FoundSF

Historical Essay

by Gia Vogerl

Radical Spiritualist newspaper of the 1870s.

The historian Hubert Perrier noted that many francophone Sections [of the Workingmen's Party of the United States] focused much of their energy on supporting refugees in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. San Francisco’s French Section did not remain neutral, but prisoner solidarity work nevertheless sustained their activity in later years. Many francophone Sections sent money to former Communards and served as a stopover or even final destination for exiles. East Coast ports provided the easiest entry for Communards who had escaped into exile, some of whom eventually took the railroad across the continent to try life in San Francisco. Benjamin Flotte arrived through this route, as did former gold miner Émile Bée who returned to California after the Commune. Yet San Francisco internationalists went a step further.(6)

Numerous Communards were imprisoned on the Pacific penal colony at New Caledonia, near New Zealand. San Francisco became a hub as the first friendly port of call for those who escaped on passing American ships. Escapees thus followed the wake of Bakunin’s transpacific flight from Siberia. Upon arrival they could expect material support and lavish public receptions by the local International. Henri Rochefort, François Jourde, and Paschal Grousset received banquets in their honor upon their arrival in Spring of 1874. One hundred and forty “French Republicans” attended one such banquet on May 25. A standing committee was established to prepare welcome receptions for all future escapees from the prison islands.(7)

Present at one of these banquets was Charles Caron, a founding member of New Orleans’ International French Section. That Section apparently suffered a split after Caron and his associates passionately argued for creating a socialist colony. Caron’s visit to San Francisco may have been intended to strengthen connections with old Icarians like J.R. Lafaix who remained active in the city. Icarians would later build on these connections to establish a new colony in California.(8)

Commemorations of the Commune provided continuing visibility for the local International. An 1875 anniversary banquet reported in local newspapers and the radical Spiritualist paper Common Sense helped inspire a new burst of activity. The March 18 celebration was filled with multi-lingual speeches, bringing together “French, Americans, and a few Germans.” The banquet helped spark a revival of internationalist activity. A month later, Dashaway Hall hosted the first in a series of weekly meetings to “discuss the relations of Capital and Labor, employers and employed, laws affecting production and exchange, etc.” under the auspices of the “International Workingmen.” B. F. French, a member of the American Section’s executive committee in 1872, took the chair of the first meeting and participated in the followups. After several meetings, attendees resolved to create a “Society for the Promotion of Political and Social Reform” to carry out public debates; French was elected first vice-president.(9)

Consensus Challenged

From its founding and through the split in the International Workingmen’s Association, the local English-language American Section stood firmly against Chinese labor and immigration. Local French and German Sections joined them. This stance, however, placed the American Section at odds with the majority of “Yankee Radicals” affiliated with the International elsewhere, particularly those overlapping with Spiritualist circles. It is thus quite notable that for a brief period starting in the mid-1870s, some San Francisco internationalists joined Healey in turning away from demonizing Chinese workers. Notably, a number of Spiritualist radicals continued their local activity and moved to oppose racial exclusion, aligning them with their East Coast brethren. Perhaps continued discourse at ongoing workingmen’s Lyceums on how to achieve workers’ emancipation helped soften participants’ racist views.

William Neill Slocum, co-publisher of Common Sense

One speaker and participant at the Dashaway Hall “International Workingmen” meetings was William Neill Slocum, co-publisher of Common Sense with his wife Amanda. W.N. was journalist by trade, an old Republican Spiritualist and abolitionist who broke with the Republican party as it catered increasingly to business interests. Alongside bits of Spiritualist discourse and reports on Spiritualist meetings, Common Sense’s pages were filled with reports and articles pertaining to temperance, free thought, and anti-monopoly politics. The paper’s title referred to Thomas Paine’s famous revolutionary pamphlet. The Slocums’ paper provided frequent accounts of meetings by San Francisco Lyceums and various interconnected reform movements.(12)

