“The Boss Has No Color Line”: Race, Solidarity, and a Culture of Affinity in Los Angeles and the Borderlands, 1907–1915

In 1910, Bethlehem Steel contracted to build battleships for the Chinese navy. Charles M. Schwab, the company’s president, and Prince Tsai Hsun, the secretary of the Chinese Navy, proceeded to make a tour of Washington, D.C., New York, and Atlantic Coast shipbuilding facilities—complete with Hsun’s entourage of members of the Chinese Naval Council.¹ The Industrial Worker, the West Coast print organ of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), reported on the visit. In an article entitled “Bosses Do Not Recognize Color Line,” the Industrial Worker declared that industrial cooperation “taken in connection with the hostility which exists between the American workers and the Chinese laborer, is good evidence of the fact that united action triumphs over disorganization. Race hatred is a weak point in the ranks of labor, but the boss has no color line.”² This self-critical article in a paper published by the most racially inclusive union of the era contrasts with much of the historical scholarship on the racism of the white labor movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³ The general consensus has been to recognize racism within the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and how white workers, more broadly, understood class in racial terms. However, the numerous contesting voices within the racially and philosophically diverse working-class that used anti-statist or internationalist ideals to organize against racism add an under-studied layer of complexity to this history.

It is true that organizing against Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigration and workers on the West Coast consistently received its most loyal support from people within the labor movement. In California cooperation between anti-Chinese groups and white laborers began during the radical origins of the state’s labor movement in San Francisco in the 1870s and continued well after its consolidation under the AFL in the 1880s.⁴ This general trend, however, has led many scholars to overlook the interconnected processes of contestation and entrenchment of racism within the full spectrum of the Left from reform-minded trade unionists to radical anarchists. This is particularly true of studies that position trade unions and regional labor councils as the primary voices of western workers.⁵ Yet, the anarchists, syndicalists, and socialists who circulated up and down the West Coast and throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were no radical fringe. On the contrary, through their organizing they became leading voices in a polyglot Left and they most strongly opposed racism, although not uniformly.⁶

Immigration to Los Angeles occurred through far-reaching and overlapping migratory networks. People moved to the city and region from the Pacific and Atlantic worlds. African Americans and Anglos migrated from the South and Midwest, while extended rail networks and proximity to Mexico made the city important in cross-border movement.⁷ These immigrations expanded the population of Los Angeles from 102,000 in 1900 to 577,000 in 1920.⁸ Workers often found employment laboring on the publicly and privately funded infrastructure projects underway in and around the city before 1920: installing gas, water, and electric lines; building aqueducts or other irrigation projects; or laying down rails for the local passenger service and regional freight lines. Many also moved through the region to complete seasonal agricultural work. With Los Angeles lacking a strong industrial base before the 1920s, the regional working class experience was typified by labor diverse in kind and location.⁹ Mobility fell disproportionally upon nonwhite and unskilled workers. Immigration and work patterns combined to create a cosmopolitan laboring environment that turned philosophical discussions about the strength of international solidarities into daily choices of action by individuals and movements. The diversity of the region presented area residents with the opportunity to put anti-statism and internationalism to use locally in the form of interracial and multilingual organizing.

Ideological outlooks influenced the form of the organizations that workers created and both of these factors, in turn, greatly affected how groups across the Left engaged race. While significant interracial and multilingual...