer, Margaret Sanger, was one of the many feminist victims of that strictly enforced law.
The Beecher-Tilden affair was an indication of the temper of the times. In her paper, Virginia Woodhull exposed the fact that prreacher Henry Beecher, first president of the AWSA, was apparently having an affair with one of his parishioners, Elizabeth Tilden, also involved in women's rights. Close friends with both of them, Woodhull claimed she disclosed the affair because Beecher was not being open, as Woodhull was, about his rejection of monogamy. Before the day was over, copies of Woodhull's paper were selling for $40 each. Again, Woodhull became the center of a national scandal. The Beecher-Tilden trial was one of the most sensational in history and everyone involved, including Woodhull, was forced to flee the country to escape widespread public outrage.
Around this time, Stanton and Anthony's public attacks on marriage and the family came to a halt.
The NAWSA began to propagandize around the moral impact women could have on government. One suffragist went so far as to say, "The stake is but the larger family, the nation, the homesead, and . . . in this national home there is a room and a corner and a duty for "mother." Stattistics were gathered on the moral superiority of women, proving she was the majority of churchgoers and the minority of prisoners. Suffragists promised that a female electorate would vote for higher penalties for rapists and would end wars forever. They said to the men in power: the government needs women's virtues. Let us have the vote and we will be housekeepers in politics, and sweep away the corruption of the world."
Thus the NAWSA was no longer demanding the vote as a deomocratic right in itself, but as a means by which women could help uphold the morality of bourgeois society. No longer stressing the inherent equality betwen men and women, suffragists dwelt on the ways women were different and accommodated their outlook to the maternal mystique of the Victorian period.
Once departing from the original argument, the suffragists' adaptation went one step farther. The imperialist need for a large, easily exploited working class made Social Darwinism, constructed to indicate that the Anglo-Saxon was the highest form of human beings, a popular philosophy. As a result, the suffrage movement began to viciously slander the new immigrants, saying it was an indignity for the daughters of 1776 to be ruled by foreign and Black men. Ann Howard Shaw, one time president iof the NAWSA, said, "Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political superiors of their former mistresses."
Another NAWSA president Carrie Catt, wrote: "The government is menaced with great danger. That danger lies in the votes possessed by the males in the slums of the cities and the ignorant foreign vote. There is but one way to avert the danger-cut off the vote of the slums and give to women the ballot."
Northern suffragists produced statistics showing there were more native born women than immigrant men, indicating women's suffrage could counteract this "menace." In the South, they pointed out that there were more white women than Black men and women combined, which would insure the continuation of white supremacy. Delegates from Black women's clubs were excluded from conventions. Blacke women were segregated in suffrage parades, and in certain years, Black women suffrage groups were asked not to apply for membership in the NAWSA since it would taint the Association's image.
The fact that suffragists would appeal to the most racist chauvinistic instincts was disgraceful for a group having its origins in the abolitionist movement. This is one of the most ignoble episodes in the history of the struggle. Fortunately, suffragists retreated from this position around the turn of the century, when they realized the need to win support from immigrant voters. In fact, New York state was won to women's suffrage in 1917 largely because of the large immigrant vote in New York City.
One of the many myths perpetuated about the women's suffrage movement is that the fight for the vote was strictly a middle-class movement-irrelevant to working women. This was far from true. It was clearly in the interests of working women to win suffrage. Mainly they wanted the vote as women whose equal claims to citizenship were being denied. They also saw the vote as one other way they could improve their working conditions. As Susan B. Anthony said: "The disenfranchised must always do the work, accept the wages, and occupy the position the enfranchised assign them." Lacking the power of the vote, working women's demands were not taken seriously by muckraking politicians of the period. This was demonstrated in 1910 when women workers attempted to get the mayor of New York to appropriate funds for factory inspections. He said to them: "Ladies, why do you waste your time year after year in coming before us for this appropriation? You have not a vote in your constituency and you know it, and we know it, and you know we know it."
One of the holidays the women's liberation movement has recently reclaimed had its origins in working women's demand for the vote. On March 8, 1908 (a day German socialist Clara Zetkin was later to declare International Women's Day), women garment workers marched through New York City's) Lower East Side), protesting sweatshop conditions and demanding the vote. Working women later testified in Albany, New York, at annual meetings for suffragists, marched at suffrage parades, and organized suffrage rallies outside their plant gates.
