With each new wave, the same howl rose from an American throat: this group is too different, too unprepared, too ill-bred: these Irish, these Chinese, these Italians, these Jews, these “colored people,” these hillbillies, these Mexicans, these Salvadorans, these Venezuelans, these Haitians. In 1909, for instance, California newspapers published stories claiming that Chinese gang warfare in San Francisco was fueling a trade in cat meat. “There is a superstitious belief among the Chinese that if their warriors are fed on the flesh of wild cats, they will assimilate the ferocity of the beasts.” In 1911 a Brooklyn man accused “a gang of foreign laborers”—ethnicity unspecified—of catching and eating his three cats. Then, as now, the provenance of the account was indirect; the story was thirdhand by the time it was printed.
To say that economic development and the creative destruction that attends it—discarding or elevating old working populations, installing new ones—creates a new phantasmagoria of cat-eating immigrants in every generation is only to describe from another angle the basic historic problem of the American working class. Continually flushed with new entrants, the working class in this country has always heard in one ear an appeal to detest the newcomers, to abhor their lawless ways and their degenerate habits. This voice has sometimes come from within the house of labor, although almost invariably its right wing. In 1902 the president of the AFL, Samuel Gompers, cowrote a pamphlet insisting that “sixty years’ contact with the Chinese, twenty-five years’ experience with the Japanese and two or three years’ acquaintance with Hindus should be sufficient to convince any ordinarily intelligent person that they have no standard of morals by which a Caucasian may judge them.”
More influential, though, are the voices of politicians who speak the language of class consciousness to divide rather than unite the working class. Woodrow Wilson, for example, a Jim Crow champion who tentatively courted organized labor, compared the consequences of Asian immigration to those of the Atlantic slave trade—for white people, that is: “Remunerative labor is the basis of contentment. Democracy rests on the equality of citizens. Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson.”
The purported enmity between different kinds of laborers—free and slave, native-born and immigrant, skilled and unskilled, black and white, male and female—is not a vestige of a bitter past. It is continually reactivated. A primary task of the American left, then, has been to mediate between one generation of working people and the next, to find the openings between their diverse traditions and connect them.