The Original Donald Trump (Throwback Thursday!)

just call them airwaves. This is basically radio, right anyway. Yeah, so I'm glad to be here, and you might be surprised, some of you, at least seeing this episode pop up. Hopefully the subtitle Throwback Thursday, because it is a Thursday. As I record this and send this out to everybody might give it a clue. But some of you longtime listeners are probably very familiar with the name of this episode.

I want to get to that, but I want to first thank the amazing support from my longtime loyal supporters John Andre Saither and Mike Mayleban supporting history impossible at the executive producer level over on Patreon. Without you guys, I don't even know where I would be with all this. But you know clearly you're both really integral parts of making this show happen. I mean, I always love hearing from you guys via email or DM, so please always feel free to reach out again, and same to all

of you listening, whether your supporters or not. Honestly, feel free to reach out. This episode might cause that, even though it is a rerun. But again, I'll get to that.

In fact, you know what, I'll get to that right now, just to explain, because I was skeptical for a long time of doing reruns of History impossible, at least of the earlier episodes, and for a while I was thinking I would do you know, the kind of thing Carlin does where he puts his old episodes behind a paywall, and you know, people who want to actually hear them

can go back and pay for them. And I still haven't done that, and I don't know if I ever will, honestly, because there's just really not much return on that, and it robs me the opportunity of doing this, which I came to realize is totally fine to do. At the time, I guess, in a weird way, I was thinking I hadn't earned the right to do so because I was, you know, was and still am small potatoes all things considered.

But that doesn't really matter. Obviously. It's a silly way of looking at things, and you know, to be honest, it's counterproductive, just doesn't make any sense. Like I've been saying or hinting that many of you hearing this have been with me since day one, or at least close to day one of history impossible, and many of you have also likely gone through the entire show archive, and I love all of you for it. I really do

appreciate that. But then I look at the calendar and I remember that it's been nearly six years since I started this show. I mean, six years is a wild thing to think about. I was just breaking into the time period known as real adulthood in my early thirties, and I decided to start a podcast. Go figure. Now, it's certainly wild to think of about where the time is gone and all the things, like crazy things that have happened since then, both in my life and in

the world around me. So I kind of figured that this was as good of a time as any to relaunch this first episode. I'm not going to be doing it with every episode, guys, This is just because of certain obvious relevance, but also because you know, a lot of you listening probably have not gone back through the archive. There's a lot there, and you know, this is a particular episode that's so far back that a lot of you might have missed it or just rolls your eyes

at it. But it, honestly, especially given what happened at the beginning of November of twenty twenty four, smacks of relevance, so to speak, because that is part of the big event or events rather that have occurred since I started this podcast. It was a historic election year. I mean, you know, the most superficial sense of the word is that it's only the second time in American history that

a man has been elected for a non consecutive term. Sorry, Grover Cleveland, I mean, I know, you spanked Grandpa Simpson in two non consecutive occasions. There's a deep cut Simpsons reference there, guys. But yeah, you're no longer the top dog in unlikely presidential terms, I guess. But more to the point, Donald Trump's reelection in twenty twenty four was also historic because of his convicted criminal status. Putting aside obviously how one might feel about the validity of those

convictions or the trials that produce them. This is historically significant. No matter how you slice it or how you feel about anything, it's significant. Now. I've had several people ask me for my take on everything that has happened, and I've given it in small doses, like in private, to friends mostly who have you know, they don't follow history like I do, obviously because they have lives to lead,

and they just are curious about my take. I hate this word, but I tend to have a kind of a heterodox view on a lot of things like this. But I've also had a number of people, even people I don't no no, ask me how I feel about Donald Trump, as in the man himself. And you know, in short, I don't really have an answer that It's pleased many people, but likely only a fair few of you listening know that it really hasn't changed since twenty

nineteen when I started History Impossible. Now, when I started the show, I came very close to beginning it with the Muslim Nazi series. I don't know how many of you guys know that or how often I've mentioned that, but it's true. I actually almost started that. That's why I had been researching Hajaman al Husseini as early as

late twenty seventeen or early twenty eighteen. But thanks to the advice of my good friend and I guess we can call him Guru Danielle Blelli, the Italian Stallion, whatever you want to call him, I came to realize that I would be essentially imposing myself on the historical podcasting audience, my new audience, by asking them to commit to a series that at that time I assumed would take a few years. And I was obviously right about that, but

more than I could even possibly have known. So I went with one offs for a while, occasionally for rain into thematic trilogies and two parters. I mean, some of those are my favorite stories that I've ever delved into. Even until this very day, I always talk about how the Great Hollywood cover Up is probably my favorite story. I guess I'll call it because it was a two parter, it's my favorite I've ever done. It's just, you know, it's scratched an itch that I hoped to scratch again

one day. But my very first episode, like I've been kind of saying talking around this entire time, was one where I tried to unpack my feelings about Donald Trump from a historically comparative perspective, and looking back at that first episode, I do think most of my feelings have remained consistent. I mean, I've never liked the fascism comparison, much less to Nazi comparisons. I think that should be

obvious by now. But I never really liked what I was seeing more in the broad sense, less to do with the man, less to do with his party, more just to do with everything that surrounded his ascension. Neil Ferguson, the famous historian many years ago now, he helped break this down just what kind of historical figure Donald Trump is. It was something that really resonated with me. It's a video I've linked it in the show notes, and it's a great video, very good time capsule in and love itself,

and it inspired me. And after a couple of months of frantic research into the period of time Ferguson discussed in that talk that I've linked in the show notes, I was able to pull together a story about a next to unknown man from American history, the so called

original Donald Trump. And then the first episode of History Impossible was born and because that was all so long ago, and because I realized that the idea of re releasing episodes is really no big deal, especially considering I have so many new listeners who might not have gone back through the archive, I figured I would re release that episode for you guys right now, that's who you're listening to, and to be honest, because it has also been a

while since I've released an audio episode for the podcast, and not for lack of trying, I'm honestly trapped right now with a looming thesis prospectus in graduate school and the ongoing writing and research I'm doing for my proper class. All that has eaten up most of my time for

the last month or so. And I have a number of other projects to which I've been committed and one of them actually kind of relates to this episode, and I actually really want to do my best to promote it here, which is a long form essay I wrote for this up and coming publisher of historical analysis called

Kinrath Publishing. I wrote a like I said, long form essay about the eighteen seventy six election Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden, and a lot of it gets into a lot of the material that I covered in this episode, so it's kind of related. I will obviously be blasting that out whenever it launches, but it should be launching within the next couple of months or so, maybe even

couple of weeks. As of this recording, I couldn't tell you, but it's all moving very fast, and I'll make sure to share it and you guys can support kind Wrath Publishing as best you can anyway. Though this is all to say that a lot of my time has been eaten up by these projects, and I do plan to have some episodes come out before the year ends, god willing, maybe an interview or two, though those are a little

less certain. But with this I wanted to give all of you who only recently found my work and or have just not found the time to work your way back through the six years of content. I wanted to give you guys something to chew on, especially given recent events that are relevant to what I talked about in this episode. Now, like I was kind of saying before, I do essentially endorse everything that I researched, wrote and said from this episode. I did so many years ago,

at least in the broad strokes. I do not necessarily endorse equality, either my delivery or the production. Maybe even some of the attempts at humor, I honestly don't. I rarely ever endorse that kind of thing. After some time goes by, I cannot promise that this episode will stand to scrutiny compared to my more recent work. It was my first stab at historical podcasting, after all. But I do think this re release relevant as it is to

the results of the twenty twenty four election. It can serve as a nice time capsule that answer some lingering questions that my followers and listeners might have regarding my feelings on our forty fifth and now forty seventh president of the United States and the world that spawned him. At the very least, it can serve as a nice historical comparison to the first Trump administration and the years

that led up to it. Now, I do believe, for what it's worth, that things are very different in twenty twenty four American society than they were in twenty fifteen to twenty sixteen, but not by much. In some ways, they are heightened. That's where I'm at, That's where the show is at. Please stay tuned for future episodes. If you have already heard this, but you know, feel free

to enjoy it again. If you don't remember it that well, or if you want to, you know, mine it for stuff you can make fun of me for for not being as good at as I am now who knows. But please sit back and enjoy this throwback. Like I said, post it on a Thursday of the very first episode of History Impossible, the original Donald Trump. Well, let me to tell you what you would have seen and heard. If will not be pleasant listening, if you were at lunch, or if you have no appetite now, it is a

good time to switch author radio. An ancestor of mine maintained that if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable. I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is inside out the dream. I feel we hear for sue to guilt, We here for issue to guilt. Some say the world will end empire, some say a night. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those of favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that

for destruction, ice is also great and look sufficed. This is history impossible. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime,

they're bringing rapists. You probably remember this quote from the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, when he was on the campaign trail in June of twenty fifteen. You probably also remember this one quote. We have people coming into the country or trying to come in. We're stopping a lot of them, but we're taking a lot of people out of the country. You wouldn't believe how bad these people are. These aren't people, these are animals unquote.

Or perhaps this one quote, the Democrats don't care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our country unquote. These quotes are all varying levels of notoriety today, especially among the president's most vocal critics and detractors. However, it's

unlikely that this statement is as well known quote. To add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy as sent to China, the greatest and oldest despotism in the world, or a cheap working slave unquote, or perhaps this lesser known gem of a statement, let me caution working men to not employ Chinese laundrymen. They are filthy, They spit on clothes, and if they have any disease it is transmitted to men and women through such washed clothing when

the body perspires. Do you want leprosy? Here? By not employing them, you can drive them from the country unquote, Or maybe even this one. A Chinaman will live on rice and rats. They will sleep one hundred in a room that one white man wants for his wife and family unquote. You'd be forgiven for being surprised at not knowing about these last three quotes coming from the United

States President in twenty nineteen. Quotes you may have at first assumed were a few of the many, many controversial statements that he made during his campaign in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, and that perhaps God just swept under the rug. But you would be forgiven for not recognized these last three quotes. For an even more important reason, the man who said those words was not Donald Trump.

In October of eighteen seventy one, a cyclone of racist chaos was about to be unleashed on nearly twenty people living in Los Angeles' Chinatown. These people were chosen at random, merely on the basis of being Chinese immigrants, after rumors began to spread around the city that quote Chinamen have been killing white's wholesale unquote in an area near the

boundaries of Los Angeles Chinatown. This area was derisively known as Nigger Alley, named after the darker skinned, mixed race Californios who had originally settled there before California's annexation by the United States, and this thin alleyway like street had already held a bit of a reputation among the Los

Angelinos at the time. An next saloon keeper had indeed been killed after seeing a police officer also killed in a gunfight, but the murderer had been an unseen criminal, likely tied up in a dispute between two different gangs operating in and around the Los Angeles Chinatown at the time.

