Chapter 2

The Seeds of Radicalism

The Democratic–Republican Ideology

Humboldt County during the Gilded Age saw the emergence of a vibrant dissenting tradition that shattered the harmony of the pioneer years. In the political arena this discord manifested itself most clearly in support for the California Workingmen’s party, the Greenback Labor party, and the Populists, which were representative of a host of independent political parties that sprang up across America. Leon Fink has calculated that in the mid-1880s alone, labor tickets or parties appeared in 189 cities and towns in 34 of 38 states or territories.¹ Yet, with the exception of the Populist movement, these third-party insurgencies have attracted relatively little attention from historians. Workingmen’s political parties in the antebellum period, especially the Jacksonian era, have received considerably more attention, with the focus usually on radicalism in a major eastern metropolis seriously affected by the early industrial revolution.² Herbert Gutman’s seminal work concentrated primarily on working-class culture and social conflict in townships in Gilded Age America and less on the role that workers and small producers played in forging political parties or working within the two-party system.³ To the extent that dissenting third-party movements have been studied, the focus has tended to be on the Great Upheaval of the mid-1880s and the Populists in the 1890s with comparatively little notice paid to the ideological and organizational antecedents of these movements.⁴

Many studies have shown that in the antebellum period, a democratic–republican tradition dating back to the American Revolution shaped the rhetoric and contours of political debate. In the words of Paul Faler “the American Revolution . . . provided a rich stock of metaphor, language and parallel experiences that all Americans reared in the folklore of the Revolution could easily use and understand.”⁵ Increasingly, works on the politics of the Gilded Age, especially studies of radical ideology and politics, have shown that the democratic–republican tradition continued to be the central framework of political expression and debate. Yet defining the democratic–republican ideology, and how it evolved, has been the subject of considerable controversy. Eric Foner and Sean Wilentz, in particular, have stressed the elasticity of the democratic–republican concept and how people of very different ideological tendencies invoked it.⁶ Its use and evolution in late-nineteenth-century Humboldt County can best be understood in the context of ongoing social and political developments. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to offer a broad definition of the democratic–republican ideology at the outset, for its radical strains are critical to an understanding of the politics of dissent in Gilded Age Humboldt County. To be sure, the elasticity of the democratic–republican heritage helped mitigate class conflict, as well as being a source of factionalism. But it provided the lens through which Humboldters perceived developments at all levels.

In spite of its remoteness, Humboldt County was not an “island community.”⁷ Pioneers brought with them an essentially national political culture that drew heavily on the democratic–republican legacy. The bitter sectional conflicts of the 1850s and the Civil War were dominant issues in county politics and helped invigorate and sustain the democratic–republican tradition. In the acrimonious political debates of this era, Unionists repeatedly invoked a central tenet of the democratic–republican ideology: the doctrine of “free labor.” Unionists characterized the sectional struggle as one between the noble free laborer of the North and an autocratic “slaveocracy” that had no respect for the rights of labor and the democratic liberties bequeathed to the nation by the Founding Fathers. Speaking to his congregation in December 1863, the Reverend J. S. McDonald of Arcata described the Civil War as a conflict by “honest laborers, who lived by their toil,” . . . “about the rights of the laborer” against the South, which “hates to give wages.”⁸ Humboldt County pioneer, James Beith, was a leading figure in the local Democratic party. In 1856, he had voted for James Buchanan “as the only conservative man in the field.”⁹ Although critical of the abolitionists and the more extreme Republicans, Beith, like many Humboldt Democrats, rallied to the Union cause as the sectional crisis deepened. In his diary he dwelt on the need to preserve the republic’s liberties and on the incongruity of a democratic republic that tolerated a system of slavery. In an apocalyptic mood on the eve of the Civil War, he wrote: “Will the human passion reign and trample underfoot all the beautiful furniture of the Temple of Liberty collected with so much assiduity and care by the Founders of the Republic. . . . Will the growth of a century be cut down in an hour? No, I cannot believe it.”¹⁰

The Humboldt Times, which was pro-Democratic until shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, ran editorials, correspondence, and poems eulogizing the “dignity of labor.” In February 1858, the Times reported that the Reverend D’Estimauville’s speech on this subject had received frequent applause.¹¹ Later the same year, the Times expressed outrage at James Henry Hammond’s proslavery “mud-sill” speech alleging that free laborers in the North were little more than “white slaves.” “The free laborers constitute the real democracy of this county,” insisted the Times, and whatever might be the case in Hammond’s native South Carolina, California was “a State which owes everything to the hardy sons of toil.”¹² In January 1860, the Times opened the new decade with a rousing front-page homily to the “Workingmen”:

The noblest men I know on earth

Are men whose hands are brown with toil.

