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Dennis Kearney (1847–1907) was a California populist political leader in the late 19th century, known for his nativist and racist views toward Chinese immigrants.
Kearney was born in Oakmount, County Cork, Ireland and immigrated to the United States. He worked as a sailor and then as a drayage proprietor in San Francisco. During the Long Depression, he became popular by speaking to the unemployed in San Francisco, denouncing the railroad monopoly and immigrant Chinese workers (known as Coolies.) His slogan was, simply, "the Chinese must go"'.
Kearney began his political life on the side of employers. In July 1877, when anti-Chinese violence broke out in San Francisco, Kearney joined William Tell Coleman vigilante Public Safety Committee as a member of Coleman's "pick handle brigade." By August of 1877, however, Kearney had been elected Secretary of the newly formed Workingman's Party of California, and led often violent attacks on Chinese, including denunciations of the powerful Central Pacific railroad which had employed them in large numbers.
Historians have struggled to assess Kearney's legacy. Hubert Bancroft, who wrote an influential history of California in the late-1880s, considered the Workingmen's Party to be "ignorant Irish rabble, even though that rabble sometimes paraded the streets as a great political party." Kearney's Irish immigrant background made him subject to frequent accusations that he was a foreign agitator. Middle class critics, fearful of Kearney's radical rhetoric and pledges, openly questioned whether Irish immigrants - embodied by Kearney - should have the right to dictate social policy in San Francisco. As the Argonaut, the newspaper founded and published by the former Attorney General of California, Frank Pixley, noted, “When an organization, composed almost entirely of aliens, who are themselves here by the sufferance of a generous hospitality, band themselves together in defiance of the law to drive out a class, who, however objectionable, have the same legal rights as themselves, it is an act of insolent audacity that ought to move the indignation of every honest man.â€
Kearney traveled east to popularize his views and campaigned with the Massachusetts' politician Benjamin Butler, the Greenback Party's candidate for President. Kearney sought the Vice President nomination, although Butler never offered it to him. Kearney faded from the public's eye by the early-1880s, leaving only his legacy of anti-Chinese laws that the Workingmen's Party had passed at the 1879 California Constitutional Convention. Many of these laws, which included a ban on the employment of Chinese laborers, were ruled unconstitutional by the federal Ninth Circuit Court. Corresponding with the English author and politician James Bryce in the late-1880s, Kearney nonetheless claimed credit for making the "Chinese Question" a national issue and affecting the legislation of the Exclusion Act in 1882.
Ironically, San Francisco's Kearny Street runs through Chinatown, but it was not named after Dennis Kearney, but after another Irish immigrant, Mexican-American War Army officer Stephen W. Kearny.1
The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the copyrighted Wikipedia "Dennis Kearney" article.