Hellraisers Journal – Friday August 7, 1903 Oxnard, California – J. Murray on Unity of Japanese and Mexican Laborers, Part III
From The International Socialist Review of August 1903
A Foretaste of the Orient
[-by John Murray Jr.]
[III of III]
The San Francisco Call March 28, 1903
Frightened at the turn [the strike] had now taken, Major Driffel, of the Beet Sugar Company, asked for a joint meeting of committees from the unions, the farmers and the company. The first day’s conference came to nothing, but at the second meeting the employers realized that they were facing a labor trust that had cornered all the available labor power in the valley, and so the men’s scale of prices was agreed to, with an additional pledge that all the idle union men would be immediately employed.
Twice, after this, the company tried to import a carload of scabs from Los Angeles-even going so far as to lock the last shipment in its car and receive them at the station with armed guards-but each time the new men joined the union as soon as they reached Oxnard-the last lot escaping from the car windows.
At this juncture, the Los Angeles County Council of Labor passed resolutions favoring the organization of all Asiatics now in California. This was done upon the recommendation of Comrade F. C. Wheeler, organizer for the A. F. of L. in Southern California, who had visited Oxnard, organized the two unions, and was much impressed by their fighting qualities.
So far everything was well with the beet thinners, the company whipped in the first battle of the local class-war and the field hands unionized. But a most unexpected and disheartening blow capped the climax of their struggles-a blow from behind. Samuel Gompers, while granting the Mexicans all rights and privileges, refused to grant the Japanese union a charter, and in his letter to Secretary Lizarraras made the following remarkable statement:
It is further understood that in issuing this charter to your union, it will under no circumstance accept membership of any Chinese or Japanese. The laws of our country prohibit Chinese workmen or laborers from entering the United States, and propositions for the extension of the exclusion laws to the Japanese have been made on several occasions.
In making such an extraordinary ruling, President Gompers has violated the expressed principles of the A. F. of L., which states that race, color, religion or nationality, shall be no bar to fellowship in the American Federation of Labor.
California, alone, contains over forty thousand Japanese who, if unorganized, will be a continuous menace to union men.
“Better go to hell with your family than to heaven by your self,”said the speaker whose stirring words decided the Mexican union to send back its charter to President Gompers, along with the following letter:
Oxnard, Cal., June 8, 1903.
Mr. Samuel Gompers, Pres. American Federation of Labor, Washington, D. C. Dear Sir: Your letter of May 13, in which you say: “The admission with us of the Japanese Sugar Beet & Farm Laborers into the American Federation of Labor cannot be considered,” is received. We beg to say in reply that our Japanese brothers, here, were the first to recognize the importance of co-operating and uniting in demanding a fair wage scale. They are composed mostly of men without families, unlike the Mexicans in this respect. They were not only just with us, but they were generous. When one of our men was murdered by hired assassins of the oppressors of labor, they gave expression of their sympathy in a very substantial form. In the past we have counciled, fought and lived on very short rations with our Japanese brothers, and toiled with them in the fields, and they have been uniformly kind and considerate. We would be false to them and to ourselves and to the cause of Unionism if we, now, accepted privileges for ourselves which are not accorded to them. We are going to stand by men who stood by us in the long, hard fight which ended in a victory over the enemy. We therefore respectfully petition the A. F. of L. to grant us a charter under which we can unite all the Sugar Beet & Field Laborers of Oxnard, without regard to their color or race. We will refuse any other kind of charter, except one which will wipe out race prejudices and recognize our fellow workers as being as good as ourselves. “I am ordered by the Mexican union to write this letter to you and they fully approve its words.
J. M. Lizarraras, Sec’y S. B. & F. L. Union, Oxnard.
The Japanese are publishing two papers in San Francisco, and another will be printed in Los Angeles by Mr. Shibuya as soon as the expected type arrives from Japan, so it can be easily seen how important their members would be to organized labor in the West. To Socialists they are particularly attractive, as the Japanese have proven themselves to be apt students of the international working-class movement that believes in a common ownership of the means of production and distribution. Their leaders in California-I speak of those whom I have met and talked with-one and all regard Socialism to be the logical conclusion of the trades union movement. The opposition of their entrance into the A. F. of L. can only be temporary, as the unions of Southern California are practically unanimous in their favor, and I hear that, since the writing of Gompers’ letters, the National executive is reconsidering its action.
But the interesting phase to the student, in all this, is the evidence offered by the Oxnard episode to the effect that labor, like capital, knows neither race prejudice nor national tradition when the class struggle is on. Even the Chinese in Oxnard-there were very few of them-aligned themselves with the unions, for they, too, wished to better their material conditions-a desire, international, within the breast of man.
I cannot avoid the conclusion, forced on me by my contact with the Japanese and Mexicans in California-where they have of their own volition been organizing-that a social revolution is as possibleamong these people as any in the world, providing their immediate environment is the same. In fact, there is history making in China, today, that must lead a sound Marxian to feel no surprise if the conquest of private capital may not be first accomplished in Cathay.
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