The "Chinese Question" and American Labor Historians
Stanford M. Lyman
[from New Politics, vol. 7, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 28, Winter
2000]
STANFORD M. LYMAN is Robert J. Morrow Eminent Scholar and professor
of Social Science at Florida Atlantic University. A specialist on
Asian American studies, minorities and sociological theory, he is
the author of Chinese Americans, The Asian in North America, and
Chinatown and Little Tokyo: Power, Conflict, and Community among
Chinese and Japanese Immigrants in America. His most recent book is
Postmodernism and a Sociology of the Absurd and Other Essays on
the "Nouvelle Vague" in American Social Science.
http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue28/lyman28.htm


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Adolph Strasser and Samuel Gompers became two "of the most famous
architects of the skill-, race-, and sex-defined trade union model,"
rejecting their older adherence to socialism in favor of "trade
unionism, pure and simple."

The Chinese worker and later other Asian, non- white, and non-Anglo
workers became the permanent, indeed the ideal enemy, a functional
equivalent of the Woodhull-Andrews Equal Rights Party, toward which
their Sorgean-derived expulsion strategy was irrevocably directed.

On October 27, 1878, addressing a mass meeting of New York City's
tobacco workers engaged in the struggle to end tenement house
production of cigars, Strasser, according to a news report in the
Nov. 5 issue of the New York Tribune, made a speech in which he said
that when the Chinese cigar makers in California began to crowd the
whites out of the work, the latter succeeded in passing a State law
requiring every cigar factory to affix on each box a union stamp, by
which cigars made by white men could be distinguished from those
made by Chinese; and the public showed their condemnation of Chinese
work by refusing to smoke cigars made by Chinamen.

The Cigar Makers' Official Journal, a monthly publication of the
CMIU, established in November, 1875, began to editorialize against
Chinese cigar makers on a regular basis after November 8, 1877 when,
in the midst of the tenement house work stoppage, the New York World
printed the aforementioned false rumor that cigar manufacturers had
requested that 300 Chinese cigarmakers be sent to New York City to
replace the whites on strike.

According to the notes supplied by the editor of Volume I of the
Gompers Papers, "The journal subscribed to the view generally
expressed in the American press of the time that Chinese workers
unlike other immigrant groups, could not be assimilated into
American culture."

A central plank of what would become the Sinophobic and racialist
ideology of the burgeoning AFL was put together by Gompers and
Strasser, the latter of whom adopted the insidious "white label" as
a national tool, analogizing the fight carried on by white
California cigar makers against their Chinese fellow workers to his
own ultimately successful effort to expel from that line of work
the "tenement scum,"i.e., rival socialist cigar makers who had
broken with the Gompers-Strasser faction and formed the Progressive
Cigar Makers Union.

together with Gompers, to use Mink's way of wording the
issue, "defended the anti-Chinese posture of their California
colleagues and actively involved themselves in the exclusion
movement."

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Adolph Strasser (1843 - 1939)
THIS HUNGARIAN-BORN FOUNDER OF THE AMALGAMATED TRADES AND LABOR
UNION of New York City and Vicinity and Gompers' hand-picked nominee
as president of the Cigar Makers International Union (1877- 1891)
appears more often than any other union leader in Gyory's book.

And well he might, for throughout much of his long life219 he ceased
his union activities as auditor, organizer, legislative
representative, arbitrator, and troubleshooter, in 1914, turning for
the final 25 years of his life to real estate in New York and
Florida Strasser served as Gompers' close colleague, coordinator,
fellow union officer, and strategist for the AFL executive, as he
had for it predecessors.

Together with Gompers, Strasser developed his perspective out of a
peculiarly American reformulation of the ideas of Marx's American
correspondent, Friedrich Sorge, leader of Section One of the
International Workingmen's Association, the latter having been
founded by Karl Marx in 1864.