During thsi same period (1890-1910), the number of women workers doubled to eight million and their plight became the focus of much social reform. At a mass meeting in 1890 of female retail shop workers, a Consumer's League was formed to publicize their low pay and hazardous working conditions. Aided by socialists and suffragists, a "White List" was devised , consistingof the names of those few employing factories who met the shop women's demasnds for protective legislation, no child labor, a minimum wage and a shorter work week. Consumers were asked to buy only from manufacturers on the list.
The early 1900s saw the growth of many unions which were largely female, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union being the best example. At the 1903 American Federation of Labor convention, a National Women's Trade Union League was formed for women in unions. For many years the WTUL functioned as the women's movement within organized labor and labor's voice within the suffragist struggtle. Although it worked closely with the AFL, it existed because of thye AFL's indifference to women workers. It was thought that women's wages were too low for them to pay full union dues and that they did not remain in the labor force long enough to be worth organizing. The NWTUL played a crucial role in the many labor strikes of the time, publicizing strike demands and raising strike funds.
The period from 1896 to 1910 is known as the "doldrums period" in women's rights. Not a single state referendum was won between these years, despite ceaseless campaigns. Susan B. Anthony's death in 1906 seemed to create a void in leadership no one else was able to fill. Her life had spanned almost sixty years of struggle for women's rights and the fact that she died without seeing women win one of the most basic of riights-the vote-must have demoralized the second generation of suffragists, many of whom had already foght twenty-five years. But this slump soon ended and a third stage in the movement began-ushered in by two events in 1910: the victory of suffrage in Washington state and Alice Paul's return from England.
The militant wing of the British suffrage movement, led by the Parkhursts, had abandoned trying to win the vote through gentle persuasion. British women burned down several buildings, including churche and castles, mutilated valued museum art objects, "stormed" the House of Commons and blew up mail boxes in their attempt to win the vote.
They felt that attacks on property would force the British government to take notice of their demand. Not even [p. 30] high society and diplomatic social occasions were immune from their attack. A common tactic was to infilltrate these tightly-guarded receptions, either by using an invitation a weatlthy supporter had turned over to them or by posing as a servant. In the middle of the gathering, the secret suffragist would jump up on the table, unfurl a "Vote for Women" banner, and launch into a speech. After one such occasion the headlines read "Suffragette disguised as lady penetrates foreign office reception."
So deep was the commitment of the suffragettes to the struggle that one deliberately gave her life to it. On Derby Day in 1913, Emily Davison, wearingthe purple, white and green colors of the suffragettes, threw herself under the King's horse and was traampled to death. For their actions , hundreds of suffragettes were thrown into prison, where they organized hunger strikes. Alice Paul, an American studying in England, had been among them.
Inspired by her experiences in England, she was determined to revitalize the American movement. Until this point, suffrage forces had been working on a state-to-state basis, feeling they had a better chance to win the states one by one than to get a federal amendment passed. Paul criticized this approach, claiming that by confining themselves to a few strikes at a time, women were not feeling their full force as a national movement, and the powers in Washington, D.C., were escaping attack. She proposed that energies be concentrarted on getting a federal amendment passed, followed by state-by-state ratification,
The first step Alice Paul took was to organize a demonstration of 10,000 in Washington, the day before President Wilson's inauguration, to dramatize the large number of women expecting the vote from his administration. The demonstrators were attacked by patriotic on-lookers, had their cloths torn off, were pelted by burning cigars, and knocked to the gtround. Troops were sent in to restore order, only to create more of a riot by themselves beating the women.
[p. 30] Finding the NAWSA hesitant to turn toward the national amendment, Paul set up the Congressional Union in 1913 as an auxiliary to the NAWSA. Her strategy was to hold the party in power, wtih President Wilson, as its symbol, respoonsible for women being denied the right to vote and to harass, the Democrats until they found it was politically inexpediant to oppse women's suffrage. Paul's chief contribution to the once-again rising women's suffrage movement was that she persuaded woment to stop begging and begin demanding.
In 1914, the Congressional Union was expelled from the NAWSA, charged with refusing to participate in state campaigns and using confrontational tactics that were alienating peotential supporters.