Who backed by no ancestral graces

Hew down the woods and till the soil

And win thereby a prouder fame

Than follow king or warrior’s name.¹³

Embodied in the free-labor ideology was an abiding faith that under a government founded and maintained on true democratic–republican principles, the workingman could rapidly ascend the social ladder. A Times editorial entitled the “Poor Man’s Country” boasted that “if there is one thing in our government which more than commends it to the people it is the fact that the gate of honor is open to the poor and rich alike.”¹⁴ A vital corollary to the ideology of free labor was the labor theory of value. A worker was entitled to the full product of his labor; any government that countenanced a system that denied him this was guilty of supporting “class legislation” and fostering the interests of “monopolies” at the expense of the honest toiler. Although the labor theory of value was critical to the ideology of dissent, it was also a fuzzy concept that could be used to legitimate theories of competitive individualism, corporatism, and, by the 1880s, a protosocialism embracing the notion of a fundamental antagonism between laborers and capitalists. There was ambiguity as to who constituted the “producing classes” and who was entitled to what proportion of the value of their labor. Despite this lack of clarity, dissenters insisted that government had a duty to safeguard a range of social, political, and economic institutions that would guarantee “equal rights” to all and thus enable people to enjoy the full rewards of their labor. As Beith put it, the ultimate question for all government should be “how to promote best the true social equality.”¹⁵ Here again, ambiguity arose: What did “equal rights” and “social equality” actually mean? In general, the equal rights creed did not support the desirability or feasibility of social equality. Instead, it entailed a belief that the political system should provide a structure in which all free laborers had an equal opportunity to succeed—an ideology of “equal libertarianism,” as one historian aptly described it.¹⁶ Governed by such principles, a society would exist where, in Beith’s words, “none are very rich, none very poor.”¹⁷

The extent to which Humboldters took pride in their republican heritage cannot be exaggerated. At Independence Day celebrations in 1861, one orator spoke of the “immortal Declaration” as the “first formal manifesto of those social and civil institutions which are our birthright inheritance—the first herald of that sublime mission of human society about to be inaugurated on the Western Hemisphere—embodying the universal wrongs of the oppressed, and proclaiming the common rights of all mankind.”¹⁸ Twenty years later, Beith, who had joined the ranks of the dissenters, described the Fourth of July as an occasion “which still bids defiance to autocracy” and celebrated the “self-denying virtues of their ancestors who . . . gained the priceless heritage of freedom to bestow it to posterity.” He referred to the birth of the American nation as “the establishment of an Empire such as the world has never seen.”¹⁹

Until the end of the Civil War, politics in Humboldt County was dominated by national issues. County conventions and the platforms of the major political parties hardly addressed local issues, and there is little evidence of divisiveness over them. The protracted sectional crisis probably helped subsume tensions, but there were other reasons for the consensus in local politics. Humboldt’s pioneers were united by a desire to promote their community to outsiders. Highly conscious of their geographical isolation, they realized the need to attract outside capital and a larger population if the county was to become a viable economic entity. Accordingly, there was a widespread recognition of the need to use county revenues to lay the foundation of a basic economic infrastructure. At the same time, the possibility of discord over appropriations and expenditures was limited by their small scale. In addition, the transience of many early pioneers lessened the chances of a polarization over local issues.

Disillusion and Dissent

In the late 1860s, with the sectional conflict no longer the preeminent issue and the county population growing and becoming more settled, important questions arose concerning county revenues that brought the consensus to an abrupt end. An increasing number of citizens began to feel that the county was going too deeply into debt to fund internal improvements and that the burden of taxation was falling disproportionately on small farmers and workers. A proposal to build a 100-mile road to link Humboldt County with the state road system raised a storm of protest. At a special meeting called in December 1867, dissenters voiced their objections to the $50,000 bond issue to finance the scheme. Leaders at the meeting appointed a Committee of Fifteen to investigate how much money exactly had been raised and spent on road improvements. A letter from “W. J. Sweasey and others” charged the Board of Supervisors with extravagance and incompetence.²⁰ H. L. Knight, the future secretary of the California Workingmen’s party, wrote a series of satirical letters to the Humboldt Times, accusing local government officials and special-interest groups of corruption.²¹ In 1868, the road bond issue lost by 1,038 to 134 votes.²²

The county’s debt and local tax rates continued to be issues of bitter contention. By 1870, there was strong disagreement as to the extent of the county’s indebtedness, since most expenditures had been financed by county warrants, which no longer sold at anything like their par value. The Humboldt Times insisted that the warrants should be repaid at par value and that the real amount of the county’s debt was only $7,000 and not $24,000, as some alleged.²³ In 1871, a plan to build a railroad from Eureka to the Eel River Valley, entailing a bond issue of $100,000, encountered the same fierce opposition that the road bond had faced. One correspondent, “White Alder,” argued that only a small proportion of the county’s residents would benefit from the railroad and warned voters to be on their guard “against the rapacious maws of an ever devouring monopoly.”²⁴ The Times reluctantly acknowledged the strength of public opposition, and in October the bond issue was defeated by 899 to 143 votes.²⁵

The Republican party in Humboldt County retained its ascendancy over the Democrats in the immediate postbellum years, but its image was tainted and its support eroded by a series of charges of corruption. A succession of letters in the Northern Independent, from “Taxpayer,” alleged that the Republican candidate for the state assembly, J. De Haven, paid almost no local taxes and that the local taxes paid by everyone on the 1869 county Republican ticket amounted to “a mere pittance.”²⁶ At the same time, Knight charged that the vote at the Republican party convention had been blatantly manipulated to secure the renomination of Humboldt County sheriff, W. S. Barnum. He also noted that county records revealed that in the past year Barnum had collected poll taxes from only a third of the county’s voters and that Barnum himself had paid no local taxes in spite of his handsome county salary.²⁷ Barnum’s rebuttal to these accusations was not convincing, and several indignant letters from “Union voters” criticized the Republican party leadership for not repudiating Barnum. The Humboldt Times, which had staunchly supported the Republican party since the Civil War, did not dispute the charges and endorsed several “independent” candidates in the 1869 elections. At the election, the Republican party’s large majority was severely pruned, and Sheriff Barnum was not reelected.

