“Men of All Parties Are in Perfect Accord”: How the Catch-All Argument for Chinese Exclusion of the Workingmen’s Party of California Became Bipartisan Consensus, 1872-1883

The Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC) dominated California politics for three years from 1877 to 1880, with Chinese exclusion and anti-monopoly as its core agendas. The party significantly contributed to the California Constitution of 1879 and indirectly influenced the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Yet, few historians have analyzed the WPC through political science frameworks, leaving an important historic case study out of the contemporary discussion on nativism populism and leaving relevant political theories unexamined by the WPC historiography. Using contemporary political science theories, this paper will analyze the WPC as a nativist and populist party. Furthermore, using qualitative and statistical analysis of historic newspapers, this paper will investigate the two main historiographical debates about the WPC’s ideology: whether anti-monopoly or nativism was the WPC’s main ideology, and whether the ideology was artificially constructed or originated naturally. This paper will first argue that the WPC’s most influential ideology was nativism instead of anti-monopoly. Then, this paper will define the WPC’s version of Chinese exclusion as undifferentiated, meaning that it was a catch-all case amalgamating cultural, racial, anti-slavery, and labor arguments against Chinese immigration. Thus, this paper proposes that the WPC’s Chinese exclusion was an intentional, artificial strategy to consolidate a broad coalition. Moreover, this paper proposes that the established parties of California, the Democratic and Republican parties, adopted the WPC’s undifferentiated ideology of nativism. These findings will suggest that the nationalization of anti-Chinese sentiments that led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 originated from political entrepreneurs, rather than from the populace.