October 24, 1871: The Los Angeles Chinese Massacre

October 24, 1871: As it frequently did in the 19th Century, especially in California, the specter of anti-Asian bigotry rears its head. After hearing (it remains unknown if it was true) that Chinese men had killed a rancher and shot a policeman, a mob of around 500 people walked into Chinatown in Los Angeles, attacking, robbing and killing Chinese immigrants. They were shot, and, regardless of whether they were already dead, hanged. The number varies, between 17 and 20.

Although Northeastern cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Boston have "Chinatowns," the West Coast of North America, due to also being on the Pacific Ocean, has always had more people of Asian descent. Los Angeles developed a Chinatown, a Little Tokyo, a Koreatown, a Historic Filipinotown, and a Little Saigon. San Francisco has, outside of New York, America's best-known Chinatown. And in Canada, Vancouver is said to be the most Asian city in the Western Hemisphere.

Chinese immigrants were hired by rich men in the American West, especially railroad barons, as cheap labor, which led to other cheap things becoming known as "Chinese." As late as 1958, the mesh screen that tried to prevent easy home runs from going over the too-close left-field fence at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the Los Angeles Dodgers played before Dodger Stadium was built, was nicknamed "The Chinese Wall," and the balls hit over it "Chinese home runs."

And, of course, being Asian, and thus "yellow," Chinese immigrants were not "white," and faced racial discrimination. They were thought of as dumb, lazy, and ineffective -- despite being used as cheap labor. Someone who didn't have much of a chance of getting something done was said to "not have a Chinaman's chance."

In spite of this, the National Hockey League, the Canadian Football League, and the England national football (soccer) team each had a Chinese player before they had a black player.

As a result of the discrimination, like other ethnic groups, the Chinese developed their own protection groups, which became gangs involved in organized crime. In their case, they were called "tongs." As with most cities, there was not one dominant gang, but multiple gangs.

And in 1871 in Los Angeles, rumor got around that a white policeman and a white rancher had been killed as a result of an inter-tong fight. As would be the case in the race riots of the 1960s, the rumor spread that it was done on purpose, and representatives of the group whose native son was killed retaliated.

The sad part is, of the 500 people who attacked the residents of Chinatown, not all of them were white: For once, the whites and the Hispanics teamed up. To make matters worse, the street in Chinatown where most of the attacks took place was named Calle de los Negros -- "Negro Alley." Chinese men, including boys, were hanged. It has been called the largest mass lynching in American history.

Eight men were convicted of manslaughter, but these convictions were overturned on appeal, due to what Wikipedia calls "technicalities," but does not elaborate. And, like many other racist incidents in American history, this one got buried, before being uncovered by activists over a century later. Many other such racial attacks got covered up for decades, most notably the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921.

Roy Bean, the famed Texas judge who called himself "the only law west of the Pecos," was alleged to have said, "I see in this book that it's against the law to kill a man, but it doesn't say it's against the law to kill a Chinaman."

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October 24, 1871 was a Tuesday. There were no scores on this historic day: Baseball season was over, college football and ice hockey barely existed, and basketball wouldn't be invented for another 20 years. 

May 26, 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924

May 26, 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 is signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. It was intended to control the racial makeup of the United States by greatly restricting immigration.

People had long been coming to America from all over the world. In the late 1840s, the Irish Potato Famine brought in people from Ireland, to the point where, by the end of the 20th Century, there were more Irish people in America than in Ireland. The European Revolutions of 1848 also led millions of people, especially Germans, to flee. Most Americans don't realize it, but Germans are still the largest ethnic group in America -- ahead of African-Americans and Hispanics, let alone Irish and Italians.

The late 19th Century saw a great deal of immigrants from Southern Europe: Italy, Greece, and the Balkan countries in between that were then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These people were, at the same time, joined by many Jews fleeing Eastern Europe, including Austria, Romania and the Russian Empire, including present-day Poland and Ukraine.

