Denis Kearney (1847–1907) was a California labor leader of the late 19th century, known for his nativist and racist views about Chinese immigrants.[1]
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Kearney was born in Oakmount, County Cork, Ireland and immigrated to the United States. He worked as a sailor and then as a drayage proprietor in San Francisco. During the Long Depression, he became popular by speaking to unemployed people in San Francisco, denouncing the railroad monopoly and immigrant Chinese workers (known as Coolies.) His slogan was, simply, "the Chinese must go".[2]
Kearney began his working life as an ally of employers. In July 1877, when anti-Chinese violence occurred in San Francisco, Kearney joined William Tell Coleman's vigilante Public Safety Committee as a member of Coleman's "pick handle brigade." By August 1877, however, Kearney had been elected Secretary of the newly formed Workingmen's Party of California, and directed often violent attacks on Chinese, including denunciations of the powerful Central Pacific Railroad which had employed them in large numbers.
Hubert Bancroft, author in the late 1880s of an influential history of California, considered the Workingmen's Party to be "ignorant Irish rabble, even though that rabble sometimes paraded the streets as a great political party."[3] Kearney's Irish immigrant background made him subject to frequent accusations that he was a foreign agitator. Middle class critics, fearful of Kearney's radical rhetoric and pledges, questioned whether Irish immigrants—embodied by Kearney—should have the right to dictate social policy in San Francisco. As The Argonaut, the newspaper founded and published by the former Attorney General of California, Frank Pixley, noted, “When an organization, composed almost entirely of aliens, who are themselves here by the sufferance of a generous hospitality, band themselves together in defiance of the law to drive out a class, who, however objectionable, have the same legal rights as themselves, it is an act of insolent audacity that ought to move the indignation of every honest man.”
Kearney traveled east to popularize his opinions and campaigned with the Massachusetts politician Benjamin Butler, the Greenback Party's candidate for President. Kearney sought the Vice Presidential nomination, although Butler never offered it to him. Kearney faded from the public's eye by the early 1880s, leaving as his legacy only the anti-Chinese laws that the Workingmen's Party had passed at the 1879 California Constitutional Convention. Many of these laws, which included a ban on the employment of Chinese laborers, were ruled unconstitutional by the federal Ninth Circuit Court. Corresponding with the English author and politician James Bryce in the late 1880s, Kearney nonetheless claimed credit for making the "Chinese Question" a national issue and affecting the legislation of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.
Today there is a Kearny Street in San Francisco that runs through Chinatown; however it was not named after Denis Kearney but after the Mexican-American War Army officer Stephen W. Kearny.[4]