In 1916, the Congressional Union held its own convention and formed an independent Women's Party. Not a political party in the usual sense, the Women's Party had no intention of vying to take power. It had just one plank -winning the vote. Recent victories had given women the vote in twelve states, which composed one-fouth of the electorate [electoral] college. The tactic of the Women's Party was to convince the women in these twelve states to vote against, and defeat, Wilson. As the partty explained:
"One thing we have to teach Mr. Wilson and his party-and all on-looking parties-in that the group which opposes national suffrage for a woman will lose women's support in twelve great commonwealths controlling nearly a hundred electoral votes; too large a fraction to risk, or to risk twice, even if once risked successfully. If that is made clear, it is a matter of total indifference to the Women's Party-so far as suffrage is concerned-why is the next president of the United States."
Peace was the major issue of the 1916 Wilson-Hughes presidential election: the slogan was "Vote for Wilson. He kept us out of war." To which the Women's Party retorted, "Vote against Wilson. He kept us out of suffrage." The WP, with a membership of over fifty thousand (as compared to two million in the NAWSA) conducted such a vigorous campaign against Wilson in the suffrage states that it was hazardous fo him to travel there. One Woman's Party campaigner, Inez Milholland, toured California, speaking night and day and sleeping only on trains. At a rally in San Francisco, she asked "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?" and with these words, collapsed dead from exhaustion. Mass memorial meetings were held across the country to protest the unnecessary death of this young woman who died with liberty on her lips.
Wilson was re-elected, carrying ten of the twelve suffrage states. In Illinois, however, the only state where votes were tallied by sex, women voted against him two to one. The important thing was that the suffrage movement forced the Democratic leaders onto the defensive. They felt compelled to put out as much literature on suffrage as they did on peace.
Then the slaughter of the first imperialistic war began. As in the Civil War, women were asked to defer their own demands to the war effort. Although the NAWSA insisted there was no contradiction between waging the war and giving women the vote, they did enough war work to avoid any questioning of their patriotism.
The Woman's Party, however, continued to fight for the vote. They picketed the White House with slogans such as "Democracy should begin at home." Noting that women in Russia were given the vote after the czar was overthrown, they contrasted "free Russia" to "Kaiser Wilson." When envoys representing Kerensky came to the White House and suffragists unfurled banners telling the Russians that the U.S. was a democracy in name only, the Wilson regime began to crack down. Shots were fired into the Woman's Party headquarters. All picketing in front of the White House was made illegal, and mass arrests were made of those who continued.
Nonetheless, on Bastille Day, pickets were there with a banner, "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite," When its bearers were arrested, two more women stepped forward to take their place; they were arrested, and so it continued with over five hundred women arrested in all. Those found guilty were sent to prison workhouses where they went on hunger strikes, demanding to be treated as political prisoners, and were force-fed. The arrests never curtailed the movement. There was always another woman who stepped forward and took the place of her arrested sister. The brutal treatnent the women received in the prison workhouses became a national scandal. Finally public pressure became so great that all the suffragists were unconditionally released and their sentences nullified.
[p. 31] The NAWSA played no part in the White House demonstrations. Its president, Carrie Catt, visited Wilson quite frequently, and felt she was slowly moving him toward active support of woman's suffrage. She considered this approach more effective than working to defeat him. The NAWSA was winning growing numbers of state victories, most importantly New York in 1917. While their sisters were geing so brutally treated in jail, the NAWSA neve issued a single word of perotst or defense of their right to picket. In fact, they went so far as to carry signs in demonstrations denoucing the left wing of the movement and declaring that they were in no way affiliated with the Women's Party.
As during the Civil War, the first world war brought large numbers of women out of the home and into either war relier work or industry. Women worked in many fields-from stell mills to explosive factories and on the railroads. It would seem that this performance combined with the large number of states where women were already voting with no disastrous effects on the home, would have put an end to the antisuffrage hysteria. The last ten years of the struggle for suffrage, brought forth the most organized opposition.
