Justice & Law Quote by Denis Kearney

Masculinity is the bait, exclusion is the hook. Kearney wraps a labor demand in the oldest kind of moral costume: honor. By insisting "We are men" and repeating "like men", he’s not just calling for dignity at work; he’s defining who counts as fully human, and who doesn’t. The phrase "contamination of slave labor" is a deliberate rhetorical splice: it collapses immigrant wage work into slavery, not to express sympathy for enslaved people, but to paint certain workers as a toxic force that pollutes a "free land". "Contamination" does the real work here. It turns economics into hygiene, making expulsion sound like sanitation.

The vow to "live...or die" raises the temperature from negotiation to crusade. It’s a street-politics cadence, engineered to turn grievances into a posture of readiness, a willingness to escalate. "Asserting the rights of our race" gives away the boundary line: this is solidarity with an asterisk. Class resentment is being organized into racial ownership, the idea that the nation is property held by a particular "our". "Our country" and "our families" complete the enclosure, shifting the frame from wages to protection, from policy to threat.

Context matters: Kearney, the sandlot agitator of 1870s San Francisco and the Workingmen's Party, spoke amid economic panic and intense anti-Chinese organizing. The intent is not simply higher wages; it’s to convert a real labor crisis into a nativist mandate, making exclusion feel like self-defense and violence feel like virtue.