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10 To Save the Republic The California Workingmen's Party in Humboldt County

1. The fullest account of the California Workingmen's party is provided by Ralph Kauer, "The Workingmen's Party of California," Pacific Historical Review 13 (September 1944): 278-291. An important book on the California labor movement and reform politics in the late nineteenth century is Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Also useful on the history of the California Workingmen's party are Royce D. Delmatier, Clarence F. McIntosh, and Earl G. Waters, The Rumble of California Politics, 1848-1970 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1970), pp. 70-98; and Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), pp. 88-129. These studies, however, focus mainly on the San Francisco branch of the California Workingmen's party and the anti-Chinese agitation. [BACK]

2. Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 26. In an important review essay, David Montgomery has stressed the incidence of independent political activity in the Gilded Age and the need for further work in the field. David Montgomery, "To Study the People: The American Working Class," Labor History 21 (Fall 1980): 485-512. [BACK]

3. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 3. [BACK]

4. Many historians of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American radicalism have noted the persistence of a democratic-republican tradition and have tried to define it, notwithstanding all its complexities. Among the most sophisticated efforts are: Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy ; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Men, Free Labor: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). In his book The Indispensable Enemy , Saxton also uses the concept to analyze the sources of radicalism in postbellum nineteenth-century California politics. See especially pp. 19-45. [BACK]

5. Humboldt Times , March 26, 1864. [BACK]

6. Letter Book of James Beith, January 24, 1862, p. 162. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. [BACK]

7. Ibid. [BACK]

8. See Robert A. Burchell, "Opportunity and the Frontier: Wealth-Holding in Twenty-Six Northern California Counties, 1848-1880," Western Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987): 177-196; Daniel A. Cornford, "Lumber, Labor, and Community in Humboldt County, California, 1850-1920" (doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1983), pp. 37-40; and Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849-1870 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1882). [BACK]

9. Besides the studies listed above, see Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Paul Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981); Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976); David Montgomery, Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967); Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1967); Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979); Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati; 1788-1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). [BACK]

10. For information on the early social and economic history of Humboldt County, see Lynwood Carranco, Redwood Lumber Industry (San Marino: Golden West Books, 1982); Cornford, "Lumber, Labor, and Community," pp. 24-106; Owen C. Coy, The Humboldt Bay Region, 1850-1875 (Los Angeles: California State Historical Association, 1929); and History of Humboldt County, California with Biographical Sketches (San Francisco: W. W. Elliott & Co., 1881). [BACK]

11. Humboldt Times , December 21, 1867 and January 4, 1868. [BACK]

12. Ibid., November 14, 1868. [BACK]

13. Humboldt Times , July 15, 1871; and Northern Independent , July 13, 1871. [BACK]

14. Northern Independent , August 26 and September 1, 1869. [BACK]

15. Ibid., August 19, 1869. [BACK]

16. Humboldt Times , March 11, 1871. [BACK]

17. Ibid., April 15 and August 26, 1871. [BACK]

18. West Coast Signal , July 9, 1873. [BACK]

19. This party is sometimes referred to as the Independent party or the Dollay Vardens. The secondary literature on it is sparse, but see Curtis E. Grassman, "Prologue to Progressivism: Senator Stephen M. White and the California Reform Impulse, 1875-1905" (doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1970), pp. 17-22; and Walton E. Bean, California: An Interpretive History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), p. 261. [BACK]

20. West Coast Signal , August 6, 1873. [BACK]

21. Humboldt Times , August 30, 1873. [BACK]

22. Ibid., July 5, 1873. [BACK]

23. Ezra Carr, The Patrons of Husbandry on the West Coast (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Co., 1875). [BACK]

24. Humboldt Times , September 20, 1873. [BACK]

25. West Coast Signal , September 24, 1873. [BACK]

26. Biographical information on Sweasey was obtained from T. J. Vivian and D. G. Waldron, Biographical Sketches of the Delegates to the Convention (San Francisco: Francis & Valentine, 1878), pp. 29-30; West Coast Signal September 24, 1873; Democratic Standard , January 1, 1879; Humboldt Times , October 1, 1893; Western Watchman , October 7, 1893; and Nerve , October 7, 1893. [BACK]

27. Humboldt Times , January 24, 1874. [BACK]

28. Ibid., January 6, 1877. [BACK]

29. Ibid., January 20, 1877. [BACK]

30. Pacific Coast Wood and Iron , a trade journal of the Pacific lumber industry, published a review of redwood lumber prices for the previous thirty years in 1899, which was reprinted in the Humboldt Standard , December 13, 1899. [BACK]

31. Humboldt Times , February 10, 1877. [BACK]

32. Daily Evening Signal July 3, 1877; Humboldt Times , July 7, 1877. [BACK]

33. Mendocino Democrat , March 2, 1878; Humboldt Times , July 21, 1877. The Humboldt Times reported several acts of alleged arson in 1877 and 1878; Humboldt Times , July 21 and October 13, 1877, March 2, 1878. Saxton asserts that arson was quite frequent in San Francisco during the late 1870s, and implies that not uncommonly it was resorted to for political reasons: "Arson in California in those days was almost as commonplace as murder," The Indispensable Enemy , p. 149. [BACK]