1920: antisuffrage forces defeated, Women vote in Federal elections
The opponents represented the growing interests of an expanding capitalist class which based itselt on the permanent existence of an oppressed class of wage-earners. Since women were the most underpaid and least organized sector of the working class, American capitalism was not eager to give them the vote. The ruling class feared that the equality of the sexes implied by granting women the right to vote might rouse them from their docility and cause them to start asserting their right to equal wages and job opportunitities. They anticipated women would support protective laws for workers.
This was especially true in the East where industrial and business interests actively campaigned against women's suffrage. The oligarchy of wealth began a red-baiting campaign, linking women's suffrage to struggles to improve working class conditions, and linking both to creeping socialism. In the South, the racist ruling claas were flagrantly defying the 15th amendment by disenfranchising Black men and were not eager to have to deal with Black women as citizens.
In the West, the liquor industry feared women would vote in prohibition and claimed the women's suffrage movement was the same organization as the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The mobilization of the Oregon liquor industry to defeat a state referendum on woman's suffrage was typicial. They calculated that 50,000 votes were necessary to defeat the referendum. Each of the 2,000 liquor retailers in Oregon were notified, and instructed to get twenty-five votes against suffrage-from employees, butchers, landlords-or else they might be put out of business.
The anti-woman's suffrage alliance of the South, East and West was joined by the political machines controlling the govenment. Women had promised they would clean up politics, going so far as to say that if they had been allowed to vote, Tammany Hall would never have come to power. So women's suffrage poses a threat to the pillars of the governemnt, based on corruption and bribery.
These forces were careful to disguise the real reasons for their opposition. While behind the scenes they whipped up hysteria in their own ranks and bribed politicians to vote against women's suffrage, pubically they put out propaganda that was an outrageous insult to a mass woman's suffrage movement. One such leaflet read: "Housewives! You do not need the vote to clean out you sink spout. A handful of potash and some boiling water is quicker and cheaper. Good cooking lessens alcoholic craving quicker than a vote on a local option. Why vote for pure food laws when you can purify your ice box with slateratus water?"
In 1911 the antis set up the National Women's Organization to Oppose Suffrage. Its members claimed to speak for the majority of their sex when they insisted they did not want to be burdened with the vote.
They produced "Spiderweb charts" tracing the suffrage movement straight to Moscow and implying it was a Bolshevik plot aimed at the nationalization of women. The NAWSA quickly exposed this group as simply a female front for big money interests, especially in the liquor industry.
The urgency with which these interests geared into blocking women's suffrage indicated that victory was an imminent one. It was. The contradiction between the role women were playing in the country and the fact that they were denied the vote became an international scandal which those who claimed the United States was a model democracy were having a hard time explaining. Although the 65th Congress had been barred from taking up anything but war measures, it set January 10, 1918, to vote on the woman's suffrage amendment.
The vote itself contained much drama. A New York representative left the death bed of his wife, an ardent suffragist, to cast his "aye" vote and returned home to attend her funeral. The amendment carried, 274 to 136, exactly the two-thirds majority required.
It took until May 20, 1919, to win the Senate vote. Ahead lay ratification in thirty-siz states-the most tedious task of all. The antis made their last desparate attempts to block victory and managed to gain control of all the deep-southern states, meaning suffrage had to carry in almost all the rest. Finally, on August 26, 1920, the 36th state, Tennessee, ratified. Women everywhere voted in elections that year, making the United States the 27th country to extend the right to vote to women. Despite the fact that women's voting had become so accepted, it was not until 1969 that the last state, Georgia, ratified the 19th amendment.
An issue which had united women for seventy years was won. The struggle had involved three generations, with none of the founding leaders living to see the 1920 victory. The two wings of the woman's movement continued to work separately, and since many women felt the vote was the only change in status women needed, both groups entered the 1920s with their membership severely reduced. The NAWSA changed its name to the League of Women Voters and began encouraging women to register to vote and educating them about the candidates.
The Woman's Party campaigned for further legal rights for women, especially their right to guardianship of their children, and this was won in sixteen states. Soon tiring, [p. 41] of working to pass hundreds of individual bills countering sexual discrimination in each individual state, the Woman's Party drafted the Equal Rights Amendment which would make any form of sexual discrimination unconstitutional. The ERA was first introduced to Congress in 1923 (where it was promptly voted down), and for a time it appeared that the women's movement would unite around this issue. But it did not.
. . .
Was the victory worth seventy years of struggle?
. . .
