The Exploited

The cartoon I have chosen is the one with the Chinese man and the Indian looking at the postings on the wall. Every dog....has his day. The Chinese man has his arms folded and his back to the Indian. In the depiction posted at the top of the wall you will see the Chinese represented and an arrow telling them to go east. The Indian with an arrow pointing west.

Some background on this picture is first of all the time is very crucial; February 1879. Also that this picture represented a "California" mentality. California at the time was a bit cut off from the rest of the country, although the railroad had been completed, if it was travelling west, it still had to go through the "Wild West". this was the time period of stagecoach robberies and Indian Wars. Huge Indian wars had been going on in most of the Northwest states. One of the most significant was the Nez Perce War.

Another issue at this time is that 1) It was during the Capitalist Gilded age, and 2) During a depression that had started when the European stock market caused problems here in the states. On top of this since the railroads were finished. Many had been left without funding and laid off quite a lot of the thousands of Chinese immigrants that had come over seas to build them. They had to look for other work. In remote California there were only so many jobs.

There was a party formed in California called the Workingman's party, in the posting on the upper right that reads "The Chinese must go", you see it is signed by Denis Kearney. He was the leader of the Workingman's party. You will also see that it says "a real American" The irony in that statement is that he was an Irish immigrant. He, leaning towards socialism, had a problem with the rich gilded age barons who had put up the money and gone to China to recruit the Chinese for their cheap labor, taking jobs from people that were already here and willing to work. Mainly the Irish and dutch that had taken the long trek west to do that work following the completion of work and competition for work on the canals in the Midwestern states.

This had also come after the huge influx of both Dutch and Irish immigrants. Following the great Irish famine almost 3 million Irish had immigrated here 30 years earlier. Kearney's idea that he was a "real" American probably attributed to the "we were here first" mentality and the sheer number of "white" vs. Chinese. The Signed Social obviously is a reference the the Workingman's origins of the Socialist party. The German references may be just because the artist, Nast immigrated from Germany when he was six years old. The signed X could either be signifying lack of education or the (if you don't know how to write sign an X) because they were manual laborers and not the gilded capitalists. Or more remotely the sign of the cross or a reference to the Catholic Church as this is a Greek symbol for Christ.

The Indian and the Chinese were both exploited for what they had to offer, and then were being told to "get lost". The Indians for their land, the Chinese for their cheap labor. The Indian says to the Chinese "Pale face 'fraid you crowd him our, as he did me".

http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-ethnic&month=0007&week=a&msg=oP5iMLiktIk63Hfeyide3g&user=&pw=

http://www.udel.edu/soe/deal/IrishImmigrationFacts.html

http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/timeline/chapter7/c004.html

http://www.army.mil/article/28124/The_Nez_Perce_War_of_1877/

http://www.thehistorybox.com/ny_city/panics/panics_article9a.htm