Increasingly, issues of taxation, public indebtedness, corruption, and political cliques became linked in the minds of many Humboldt County residents, a perception that was reinforced by their view of developments in state and national politics. To a growing number of people it seemed that, whether the symptom was a corrupt local sheriff or a national Credit Mobilier railroad scandal, a serious malaise had begun to afflict the American body politic. Numerous instances of actual or alleged corruption at all levels of government in the late 1860s and early 1870s shook people’s faith in their political institutions. In Humboldt County, the Republican party had emerged from the Civil War with a large reservoir of moral and political credit that enabled it to buck the trend toward the Democratic party that occurred throughout most of California. But by the early 1870s, many Humboldters felt that the Republicans had exhausted their credit.

In 1871, Louis Tower, who had been an ardent supporter of the Republican party in the 1860s, eloquently expressed the growing sense of foreboding and disenchantment of many Humboldters in a series of articles entitled the “Next Irrepressible Conflict.” Tower stated that it was his duty to “call the attention of my fellow laborers—the producers of wealth—to the consideration of our interests as treated in the policies and practices of our government.” He asserted that “the tendency of our legislatures both national and state . . . is drifting in favor of capital” and mentioned specifically the growing wealth and power of corporations and railroads; the pervasiveness of corruption in politics; and the “absorption” of the public domain “into the hands of capitalists through Congressional action,” which threatened the free laborer with “the fate that has befallen the workers of the older more densely populated countries.” Tower spoke of the Republican party in its early days as representing “the rise, progress and culmination of the principle that labor should be free and that the soil, the great bank of labor exchange, should be free also.” But, he argued, the conflict between labor and capital was now inevitable, and the “producers of wealth” should form a new party that would elect men of integrity.²⁸

The Humboldt Times sensed the growing disaffection and entreated the “laboring classes” to retain their loyalty to the Republican party. The newspaper reminded readers that the Democratic party had supported slavery, “the very bane of free labor,” had opposed the income tax, and had failed to provide public education in many states; the Republican party, in contrast, had abolished slavery, had thrown open the public lands to settlement, and had established a public educational system in many states.²⁹ Despite such pleas, disillusionment with the Republicans in Humboldt County mounted. In 1873, when Henry McGowan announced his candidacy for the state assembly as an independent, he expressed many of the same sentiments as Tower. He praised the Republicans for seeing the nation through the ordeal of the Civil War, but, he said, the party “has unfortunately allowed itself to be led by corrupt and designing men into a state of political depravity.” In referring to the “great leper spots” that besmirched the party’s image, McGowan spoke of “Land and Railroad monopolies, Credit Mobiliers, Back Pay Stealings, and other eruptions of a similar nature.”³⁰

On August 2, 1873, at a mass meeting at Ryan’s Hall in Eureka, a Tax-Payer party was formed. The party’s formation paralleled, but apparently had no direct links, with a Tax-Payer Independent party that was beginning to pick up momentum in California under Newton Booth.³¹ Booth, the Republican governor of California, had been elected in 1871 with the strong support of the Grange, running on a platform stressing opposition to railroad subsidies. In Humboldt County, many of the leading figures in the new party were former Republicans. The most notable among them was W. J. Sweasey, who had been chairman of the county’s Republican party since the Civil War. Sweasey was elected president of the new party, and a full slate of candidates was chosen for the upcoming elections. First among a long list of party resolutions was an expression of strong opposition to “giving lands or money or loaning the National credit to corporations or other persons, for the purposes of creating dangerous monopolies to oppress the people.” Another resolution denounced corruption “whether by means of ‘Credit Mobilier Frauds’ in the East” or “Contract and Finance Companies in California.” The Tax-Payer party declared its support for “equality of taxation, so that the burden of maintaining the government shall be borne by the rich in proportion to their wealth.” Finally, it endorsed a measure to regulate “the carrying business of the country” by controlling railroad freight rates.³²

The ensuing campaign was one of the most heated in the county’s history. The Tax-Payer party had problems from the outset. The Republican platform, although not quite as populist in tone, was almost indistinguishable from the Tax-Payer program in its planks on taxation, corruption, and monopoly. Several Republican candidates openly acknowledged that corruption and monopoly were serious issues. The Tax-Payer party also had to face the opposition of the county press and repeated allegations that party members were a group of “sore heads and broken down political hacks” who had been shunned by the Republican party, notwithstanding the fact that the Tax-Payer party held its convention before the Republicans.³³

The Republicans fretted, in particular, about the allegiance of Humboldt’s farmers. In 1872 and 1873, there were growing manifestations of their discontent. Farmers in various locales throughout the county began forming Farmers’ Protective Unions in 1872 “for the purposes of reflecting the best interests of the farming community of the county and deriving some plan of action for mutual benefit.”³⁴ In 1873, the Humboldt County farmers affiliated with the California Grange.³⁵ While the Humboldt Grange did not make political endorsements, there can be no doubt that the organization reflected deep-seated discontents. Farmers complained repeatedly to the county press about low prices, and the Humboldt Times reported that for “several years” local farmers “have received but indifferent rewards for their labor” and that “in some instances it has taken nearly all . . . to pay commission and expenses of transportation.”³⁶

The overall performance of the Tax-Payer party was impressive. It succeeded in electing its candidate to the state assembly and lost most of the county contests by narrow margins. The extent of the county farmers’ disaffection showed in the strong support the Tax-Payer party received in most rural precincts, equivalent to its showings in Eureka and Arcata.³⁷ The 1873 election was the first electoral expression of a rising tide of dissent in Humboldt County. Rumblings of discontent had been growing louder since the Civil War and were finally crystallizing into a coherent political movement. Several leading political figures in Humboldt County permanently severed their connections with the Republican and, to a lesser extent, Democratic parties. Sweasey emerged as the leading dissident in the county—a position he occupied for the next decade and that culminated in his nomination for the lieutenant governorship of California on the Greenback Labor party ticket in 1882. No one else in the county expressed with such lucidity and forcefulness the profound sense of disillusionment felt by many people.