Amanda’s close involvement with Common Sense was part of a broad movement of women publishers and typographers. Women participated in the printing trade since its inception in the 15th century, even as their vital role was often overshadowed by male counterparts. Family-run print shops required involvement from wives and daughters of the men named on the marquee. They participated in all steps of the process from typesetting to editorializing. Widows commonly ran such enterprises after their husbands died. Independent-minded women found ways to learn the trade despite exclusion from formal apprenticeship systems. One journal estimated that half of working compositors in US towns were women in the mid-nineteenth century. Clara Dixon produced her first political pamphlet using a “toy typesetting device” and later published anarchist newspapers in San Francisco in the early 1890s. Early feminist movements were buoyed by women-run periodicals.(13)

During San Francisco’s early years, the succession of all-male typographical unions forbade contract shops from hiring women. Patriarchal chauvinism was often articulated through economic excuses; “feminizing” the profession would lead to lower wages. During labor disputes owners often took advantage of these fears by hiring white women to set type. In response, labor-minded white women joined with sympathetic male counterparts to demand union membership and “equal pay for equal work” as a means to short-circuit employers’ threats. A Women’s Typographical Union was founded in New York in 1868. The next year the International Typographical Union’s convention lifted its outright ban on women’s membership, though the aforementioned dispute over Susan B. Anthony’s seating at the National Labor Union underlines the vitriolic debates involved. Four years later the ITU recommended all locals admit women on an equal basis, yet inclusion was merely optional for another decade. Many locals, including San Francisco’s, persisted in excluding white women until the ITU formalized gender inclusion in its constitution by the 1880s. A pronounced gender-pay gap persisted outside of union shops. Notably, despite similar arguments made for including non-white members, racial inclusion remained off the table for the time being.(14)

The white women who moved west seeking greater autonomy for themselves included many typographers. San Francisco emerged as a notable center. The city’s first women-run and typeset literary magazine, The Hesperian, was founded in 1858. Lisle Lester took over editorship in 1863 and renamed the publication to Pacific Monthly. In 1865 she attempted to form a Women’s Typographical Union but the effort failed and the Pacific Monthly folded in 1868. Women were only able to obtain work at low-paying non-union shops. Continued exclusion prompted Agnes Peterson to found the Women’s Co-Operative Printing Union the same year as the Pacific Monthly ended. The WCPU put out a weekly newspaper and provided job-printing services for a wide-array of books, pamphlets, legal briefs, and more.(15)

Image from West Coast Journal, May 18, 1870 sourced at Bancroft Library

Flora Chaney and her then-husband William (aka Dr. W.H. Chaney) were another couple closely associated with Common Sense. Both Flora and William were agents for the paper, “authorized to receive subscriptions.” They were prominent lecturers in and beyond San Francisco’s reform scene and Flora was noted as a talented public-speaking instructor. In early 1875 the Slocum’s purchased the office and printing equipment of a Women’s Pacific Coast Publishing Company founded by a former leader of the WCPU. Amanda and Flora ran the shop together, maintaining it as a “women’s office.”(16)

Later that same year, Flora was pregnant. In June she shot herself in a failed suicide attempt after William rejected becoming a father. According to a contemporary newspaper account, he attempted to convince her to abort the child. She refused. William later claimed the child wasn’t his. He insisted he was in fact sterile and that Flora had other lovers, perhaps within their broad Spiritualist community of Free Love supporters. William soon distanced himself from those local Spiritualists that promoted Free Love and had nothing to do with raising Flora’s child. Flora was taken into the Slocum home, where she gave birth to a son who would become one of San Francisco’s most famous radicals: Jack London.(17)

Alongside the Slocums, Common Sense’s management included one Albert Kendrick. During the paper’s run Albert married the Medium and close associate of Victoria Woodhull, Laura Cuppy Smith (who took Albert’s surname). Laura was a trance speaker who first arrived in San Francisco in the 1860s and was one of the first prominent women orators in the city. Notices and accounts of her speeches were frequent matter for Common Sense. She was also one of three trance speakers sent to present the first petition for women’s suffrage to the California state legislature. Laura traveled to the 1872 Equal Rights Convention that nominated Woodhull for president and the next year defended Woodhull in court from obscenity charges. She has been described as Woodhull’s “only intimate friend,” though Woodhull later turned her back on Laura.(18)