If there is need for further evidence in support of one strand of
the theory of "American exceptionalism" here referring to the manner
in which European conceptions of class were transmogrified to become
the thesis that a workingman's wages ought to be calibrated on the
basis of his biosocial proximity to "whiteness" it will be found in
Strasser's (and Gompers') adaptation of German Marxism: "If there
was anything exceptional about the American labor movement compared
to its counterparts in other industrial countries," writes Timothy
Messer-Kruse, "it was the unique way in which the teleological
underpinnings and revolutionary fervor of Marxism were deracinated
and engrafted upon an essentially inward-looking and racially
exclusive trade union movement."

For, as Messer-Kruse goes on to show, Strasser and Gompers, although
each had independently "absorbed the passion, commitment, and
historical materialism of their German American Marxist teachers,
[together they created out of these one of] the most politically
conservative working-class movements of the 19th and 20th
centuries."

A central plank of what would become the Sinophobic and racialist
ideology of the burgeoning AFL was put together by Gompers and
Strasser, the latter of whom adopted the insidious "white label" as
a national tool, analogizing the fight carried on by white
California cigar makers against their Chinese fellow workers to his
own ultimately successful effort to expel from that line of work
the "tenement scum,"i.e., rival socialist cigar makers who had
broken with the Gompers-Strasser faction and formed the Progressive
Cigar Makers Union.

Gyory wishes his readers to believe that Strasser's testimony before
the Hewitt Committee favoring the exclusion of all contract laborers
from the United States regardless of race which he reprints refutes
the charges made by both Herbert Hill and Gwendolyn Mink that
Strasser, together with Gompers, to use Mink's way of wording the
issue, "defended the anti-Chinese posture of their California
colleagues and actively involved themselves in the exclusion
movement."

But, Mink's statement is in accord with the facts on this issue.
Strasser took a major part in bringing California workingmen's anti-
Chinese prejudices to the east coast locals and to the national
executive council of what would become the AFL. On October 27, 1878,
addressing a mass meeting of New York City's tobacco workers engaged
in the struggle to end tenement house production of cigars,
Strasser, according to a news report in the Nov. 5 issue of the New
York Tribune, made a speech in which he said that when the Chinese
cigar makers in California began to crowd the whites out of the
work, the latter succeeded in passing a State law requiring every
cigar factory to affix on each box a union stamp, by which cigars
made by white men could be distinguished from those made by Chinese;
and the public showed their condemnation of Chinese work by refusing
to smoke cigars made by Chinamen.

The Cigar Makers' Official Journal, a monthly publication of the
CMIU, established in November, 1875, began to editorialize against
Chinese cigar makers on a regular basis after November 8, 1877 when,
in the midst of the tenement house work stoppage, the New York World
printed the aforementioned false rumor that cigar manufacturers had
requested that 300 Chinese cigarmakers be sent to New York City to
replace the whites on strike.

According to the notes supplied by the editor of Volume I of the
Gompers Papers, "The journal subscribed to the view generally
expressed in the American press of the time that Chinese workers
unlike other immigrant groups, could not be assimilated into
American culture."

Thus, the CMIU, over which Strasser presided for 14 years, took a
position based not on the generality of working conditions or the
universality of class consciousness, but rather one rooted in the
assessment of each ethnic group's assimilability. Largely composed
of German and Bohemian immigrants, whose separate language-based
locals Strasser managed to merge the CMIU, whose rallies Strasser
often addressed in German, had no doubts about the Americanization
capabilities of these European workers but no sympathetic concern
for the working and living situations of the Chinese laborers in the
same industry.

Had Gyory consulted articles on the labor question that appeared in
Die Gewerkschafts-Zeitung, a German-language publication that was
published for only a few years in New York City and edited and
contributed to by Adolph Strasser, Carl Speyer and Hugo Mller, he
would have discovered more evidence of Strasser's support for
Chinese exclusion.

In the formative years of America's trade union movement, this
journal had a significant influence not only on its German-reading
subscribers, but also on August Sartorius von Waltershausen (1852-
1938), a German economist who visited the United States in the
1880s, carefully consulted its pages, and wrote comprehensively and
critically about many aspects of the labor movement.