Sweasey was born in London, England, in 1805. At age twenty-one, he captained a sea vessel engaged in trade with the West Indies. In 1837, he left “‘perfidious Albion’ to set out for the land of the free,” and, shortly after arriving in America, he and his family joined Robert Owen’s communitarian settlement in New Harmony, Indiana. For several years he was a “near neighbor” and employee of Owen, whom he described as “an old and valued friend.” In the 1840s, Sweasey became involved with the Young America movement before taking the overland route to California in 1850. Soon after his arrival, he became a champion of settlers’ rights in their battle with the Spanish land-grant holders. He became known as the “Squatter King,” and he lived on a ranch near Redwood City until he was evicted. He joined the Democratic party and in 1853 was elected to the California Assembly as a representative from San Francisco. In 1855 he moved to Hydesville, in southern Humboldt County, where he engaged in dairy farming. Within a year, he was chairman of the Humboldt County Democratic party, but shortly after the election of James Buchanan in 1856, he left the party. He helped found the county’s Republican party and was its chairman from its inception until 1872.

Sweasey moved with his family to Eureka in 1862 and he established a successful general store there.³⁸ By 1867, in spite of his prominent position in the county’s Republican party, Sweasey had become highly critical of the Republican-dominated county administration. Just before the 1873 elections, he severed his ties with the party. He wrote frequent letters to the local press voicing his profound concern at the direction in which he believed America was heading, the most eloquent of which appeared a few months after the 1873 election:

Look at the corruption and venality exposed in our late national councils. Look at the profligate disposal of our public domain, the noblest inheritance ever bequeathed to a people. Look at our swindling financial system, made and perpetuated to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Look at the mass of misery and crime in our great cities; near 1,500 homicides in the city of New York alone in one year; thousands thrown houseless, breadless on the street. Why? Are they idle, unwilling to work? Has nature refused her support? Neither. Our harvests were never more bountiful. . . . A century ago honesty and ability guided our national councils. Today can we say so? A few years more of this misrule of the weak minded and where will be the superiority of the condition of our people over the condition of the people of the monarchial governments of Europe? Already our taxes are greater than the taxes of any other people or nation. Our lands are held in quantities larger than German principalities; not by aristocracies of birth, but by aristocracies of wealth, by corporations who have no souls, who never die, who control the weak minded men, who fill our legislative halls, both National and State, while thousands upon thousands are suffering for food, shelter and the commonest necessaries of life.³⁹

The depression of the late 1870s reinforced the fears of men like Sweasey and led to a revival of organized dissenting political activity. The dissidents were struck both by the social and political turmoil at the state and national levels and by unprecedented social and economic dislocations in their own community. The destitution caused by the depression hit Humboldt County as early as January 1877. The Humboldt Times complained about the “insufferable nuisance” caused by the “professional beggar.”⁴⁰ A few weeks later, the Times stated that “there seems to be a regularly organized band of ruffians in this city. Scarcely a day passes but what we hear of an assault being made upon some of our citizens.”⁴¹

The depression severely affected the Humboldt County lumber industry. The price of redwood lumber plummeted. In 1876, prices stood at an all-time high of $30 per 1,000 board feet for clear lumber; by 1879, the price had slumped to $18 per 1,000 feet.⁴² Lumber workers had their wages cut from $5 to $25 a month in February 1877, a move that reportedly gave rise to “considerable complaint.”⁴³ After the July 4 holiday that year, lumber employers closed their mills indefinitely. Hundreds of workers lost their jobs, and there were dire predictions about the repercussions on the local economy.⁴⁴ Few mills resumed operations during the remainder of 1877, and poverty and unemployment were widespread. A man who spent five fruitless weeks in Eureka looking for work reported that “every street corner could boast of at least one dozen idlers.”⁴⁵ The Humboldt Times conceded that “several families” in Eureka lived “in very destitute circumstances” and urged the community to be charitable and hold special benefits to raise money for the deserving poor.⁴⁶ In the fall of 1877, complaints about tramps recurred in the local press, but several apparent incidents of arson caused much greater alarm.⁴⁷ The Times reported that a “diabolical attempt was made to burn the city” and called for a special police force to combat the incendiaries.⁴⁸

The local press received a stream of anonymous letters that were indicative of growing social tensions. The Democratic Standard, which in 1877 came under the auspices of Greenback Labor party supporter William Ayres, provided a fresh outlet for expressions of discontent. In November 1877, it published a strongly worded letter from “Argonaut,” insisting that a man had the right to work and warning that, while people prefer legal remedies, “men cannot be patient when they are hungry.” He compared the plight of labor to a turtle “upon which the elephants of capital stand.”⁴⁹ The Humboldt Times received an equally strongly worded communication from “Justice”:

Dissensions, like contagions, seem to spread over the country. Even the little Hamlet of Arcata is not an exception. She has a few pioneers who have been fortunate enough to make a little money out of the Indians, the soldiers and the later immigrants, until they have acquired a few town lots and some tenantable housing. Not unlike the railroad kings they are the self-constituted aristocrats who claim the right to extort by law . . . all the blood money possible from the poorer classes.⁵⁰