But nuance was not on the mind of the mob of both white and mestizo men, mostly working classmen, who stormed around the still relatively nascent city looking for Chinese people to murder after being told that quote the Chinks are shooting and carajo lachino, which is Spanish for damned Chinese, and that quote American blood had been shed unquote the

last statement. According to a letter later written by a member of the mob, the writer of the letter would also say, quote we all moved in, shouting, in anger, and as some noticed, in delight at all the excitement one quote. The first thing the Chinese American inhabitants of Los Angeles heard that day as they went about their business, tending their shops, chatting with friends, was a mass of

screams coming their way. They likely heard chanting, but it wasn't clear right away what was being said, just shouts, syncopated shouts. And then the mass of voices became clearer, entering focus along with the angry, perhaps surprisingly multiracial faces of the approaching mob. Hang them, hang them, hang them. Before they even realized what was happening to them in their community, Chinese American inhabitants were being yanked out of the front doors of their own homes and shot point

blank in their faces, chests, and stomachs. Some were pulled out of their homes and their shops by the ropes cinched around their necks that were used to lynch them right then and there. Others were dragged by the neck to their hanging place as they writhed on the ground, just struggling to free themselves. Once the mob removed the residents from their homes, they immediately began looting, rooting around

for any trace of gold or other valuables. The ager social distinction of the victims didn't matter and did nothing to halt the mob's racialized bloodlust. Most of the victims were laundrymen and cooks, but there was a cigar maker, a musician, and a shopkeeper who were later counted among

the dead. There was even a well known doctor named doctor Chi Loong Tongue locally known as Jeanne, who, when dragged from his home, begged the angry mob in both English and Spanish to spare him, but it made no difference. He was strung up by his neck and killed, but not before his trousers had been yanked free and all of his money removed from his pockets. After swinging from the rope, his finger was severed to remove the diamond

ring that he wore. A young boy was cornered by the mob, and a journalist at the time, a man named P. S. Dorney, who covered the incident, wrote quote, A boy was thus led to the place of slaughter. The little fellow was not above twelve years of age. He had been a month in the country and knew not a word of Inga. He seemed paralyzed by fear. His eyes were fixed and staring, and his face blue, blanched and idiotic. He was hanged when the violence finally subsided.

At least seventeen Chinese Americans had been lynched or shot. Their names were doctor Gene Tong, a Wing Chang Wang Long, Tui Along, Juan Fu Tong Wan, Alu Dei, ki Awa Hohing, Lohi a Wan Wing, Chi Wung Chin Asu, and was Sinchwi. These victims had been set upon by an estimated five hundred people out of eighteen seventy one Los Angeles His overall population of six thousand, eight percent of the city of Los Angeles had murdered seventeen Chinese in cold blood.

Historian Paul M. Defala described the scene of the carnage in a nineteen sixty Southern California Historical Society Journal better than most quote the dead Chinese and Los Angeles were hanging at three places near the heart of the downtown

business section of the city. From the wooden awning over the sidewalk in front of a carriage shop, from the sides of two Prairie schooners parked on the street around the corner from the carriage shop, and from the crossbeam of a wide gate leading into a lumber yard a

few blocks away from the other two locations. The event became notorious, especially on the East Coast, with a newspaper even referring to Los Angeles as a quote bloodstained edenot Eight of the five hundred participants were convicted for the crimes committed on that day, their charge manslaughter, their sentence overturned due to a legal technicality, letting them walk out of the courtroom as free men. This was the largest

mass lynching in American history. While all of this abject horror was occurring in eighteen seventy one, Los Angeles, America was in the middle of a series of massive transitions, not least of which being an incredible influx of immigrants from all over the world. This influx actually included my own great great grandfather of nineteen year old German Jew from Prussia and self described entrepreneur who had arrived in Ellis Island earlier that same year as the Los Angeles

Chinatown pogram. This rise in immigration was important because it fits nicely into the ingredients the five ingredients specifically outlined by the prolific modern historian Neil Ferguson in a talk he gave in early twenty sixteen about what he termed

the Populist Backlash. He went on to describe how what was going on in American politics in twenty sixteen and the looming election of Donald Trump to the presidency were certainly interesting and even alarming to many millions of us, but that these things were nothing unique to the brief history of the United States. And he was right. That's

what this story is about. In other words, as impossible as it may have seemed in twenty sixteen, around the time of the election of Donald Trump, something like this had happened before, or rather, someone like this had happened before there was an original Donald Trump. Now it's important for me to point out at the top here that

this is not a podcast about contemporary politics. In fact, I find contemporary politics kind of boring on its own, simply because you can't really construct a reasonable or even that interesting of a story out of them, because they're ongoing. But contemporary politics have a funny way of opening the window to past events that we are well completely impossible, and this is why they're inevitably going to come up every so often in this podcast, though usually only as

a point of comparison, a point of relation for us. So, while America's forty fifth president, Donald Trump is certainly new in terms of how powerful he's become on a platform of nationalistic populism, especially in the twenty first century, what he sold to the American people, whether it was a bill of goods or a brave new world, depending on what you believe was a bill of goods or a brave new world that had been promised nearly one hundred

and fifty years ago by someone else, our titular original Donald Trump. In his talk Neil Ferguson neatly outlined what he called the five ingredients necessary for a populist backlash akin to the one being seen both today in the latter twenty tens and in America's not too distant past. These ingredients are all really important for us understand and what we're going to spend a lot of the story

focusing on, probably the first half of it. Really these ingredients were, as Ferguson put it, quote, partly economic, but they were partly cultural unquote. This is why it's a mistake to look at the populous backlash of both the eighteen seventies and the twenty tens in purely materialistic terms.

There were certainly economic concerns. You could argue that the economic situation of the eighteen seventies or the economic situation of the twenty tens were the driving forces, but that, as both Ferguson seems to end that I do believe is a limited view. You could have economic turmoil on its own, but without the other ingredients, you don't have the backlash and you don't have its usually very dire consequences.

The first ingredient is evidence of that, since it's rooted in the realm of perception rather than the realm of the material. Specifically, this perception was and is the perception of rampant corruption. The perception of corruption is important less because of the question of whether or not there was corruption in the American political system of the eighteen seventies or the twenty tens, and there was, but rather the mere fact that there was a perception in place at

all that things were corrupt. The fact that the perception was largely driven by reality made it just a lot easier for the perception to keep at pace, if not straight up outgrow the reality. This is why perception matters so much more to me than what's going on on the ground, because perception is really what shapes reality. It shapes what's going on on the ground, especially when it

comes to politics. There were many, many reasons for people of the time to see corruption in their politics, not least of which during the eighteen seventy six election, which frankly deserves a podcast all on its own, especially for political and election junkies out there. This election was going to be seen as being rife with corruption no matter what, especially considering the sheer amount of voter fraud and intimidation that was occurring mostly in the South but also out west.

A congressman from the time, a man named A. S. Wallace, put it this way, quote intimidation is the order of the day, and terrorism reigned Supreme unquote, and he wasn't joking. Racial programs against black communities were the norm for Democratic Party sponsored militia and mobs, such as the one that hit Hamburg, a small town in South Carolina in eighteen

seventy six. There were several black veterans of the Union Army living there at the time, and after an altercation with a couple of local white men, they were subjected to what can only be called a whirlwind of violence, very similar to the kind that hit Chinatown in Los Angeles in eighteen seventy one. Historian Michael A. Bli describes

the events that followed in appropriately blunt terms quote. The following day, several hundred angry whites, led by former Confederate General Matthew C. Butler, attacked the town, leaving twelve blacks and one white dead, including the town's marshall. When asked by a congressional committee to explain his conduct, Butler said that the blacks had little regard for human life. He failed to men that Marshall James Cook's tongue had been ripped out and placed in his hands by members of

the white mob. Events and threats of events like this swept across the South, all but ensuring a Democratic victory in the local elections and giving both black and Republican voters of the time a sense that there was nothing fair or legitimate about the election, at least on a local level. The frustration in fear wasn't limited to the South, though,

and neither was it limited to blacks. In East Texas, there was a thriving community of German immigrants which were set upon by a mob of vigilantes who were bitter about the German American support of the Union during the Civil War and their continued support of the postwar reconstruction

measures that had largely subordinated the South. Many of these Germans were killed in an ethnically motivated pogrim, and when the Texas Rangers were sent in to put a stop to it, they were unable to press charges against those they arrested due to the Democratic Grand Jury rejecting any attempts to bring in indictments. This was yet another example of what was starting to feel like a fixed election

for everyone living in Democratic dominated states. That said, the election of eighteen seventy six between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden did see the largest turnout, the highest turnout of the electorate up to that point. However, the election was a political disaster, to put it mildly, and it did its part in undermining the public's confidence in the institution of government, both with Democrats and Republicans alike.

This is because it was a highly contested election, and while we definitely have had a fair few of those in recent decades, at least in my lifetime, I don't think we can say that we've ever experienced anything like the eighteen seventy six election. In addition to the many Southern states being stolen outright stolen by the Democrats, there were mixed reports about the election's overall outcome. It appeared that Tilden had claimed victory through the electoral College with

two hundred three votes, but it wasn't that simple. This guy had a general named Daniel Sickles realized this as he was leaving an after party type shindig on election night. I can only imagine a few sheets to the wind, to be honest, and he went back to his office and started looking at the returns. He quickly realized that if Hayes took Florida, and I just got to stop

and say, it's always Florida, isn't it. But if Hayes took Florida, if he took Louisiana, and if he took South Carolina in the electoral college, Hayes would in fact beat Tilden. Upon realizing this, Sickle shot off telegrams to the Republican committees in all three of those states and told them to hold fast, saw the results, and get

ready to challenge the presumed Tilden victory. And while all of this very behind the scenes house of cards esque politicking stuff was happening, the people who had voted were getting mixed messages from the press. New York's Evening Post, Sun, and Tribune all reported a Tilden victory, while the New York Times and the New York Herald reported that there

was yet to be a clear winner. If you're old enough to remember the two thousand election, you might remember that the Supreme Court resolved the Florida fiasco in December of that year. Now imagine the same thing in this situation in eighteen seventy six, but lasting until the following March, well after US Modern voters are used to seeing the

new president get inaugurated. And now imagine that the efforts to determine the winner were spread across three states instead of just one, and every method under the sun being used to ensure victory by both sides was happening, as Michael Bli puts it, quote, over the ensuing weeks, the two parties use every method fair and foul to capture the votes of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina. Republicans, who