In 1883, Sartorius published a lengthy essay entitled "Die Chinesen
in den Vereinigten Staaten von America,"which, while it concluded
with support for exclusion, offered what David Montgomery
calls "both a thorough account of the harassment and exclusion of
Chinese by state and federal legislation, labor movement boycotts,
and mob action between 1844 and 1882 and a serious informative
effort to analyze the economic and institutional framework of the
Chinese immigrant community itself."

Sartorius had met and talked with Strasser, among others, and
adapted his own, already established racist outlook on the allegedly
inferior races (influenced, as Montgomery reminds us, by the
writings of a German social geographer, Friedrich Ratzel [1844-
1904], a right-wing National Liberal imperialist and Social
Darwinist, who had also visited the United States and written on the
Chinese question) to the Sinophobia of the white trade unionists.

Moreover, Sartorius praised the use of the boycott and the white
label, tactics championed and introduced to the East coast white
workingmen by Strasser, describing with obvious approval how the
boycott and the label were combined in a two-fold attack on Chinese
cigarmakers:

In the last three years during which the labor movement has made
such extraordinary strides in terms of organization, the label
system has been more successful than ever, particularly since it has
been linked to boycotts. In saloons and shops union members demand
label cigars.

If the owner or the manager does not supply them, the establishment
is boycotted. When he accepts the workers' demands, they make
further demands, for instance that he stock only label cigars (i.e.,
for all smokers). If he does not accede, the workers will again
boycott his goods. In the smaller cities, where unionization is
strong, this approach has been successful on many occasions.

To understand Strasser's role in the anti-Chinese movement one must
examine what he (and Gompers) learned from watching the fractious
divisions within two American sections of the International
Workingman's Association. Strasser and Gompers were at first
sympathetic to socialism and to much of the efforts of IWA Section
One, Sorge's largely German group.

Sorge perceived as his greatest rival the leaders of the mostly
American-born Section Twelve, headed by feminist, spiritualist, and
candidate for the Presidency of the United States, Victoria Woodhull
(1838-1927), and by the utopian socialist sociologist who had
translated and published in Woodhull's and Claflin's Weekly the
first English language version of Marx's and Engel's Communist
Manifesto, Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812-1886).238 Strasser and
Gompers carefully noted how Sorge utilized expulsion and the boycott
to rid the American branch of the IWA of its left-wing deviationists.

Thus, in 1872, when, Woodhull and Andrews formed the Equal Rights
Party with Woodhull self- nominated for the U.S. Presidency and
African American ex-slave Frederick Douglass as her vice-
presidential running mate, Sorge appealed to Marx for assistance in
ridding the IWA of this wholly unprecedented move.

Marx complied, denouncing Section Twelve members as "bogus
reformers, middle class quacks, and trading politicians" and Andrews
and Woodhull and their followers as "middle-class humbugs and worn
out Yankee swindlers in the reform business." Section Twelve was
suspended and then expelled from the International, the electoral
campaign failed, and Sorge and Section One emerged the victors.

What Strasser and Gompers learned from this incident was that their
enemies might also be boycotted and if necessary expelled from the
trade union movement. Whereas the Woodhull-Andrews group
thereafter "rejected the trade union tactic of winning a larger
share of the capitalist pie by controlling access to labor markets
and rejecting women and racial minorities from their membership
rolls," moving toward "egalitarian and inclusive unionism," Adolph
Strasser and Samuel Gompers became two "of the most famous
architects of the skill-, race-, and sex-defined trade union model,"
rejecting their older adherence to socialism in favor of "trade
unionism, pure and simple."

The Chinese worker and later other Asian, non- white, and non-Anglo
workers became the permanent, indeed the ideal enemy, a functional
equivalent of the Woodhull-Andrews Equal Rights Party, toward which
their Sorgean-derived expulsion strategy was irrevocably directed.