A widespread suspicion that public land laws were being violated aggrieved many in the county. In a letter to the Daily Evening Signal, “Pre-empter” stated that “much complaint is made by the settlers who were trying to file preemption claims in the county.” He criticized the long delays of the county surveyor in filing plats and suggested that many people believed that it was a conspiracy to aid the “land grabbers.” He inquired whether either of the candidates for the state legislature was interested in these abuses or if they were “in unison with the land grabbing fraternity and monopolists generally.”⁵¹ These charges were not without considerable foundation (see Chapter 5). Humboldt County pioneer J. C. Blake recalled that it was common practice for large landholders to circumvent the 160-acre homestead limit by paying another person a fee for filing the initial claim, with the clear understanding that the land title would soon be transferred to the sponsoring landholder.⁵²

The findings of a study undertaken by the Sacramento Daily Record in 1873, based on data from the State Board of Equalization, revealed that the pattern of land distribution had become very skewed in many California counties, including Humboldt. Forty individuals or businesses owned over 1,000 acres in the county in 1873, and five owned more than 5,000 acres.⁵³ Joseph Russ, who had come to California in 1850 with a few provisions to engage in merchandising and stock raising, and who had operated a butcher shop in Eureka before becoming a lumber entrepreneur in 1870, owned 23,169 acres in Humboldt County.⁵⁴ In evaluating the impact of both land frauds and concentrations, it is important to keep in mind that the state’s press gave considerable coverage to these issues and that a large proportion of Humboldt County newspaper space was taken up with extracts from the state and national press. Incidental references indicate that libraries and a significant number of individuals subscribed to a state or even an eastern newspaper, such as the New York Times. On the land question, the San Francisco Chronicle serialized the findings of the Sacramento Daily Record and commented that they revealed a “startling evidence of the existence of a gigantic land monopoly.”⁵⁵ With undisguised sarcasm, the Chronicle referred to Miller and Lux’s “little patch in Merced [County].”⁵⁶ The Humboldt Times, it should be noted, carried the statistics on landholding in Humboldt County. Letters to the county press by the late 1870s on the land question were frequent enough to suggest that sentiment on this issue contributed significantly to the discontent in Humboldt County. Certainly, indignation over land frauds, as much as any other issue, led to the birth of branches of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) and the Knights of Labor in the mid-1880s.⁵⁷

Land monopoly and fraud received more attention than any other issue in the debates surrounding the election of delegates to the California constitutional convention in 1878.⁵⁸ Sweasey wrote several long, impassioned letters on the subject. He asserted that unless reforms were undertaken to ensure a more equitable distribution of land, the result would be “serfdom and slavery or a bloody revolution.”⁵⁹ He pointed to the turmoil in Ireland as proof of his argument and added that “what was done in Ireland by war and conquest was more successfully done in California by fraud under the pretense of law.”⁶⁰ Sweasey described in great detail the fraudulent means by which much of California’s land was acquired by people shortly after the Mexican-American War. He insisted that similar frauds were being used to obtain land in parts of California not covered by the Spanish land grants and alluded to one scheme to aggrandize “thirty square leagues, north of Cape Mendocino,”⁶¹ an area 30 miles south of Eureka. In another letter, Sweasey spoke of land monopoly as the “greatest evil,” and recalled the day he had witnessed 80 families being evicted from their land under the English enclosure laws to make way for a deer park.⁶² At the Franklin Society Debating Club in Eureka in 1878, a schoolteacher, George Sarvis, echoed many of Sweasey’s arguments. Sarvis spoke in favor of a motion to limit the amount of land an individual or corporation might own on the grounds that “the holding of large and unlimited quantities of land by one individual or an association of individuals disturbs the unalienable right of each citizen and when carried out, destroys popular government.”⁶³

Humboldt County farmers were not immediately hit by the depression of the late 1870s. Harvests in 1877 and 1878 were bountiful, and prices for most crops held constant, although they began to fall slightly in 1879. Nevertheless, the county’s Grange did not hesitate to join other dissidents in calling for far-reaching reforms. The Grange had become a strong force in the social and political life of the county by the late 1870s. There were at least six branches of the Grange in 1877. Complete lists of branches and membership figures are unfortunately hard to obtain, but the fact that the Ferndale Grange boasted a membership of 150 in 1877 (up from 90 in 1874) suggests that the Humboldt County Grange was flourishing.⁶⁴ The Grange performed important social and economic functions. The Table Bluff Grange built its own hall,⁶⁵ and all the Granges frequently held dances and other events. The Table Bluff Grange (and perhaps others) also established cooperative retail facilities.⁶⁶ In the political realm, Humboldt Grangers stressed the need for a stable and expanded money supply based on silver and greenbacks. And, in general, they shared a gloomy prognosis of the American body politic with men like Tower, Sweasey, and Sarvis. In March 1878, the Ferndale Grange passed the following resolution:

Whereas, a people view with alarm the growing tendency (by class legislation) of a bourbon aristocracy, a system of landlordism such as exists in Germany, England and throughout Europe, and which if not checked soon will finally reduce the working classes of America to mere slaves and vassals. . . . The toiling masses of this country are today to the banks and corporations what the peons of Mexico are to the aristocracy of that so called Republic.