had the deeper pockets, triumphed in all three states. Democrats rejected the official tallies and called together their own election boards, which validated a state of tilded electors, also setting up rival government in opposition to the victorious Republicans. Nut, if you thought we had a problem with the two parties having two different sets of facts alternative facts, if you will just know that this, like everything in this story

of ours, was happening nearly a century and a half earlier. Now, it's important for me to note here that the results of the eighteen seventy six election are still being debated to this day by the real historians and experts. No clear consensus has ever been reached, and as we know, historians all have their own biases and presumptions that they

have to work through. But this is understandable in the contemporary context, since as the weeks continued into eighteen seventy seven, something unprecedented and something the founding fathers never anticipated when they created the electoral college actually happened. Tilden was leading by nineteen electoral votes and twenty votes were up for debate. In other words, as Michael Bili puts it, quote, Tilden

only required a single vote to be president unquote. This might sound silly, but take a second and close your eyes and imagine February and then March of twenty seventeen rolling around. Imagine that Obama is still the president. Hillary and Trump have been sniped at each other via CNN and Fox and Twitter and Facebook and god help us all probably their Instagram stories, and we're still no closer to knowing who won. No one in Washington seems to

know what to do. Everyone is the figured of chicken with its head chopped off. This scenario happened in eighteen seventy seven, though obviously without social or televised media, congressional investigations, and even redoing the whole thing. Holding a whole new election were things that were suggested in discussed, so everyone was going into panic mode, not least of which because the parties were starting to fragment from within on the issue,

mostly along North south lines. This debate was felt strongest in Congress, where eventually the House Judiciary Committee created a commission made up of five House representatives, five Senators, and five justices, the last of whose names would be no

joke drawn from a hat. This commission, as strange as it sounds, was created and agreed upon by both Tilden and Hayes in order to avoid a second civil war only eleven years after the first one ended, because that's really where this country was headed all over again, and no one wanted that, not with six hundred thousand dead

Americans whose bodies were essentially still warm after all. When Tilden was told by his supporters that he should oppose the commission out of principle was by Democratic allies of this to him, he simply retorted, quote, what is left but war? Unquote. So this sense of teetering on the edge of a new civil war was felt all across the country. With the coverage of the crisis, paranoia and

even calls for violence started to spread. Members of Congress were even bringing loaded pistols into session just as a precaution. Take an extra second to imagine Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell addressing Congress with three fifty seven magnums strapped at their sides. And funny as that might be, the reality of the situation really starts to set in when you hear what the famous Civil War general William to comes

to Sherman said about the situation at the time. Quote, the term of President Ulysses Esque ends at twelve o'clock on the fourth of March. He will then be in no position to give orders to me, and I shall receive no orders from him unquote implicit threat of military coup anyone. But something that dramatic never came to pass, because at the eleventh hour, at four in the morning on March second, eighteen seventy seven, Hayes's victory was confirmed by the commission he and Tilden had agreed to in

order to avoid war. The crisis was over. But there was a cost to this crisis, one that couldn't really have been anticipated. I'll give them credit there. The cost of all this uncertainty and behind the scenes politicking was

It was greater than anyone could have anticipated. Rutherford B. Hayes would only serve one term as president and be dogged by accusations of corruption for his entire tenure, so much so that he would frequently be given the name Ruther Fraud in the press, which I'm sure you pun lovers will no doubt get a good laugh at. At the end of the day, though, this automated distrust happened because this electoral circus certainly sapped the faith of the

public in their political institutions. This lead to the perception of rampant political corruption as well as just the general perception that the politician the men in Washington, namely were the quote unquote bad guys. That's what happened, that's what

formed that perception was created here. This perception was actually so widespread that even former politicians were calling it out, with a former Republican senator at the time named Carl Schertz recalling that quote, all branches of the municipal government were honeycombed with corruption and wickedness unquote, or as the always awesome and super quotable Mark Twain said in response to this growing populist backlash that was starting to sweep

across the United States during this time. Quote where the government is a sham, one must expect such things unquote. But there was another factor, both in the eighteen seventies and in the twenty tens, another ingredient being added into what our friend Neil Ferguson calls the populous backlash soup, a stark rise in income inequality. The notion of inequality is actually tougher to measure than many people believe, or than how it's normally talked about, at least in terms

of real world effects. You can look at the differences that exist in individual income and capital, but that doesn't really tell the whole story of how well or how

not well someone is living. You can make a reasonably educated guess that someone working at McDonald's is probably not living as large as the head of a Silicon Valley tech giant or a Wall Street stock trader, just like you could have made a reasonably educated assumption that a labor at a canning factory working for a few dollars a day wasn't living as large as a railroad or

steel or oil magnate. In the late nineteenth century. That said, it's still really tough to actually measure the effects of these inequalities income beyond the anecdotal stories of lavish parties

and expenses versus abject suffering and starvation. But here's the thing, it's actually even more difficult to measure even just the numerical inequality that was occurring in the eighteen seventies since, as Neil Ferguson pointed out in his twenty sixteen presentation on the Populist Backlash, that we don't actually have income

tax data from back then. However, given the economic trends pointed out by other economic historians, we do know that income inequality was at a peak in the years leading up to the First World War and the years afterward, and the data appeared to show that it was part of an existing trend that had been growing for decades. It seems to be pretty common knowledge that the latter half of the nineteenth century was a time filled with magnates. And no, that's magnates, not the thing that became an

insane clown posse meme all those years ago. I'm talking about magnates, steel, oil, newspaper, railroad magnates, super wealthy, largely self made, and cut throat level ruthless men capitalizing on these relatively new economic frontiers. You had Andrew Carnegie, Scottish immigrant, post Civil War steel magnate and inspiration for Scrooge McDuck as it happens, whose his wealth would be about two percent of the United States GDP by nineteen oh one, and that, by the way I did the math, that's

over three hundred and seventy billion dollars. That's of twenty fourteen when you account for inflation. You also had John D. Rockefeller, whose wealth was quote unquote only thirty billion dollars less than Carnegie's, but still massive thanks to his early investments in oil in the eighteen sixties, which actually ended up turning into a near monopoly of ninety percent by eighteen

eighty with his company Standard Oil. You had JP Morgan, yes that JP Morgan of the Bank Fame, the one that the bank's named after, who bought Carnegie Steel Empire for nearly five hundred million dollars in nineteen oh one. Money. You had William Randolph Hurst, thefa mious yellow journalism magnate and the inspiration as it happens for citizen Kane thanks to I guess similar ruthless citicism and predilection for ostentatious castles.

And you had Cornelius Vanderbildt and earlier member of this crew of wealthy dudes who struck it enormously rich in railroads and shipping in this case, as well as being the ancestor of a certain CNN anchor with an adorable giggle,

a one Anderson Cooper. And these guys are worth mentioning for the fun trivia, absolutely, but they're more worth mentioning as sort of paragons of extreme wealth during a time when many working class Americans were, in so many words, living on bread and water in one dollar a day. It's not necessarily about these working class Americans and their families living horribly while these magnates, these robber barons as they were known, and their families were living lavishly and easily.

Though this definitely was the case, it's not that this alone amplified the friction of the growing inequality in American society. It was just how much of a financial golf that was appearing between the working masses and these magnates was staggering. Both then and in the twenty first century for being honest.

The mere presence of these magnates and the sheer, unheard of wealth that they possessed really gives us an idea of how the United States really became a nation with its insurmountable one percenter class that we still to this day keep hearing about in one form or another. And when you have a one percenter class, whether or not it's being abjectly felt by everyone in the ninety nine percenter class doesn't matter. There is a stark perception of

gross injustice at this income inequality. You can call this perception of injustice simple resentment. You can call it an unfair distribution of resources. Whichever political bias you have informs you, you can call it those things, but it doesn't matter. The point is that class differences, this stark tend to cause our pattern recognizing the million brains, a bit of discomfort,

a bit of cognitive dissonance. Even cognitive dissonance actually is a really important aspect to this story and any story really that deals with income inequality, and it's one that doesn't get discussed often enough, at least not in a way that isn't depressingly informed only by Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Cognitive dissonance is simply the mental discomfort that you feel when your internal beliefs come into conflict with the reality of your actions and sometimes just your environment.

It's not hypocrisy, as the way it's thrown around on social media in twenty nineteen might have you believe. Cognitive dissonance in the end is simply what I first called it,

mental discomfort. But it's powerful mental discomfort. And how else would you describe the feelings of a worker on one of the railroads, or in one of the oil wells, or in one of the coal mines of the time, or one of the factories, just seeing the owners of their jobs continue to get monumentally richer and richer, while they just continue to scrape by with barely enough to support their growing families, all while they're just trying to buy into this notion that in America every freeman owns

his labor and can use his labor to become his own boss and make his own fortune. How else would you explain it. I mean, maybe this cognitively dissonant worker shouldn't have had the family at the size that it is, and that keeps growing, and maybe he should should have kept his expenses down. Sure, or maybe he's not receiving the level of income that he deserves for the value his labor brings. Sure, that might be it, too, But like I was saying before, neither of those reasons, neither

of those biases matter. He sees the contradiction, and more importantly, he feels it, and that cognitive dissonance doesn't feel too good. If you've ever experienced it, and you probably know if you have, you know that it doesn't feel good. And for this worker, it really doesn't feel good, especially when he feels it day after day after day with no end in sight, all while his bosses can literally sleep

on a mountain of money if they chose to. That cognitive dissonance is really what people are talking about when they talk about inequality and the problems that inequality produces. This widening gulf that was full of cognitive dissonance was paradoxically actually part of a healing process, like a culture

wide healing process. The era specifically, it was the healing process that existed in the era that followed the worst war ever fought in American soil, the Civil War the eight years between eighteen sixty five and eighteen seventy three were actually in some ways the best years in American history by then, at least from an economic standpoint. It's actually pretty similar to what we experienced in America following

the fall of communism. It's our good friend and most recent victim of cultural nostalgia milking the nineteen nineties, and very much like the nineteen nineties and into the twenty first century. In the years after the Civil War, prosperity was on the rise. Along with economic growth. There was a rise in jobs thanks to massive projects, namely the transcontinental railroads that reached thirty three thousand miles in total.

These projects are actually really important to get into because they were perceived by bankers, mostly especially bankers in the North, as being hugely profitable, just like the notion of home ownership being the great investment of the early to mid two thousands, spurred on by a strong economy left over from the late nineteen nineties. In that case, the thing is, in the eighteen sixties and seventies, railroads were not only being seen as massive cash cows for their investors, very profitable.