Laura was a driving force in San Francisco internationalists’ softening of their previously bitter Sinophobic stance. Unwavering defense of her firm belief in universal equality led many former associates to later reject her, sometimes leaving Laura a “radical without a following because she fought injustice everywhere.” When she passed away in 1882 following a stroke at the age of 49, Boston anarchist Benjamin Tucker eulogized her with a glowing obituary that declared “Liberty has lost an apostle – one of her most tried and true defenders, one of her most courageous soldiers, one of her most ardent advocates, one of her most devoted martyrs.” She first left California in the early 1870s; whether she participated in the founding of the local American Section is unclear. Yet when she returned to San Francisco in 1874 to find “labor agitation… coming to the front,” she “plunged into it, body and soul.” Laura brought with her the ideals of cross-racial solidarity in debates over Chinese immigration that characterized some East Coast radicals, Spiritualists in particular. While many other agitators were denouncing Chinese workers, Tucker claimed she “championed” them.(19)

Discourse on the “Chinese Question” was relatively frequent in Common Sense. Some correspondents parroted common Sinophobic talking points but were usually met with rebuttals. In Fall 1874, a comment negatively prophesying that Chinese people were the “future workers of America” was met with a reply by an apparent Chinese slippermaker named Ah Hea Lea. Ah Hea Lea claimed to favor the rest of Common Sense’s radical material and asserted bluntly that Chinese people were not to blame for the societal ills the paper campaigned against. His letter was paired with an editorial comment admitting that Chinese people had a “natural right” to come but that it was also perfectly natural for their arrival to face opposition. Whichever Slocum penned that reply nevertheless admitted benefits to Chinese labor, as well as “improvidence” on the part of white workingmen, concluding that “it remains an open question whether it would not be better for our own people to discourage the importation and employment of Chinese.” The columns of Common Sense were declared “open to all honest, earnest expression of opinion on this subject, on either side.” Ah Hea Lea wrote another reply, asserting that the “improvidence” attributed to white workingmen in the form of drinking and frivolous purchases was in fact an integral if potentially harmful aspect of the American economy. He once again came to the defense of Chinese laborers, insisting they were the only ones in the state willing to do all the hard “work that must be done.”(20)

Following Ah Hea Lea’s submissions and the letter from Healey was an ongoing exchange for and against the presence Chinese workers in back-to-back May 1875 issues just prior to the paper’s end. A “P” wrote to Common Sense to decry what he saw as a link between “Asiatic Labor” and “the rapid accumulation of capital in the hands of a few.” Yet P did at least allow that “we need not… entertain the idea that he can be driven from our shores… this is a free country ‘for the oppressed of all nations.’” P instead argued for white labor to “make a new departure” toward (segregated) cooperative systems. Dr. Pilkington wrote a reply arguing that:

Prejudice against the Chinese is not confined to the Irish alone, but seems to prevail in proportion to the ignorance of the masses, and to some extent, amongst a more intelligent portion, some of whom take the ground that this country belongs to the white man alone, supposing that because they are whiter than some of their neighbors, this entitles them to a preference, merit or no merit.

By taking on lower paying jobs manufacturing goods previously imported from elsewhere, Pilkington asserted that Chinese workers made possible a plethora of new industries that also provided higher-waged employment to white men. Pilkington also praised what he saw as Chinese tendencies toward “communistic and co-operative” living and labor that, like Reclus, he thought “far more” pronounced “than white men.”(21)

The shifting views of San Francisco’s internationalists regarding Chinese labor by no means evaded orientalist or paternalistic tropes and were often articulated through a settler colonialist developmental logic. It is also doubtful that they had especially broad reach outside the pages of Common Sense and English-language Lyceum debating circles. Some notable advocates of cross-racial solidarity like Pat Healey labored for wages in trades alongside numerous Chinese counterparts, but many vocal advocates could hardly be called “working-class.” Far more local white tradespeople were likely members of the contemporary anti-coolie clubs than attendees of the “Lyceum for Self Culture” or meetings of the Society for the Promotion of Political and Social Reform. The transformation may not have translated into the International’s French and German Sections; the latter was the largest local Section upon the Tenth Ward International’s merger into the Workingmen’s Party. A quarterly broadside circulated by the Tenth Ward council in 1875 noted that San Francisco’s German and French Sections (1 and 2) were attempting to mediate conflicts occurring in New York Sections, but mentioned that the American Section (3) “takes no part in this.” While all of the Sections would ultimately join the new Party, a breach could perhaps have opened between San Francisco’s local groups. Continuing anti-Chinese racism by SF’s German Workingmen’s Party members will be discussed shortly.(22)