Resolved, that we look upon this bourbon element with suspicion and distrust in their efforts to subvert that form of government bequeathed to us by our fathers, and to erect instead a semi-despotic government, controlled by a centralized aristocracy.⁶⁷

The Workingmen’s Party

A host of grievances that had been simmering for a decade surfaced in 1877–1878 in the context of the depression and the debate over the need for a new state constitution. Complaints included the cost of state government, inequitable tax laws, corruption in government at all levels, and the political power of the railroads in California and nationwide. This conjuncture of events and discontents led to the formation of a California Workingmen’s party in Humboldt and 39 other California counties.⁶⁸ Humboldt voters expressed their growing disquiet in September 1877 when a statewide referendum was held on whether to call a convention to rewrite the 1849 California Constitution. In general, Californians content with the status quo were opposed to a convention. Humboldt County voted in favor of a convention by a margin of 10 to 1 (2,552 to 258 votes);⁶⁹ voters statewide approved the measure by less than a 2 to 1 majority (73,400 to 44,200 votes).⁷⁰

In San Francisco, another issue gained prominence at this time. Anti-Chinese sentiment reached new heights during the depression of the late 1870s, a fact that historians have viewed as the most important element in the birth of the Workingmen’s party there. The Chinese population of Humboldt County increased from 38 in 1870 to 242 in 1880,⁷¹ and by the late 1870s Eureka possessed a Chinatown of sorts.⁷² The local press commented occasionally on the alleged existence of opium dens and brothels in Eureka’s Chinatown, and several attacks on Chinese people, usually by Eureka youths, took place. Notwithstanding this, and the fact that in 1885 Eureka achieved the dubious distinction of being one of the first western communities to expel its Chinese population, Sinophobia was not a major issue in county politics for a number of reasons.⁷³ First, by 1880, the Chinese constituted only 1.5 percent of the county’s population, whereas in San Francisco they made up 16.3 percent of the inhabitants and 8.7 percent of the state population. Moreover, Humboldt’s Chinese population was relatively dispersed. In 1880, Eureka, with its so-called Chinatown, contained only 101 Chinese people out of a total population of 2,700. Second, while competition from Chinese labor may have aroused some animosity, few Chinese were employed in the county’s two principal industries, lumber and agriculture. Most worked as miners (66), laborers (62), cooks (37), and in the laundry business (23). Only 6 of the 228 Chinese employed in the county worked in the lumber industry.⁷⁴ Thus, the Chinese in Humboldt County did not threaten white labor as directly as they did in San Francisco and other parts of California. Significantly, when lumber employers tried to make more extensive use of Chinese labor in the early 1880s, anti-Chinese sentiment rose dramatically. Undoubtedly, most Humboldters favored Chinese exclusion by the late 1870s, but a host of other grievances were far more important in the formation of the California Workingmen’s party.

The Humboldt County Workingmen’s party originated in May 1878 to contest elections to select delegates to the California constitutional convention. Sweasey, the party’s first chairman, was the candidate for the county delegate seat. James Barton, a farmer from Ferndale, received the senatorial nomination for the 27th District. The party’s convention passed a string of resolutions: Public officers convicted of bribery should be liable to a twenty-year jail sentence; taxes should be levied only “to meet the expenses of government”; and “taxation should be equal, so that the burden of maintaining government be borne by the rich in proportion to their wealth.” Also, railroads should be taxed in relation to their “actual cash value,” while the large landholdings of corporations and wealthy individuals should be taxed at the same rate per acre as small landholders. All legal means should be used to halt the immigration of the Chinese “and other inferior races who cannot amalgamate with us.”⁷⁵ A few days after the convention, the party founded a newspaper, the Workingman, which was edited by Sweasey and Barton.

The county Democratic and Republican organizations joined forces to elect delegates to the constitutional convention. County Judge C. C. Stafford applauded this cooperation, for “as matters now stand it is possible for the Communists to get control of the Convention.”⁷⁶ The fusion plan aroused the ire of the Workingmen’s party. The Democratic Standard asserted that “the managers of the two parties, under the direction of the monopolists, have joined hands . . . against the ‘common enemy,’ that is, the workingman.”⁷⁷

At the June 19 election, the Humboldt County Workingmen’s party triumphed over the “nonpartisan” party. Both Sweasey and Barton were elected delegates to the constitutional convention. On the whole, the votes for the two men were remarkably evenly distributed over the county, with both candidates picking up approximately the same levels of support in Eureka as they did in the rural precincts. In Eureka, which accounted for a third of the county’s total vote, Sweasey and Barton won 56 percent and 60 percent of the vote, respectively. Outside Eureka, Sweasey’s share of the vote in all precincts combined was slightly lower (50 percent) and Barton’s somewhat higher (67 percent). The consistency of the two men’s performance throughout the county’s 23 precincts indicates the breadth of support for the Workingmen’s party.⁷⁸

Barton proved an especially effective spokesman at the constitutional convention. He spoke with particular stridency on the issue of “land grabbing,” calling for a state investigation and the repossession of fraudulently acquired lands. But he declared that he was pledged to no “agrarian measures” and that he was not at the convention “to disturb the rights of property.” He advocated “equal taxation” as the best means to stop land grabbing. To this end, he introduced several resolutions calling for amendments to the state’s tax system, including the adoption of a state income tax. He also spoke in favor of a retrenchment in state expenditures and a reduction in the salaries of state officials.⁷⁹

The Humboldt Workingmen’s party was pleased with the outcome of the constitutional convention and, unlike the San Francisco branch of the party, did not split on the question of ratification. Within two weeks of the convention, the party launched a vigorous campaign to ratify the new constitution, which promised strict regulation of railroads and other public utilities, a more equitable system of taxation, an eight-hour day on all public works projects, and a series of anti-Chinese provisions. The Democratic Standard was the only newspaper in the county to endorse ratification unequivocally. It denounced the California Democratic party for opposing ratification and accused the party of betraying “the true principles taught us by a Jefferson and a Jackson,” and called on its readers to “remember General Jackson and his war upon the privileged classes.”⁸⁰ In the ratification referendum on May 7, 1879, California voters endorsed the new constitution by a relatively small margin of 77,959 to 67,134 votes; but in Humboldt County the ratification majority was much more decisive, with 1,714 votes in favor and 1,051 against.⁸¹