In other words, they were also extremely expensive. And what do you do when you see a big, shiny new investment that might be a little out of your price range, but that's totally, definitely, absolutely, for sure gonna make you money at the end. You'll be responsible, gather enough savings to afford it before you make the initial investment, right, make sure you have a little safety net beneath you, just in case this prohibitively expensive and rapidly growing investment

goes belly up. Shut up, you was no. You start borrowing. Come on and borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and borrowing. And this borrowing, in our story, only increased around the nation after a number of cities like Chicago literally burned to the ground in the early eighteen seventies and their

governments needed to rebuild and rebuild quickly more borrowing. To give you an idea of the kind of growth we're seeing during this period that's leading to an increased perception of gross inequality as well as something far, far worse we're about to get into. I'll turn to Michael Belie

again describing this eight year period of growth. Quote, the economy appeared fevered in its growth, increasing from four hundred and thirty one thousand businesses in eighteen seventy to six hundred nine thousand, nine hundred and four in eighteen seventy one. There were three hundred and sixty four railroads at the beginning of eighteen seventy three, two hundred and sixty of which paid no dividends, representing a total investment of three

point seven billion dollars. That's, by the way, sixty three billion dollars in twenty eighteen. Money I did the calculation there too, Blie continues quote, tripling the industry's capitalization in just six years. Banks were low five times their actual

money supply. During this period of rapid growth, there was also a massive flux of lying, bribery, and indeed speculation going on, all assisting and giving regular Americans the perception that not only were these investors and magnates far better off than they were and they were, but also how completely corrupt the political system being bribed by these investors and magnates was. Because they were being bribed a lot

as well. Massive government land grants and subsidies were being given to these railroad companies, and that didn't help the perception either. But these perceptions of inequality and corruption. These perceptions effects couldn't really be felt on their own, at least not yet, because while this perception was building, so was the debt, and so was the speculation. This might not have mattered if not for a plucky new empire

in Germany deciding not to mint silver coins anymore. And while this might sound like a silly ingredient to throw going to the populist backlash soup, maybe a sprinkle assault, we can call this The lack of silver mintage in Germany caused the demand for silver to drop like a stone, and since the United States was Germany's primary source of silver, this affected the United States in ways that might have been less of a big deal if so much of

our economy wasn't being based on specuative deals and tons of borrowing. It threw us into a de facto gold standard thanks to something called the coinage active eighteen seventy three, also called the crime of eighteen seventy three by critics of the time. And what did this do? It completely dismembered our money supply. This is why excessive borrowing matters. And keep in mind, I do understand that this is how an economy typically functions. You can't build infrastructure on

this scale without borrowing. You have to spend money to make money, like it or not. Guys, I understand that. But with the level of spending that was occurring, spending money that didn't even exist, combined with the unfortunate coincidence that the resource of value lost its value due to another country's own decisions, is what makes investments on this scale,

these speculations so goddamn dangerous. Here's what happens when money supply is slashed, interest rates spike, making repayment difficult, if not outright impossible, and this in turn lowers the confidence of investors. And here's the billion dollar question, friends, what happens when everyone loses their economic confidence all at the

same time. You probably saw where this was going, folks, But this is where head chef Neil Ferguson gives us his third ingredient for a populous backlash in a society, a giant economic crash. In September of eighteen seventy three, Andrew Carnegie, who we mentioned earlier, wrote in his diary the following quote. All was going well when one morning in our summer cottage, a telegram came announcing the failure

of j Cooking Company. Unquote, he continued later in his diary, quote, loss after loss ensued until a total paralysis of business set in. Real historians like Neil Ferguson and actual history students unlike me, tend to point shaking fingers at the Panic of eighteen seventy three as evidence that we don't take history seriously enough. And the more I've read of both real historians and the opinions of actual history students, the more I've come to learn that they're probably right,

especially when it comes to economics. We all know about the great depression of the nineteen thirties and the forties brought on by the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine, and we, especially us cusper millennials in the United States, all know about and even felt, the crisis of two thousand and seven. In two thousand and eight and the

great recession that followed. I can count the number of friends of mine who experienced employment trouble after leaving college on both hands and feet, so much so that many just decided to go back to school and raise their debts and hopes of increasing their job market value, never mind escaped the crushing reality of the job market at

the time. But here's the thing, guys, we don't know enough about the eighteen seventy three panic and the economic depression that followed, which was at its time called the Great Depression. This was not just a big one. It was the big one. It was big, it was bad, and its far reaching effects make up much of the materialist backbone of our story. The last two ingredients we discussed, the perception of corruption and income inequality, were largely psychological

in nature. And while psychology plays into every part of this story in one way or another, and really every story from history at that this ingredient is in the realm of the material firmly planted. It's the most measurable and objective of our ingredients. In a lot of ways, the populous backlash chefs Historians of different political orientations in this case can and do seem to have come to a consensus about how important this collapse was to the

events of the late eighteen seventies. It began with Jake Cook, the guy mentioned in Carnegie's Journal a moment ago, another robber baron type and an investment banker really so corrupt that it is probably worth devoting another podcast to them alone. In short after being unable to get more loans to invest in the rapidly growing railroad game that he was already invested in, not to mention to bribe more politicians and continue to buy out newspapers that might have been

a little bit critical of what he was doing. Jake Cook had been taking all of his client's money without saying a peep to them. Because he was pocketing all of this money for himself, he completely sucked his bank's liquid resources dry. Thanks to a recent ruling from Congress, paper money called Greenback's at the time had been getting taken out of circulation, so that the money supply was

technically low for that reason as well. Thanks to these things, his outright thievery of his client's money and his ability to somehow vacuum up every dollar his company was holding, Jay Cook was eventually forced to close the doors of as many successful banks scattered across the East Coast. And this wouldn't have been a problem if his banks hadn't been so crucial to the American economy at this point.

As reported by the New York Tribune. When this news hit the New York Stock Exchange quote there was an uproar such as scarcely filled the exchange since it was built. Messengers fled every way with the story of ruin and down came the stocks all along the line quote Historia. Michael Blile writes of the damage caused to American financial institutions and to the growing railroad industry thanks to the Panic of eighteen seventy three in a much more concise

way than I can quote. Like many other leading stocks, Western Union lost one third of its value in a few days, and fully one half before the markets finally stabilized at the end of October. Most railroads lost one fifth to one third of their value during the same period. A total of forty financial institutions failed in September eighteen seventy three, and on September twentieth, the stock market suspended all trading for the first time in its history, remaining

closed for ten days. He goes on to describe how in the year that followed the initial panic eighteen seventy four, more than half of the American railroad companies would go bankrupt. However, the rapid failure of these banks and railroad companies was just the beginning. The real world on the ground. Consequences

of the panic had yet to start. A man named Alvred Nettleton, general in fact and Northern Pacific exec wrote his wife in a letter, quote, if I had been struck on the head with a hammer, I could not have been more stunned on quote. As soon as he finished writing this somber letter to his wife, he, as described by Michael Blile, quote rubbed his eyes in disbelief,

and then set about firing people unquote getting fired. That was the real consequence of the panic of eighteen seventy three, of the great depression of the nineteen thirties, and of the great recession of the two thousands. It always is it in its effects are the heart and soul of

this ingredient. In our populous backlash soup and the years that followed the panic, thousands of businesses would shut their doors eight hundred and thirty in eighteen seventy four, seven hundred and forty in eighteen seventy five, and a wopping nine thousand in both eighteen seventy six and eighteen seventy seven each. In eighteen seventy four, half a million railroad

workers were laid off. Belyle points out that there weren't accurate statistics for unemployment rates during this time, but there are estimates that range from as quote unquote low as fifteen percent to as high as thirty percent. And it's not as if the people lucky enough to remain employed had a grand old time either. While statistics for wage rates during the eighteen seventies are apparently quote unquote notorious Belile's words not mine for being unreliable, wage reduction is

generally placed at around fifteen percent during this time. Imagine that for a second. And maybe some of you don't have to if you're unlucky enough. And I'm sorry, I'm sorry to hear that if that's the case, But just imagine this for a second. Everyone around you at your company is getting laid off left and right, and you think you might be next. Your manager calls you in for a meeting, but it turns out you're fine. She says that you're too valuable for the company to lose.

But there's a problem. You got to take a cut to yourself salary and say you're making pretty good money by twenty nineteen standards, at least like one hundred grand a year. Fifteen percent of that is fifteen grand. But that's not all. You can't negotiate this. You're just lucky that you're still here. And you know how bad the job market is fifteen to thirty percent unemployment overnight, after all, So what else can you do besides grit your teeth and take it. I mean, what other choice you have

besides resort to begging on the street for food. And this is not an exaggeration. This is how bad it got, not begging for money food. Michael Ballile describes the pretty wretched conditions of everyday American life and some pretty nightmarish terms here. Quote. The signs of want were everywhere, with half the workers in the industrial areas of the country either out of work or only haphazardly employed, reduced to begging for food and waiting patiently for things to turn around.

Anyone who looked closely at American cities would see disease, defeat, and death. Visitors to baltim may have noticed that the streets reeked of sewage, but they did not know that the drinking water was contaminated and contagious diseases found a breeding ground in the cramped apartments of the poor, killing up to one hundred and thirty nine infants in a single week unquote. While we have to take most news stories, both back then and now, frankly with a grain of

salt thanks to their yellow nature. Utah's Salt Lake Weekly Tribune described the direness of the situation facing many Americans, talking of a rise in quote rape, robbery, and murder unquote, with quote women going into prostitution for bread unquote end quote, men going to vagabondage for lack of opportunity to labor unquote. Journalist left Kadio Hearn, writing in eighteen seventy seven, described the destitution he witnessed in the city of Cincinnati. Quote.