The Southern Europeans were white, but darker-skinned than people from Germany and the British Isles. And they were Catholic, in many cases Eastern Orthodox, which seemed, to many Americans, to be even more "foreign" than the Roman Catholicism practiced by the Irish. Many of the Eastern Europeans were also Catholic, some Eastern Orthodox. And the Jews weren't even Christian.

These immigrants included my mother's paternal grandparents from Vilnius in Lithuania, before 1901, when their 1st child was born in Manhattan; and my father's Catholic paternal grandparents from Borki Wielkie in northeastern Poland, sometime between 1891, when my great-grandfather was born there, and 1914, when my grandfather was born in Newark, New Jersey. It's only recently that I was able to narrow it down that far, much less any further. (As for maternal grandparents, my mother's were English and my father's were Dutch, and they were already here before the American Civil War of the 1860s, but that's all I know so far.)

All this foreignness led to a backlash, which got to be disgusting. In 1896, one national magazine actually printed these words: "Europe is vomiting."

This cartoon had the same idea.

But it didn't stop. In 1907, immigration to America peaked, with 1.1 million people coming in. April 17 of that year was the busiest day New York's Ellis Island immigration station ever had.

White Anglo-Saxon anger over immigration, including agitation from the Ku Klux Klan -- who, let's not forget, were Protestant, and thus as much anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic as anti-black -- was a big reason why Prohibition was passed -- and a big reason why it passed when it did. Anti-immigrant and anti-liquor activists knew that, after the reapportionment from the 1920 Census, they'd never have another chance, so they had to get it done before then, to strike the blow they wanted against the Germans with their beer, the Italians with their wine, the Irish with their whiskey, and the Eastern Europeans with their vodka.

The 18th Amendment was ratified in 1919, and took effect in 1920. Of course, ethnic gangs got better organized, and bootlegged and sold booze, and the American Mafia as we know it was born. Prohibition totally backfired, and the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th in 1933. By that point, organized crime had anticipated this, and had increased their involvement in their other fields, including gambling and prostitution. Drugs soon followed.

The activists did not learn their lesson, and tried harder to restrict immigration. The Immigration Act of 1924 was also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, for its sponsors, Representative Albert Johnson of Washington, and Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, both Republicans.

Johnson was not merely a racist, he was a eugenicist. In 1927, he justified the Act as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed." And Reed was an out-and-out fascist: On July 1, 1932, during the Bonus Army march on Washington, He took to the Senate floor, and said, "I do not often envy other countries and their governments, but I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now."

The Act prevented immigration from Asia, and set quotas on the number of immigrants from the rest of the world: 165,000 per year, and 3 percent of any country from their 1910 population. It also authorized the creation of the country's first formal border control service, the U.S. Border Patrol, and established a "consular control system," which allowed entry only to those who first obtained a visa from a U.S. consulate abroad.

Albert Johnson was defeated in the Franklin Roosevelt landslide of 1932. He died in 1957, a proud racist and eugenicist to the end. David Reed was defeated in 1934, in another Democratic landslide. He died in 1953. His house in Washington, D.C. is, with some appropriateness, now the Embassy of a nation of nonwhite people: The Asian nation of Laos.

The 1924 Act would define U.S. immigration policy for nearly three decades, until being substantially revised by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, and ultimately replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

On November 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Its most significant effect was that it allowed immigrants who had entered the U.S. illegally before January 1, 1982 to apply for legal status, provided they paid fines and back taxes. This provision, which Reagan himself referred to as “amnesty,” allowed around 3 million immigrants to secure legal status after paying $185, demonstrating “good moral character” and learning to speak English.

Conservative activists since Reagan, who have demagogued the issue of illegal immigration since the 1990s and especially since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, find it hard to believe that their favorite President of all time could have done such a thing, but he did. Say what you want about him, and I have, but the man did believe that immigrants made America stronger, not weaker.