Common Sense seems to have folded after May 1875, leaving a gap in the ability to track the evolution of this discourse. No other local papers provided detailed accounts of the local International during this late period or of the early days of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States. The limited correspondence available with the central office in New York during the middle of the decade is likewise silent on the matter. A challenge to the prior racist consensus of the local International was nevertheless clearly emerging from the Spiritualist milieu within San Francisco’s American Section.

Aside from Ah Hea Lea, though, there is no evidence of actual conversations with Chinese people. Given Ah’s own proactive outreach, they may have simply relied on Chinese people coming to them rather than actively reaching out. The conversation about Chinese labor was shifting, but it did not by-and-large include actual Chinese people. By the time of the fateful Sandlot rallies of 1877, ex-internationalists turned Workingmen’s Party agitators did not go much further in public agitation than simply leaving Chinese people out of their denunciations of railroad barons while insisting they weren’t there to hold anti-Chinese meetings. Certainly a notable shift from earlier in the decade, but far from adequate to prevent the catastrophe that unfolded.

Notes

6. Perrier, “L’Union républicaine,” 216. Michel Cordillot, FLOTTE Benjamin, Le Maitron
7. Perrier, “L’Union républicaine,” 216. Michel Cordillot, FLOTTE Benjamin, Le Maitron, Perrier, “L’Union républicaine,” 222. Los Angeles Herald, May 26, 1874. Marysville Daily Appeal, May 26, 1874. “French Republican Banquet,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 26, 1874. Michel Cordillot.
8. Michel Cordillot “CARON Charles,” Le Maitron, “LAFAIX Jean-René” Le Maitron
9. “Signs of the Times,” Common Sense, San Francisco, March 27, 1875. Common Sense, San Francisco, April 17, 1875. “Meeting of Working Men,” Common Sense, San Francisco, April 24, 1875. “Workingmen’s Meeting,” Common Sense, San Francisco, May 1, 1878. “Meeting of Workingmen,” Common Sense, San Francisco, May 8, 1875. “Meetings of Workingmen,” Common Sense, San Francisco, May 15, 1875. “Meeting of Reformers,” May 22, 1875. B. F. French would remain active in Socialist causes in San Francisco and Los Angeles at least to 1901, later participating in the Bellamy inspired “Nationalist Movement” and the Socialist Party.
12. “Workingmen’s Meeting,” Common Sense, San Francisco, May 1, 1875.
13. Overbeck, The Tramp Printers, 91-92. Joel Sachs, Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13.
14. Overbeck, The Tramp Printers., 99-100. Libby Ingalls, “Women in Printing,” FoundSF.org
15. Ingalls, “Women in Printing,”
16. Common Sense, October 24, 1874; “Flora Wellman Chaney,” Common Sense, June 13, 1874. Ingalls, “Women in Printing.”
17. I highly recommend the Transmetropolitan Review’s zine/article “Who the Hell is Jack London,” though it does not take note of the radical home he was born into. “William Chaney,” Jack London Online 18. Braude, Radical Spirits, 172. Emanie Sachs, “The Terrible Siren”: Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927) (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1928), 217-218. Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, New York, May 18, 1872. “Common Sense Publishing Company,” Common Sense, June 20, 1874. Common Sense, April 24, 1875.
19. Sachs, “The Terrible Siren,” 217-218. “In Memorium,” Liberty, Boston, January 21, 1882.
20. “Ah Hea Lea Speaks,” Common Sense, San Francisco, September 26, 1874. Reprinted in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, October 17, 1874. “Chinese Labor,” Common Sense, San Francisco, October 31, 1874.
21. “Higher or Lower,” Common Sense, San Francisco, May 22, 1875. “The Chinese Question,” Common Sense, San Francisco, May 29, 1875.

---

Excerpted from the chapter "On the Sandlot" in Deconstructing Settler Socialism: Anarchism and the Internationals in the Wild West, published by Historical Seditions, 2025