The Humboldt Workingmen’s party perceived the ratification as a triumph for the workingman, and the party’s success encouraged the belief that the time was ripe for a basic realignment of political forces to regenerate a corrupt and decadent America. With remarkable frequency, letters to local newspapers harkened back nostalgically to the days of Jefferson and Jackson when the American republic supposedly had true Democrats at the helm. As one writer, “Jeffersonian,” put it: “We are upon the eve of a reorganization of political forces. The two old parties have had their day.” The Democratic party represented democracy in name only and had “drifted far from its moorings,” while the Republican party was dominated by corporations and pro-Chinese sentiment. He concluded that the Workingmen’s party was the only true standard-bearer of pure democratic principles.⁸²

The profound concern expressed about the peril to American democracy cannot be dismissed as partisan political rhetoric. “Is this a Republic?” asked the Democratic Standard at the head of its editorial column immediately after the ratification election. It recounted how, just before the election, workers at one lumber mill had found a ticket under their dinner plates marked “Against the Constitution.” The Standard commented: “When the daily laborer can be intimidated and forced to vote against his judgement what is he but a slave,” and the editorial concluded that “if we are to be a republic let it be so in fact. Our sires laid down their lives to establish one. We should be prepared to maintain it, if needs be with our lives.”⁸³ A month later, the Standard reported that some employers in the county had dismissed workers who had voted for the new constitution.⁸⁴ Events at the local, state, and national levels produced profound disquiet on the part of many Humboldters, who saw themselves as defending a sacred democratic–republican legacy. Not surprisingly, they invoked the figureheads, symbols, and rhetoric of a supposedly golden age.

The Humboldt Workingmen’s party began taking steps in the spring of 1879 to consolidate its organization to contest the forthcoming statewide and county elections. In March 1879, a convention was held to elect delegates to a state convention of the Workingmen’s party and to encourage the establishment of workingmen’s clubs. By June 1879, clubs were mushrooming throughout the county.⁸⁵ In the same month, a convention nominated candidates and drew up a platform. The platform extolled the new constitution stressing, in particular, how it would reduce the burden of taxation. But it reiterated that the resolute implementation of the new constitution depended on electing “faithful friends” to all branches of government.⁸⁶

Who were the “faithful friends” nominated by the Workingmen’s party?⁸⁷ Most of the candidates were in their forties or early fifties and had come to California in the 1850s. Almost all had resided in Humboldt County for at least ten years. A majority were natives of the New England and Middle Atlantic regions and came from relatively humble origins. Very few had held public office before, and only one had done so in Humboldt County. Two farmers, both Grangers, were on the ticket; one owned a “small farm” and the other a “comfortable farm.” Thomas Cutler, the candidate for sheriff, was the only merchant on the ticket. He was, allegedly, one of only two merchants in Eureka who supported the Workingmen’s party “against all the threats of the San Francisco wholesale merchants and railroad carriers.” Two of the men on the ticket ran livery stables. One was Pierce Ryan, the senatorial candidate for the state’s 27th District; the other, John Carr, had spent most of his life as a miner and blacksmith. The nominee for county clerk was a carpenter, and the candidate for county treasurer had worked in the lumber mills for six years. Three professional people—two lawyers and a schoolteacher—rounded out the ticket. Their prospective offices of district attorney, superior court judge, and school administrator demanded at least a modicum of professional training and experience.

The Workingmen’s party conducted a spirited campaign against the Republicans and Democrats in the county. Leaders of the new party berated the old-line forces for opposing ratification of the state constitution and portrayed themselves as the true standard-bearers of the American democratic tradition. J. D. H. Chamberlin, the Workingmen’s party candidate for superior county judge, opened a speech at Ferndale by quoting at length from the Declaration of Independence.⁸⁸ The Democratic Standard warned that there were “vital principles involved in the election of the most unimportant officer. . . . The tory spirit has revived after 100 years of rest and today opposes the honest yeomanry of our country with all the oppressive bitterness that persecuted the heroes of American freedom.”⁸⁹ On the evening before election day, the Workingmen’s party staged a torchlight parade in Eureka that drew supporters from all over the county. The Standard described the procession as “composed entirely of farmers, laborers and mechanics.”⁹⁰

Although the Workingmen’s party did not achieve the sweeping success it had in electing delegates to the constitutional convention, its performance was impressive. Every candidate for statewide office on the Workingmen’s ticket got a majority of the vote in Humboldt County. Party candidates for the state senate and legislature were elected, and the party won half the county’s executive positions, losing the remainder by only a few votes to the fusionist opposition. Precinct returns again indicated that the Workingmen’s party received consistent support throughout the county, performing best in the burgeoning agricultural townships of Ferndale and Table Bluff. In most other rural precincts the party performed no better, and sometimes worse, than in Eureka, where the party fell only a few votes short of a majority in almost all county and state contests. Statewide, the Workingmen elected the chief justice of the state supreme court, 5 of 6 associate justices, and 16 assemblymen and 11 state senators. This result was not unimpressive, but it failed to give the party a majority in the state legislature and was somewhat disappointing in view of its strong showing in the 1878 constitutional convention elections.

The ineffectual performance of many party representatives at state and local levels and persistent factionalism in the San Francisco branch led to a rapid decline of the party after the 1879 state elections. The gathering political momentum of the National Greenback Labor party encouraged some members of the Workingmen’s party, including Denis Kearney, leader of the San Francisco branch, to join the Greenbacks. In addition, the success of the Workingmen’s party encouraged California’s Republican and Democratic parties (especially the latter) to become more responsive to the demands of the Workingmen’s party on such issues as Chinese exclusion, land monopoly, and stricter regulation of railroads. Many Workingmen’s representatives aligned with one of the two major parties, usually the Democrats, in a process that Alexander Saxton has dubbed “the institutionalization of labor politics.”⁹¹

The Workingmen’s party’s decline in Humboldt County reflected the demise of the party statewide. Its supporters were discouraged by the overall performance of the party in the 1879 state elections and in municipal elections in Humboldt and other counties in early 1880. Throughout the 1879 campaign, party leaders stressed that the new constitution was a dead letter unless the party obtained a majority in the state legislature. Thus, the Humboldt County Workingmen’s party virtually turned the election into a referendum on the future of the party. Immediately after the election, the Democratic Standard declared that the new constitution had been “practically nullified.” It lamented the well-publicized factionalism of the San Francisco branch and the fact that a considerable number of Workingmen’s party representatives were moving into the old parties.⁹² Humboldters who retained their faith in the new party after the elections soon became disillusioned with the performance of some representatives. In April 1880, the Standard reported “much talk of dissatisfaction among the workingmen of Eureka about the policy which some of the county officers elected on the Workingmen’s ticket have chosen to pursue.”⁹³ George Shaw, who had been elected county assessor on the party ticket, incurred the wrath of many people when he added an office clerk to his staff at a salary of $135 per month and selected a long-time enemy of the Workingmen’s party as his main adviser.⁹⁴ By April 1880, Shaw was so unpopular that he required a bodyguard.⁹⁵ Disillusionment with the Workingmen’s party can be gauged from the following communication of one disgruntled Humboldter:

Mr Editor, I am mad, desperately mad. . . . In the first place we adopted the New Constitution. Of course I expected it would be the means of lightening our burden of taxation by lopping off the County Court, reducing expenses in Grand Jury matters, reducing the length of the sessions of the Legislature, etc. I should not have voted for that instrument had I not believed that it would help us. . . . O, how gloriously we have been bilked. But it is the fault of the people themselves, by electing men to the Legislature and the Board of Supervisors, who were hostile to the New Constitution.⁹⁶

Growing interest in the Greenback Labor party hastened the dissolution of the Humboldt County Workingmen’s party. Greenback clubs sprang up throughout the county between 1878 and 1880. In fact, remnants of the Workingmen’s party reconstituted themselves as the Humboldt Greenback Labor party. The Greenbackers’ panaceas had a much stronger appeal in Humboldt County than they did in San Francisco and many other California counties.

By the late 1870s, a coherent dissenting tradition had emerged in Humboldt County. The evolution of this tradition owed much to the persistence of values associated with an antebellum democratic–republican ideology that stressed the superiority of the American political system. Chauvinistic and almost millennial assumptions engendered a profound set of beliefs and expectations about the nature of the American political economy. In particular, the free-labor tenet and its corollary, the labor theory of value, stressing as they did the immense contribution of the free laborer to America’s progress, heightened expectations about the future, reinforced the workingman’s sense of his moral worth, and endowed him with a civic responsibility to scrutinize the destiny of the republic. Between 1866 and 1880, developments at the local, state, and national levels convinced many Humboldters that pernicious economic and political events threatened the sanctity and purity of America and seriously threatened the free laborers’ advancement.

Undeniably, contradictions and ambiguities existed in the democratic–republican legacy. Two contradictions, in particular, are worth noting. Both derived from a marked discrepancy between the dissenters’ penetrating political analysis and their often superficial prescriptions. For example, on the crucial question of land monopoly, Sweasey took a radical stance in advocating a statutory limitation on the amount of land a person might own. Barton and the Ferndale Grange, for all their deeply felt anxieties about the concentration of land ownership and land fraud, could not countenance so direct an interference with the rights of private property.⁹⁷ Paradoxically, many dissenters railed against what they perceived as the dangers of unfettered capitalism but could not bring themselves to advocate far-reaching controls (with the possible exception of the railroad regulation) over private property rights. This disparity between a keen perception of fundamental problems and a naive faith in piecemeal solutions that ignored underlying structural problems stands out in the dissenters’ faith that all could be rectified if only good, honest men were elected. Even a man as disenchanted as Sweasey could in one breath speak of dangerous social and economic trends and the threat they posed to the republic and in the next proclaim his belief in the ability of the “best men” to rectify the situation.

Notwithstanding its ambiguous features, the democratic–republican tradition provided Humboldt’s dissenters with an arsenal of ideas. Increasingly, they would jettison many (but not all) of the contradictory strands of the tradition and embrace reforms that entailed at least a measure of state control over private property. The Humboldt Workingmen’s party bequeathed to the county a dissenting ideological legacy that the Greenback Labor party, the International Workingmen’s Association, and the Knights of Labor were to draw on in the 1880s, and the Humboldt Populists relied on heavily in the 1890s. Many leaders of the Humboldt Workingmen’s party played important roles in these movements. In 1886, the Arcata Union commented with alarm and derision on the growing strength of the People’s party, the political arm of the Humboldt Knights of Labor, describing its leadership as “in the main the same old political fossils . . . that have monopolized every reform movement from the days of Kearney.”⁹⁸