Waltraud Ireland (1970) " . . . the feminists failed to produce an integrated, radical analysis either of the nature of women's oppression or tis relationship to the basic social and economic structures of capitalist society . . . success killed the women's movement."
. . .
The frist place to look for a partial answer is in the general social and political conditions under which the suffrage movement declined. It has been pointed out that the struggle of women for their liberation has ebbed and flowed according to the extend of general radicalism in the society. It began in the era before the Civil War (a revolutionary period when an entire system-the southern plantation system based on slavery-was challenged and overthrown) and dies out in the years of reaction after the first World War. During the 1920s, the liberalism of the Progressive era was replaced by the hysteria of the Red Scare. Strikers were brutally smashed. . . . there were exceptions to the general trend of conservatism . . . It was clearly not a good period for any movement for social change.
Under these conditions, rebellion and discontent took a personal, rather than organized political form. During the 1920s many feminists who had fought for the vote shifted their rebellion to the realm of individual sexual freedom and dress reforms as embodied by "flapperism." And in a certain sense, the fight against female oppression did continue in this area.
[Note the recurring theme of Paris, tourism and cultural change as havens, cultural melting pots, and personal control of a realized life, even zones for out of culture experienes. KR]
For just as the "sexual revoluton" of the 1960s contributed to the liberation of women [disassociating] sex and reproduction, the flapper era gave women the right to drink and smoke in public, shed their bodies of restrictive clothiing and enjoy pursuits beyond the parlor . . .
The suffragists had focused on the vote not out of fear of other issues. In fact the womna's rights movement had raised and won other demands: the right to control their own wages, an end to child labor, protective legislation. But our sisters chose suffragte as the focus of struggle because they correctly felt that so long as such a blatant assertion of their inferiority under the law existed, their basic dignity and humanity were denied . . .
. . . One weakness of the woman's rights movement which contributed to its decline was its illusions about the vote and what women would be able to do with it. This reflected deeper illusions about the nature of society itself and the possiblity of winning complete liberation uner capitalism . . .
. . . and early socialists in the United States did not understand feminism.
. . . [p. 42] Most of the socialists thought Feminism was middle class, non-worker related, and potentially divisive along sex line. And race issues were similarly suspect for the socialists.
. . . The great victory of the suffrage movement was that it demonstrated, for the first time, that women can organize as women to raise demands that meet our needs, and that through struggle we can win these demands.
Unlike during the 1920s, the conditions for an all-out attack on women's traditional roles are now overripe. The tremendous technological expansion and immense social wealth we see in the United States today, make demands for birth control, child-care centers, and equal pay for women seem much more reasonable and attainable than ever before. It is only by being conscious of these changes in the objective conditions laying the basis for the feminsist movement that we can understand the reasons why the women's rights movement died out, and why the movement today has so much more potential.
. . .
Unlike the movement of the 1920s, the new women's rights movement has arisen in a period of growing and deepening radicalization. An entire generaltion of young women is becomiing convinced of the fact that capitalism is historically and forever incapable of ending our oppression. The capitalist verbiage of freedom rings hypocritical when this is systematically denied to 53 per cent of the population because of sex. Rather than organizig around a single issue such as the vote, the conditions now exist that make it possible for the women's liberation movement to take on the oppression of an entire sex, and to raise a whole series of demands.
Granting women the vote was somethig capitalism could begrudgingly do, but the demands that the movement is raising today-for free, twenty-four hour child care, for free abortion on demand, for an end to job discrimination, for roles beyond that of wife and mother-can not be met under this system . . . the logic of the demands taken together-that women should have full control over their lives, freed from responsibilities within the family-is something a system dependent on the continued oppression of women cannot tolerate . . .
Feminists today already have fewer illusions than our sisters did about what a particular change within the capitalist system can do . . . Through the examples of the Black struggle and the anit-war movement, women today have acquired far more faith in themselves, and in the power of mass movements to change society. We will no longer tolerate anyone putting our struggle last.
The struggle for woman's suffrage was unable to end the oppression of women-the oldest, deepest form of oppression in history-does not mean that it failed or should not have been waged. It simply means that those of us in the feminist movement today must pick up our sisters' struggle, inspired by their examples, and cartry it farther.
. . . .
Biblio.