Chinese Shoemakers in the Berkshires

19th Century Chinese worker in America.

"On a June morning in 1870, seventy-five Chinese immigrants stepped off a train in the New England factory town of North Adams, Massachusetts, imported as strikebreakers to the local shoe manufacturer. They threaded their way through a hostile mob and then-remarkably-their new employer lined them up along the south wall of his factory and had them photographed as the mob fell silent."

So begins "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, Spring 2008) by Anthony W. Lee.

Lee seeks to understand the social forces that brought this now-famous photograph into being, and the events and images it subsequently spawned. He traces the rise of photography as a profession and the hopes and experiences of immigrants trying to find their place in the years following the Civil War. He describes the industrialization of a once-traditional craft, and the often violent debates about race, labor, class, and citizenship that it engendered.

Generously illustrated with many extraordinary photographs, A Shoemaker's Story brings to vivid life America circa 1870. Lee's spellbinding narrative interweaves the perspectives of people from very different walks of life-the wealthy factory owner who dared to bring the strikebreakers to New England, the Chinese workers, the local shoemakers' union that did not want them there, the photographers themselves, and the ordinary men and women who viewed and interpreted their images. Combining painstaking research with world-class storytelling, Lee illuminates an important episode in the social history of the United States, and reveals the extent to which photographs can be sites of intense historical struggle.

Here's a transcript of Professor Lee's on-air commentary for WBUR's special series "Counting On Immigration: Its Impact on the Massachusetts Economy" :

"In June 1870, seventy-five Chinese men, mostly teenagers from Guangdong Province in southeast China, arrived in North Adams, Massachusetts, a factory town nestled high in the Berkshires. They came for the same reasons most immigrants came to New England then, to find a job, make enough money to help their families through tough times, and for some experience a culture and society radically unlike any they had ever seen. From the point of view of others, however, the Chinese arrival marked another kind of venture—bold, risky, and unprecedented. In the immediate post-Civil War era, when factories needed to fill their berths and the end of slavery put the country on a different labor economy, factory owners scoured the world for cheap workers. First the Irish, then the French Canadians came to North Adams. But those two groups soon ended up organizing into labor unions, demanding fair wages, and from the point of view of manufacturers, becoming far more disruptive than productive. At least one factory owner, a man named Calvin Sampson, thought to try a different kind of worker. That is, unbeknownst to the Chinese men until their arrival, they came as strikebreakers, charged to fill the benches of a shoe factory, which was taken to the picket lines by immigrant laborers. Where once Chinese labor competition was a question that was asked in faraway California, with the arrival of the Chinese in North Adams, it suddenly became a national issue.

On the day of the men's arrival, about a quarter of the town showed up at the station to greet them, bringing bricks and bats and brass knuckles. Sampson arranged for an armed guard and outfitted himself, so he claimed, with six pistols. But then a most curious thing happened. As the men stepped onto the platforms, the crowd froze. “These pig-tailed, calico-frocked, wooden-shod invaders made a spectacle which nobody wanted to miss even long enough to stoop for a brickbat,” a witness observed.

Something of that initial reaction—between curiosity and loathing, fascination and anger—characterized how the deposed factory workers dealt with the Chinese during their time in North Adams. They spat on them and at the same time tried to convert them to Christianity. They agitated for their removal and at the same time asked them to join the labor unions. And they sent emissaries to Congress to enact discriminatory legislation at the same time they sent children to teach the Chinese the English language.

The Chinese stayed for ten years, occasionally being augmented by new recruits from Guangdong when the factory needed more hands. But the combined forces of organized labor needing jobs and politicians needing votes eventually brought about a political solution to the Chinese question. In 1882, a little over a decade after the Chinese arrived in North Adams, Congress passed an act that simply excluded the Chinese from country altogether.

The presence of the Chinese in North Adams represented a dynamic that is still with us today. Immigrants, migrants, and laborers were pitted against each other, and the social loathing between them was the result of a competition for the most minimal wages. Their story differs in that it took place in the aftermath of the Civil War, in which race was divided into black and white, and the Chinese, neither black nor white, had no means to claim legal citizenship. When they left North Adams, they took whatever shards of an immigrant Chinese society that had sprouted around them. There has not been one in the Berkshires since. "

Anthony W. Lee is Associate Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College. His books include "Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco" and "Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals."