Leadership Quote by Denis Kearney

Kearney’s line is a pressure-cooker of late-19th-century American panic, engineered to make economic pain feel like a conspiracy. The target isn’t just Chinese laborers; it’s the story that laborers have been forced to tell themselves when wages drop and rents rise: someone did this to us. By casting the “aristocracy” as “bloated,” he turns inequality into physical disgust, a body gone soft and parasitic. Then he widens the enemy list with a bit of geopolitical theater: China is “the greatest and oldest despotism,” a phrase that pretends to be worldly while doing a simple job - laundering racism through the language of political morality. If China is tyranny, then the Chinese worker becomes tyranny’s emissary, not a neighbor.

The real trick is how he smuggles in a class argument and then reroutes it into ethnic scapegoating. “Cheap working slave” reframes a paid immigrant laborer as an instrument of elite cruelty, collapsing “competition” into “bondage.” That move absolves white workers of agency (“we didn’t lose; we were undermined”) and offers a clean moral hierarchy: we are free labor, they are servile, the rich are corrupt.

Context matters: Kearney rose during the Depression-era shocks of the 1870s and the Workingmen’s Party agitation in California, when Chinese immigrants were blamed for unemployment and wage suppression. The intent is mobilization, not nuance - to fuse legitimate anger at capital with nativist politics, paving the road to exclusion by dressing it up as anti-oligarchy.