Workingman's Party

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Workingman's Party was a California labor organization led by Dennis Kearney in the 1870s. The party took particular aim against Chinese immigrant labor and the Central Pacific Railroad which employed them. Its famous slogan was "The Chinese must go!" Kearney's attacks against the Chinese were of a particularly virulent and open racism, and found considerable support among white Californians of the time. This sentiment led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Kearney's party should not be confused with another party based in the east of the United States called the Workingmen's Party, whose best-known leader was American Marxist Daniel DeLeon. Both parties drew their name from an older, non-racist Workingman's Party formed in 1829 by utopian socialists Robert Owen and Frances Wright, most of whose members joined the Whig Party, whereafter the original Workingman's Party collapsed.

Kearney's racism was also not echoed by DeLeon's Workingmen's Party, who blamed racism on the competition for jobs among the multicultural American workforce, and thus one of the many evils (along with crime, poverty, sexism etc.) for which capitalism was responsible.