These wanderings in the haunts of the poor, among shadowy tenement houses and dilapidated cottages and blind foul alleys with quaint names suggesting deformity and darkness, somehow compelled the fantasmal retrospect of the experience, which clings to the mind with

nightmare tendency unquote. Hearn continues to describe, in pretty darkly poetic terms that this mass of pitiful people were just lying there in these wet, dank tenement apartments, simply waiting to die, or, as he put it, waiting to be absorbed into quote the shadow itself being led through the tenement by Cincinnati's overseer of the poor. He continued to describe the horror of what he witnessed in this tenement

house quote. The scene lay in the second story of a sooty frame perched on the ragged edge of Eggleston Avenue hill. The sufferer was an aged man whose limbs and body were swollen by disease to a monstrous size, and for whom the mercy of death could not have been far distant. The room was similar to other rooms, excepting that in the center of the weak floora yawning, ragged hole had been partly covered by a broken bottomed washtub. The slowly dying man moaned feebly at intervals and muttered

patient prayers in the Irish tongue. Unquote. Herne finally describes what really truly hit home for me, how truly awful things were during the Depression of the eighteen seventies, especially in these tenement houses, when he describes a horrible sound, probably one of the worst sounds anyone can hear, was coming up through the floorboards of the tenement house, he writes, quote, there came up through the broken planking, a voice of cursing, the voice of a furious woman, and a sound of

heavy blows mingled with the cry of a beaten child. Some little one was being terribly whipped, and its treble was strained to that hoarse scream, which betrays an agony of helpless pain and fear and pleading to merciless ears. To the listener, it seemed that the whipping would never end. The sharp blows to sended without regularity, in a rapid shower, which seemed to promise that the punishment could only be

terminated by fatigue and the part of the punisher. The screams gradually grew hoarser and horser, with longer intervals between each, until they ceased altogether, and only a choking gurgle was audible. Then the sound of whipping ceased. There was a sudden noise as of something flung heavily down, and then another horse curse. This isn't a scene from the dark Ages of Europe or from a Cormack McCarthy novel like Blood

Meridian or The Road. This kind of scene, this kind of thing was happening all over America to countless families, and it wasn't even one hundred and fifty years ago. The working class was the class that was hit hardest by this constant horror, for sure, and had to live through this nightmare day after day. But the middle class was getting whipped up into their own hysteria because of this.

It wasn't just about the fear of losing one's livelihood or being subjected to the horrors reported by journalists like Hern, though I do suspect that was the primary subconscious reason for this hysteria. But this hysteria turned into more of a moral panic about tramps filling every city. The middle class was treating tramps essentially like they would a zombie apocalypse. To hear many people of the time tell it, every city resembled skid row here in Los Angeles, just minus

the broken meth pipes and use needles. And while that might not esthetically be far off the tramp quote unquote basically slangford unemployed worker in this case was the scourge of society and destroying it with his laziness, vice, and even violence. Like I said, it was like a zombie apocalypse as far as these newspapers and middle class panickers

were concerned. The tramp was essentially the late nineteenth century version of the racial dog whistle thug that we sometimes hear being thrown around in twenty nineteen, but referring to a lower class unemployed worker in this case. It might sound strange in this day and age to use a term like the tramp scare, but that really is what

this was a mass fear of the homeless and jobless. Nowadays, we either toss a book to the highway panhandler or drive on past, and you might hear the off color comment every now and then, but I can't imagine it's too often, at least if you live in a big city like I do, to hear people speak about the homeless in fearful tones. In short, the middle class, both the lower and upper middle class, which were new distinctions

in the eighteen seventies, they were terrified of tramps. Like I said, they looked at them like it was a zombie infestation. But I think also what's very interesting is that what I don't find zombies scary, but I think people find zombies scary because of what they represent, not of the zombies themselves. They might be a little grossed out by them, but they're scared of what zombies represent, being dead and yet not being trapped within a dead mind,

being unable to control your own behavior. I think that fear of representation is indeed why people were afraid of tramps. These tramps represented what both these lower and upper middle class Americans feared they could become if the already unsteady foundation upon which this middle class existed collapsed any further. This is why they dismissed tramps as being lazy rather than the victims of the economic circumstances they were also

victims of that everyone was a victim of. Newspapers and magazines, though didn't help, because they were constantly blaring headlines about quote unquote an army of tramps and made comparisons to both the Reign of Terror and revolutionary France from nearly one hundred years earlier. Newspapers would continually produce vague headlines and stories without important details, but full of robbery, rape,

and even murder, all being attributed to tramps. Looking at these kinds of headlines now, all these stories read more like the vague headlines about a Kardashian that you see in the checkout line at the grocery store. It was just gossip. There were stories of tramps who were only taking jobs, you know, the things that they wanted most ever since losing theirs, mind you, but never mind that pesky logic. They were taking jobs to serve as covers

so they could steal from their employer. That was what these headlines tended to suggest. And that's so outlandish at this point in our story that I can't help but just smirk at it every time I see these headlines. There were absolutely confirmed cases where gangs of tramps did commit crimes, but these were relatively small in number and really just served to confirm a growing problem in the eighteen seventies caused by the economic collapse. This is the

problem of class tension. This is what we could I guess call the I guess we could call it the dash of sauce, the dash of pepper, maybe of maybe the spices in general. I already use this salt analogy earlier, so I don't want to use that again, but I'll say, you know, the rest of the spices into our populous backlash soup. Michael Bellile explains, however, that this class tension, while relevant, wasn't meant to stay constrained simply in these

class based terms. Quote. As Edmund Morgan pointed out for the colonial period see Van Woodward for the late nineteenth century and Dan Carter for the mid twentieth century, class tensions can be sidestepped by appeals to racism unquote. And this is what leads us to Neil Ferguson's fourth ingredient for his patented populist backlash super recipe arise in immigration.

William Graham Sumner, professor at Yale and considered to be the father of American sociology, documented the number of immigrants who arrived in the wake of the economic collapse of the eighteen seventies to be one hundred sixty nine nine hundred eighty six, sixty percent of whom came from Western and Northern Europe. No one really cared all that much

by the eighteen seventies about that sixty percent. People like Sumner and really most Americans with immigration on their mind at that time, really only cared about that other forty percent who had been building up during the last couple of decades, and they were mostly made up of people coming from one place, and that one place was China. The rise of immigration in the twenty first century has only reached its current peak levels in recent years of

around fourteen percent overall. At one other time in United States history, and that's the mid to late nineteenth century. Much of our current fourteen percent peak, which was existing at the time of the twenty sixteen election, began in the nineteen eighties and was largely coming from immigrants, both legal and illegal, arriving from Latin America. But the vast majority of non European immigrants coming to the United States during the first peak of the mid nineteenth century were

coming from China. The primary reason for this massive influx back then was simple, since it was really the exact same reason so many Americans on the East Coast were rushing towards the West, and that was gold. The California gold Rush as we know it, began in January of eighteen forty eight when a foreman working for a man named John Sutter near what's now Sacramento found something shiny

in the water wheel of Sutter River Mill. Cut to the following year, number of people coming to California to strike it rich on this gold was swelling towards the eventual peak of three hundred thousand, a massive spike in the population that would eventually include tens and then even hundreds of thousands of Chinese coming across the Pacific. It's often said that people come to the United States searching for a better life, and that's definitely true a lot

of the time. I'd say most of the time, even and the influx of Chinese into the United States in the nineteenth century was no different most Chinese peasants at the time. The primary demographic of Chinese folks who came to the United States, they were dirt poor. This was because they were still living in what we could charitably

call destitute serfdom. During the nineteenth century. They were still being ruled by the Qing dynasty, which involves a whole other set of ethnic, cultural, and violent drama that goes back a few hundred years before this time that we just don't have the time to cover here. It would

just take too long. Sticking to the mid nineteenth century, the late journalists and historian Ira Chang, in her amazing book about the History of the Chinese in America, describes how most Chinese citizens lived in their part of Asia during this time. In pretty vivid terms here quote, most people in China lived in the countryside as peasants, serving as the nation's raw muscle. Their costumes rarely varied in

South and central China. The men wore baggy cotton trousers, sandals of leather or grass, and broad brimmed hats to protect their faces from the sun. Their lives followed an endless cycle dictated by the seasons, pushing plows behind water buffalo to break the soil and prepare the seed bed, planting rice seedlings by hand and ankle deep water, stepping backward as they progressed from row to neat row, scything the rice stocks at harvest, then threshing them over hard

earth floor. In short, lives spent generation after generation and non stop backbreaking labor unquote. This backbreaking labor that Iris Chanks speaks of wasn't even the peasant's own. It didn't even belong to them. Remember, they they were living at the pleasure of their emperor, essentially a god king. But more importantly, they were living at the pleasure of the

landowners and the magistrates that ruled over the landowners. Chang reports that By the nineteenth century, an estimated eighty to ninety percent of Chinese citizens were living in this quote unquote dirt poor context his peasants, and as she puts it, quote no group in China worked harder for so little

than the peasants unquote. Chang also described the pretty awful living conditions, sleeping on mats with bamboo pillows and using only quote an armload of fuel to warm and feed a dozen people unquote, not to mention eating things like bark and clay during times of famine, which tended to happen a lot over the centuries. This led to a fundamental appreciation of food, especially meat, in times of plenty

and in times of want. If you're Chinese or have Chinese family members, you'll know that the biggest difference between American folk and Chinese folk is just how much is wasted in American cooking, contrasted with how little is wasted in Chinese cooking. Generation after generation of thankless hard living conditions like the ones who just described, that's what allows this mentality of not wasting anything to develop in a group of people. And by thankless, I mean what I

said before this labor was not even their own. Neither was their land. This was serfdom. This is where the peasants essentially use their labor and their crops to pay for the privilege of living on their land. Social advancement was basically frozen in place. It's about as conservative as

you can possibly get. The only way to move up the social ladder was first to be male, and second to do well enough on these next two impossible imperial exams that would let young men become ministers for the Manchu government, making them the bosses of the backbreaking landowners. The incredibly fierce competition in these exams, as well as the unfair advantages given to the wealthy families like the land owning ones, unsurprisingly created a pretty morally bankrupt and

fundamentally corrupt system. Now, granted, that was the idea. The Manchus and their Qing dynasty had been ruling over the Han majority for over two centuries, acting essentially as an occupying force. And for context, the Han make up about ninety percent of all Chinese people on the planet, so

they were the vast majority. These imperial exams and the culture surrounding them were just a method of controlling the local populace by keeping all of the Han at each other's proverbial throats in constant competition to improve their social standing.