And every President after him agreed: Both George Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- until Donald Trump, who was so anti-immigrant, he made Calvin Coolidge look like a believer in open borders. 

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May 26, 1924 was a  Monday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees beat the Detroit Tigers, 8-2 at Yankee Stadium. "Bullet Joe" Bush went the distance for the win. Babe Ruth hit a home run, and 2nd baseman Ernie Johnson went 4-for-4 with 2 home runs and 3 RBIs. Ty Cobb, by this point also the Tigers' manager, went 0-for-3 with a walk.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Cleveland Indians, 10-9 at Fenway Park in Baltimore. Tris Speaker, by this point also the Indians' manager, went 2-for-5 with an RBI.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the St. Louis Browns, 2-1 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. George Sisler, the Browns' greatest player ever, went 0-for-4.

* The Washington Senators beat the Chicago White Sox, 8-2 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds, 4-3 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. None of the other National League teams were scheduled for the day.

March 23, 1903: The Oxnard Strike

March 23, 1903: The Oxnard Strike reaches a climax. It is a landmark not just for the labor movement, but for civil rights, especially in the State of California.

Brothers Henry, James, Benjamin and Robert Oxnard ran a sugar refinery in Brooklyn. In 1887, they sold it, and moved west to booming California. In 1897, they founded the American Beet Sugar Company. Many of their workers were Chinese, but Exclusion Acts reduced their availability, and so they had to hire Japanese and Mexican workers. Eventually, the brothers became members of the Western Agricultural Contracting Company (WACC).

On February 11, 1903, the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA) was founded by 500 Japanese and 200 Mexican laborers. They accused the WACC of artificially suppressing wages. They opposed the subcontracting system, arguing that it forced workers to pay double commissions. And they called for the freedom to buy goods, rather than be subjected to the inflated prices of the company store.

Limiting employees to shopping only at stores that the company owned meant that, in some cases (not this one), they didn't get paid in money so much as in credit; and that, if they didn't produce enough, they were actually in debt to the store.

In 1947, country singer Merle Travis wrote "Sixteen Tons," imagining a coal miner who had to shovel eighteen tons a day to "break even" at the company store. With Tennessee Ernie Ford singing it in a basso profundo voice that made it a Number 1 hit in 1955, the chorus went:

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt.

St. Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go:
I owe my soul to the company store.

The WACC was never going to meet the demands of this union of nonwhite people, and so, in early March, the strike was on.

On March 23, the strike reached its turning point. During a confrontation between the JMLA and IALU strikebreakers in Oxnard's Chinatown, shots were fired, wounding 2 Japanese and 2 Mexican members of the JMLA. Luis Vasquez, a Mexican member of the JMLA, was killed by the gunfire.

Initial reports by local newspapers, of course, owned by rich men, including WACC members, blamed the JMLA for the violence. A statement released by the JMLA in the following days asserted that union members were not armed at the confrontation, pointing out that no union members had been arrested. The sole arrest from the confrontation was that of Deputy Constable Charles Arnold, for the murder of Luis Vasquez. An all-white male jury found Charles Arnold innocent in the murder of Luis Vasquez, and he was cleared of all charges.

After the deadly skirmish in Chinatown, JMLA representatives met with representatives of local farmers and the WACC to engage in negotiations. During the 1st 2 days of negotiations, the JMLA stated clearly that they would refuse to end the strike until the WACC ended their monopoly over Oxnard Plain sugar beet operations, and allow workers to contract directly with local farmers. The strike reached an official end on March 30, after the WACC agreed to cancel all standing contracts with local sugar beet farmers, and grant farmworkers the right to contract directly with local growers.

The City of Oxnard was incorporated on June 30, 1903. Today, it is a mostly-Hispanic city of about 200,000 people.

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March 23, 1903 was a Monday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. Basketball barely existed. And hockey was still all-amateur. So there were no scores on this historic day.