The North Adams strike (also called North Adams Scandal) was a strike in 1870 by shoe workers of the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, against Calvin T. Sampson's Shoe factory, in North Adams, Massachusetts. The strike itself was broken when the factory superintendent, George W. Chase, fired the Irish workers, replacing them with newly employed seventy-five Chinese men from California.[1] Bringing national attention to North Adams, the event started a nation-wide trend of bringing in scab labor and helped perpetuate the concept of immigrants coming to the United States to steal jobs, which led to much hostility towards Chinese immigrants across the nation.[2]
| North Adams strike | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 "Chase's Chinamen"— Chinese workers | |||
| Date | 1870 | ||
| Location | 42°42′7.44″N 73°6′49.97″W / 42.7020667°N 73.1138806°W | ||
| Goals | Eight-hour day | ||
| Methods | Strikes, Protest, Demonstrations | ||
| Resulted in | Chinese immigrants brought in from California, replacing union workers for more competitive wages | ||
| Parties | |||
| |||
| Lead figures | |||
Non-centralized leadership | |||
| Casualties and losses | |||
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Legacy
editThe incident sparked widespread working-class protest across the country, shaped legislative debate in Congress, and helped make Chinese immigration a sustained national issue.[citation needed] Twelve years later, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring most Chinese immigrants from entering the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major anti-immigration law in American history.[3][4][5]
References
edit- ^ Brown, Elspeth (April 14, 2010). "Elspeth H. Brown. Review of "A Shoemaker's Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town" by Anthony W. Lee". Caa.reviews. doi:10.3202/caa.reviews.2010.39. ISSN 1543-950X.
- ^ Eckman, Brennan. "Sampson Shoe Factory". Historic North Adams. Retrieved June 26, 2022.
- ^ "On This Day..." Mass Moments. June 15, 2005. Retrieved November 18, 2015.
- ^ "A Study of the North Adams Labor Strike, 1870". Inquiry Unlimited. Retrieved November 18, 2015.
- ^ Gyory, Andrew. "A Shoemaker's Story". Picturing U.S. History. Retrieved November 18, 2015.
Sources
edit- Anthony W. Lee (2008). A Shoemaker's Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691133256.