But the regular Han people could also be at each other's throats in a literal sense as well, especially if a young man from the community passed his exams and became the community's governmental magistrate, which is essentially like Charlie finding the golden ticket to Willie Wanka's chocolate factory, but only if Charlie was so competitive and entitled to his

achievements that he became a complete and total sociopath. Iris Chang describes these men and the reign of terror they tended to bring after scoring this proverbial golden ticket quote. Such men often ruled their districts like totalitarian despots. Virtually no redress could be taken against any official who broke the law, because he was the law. A Chinese magistrate could, with no threat of retaliation, accuse a peasant of banditry, throw him in jail, take his property, and even execute

him if he proved a troublesome prisoner. If he lusted after a girl in the village, he could coerce her father to surrender her to him as one of his concubines. So absolute was his power that a Chinese man once told a Western observer, quote, I would rather be mayor

in China than president of the United States unquote. So imagine that you're one of these peasants living in this way, working for nothing, constantly in brutal competition for something you're really unlikely to get, and always terrified that you could come across a government minister having a bad day. So if there's a chance to escape this kind of life,

you're probably going to take it right. And that's exactly what many young men in China did, especially after opportunities for better employment in the port cities of southern China completely disappeared. That was thanks to a British cause credit crisis that disintegrated over one hundred thousand jobs in the area. And this massive escape from the destitution of Chinese living was all but assured once these young men and their family started hearing tales of gum Sum or the Gold

Mountain across the Pacific in California. It's safe to say that it's not that surprising that thousands of young men jumped at the chance to strike at rich overseas as quickly as possible. Chinese people had indeed existed in the United States before the Gold Rush, but in statistically invisible numbers. Iris Chang places the estimate at around fifty people by eighteen forty eight, and most of them were really just

side shows in circuses and anthropological showcases. There was a Fung Moi, recorded as the first Chinese woman ever to come to America, who was presented as part of a cultural exhibit in eighteen thirty four. And there were the famous Bunker brothers Chang and Eng, who were, as it happens, the origin of the term Siamese twins, since they were indeed conjoined and originally from the former Ssiam, but were

ethnically Chinese. These guys are actually really fascinating characters in the law of American carnivals and entertainment from the nineteenth century, not just for the fact that they married a couple of non conjoined white women and became filthy rich while they were doing their act, but also because they ended up owning a plantation in the South, and weird or shocking as this might sound to our modern ears, actually own thirty three black slaves and were actually pretty adored

by the white aristocratic community surrounding them, despite appearing so alien to the local population. That all being said, while there was certainly a vague awareness of China itself, the Orient as it would be called, and its people, mostly thanks to diplomatic and religious missions, newspaper articles and books concerning international affairs, and really just tall tales sold around the campfire and in the schoolyard, most Americans had never

even seen a Chinese person. Littlone knew anything about their rich cultural traditions or customs, or their vast history. So when hundreds of Chinese started arriving, and then those hundreds of Chinese quickly started turning into thousands of Chinese, it's not that surprising that this rapid growth started to put attension in the air, namely in California and on the

rest of the West Coast. This distinction is important for the last part of our story, by the way, since east of the Rockies there was barely a perception of the rapid growth in Chinese immigration, but we'll return to that part later. By the way, this is a really hard thing for us to imagine now in twenty nineteen, I'd be hard pressed to find a person with an Internet connection in the United States who hasn't at least seen a picture of someone from a different ethnic group

than them. That's not to say that this is some sort of bulletproof vest against bigoted assumptions, but it is to say that people in the United States will never have that blind spot ever again. But back in the nineteenth century, the American people definitely did have that blind spot, and it did affect their perceptions of the Chinese, including

how to treat them when times got tough. It also certainly didn't help that in the mid nineteenth century, Americans had a much different sense of what a pretty famous twentieth century German demagogue will call Lebensraem or living space. Iris Chang actually describes a case that would be a lot funnier if not for the disturbing implication behind it of an Illinois man leaving Illinois itself during this period because quote, people were settling in right under his nose.

Unquote right under his nose to this guy meant twelve miles away. Just try to imagine how crowded this must have felt if he had moved up to Chicago from where he was living, especially if he gotten his time machine traveled through time and then went there. Now twelve

miles away. Really that's right under his nose. But now, in all seriousness, try to imagine how a guy like this, a pretty typical American at the time, how he might have felt if people from a strange land that he may have heard of in books and newspapers or had been told about by friends of his but he had

never seen before. If these people started to arrive, bringing their atypical appearance, language, food, customs, customs, and all these things that were completely alien to him, he was so put off by other, most likely also white Americans, showing up arriving about twelve miles away from him, that he

just up and left the state. And I'm not making excuses for xenophobia, by the way, I'm just trying to paint a picture of what America was like when the Chinese, which were the first ethnic group to enter the United States with completely unfamiliar cultural standards and physical appearance, compared to the arrivals from Europe, who had already gone through their own hurdles with the No Nothing movements pathological hatred

of the Irish only a couple decades earlier. I'm just trying to paint a picture of what it was like when the Chinese started to arrive in California in search of their gold mountain. And this isn't to say that it was a holy negative reception that they received, especially not at first. Most Americans were actually fascinated by the

Chinese of anything. San Francisco had actually become a massive, really extremely cultured city by the standards of the time, really quick after the Gold Rush began, largely thanks to the gold that was financing its growth. Intellectual types like Mark Twain, who I quoted earlier, He would make San Francisco his home during the eighteen sixties, along with many

other famous intellectuals and writers. And Mark Twain himself even wrote positively of his first impressions of the Chinese as quote quiet, peaceable, tractable, and free from drunkenness unquote, and that quote a disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist unquote. Kind of a backhanded compliment by today's standards, but nevertheless, it was a very positive way to look at a strange arrival for Americans of

the mid to late nineteenth century. Iris Chang, to quote her again, describes what she calls the quote avid curiosity about the new ideas and experiences unquote of the early San Franciscans and how that and a common purpose sort of helped the Chinese arrivals be initially accepted so easily. She writes, quote, if San Francisco did not initially resist their arrival, perhaps it was because almost everyone in San

Francisco had come from somewhere else. By eighteen fifty three, more than half of the San Francisco population was foreign born, and in a city united by the single driving obsession to make money, only one color seemed to matter, gold unquote. So there was certainly tension in those early years. But in some ways, the strangeness, the novelty really is a better way of putting it, of this new culture of men showing up in California is actually what diffused it.

There's this great piece of what Iris Chang calls quote unquote gold Rush folklore in which the owner of one of the many Chinese restaurants cropping up all over San Francisco was closing up shop and a bunch of these drunk miners just crashed through his front door. Now, instead of trying to get these guys to leave or threatening them or whatever. He decides to feed them. So he orders his cook to fry up all the table scraps that they hadn't yet tossed in the trash, like shreds

of veggies, pieces of dark meat, oils, and sauces. The result a little dish known as chop suey. Now true or not, this tall tale is a great way to describe what it was like to be Chinese in those early days during this spike, this beginning of the spike, I should say, in immigration, there's an atmosphere thick with tension,

but the ability to diffuse it still existed. But unfortunately this was going to start changing, first into resentment and jealousy, and then into the outright hatred of the kind with which we opened our story with the story of the eighteen seventy one Los Angeles Pogram of the Chinese. This is because the American prospectors had started to resent the Chinese for and I am not kidding here, working harder than them, and not just working harder than them, but

working harder than them and doing better than them. There was a story of a Chinese prospector who bought a cabin from a group of miners who hadn't had much luck in the area, and they were just happy to make a chunk of change by selling him the cabin.

Shortly afterward, though, using the techniques he'd learned from his time toiling away as a peasant back home in China, this guy patiently sifted through all of the dirt the men had been shaking out gold nuggets from, and collected enough gold dust while in this cabin to make a pretty tidy sum and return home to China to be a rich man. If resentment at that kind of ingenuity

can't be called entitlement, I don't really know what can. So, Like most things, while the resentment starting to be directed at these men was largely motivated by jealousy, it very quickly became cultural and flat out racial. The more alien from the majority, the easier it is to do this

to a minority, hard working or otherwise. It reached the California State legislature pretty quickly with testimony that quote, their presence here is a great moral and social evil, a disgusting scab upon the fair face of society, a puturefying sore upon the body politic. In short, a nuisance unquote. This kind of hateful rhetoric would be just the beginning.

After the California state government started to apply quote unquote coolly taxes on immigrant laborers, Chinese laborers specifically, the target of the populace backlash was basically identified right there. Taxes and licensing fees were common ways the government had answered people's grumbling about the Chinese, but it became legal as well. The Chinese identity was actually placed under California's Criminal Preceding Act, which made it illegal for blacks, mixed race, and American

Indians to provide evidence in a criminal trial. So the Chinese were now legally speaking quote unquote colored. They were finally to fight as non white in a legal capacity. This new expansion of this law got a white man named George W. Hall off the hook for murdering a Chinese man named Ling Singh. Chinese people couldn't become citizens thanks to the infamous seventy to ninety Naturalization Acts, so they had no political recourse to fight against these laws

at the polls. Reet prices also became prohibitively discriminatory, with a white man only having to pay two hundred dollars a month for a house, while a Chinese man had to pay five hundred. Despite all this, the number of Chinese appearing on the West Coast continued to just keep increasing.

Some Americans were uneasy by the fact that most Chinese stayed close together, largely didn't speak very much English, and made no effort to meaningfully assimilate, at least in any way deemed meaningful by the Americans they lived with and near. And yet other Americans were nervous at the idea of

the Chinese assimilating. Newspapers across San Francisco printed these editorial screeds saying that the Chinese were quote more a far worse class to have among us than the negro unquote, while the fears of quote unquote pagan hordes would pepper the Washington discourse over the years. This basically trapped the Chinese living in America just smack dab in the middle of a cultural double standard. And this wasn't just because

of the gold Rush. By the late eighteen sixties and into the eighteen seventies, the Chinese were everywhere west of the Rockies thanks to something even more valuable than gold that we actually already touched on earlier in our story when we talked about the robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, I'm talking about the trans Continental Railroad. The sort of cultural awareness that most Americans today have about the Chinese in America has to do mostly with the railroad, usually

in passing reference at best. And there's a reason we fixate on that. This is because thousands of Chinese were ultimately instrumental in the construction of the thirty three thousand miles of railroad that snaked around our country. Iris Chang reports that at the peak of the Central Pacific Railways instruction, ten thousand of the workers were Chinese. And what doing you know it? The same resentment felt by the gold Russian forty nine ers who were suspicious of Chinese industriousness

existed here too. But everyone in this case was in the same boat. Once the railroad was finished in eighteen sixty nine, everyone Chinese, white, whatever, was out of a job. That is, until the factories and other industrial professions started excitedly hiring this quote unquote COOLi labor that cost them less and was way more efficient than the labor of the white working class that was getting increasingly organized and

willing to fight for their employment rights. This influx of Chinese laborers became part of what was starting to become known as the Koli trade. And I've said coolly a couple times here. You might be sensitive to that word. It is. It is and has been used as a slur. But there is a history behind it that I kind of want to get into here, just to give you some context. The term kooli is actually derived from the

Chinese term kouli, which literally translates to hard strength. This term has, like I was saying, a long, storied and actually pretty dark history. But in the interest of keeping this lengthy aside brief, it was essentially exploitive contract labor organized by corrupt Chinese businessmen over in China making deals with American companies to export easily manipulated young men for cheap labor in the United States, basically a step above slavery.