34. Democratic Standard , November 3, 1877. [BACK]

35. Humboldt Times , August 25, 1877. [BACK]

36. Daily Evening Signal August 18, 1877. [BACK]

37. Eugene F. Fountain, The Story of Blue Lake (n.p., n.d.), vol. 3, pp. 589-592. Manuscript in possession of the Humboldt State University Library. On fraudulent land acquisition practices in Humboldt County, see Howard Brett Melendy, "One Hundred Years of the Redwood Lumber Industry, 1850-1950" (doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1952), pp. 80-98. For an account of the dubious land acquisition practices of many lumber entrepreneurs in the United States, see Thomas R. Cox et al., This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), pp. 138-142. [BACK]

38. The study listed all landholders possessing 500 acres or more in every California county. The San Francisco Chronicle began serializing the findings on October 28, 1873, and the findings for Humboldt County were published in the Humboldt Times , November 8, 1873. [BACK]

39. Humboldt Times , November 8, 1873. [BACK]

40. See E. B. Willis and E K. Stockton, Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention , 3 vols. (Sacramento: J. D. Young, Superintendent of State Printing, 1880). [BACK]

41. Humboldt Times , April 27, 1878. [BACK]

42. Ibid. [BACK]

43. Ibid. [BACK]

44. Ibid., May 11, 1878. [BACK]

45. Democratic Standard , November 23, 1878. [BACK]

46. Humboldt Times , May 9, 1874; Pacific Rural Press , July 14, 1877. [BACK]

47. Humboldt Times , October 21, 1876. [BACK]

48. Ibid., November 18 and December 2, 1876. [BACK]

49. Daily Evening Signal March 15, 1878. [BACK]

50. Humboldt Times , September 22, 1877. [BACK]

51. Delmatier et al., Rumble of California Politics , p. 83. [BACK]

52. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistics of Population of the United States at the Ninth Census, 1870 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1872), vol. 1, table 3, p. 90; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census, 1880 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1883), vol. 1, table 14, p. 498. [BACK]

53. Evening Star , January 17, 1877. [BACK]

54. Lynwood Carranco, "The Chinese Expulsion from Humboldt County," Pacific Historical Review 30 (November 1961): 329-340; Lynwood Carranco, "The Chinese in Humboldt County, California: A Study in Prejudice," Journal of the West 12 (January 1973): 139-162. [BACK]

55. Data compiled from the Manuscript Census of Population for Humboldt County, 1880. [BACK]

56. Humboldt Times , June 4, 1878; Democratic Standard , June 1, 1878. [BACK]

57. Humboldt Times , May 11, 1878. [BACK]

58. Democratic Standard , May 25, 1878. [BACK]

59. Humboldt Times , July 6, 1878. In 1878, most lumber workers, as well as laborers, artisans, and business and professional people, resided in Eureka and, to a lesser extent, Arcata. Farmers constituted the majority of the electorate outside these precincts. Unquestionably, they made up a larger proportion of the registered voters in relation to their numbers than lumber workers and most other working-class occupational groups. Nevertheless, lumber workers and other workingmen made up a significant proportion of the registered voters. The geographic stability of a significant core of lumber workers and the relative leniency of residency requirements imposed by California election laws facilitated this. While farmers tended to "persist" longer on the voting registers than most other occupational groups, they too were a fairly transient bunch. On the above, see Burchell, "Opportunity and the Frontier," pp. 189-190. [BACK]

60. Willis and Stockton, Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention , vol. 2, p. 1144. [BACK]

61. Democratic Standard , May 3, 1879. [BACK]

62. Ibid., May 24, 1879. [BACK]

63. Ibid., April 5, 1879. [BACK]

64. Ibid., May 10, 1879. [BACK]

65. Ibid., June 7, 1879. [BACK]

66. Ibid., April 12 and June 28, 1879. [BACK]

67. Ibid., July 5, 1879. [BACK]

68. Biographical sketches of the men on the Workingmen's party ticket appeared in the Democratic Standard , July 19, 1879. [BACK]

69. Democratic Standard , August 16, 1879. [BACK]

70. Ibid., July 5, 1879. [BACK]

71. Ibid., September 6, 1879. [BACK]

72. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy , p. 152. [BACK]

73. Democratic Standard , March 13, 1880. [BACK]

74. Ibid., April 24, 1880. [BACK]

75. Ibid., May 15, 1880. [BACK]

76. Ibid., April 17, 1880. [BACK]

77. For critical responses to Sweasey's land-reform proposals, see the Humboldt Times , May 4, 11, and 18, 1878. Sweasey strongly defended his proposals in the Daily Evening Signal , June 12, 1878. [BACK]

78. Arcata Union , August 14, 1886. [BACK]


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