This kind of labor, though, undercut the worth of American workers and their labor and became central to the otherization of not just Chinese workers, but Chinese people in general. Nuance has never really been the American people's strong suit. A famous case of Chinese labor is facing the brunt of This otherization actually happened in North Adams, Massachusetts. In eighteen seventy a shoe factory owner named Calvin Simpson fired all of his employees when they all organized a strike

for better wages. He couldn't hire more white workers because the shoemakers are part of the Knights of Saint Crispin, which was an extremely power powerful union on the East Coast, and they will block any attempts to hire scabs by convincing the scabs or the would be scabs, I should say, to join the strike as soon as they arrived, and

they usually worked. I can just imagine, though, the light bulb appearing over Simpson's head as he read the newspaper over his morning coffee and read a story about the Chinese industriousness in a San Francisco factory. As soon as he read about that, and that light bulb went off, he immediately hired seventy five Chinese laborers through what we could probably call a coolie agency named Kwang Chong Wing and Company, which specialized in importing cheap labor from China.

And when these Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams at the train station, laborers and labor supporters were there to meet them. Not exactly all smiles. The Nation reported at the time quote a large and hostile crowd met them at the depot, hooted them, hustled them somewhat, and threw stones at them. Unquote. This was as bad as it got at the time, and in the end, the East Coast was actually a much more accepting environment of Chinese

labor than the West Coast was and would become. But this reaction in North Adams to the arrival of these Chinese labors can seen as a sort of a pretty dark bit of foreshadowing for the kinds of attitudes directed at a group so unlike all the other groups and so willing to do what others wouldn't for a fraction

of the cost. Because out west things were getting much worse, mass violence and pograms were becoming increasingly common, especially in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the Chinese were concentrated in California. This is why I opened our story with the particularly horrifying case of the Los Angeles

Chinatown massacre of eighteen seventy one. This was starting to occur with more frequency, and it represents the true culmination of the populace backlash, where it was heading and who the target was going to be. In other words, and given what was going on, especially with the rise of immigration just happening to coincide with an economic collapse, not to mention the perception and of corruption and gross inequality,

those things have been covering for the last while. Most sane historians would agree that it's not too surprising that things started turning out the way they did, especially given the nature of the times. In the nature of the nation, as Iris Chang impressively puts it, quote, racial and ethnic tensions simmerre just below the surface and virtually all multi ethnic societies, but it usually takes an economic crisis to blow the lid off civility and allow deep seated hatred

to degenerate into violence. When our livelihoods are at stake, when we are desperate, when families are uncertain where their next meal is coming from, when adults fear for the futures of their children, it is natural to ask why fortune has treated us so cruelly, And in these moments we are all vulnerable to explanations that easily assign blame to some outside group. Perhaps it goes back to our primitive origins when in threatening times our personal safety was

best assured by sticking with our own tribe. But for whatever reasons, a general rule of history seems to be that the more people feel insecure about their own well being, the more likely they will join with those of close affinity and striking out at some alien group. The question

then becomes obvious who will they join? Because it's important for us to remember here, none of the violence that I described at the outset of our story was part of an overarching goal or campaign, and wasn't really led by anyone. When it comes down to it, things like the Chinatown massacre of eighteen seventy one in Los Angeles were simply extreme, disorganized, nebulous expressions, illogical conclusions, if you will, of the widespread existential tension that arose from this rapid

increase of immigration. Alongside the other ingredients for Neil Ferguson's populist backlash, these were all diffuse hostilities, and we need to remember that diffuse hostilities toward any kind of group, whether it's racial, religious, or even simply political, it's a sign that you're only one ingredient away from a true populist backlash and its lasting effects. We're about to receive in our story that last true ingredient. So let's recap.

You have the perception of corruption, you have the increase in income inequality and the perceptions that come along with that. You have the unprecedented economic collapse, and you have the first peak increase in immigration. You have these four things happening all at once, converging perfectly prepping the people with enough tension, resentment, and eventually just flat out rage and hatred to create a populist backlash. But getting people to

act as one is harder than you might think. Like I said, you'll see loose expressions of organization like the eighteen seventy one Chinatown massacre, but in the end these are part of formless rage, nebulous, to use the word I used earlier. You don't actually have people acting as

one with a true purpose in things like that. It's just mob not unless you add the fifth and in some ways the most important central ingredient to the populist backlash, soup that had Chef Neil Ferguson talked about way back in twenty sixteen. To preface this coming storm, We're going to turn again to our friend Michael Bellile, who writes, quote,

it seemed that the whole edifice was collapsing. Depression, government corruption, racial violence, stolen elections, class conflict, and myriad forms of potential violence appeared to be tearing society apart. Numerous visitors to the United States held to the conviction that trouble lay ahead unquote, this is where we get our demagogue. A demagogue, almost by his or her very nature, is basically a clown at first, second, and even third glance.

There's something kind of ridiculous about what makes demagogue so compelling to so many people. Demagogues know how to work their way into your mind with brash claims, hyperbole, usually a professed mortar complex when they're attacked, and just a bunch of wild promises that make no sense even when given just a cursory amount of scrutiny, and in some

ways most importantly, catchphrases. While we have the self directed chance of build the wall, echoing a countless rallies and demonstrations all throughout twenty sixteen, there was a very different and yet strikingly similar phrase being employed at the end of every speech given by this man. The main character of our story, the Chinese must go. The man, This man, our demagogue who made that his trademark, was a man so remarkable that he was, of course largely forgotten by history.

His name was Dennis Kearney. You'd be forgiven for immediately scratching your head and saying, who I mean? This is what a lot of people might have said before Dennis Kearney's rise to fame as well and in the decades after his peak, as he began his march into historical obscurity, he was the living embodiment of lightning in a bottle, or, as Neil Ferguson put it as he wrapped up his Populous Backlash super recipe during his twenty sixteen presentation, quote,

Dennis Kearney was the Donald Trump of the eighteen seventies. Unquote. Kearney was the demagogue that the populace backlash was waiting for, directing the people's indignation in terms that only a demagogue could quote. These leprous chinamen are about the meanest creatures that God Almighty ever put breath into the question is are the chinamen to occupy this country or the white man? Will you assist us in ridding this country of the

moonlight lepers. All in favor of the Chinaman, hold up your hands, no one, and all in favor of the white man, up hands unquote. So let's get back to the question you're most likely still wondering. Who was he? Dennis Kearney was actually not an American by birth. He was an Irishman. He had been born in County Cork, Ireland in eighteen forty seven, and was part of a

stereotypically large Irish family with six brothers. Kearney's father died when Dennis was only eleven years old, and doing what I suppose is only natural for an eleven year old boy to do when his father dies, young Dennis decided a life on the ocean was for him and became

a sailor on a clipper ship called the Shooting Star. Now, despite being just a kid, he actually managed to become first mate and even captain during his years on the sea, and he would later claim that he quote circumnavigated the globe and visited many parts of the Earth's surface unquote.

He would eventually land in San Francisco and get married when he was twenty three, and promptly become a small business owner, purchasing a draying business, which was basically a nineteenth century version of a trucking company in which goods were hauled around by a fleet of wagons. This business that he was running became quite successful, making him pretty wealthy,

and he began making enormous investments in mining companies. But then, like the thousands of other Americans we talked about earlier, the crash of eighteen seventy three happened and he lost everything. It's after the crash that we see a shift in Kearney's interests in a more trivial parallel with our current resident. Kearney abstained from drinking and smoking, which was unlike many men of his day who had lost as much as

he had. But replacing those vices, he made it a point to start honing his skills in public speaking fame seeking as well by participating in debates in a club

known as a lyceum of self culture. These skills that he worked on and honed paid off, because as he started to show his face around San Francisco politics in the eighteen seventies, he became known as a quote unquote ready and forcible speaker, especially as he started emerging as the main attraction at the San Francisco Sandlots as they were known, which became a prime venting place for out of work laborers and men who had lost everything in

the eighteen seventy three crash, just as he had. It was during these sandlot rallies where Kearney would develop his build the Wall esque battle cry of the Chinese must Go, with which he closed every speech he made. It was his catchphrase. The repeated successes of Kearney's speeches and his rising popularity made it almost a foregone conclusion to his thousands of fans and supporters that he would become elected as President of the Working Men's Party of California, which

did indeed happen. With this new found position of influence, he began to dedicate himself to making his chapter of the nationwide Working Men's Party the most powerful and influential populist third party in American history. Like any good demagogue who came before or after him, Kearney had a trademark speaking style and a set of identifiable mannerisms that he began to develop in those early days on the San

Francisco sandlots. He would perfect them later on as he toured the United States, spreading his populist message, so much so that a lot of ink was actually spilled in the press at the time simply describing his appearance and presentation. And this appearance in presentation was for the time, to put it, mildly electrifying. To further draw our comparisons between the demagogue then and the demagogue now. Politicians, union men, popular public figures of the time, none of them spoke

like this. This was new, this was novel. Kearney's extremely atypical style is what made him so popular. Historian Andrew Goyori, whose excellent book Closing the Gate contains probably the most thorough look at Kearney, describes it as follows. Quote. He dresses The New York Tribune reported, just like his class, in a dark rough jacket, a blue or checked muslin shirt, and a short silk cravat tied in a sailor's nod.

One of his trademarks was, after speaking and getting hot, to throw off his coat dramatically and unbutton his collar. Gestures had always provoked a storm of applause. Then he would stand quote with his thumbs in the armholes of his vest unquote, waiting for the ovation to subside. As he spoke, the former seaman would march phrenetically up and down the platform quote as though pacing the deck of a vessel unquote. If this sort of physically conscious thing

isn't sounding vaguely familiar already. Another speaking tactic of Kearney's was to use his hands in a very obvious way to make a point. Right before he made his point, he would stop talking for a second while raising his right hand in suspense, like a conductor in front of an orchestra, and then he would to quote another observer at the time quote hurl it toward the audience as though he were throwing a stone unquote, and then he would enunciate his words quote forcibly ejected like a hot

shot from a battery unquote. He would eject this quote unquote hot shot from a battery in the direction of not just the Chinese and their immigration the fourth ingreading to the populist backlash, remember, and his primary target most of the time, but also the quote unquote thieving capitalist as he called them, among other things, while at the same time saying that the time had come to give all the financial power of the country to the workingmen.

He spared no viciousness when he spoke of business owners, bankers, and anyone else who could be considered a capitalist, as in the men who not only caused the panic and the depression, but also who continued to get richer as the unemployed workingmen grew poorer. In other words, he used two of the main outrages ingredients remember of this populist

backlash to rally his people. He even went so far at one of his Sandlock gatherings in eighteen seventy seven, to recommend that every workingman watching him at that moment go out by themselves a gun, and that every capitalist should be hung from the neck until they were dead. He would bellow out claims that the mansions belonging to the upper class needed to be burned to the ground, and he would encourage everyone listening to quote cut the

capitalists to pieces. And he also launched attacks directed at the other key ingredient of the populist backlash, the corrupt politicians of both parties, the Washington elite. Instead of saying that it was time to drain the swamp, he would claim, quote, they have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption. They have made speculation in public robbery as science. They have loaded the nation, the state, the county, and the

city with debt. Instead of saying drain the swamp, he would make threats that quote, bullets will replace ballots unquote, until the capitalists were run out of power and to be replaced with the working class. Banners and signs were being carried around by his supporters at his rallies, and these banners and sides would include effigies of bondholders and elected officials being hung, along with captions like quote sure

cure for corrupt officials. Kearney has come unquote. And Kearney spared no expense with his vitriol and took no partisanside with it either. According to him, his only side was the side of the workingman, the ones forgotten by Washington.

In one of his later speeches that he made in Boston, he rolled all of the grievances, all the elements of the populist backlash, rolled it all into one when he proclaimed the following quote, it will be well for you to know some of the issues that deceive the democratic thief and the Republican robber out of sight in California.

The workingmen of California are becoming overpressed. The capitalistic thief and land pirate of California, instead of employing the poor white man of that beautiful and golden state, send across to Asia, the oldest despotism on earth, and there, contracting with a band of leprous Chinese pirates, brought them to California and now uses them as a knife to cut the throats of honest laboring men in that state. A

Chinaman will live on rice and rats. They will sleep one hundred in a room that one white man wants for his wife and family. But as you can see, while he would use the other ingredients as a base for his vitriol, it would always come back to the Chinese. A lot of Kearny's lambassing of the Chinese is very easily boiled down to simple race baiting rhetoric, often simply employed for cheap laughs, as the transcripts of these speeches

and the crowd's reactions show. During his eighteen seventy seven Sandlot harangues, he would make pronouncements that range from simple conspiracy mongerine, such as unsubstantiated claims of Chinese being secretly smuggled into America down from British Columbia up from Mexico to outright calls for exclusion and deportation. In one of his Sandlots speeches in October eighteen seventy seven, Kiarni would

proclaim to a massive crowd of cheering workingmen and curious onlookers. Quote, before you and before the world, we declare that the Chinamen must leave our shores. We declare that white men and women, and boys and girls cannot live as the people of the Great Republic should and compete with the single Chinese coolie in the labor market. Death is preferable to an American to life on a par with the Chinaman. Unquote.

And if you think that Kearney stopped short of invoking force or violence to achieve this end, you'd be mistaken. According to several speech transcripts and witness statements reported by Iris Chang And in her book on the Chinese in America and Betty Lee Sung in her own Kearney would outright imply extermination or at least violence to drive the Chinese out of San Francisco. He'd have ideas that would be so hair brained that they would be funny if

they weren't terrifying in their implications. These included releasing balloons carrying dynamite over Chinatown and letting laws of physics do the rest of the work for them. And while it's most certainly true that it's not always fair to pin the blame of outside rhetoric for the actions of individuals, we can draw at least at least one direct instance

of brutal violence to the rhetoric of Dennis Kearney. On March thirteenth, eighteen seventy seven, six Chinese woodcutters were calling it a day after a long afternoon of work at their employer's wood shopping camp about two miles outside of Chico, California. They were all gathered in the living area of their cabin that they were staying in. They were settling in

for their nightly meal, laughing and relaxing. According to the sole member of the group who survived, this is why they never noticed that they were being watched from the darkness outside of their cabin. Suddenly, many shots were fired from pistols and rifles, and five men and a boy burst into the cabin and riddled five of the six

Chinese men with bullets. Following the mass shooting, the killers made sure to douse all of the bodies and the cabin itself with a gallon of kerosene before setting everything on fire, basically destroying any physical evidence except for the charred remains of the men they killed, though they obviously didn't account for the testimony of the sole survivor of their mass murder, who had escaped when he heard the shots.

Following the Chico massacre, the Sacramento Daily Union reported that the perpetrators were quote beyond all question, white men unquote. The article continued its analysis of the crime with the following ominous words, quote it is evident, however, that this and other crimes of the same kind, had been perpetrated by ruffians who possessed some kind of organization and to

support one another in their infamous practices unquote. Sure enough, one of the perpetrators was caught, and, after some questioning, finally admitted that what they had done was under the orders of the Workingmen's Party leadership. Unfortunately, the party's leaders couldn't be convicted of any crime because the evidence remained circumstantial.

Kearney would continue his anti China these stump speeches throughout the remainder of eighteen seventy seven, as working class strikes raged across the country, and its popularity would only continue to increase. Kearney's blaming of the Chinese for the lack of work for the working class in the late eighteen seventies was easy, and it was easy for a lot of reasons. One of these reasons was because it was in essence true that Chinese workers were replacing white ones

in certain jobs. But the problem with this view is that it left out the important fact that the only reason the Chinese were being hired by businesses was because the businesses wanted cheaper labor that didn't have the tendency to organize and strike for higher pay or better working conditions, as we saw earlier in our story with the North

Adams incident. But the important thing to remember is that while the racial and cultural quote unquote otherness of the Chinese certainly contributed to them being easily being made targets, this was just a number game, at least initially on the West Coast, because in San Francisco by eighteen seventy one, there were two whites and one Chinese for every available job. But we should be real here. If it hadn't been

the Chinese, it would have been someone else. As Iris Chang said earlier in our story, quote, all of us are vulnerable to explanations that easily assigned blame to some outside group unquote. And this had been seen before. The general hostility of Americans toward the Irish, German and Italian immigrants only three decades earlier shows us as pretty clearly.

And believe me, the irony of an irishman, a man who, if he'd been alive and trying to find a job in America those three decades earlier, a man who would have faced a similar level of discrimination as the kind he was currently heaping on the Chinese. This irony was not lost on contemporaries either, invoking the site of the no Irish need apply signs plastered all over American cities

during the ages forties and eighteen fifties. The famous novelist Robert Lewis Stevenson, writer of Treasure Island and the Strange Case of Doctor Jekyl and Mister Hyde, he wrote in a piece in The Amateur Immigrant during all of this anti Chinese sentiment quote a while ago, it was the Irish. Now it is the Chinese who must go, regardless of

historical ironies or the inevitability of ethnic targeting. Kearney had his targets, and he had his persona, his character, the firebrand who stood up for the working men against the encroachment of the yellow Horde from the Orient. To put

it in crude terms, from that era. In other words, Kearney was well aware of how he could take advantage of the suffering and resentments of his constituents, all tied to the first three ingredients of our populist backlash, the perception of corruption, inequality, and the results of the economic crash. Remember and create a laser focus for this suffering and

resentment onto the fourth ingredient, the rise in immigration. In other words, like all demagogues, Kearney possessed a keen awareness of the observation from Michael Bellile that we laid out earlier that class tensions can be sidestepped by appeals to racism. In other words, it didn't matter whether or not Kearney actually believed in his heart the things that he was saying about the Chinese, because all that mattered to him

was that they worked. We know this because it wasn't always this way with Dennis Kearny as a member of the Draymen and Teamsters Union. Kearney was a union man earlier in his career, which is where he got his first true taste of political power when he became the leader of the Workingmen's Party of California in eighteen seventy seven.

Like we were talking about earlier, but this was happening just as the Great Strikes of eighteen seventy seven, the great insurrection of American workingmen that was actually covered quite well in Sam Davis's Inward Empire podcast. I might ass you should check that out if you want more detail on the Great Strike. But these strikes, the Great Strikes of eighteen seventy seven, they were in full swing. Well, Kearney was experiencing his rise to power. Here's a thing.

It's a mistake to assume that this was because Kearney was a tried and true friend of the working man. This indeed might be sounding familiar to those of you who paid close attention to those rallies and speeches in twenty sixteen, But this, in my view at least, is really what takes the cake. When I invoke catchphrases about the quote unquote original Donald Trump. Kearney's words of support and even love of the working men of America were

words of convenience. He had found a vibrant, fertile political market, and he had tapped into it with a vengeance. And don't think that this is just me being cynical, or even modern historians who have covered Kearney are just being cynical and using the historical twenty twenty hindsight goggles. A contemporary of Kearney's, the famous labor writer Henry George, wrote about Kearney's political opportunism as Kearney was making his rounds

across the country in eighteen seventy eight. George's commentary is one of the primary sources that we can turn to for some sense, for a more accurate sense of what the pre Kearney labor movement thought of the guy who was,

in essence at this time, stealing their thunder. Recalling Kearney's earlier appearances at the Lyceum of Self Culture, where he was cutting his teeth on public speaking, George wrote, quote, he was noticeable not merely for the bitter vulgarity of his attacks upon all forms of religion, especially that in which he had been reared, the Catholic, but for the venom with which he abused the working classes and took on every occasion what passed for the capitalistic side unquote.

George continues with a revelation that even I have to admit, shocked me after hearing and reading all this stuff about

Dennis Kearney his hatred for the Chinese immigrant. But this didn't shock me just because of the apparent inconsistency with the character of Kearney that would begin to emerge along with his fame, but also with how similar it seems to fall in line with the inconsistent ideological methodology of a certain president of the United States, say quote, with all the vehemence with which he has since invaghed against

quote unquote thieving capitalists and quote unquote lecherous bondholders. He denounced the laziness and extravagance of working men, declared that wages were far too high, and defended Chinese immigration unquote. Wow, So we can see here that this guy Dennis Kearney, who spent so much energy and became monumentally successful and famous defending the American workingman and excoriating the Chinese as pests.

Only a few short years earlier, he couldn't wait to call unemployed workers bums, which he did, and even defend the rights of the Chinese to come into America. Quite a change of heart, wouldn't you say. But let's be charitable for just a second. Is it possible that Kearney simply changed his mind? People changed their minds all the time.

Is it possible that maybe he saw things in the culture that maybe he read the tea leaves, or maybe even experience enough rough realities that showed him the way he believed things truly were. Of course, anything is possible. Maybe he met enough out of work laborers with truly moving stories of losing their livelihoods, and he simply latched onto the most obvious solution that the men who weren't working, the white men, weren't working because of the men who

were working, the Chinese men. This is certainly possible. I can't pretend it's not. But Dennis Kearney was anything but stupid. He may have been uneducated, he was very uneducated, but he wasn't stupid. He knew how to read a room. As we saw earlier. I mean, he understood what comedians today called crowd work, in some ways the most fun part of a stand up comedy show. But he understood crowd work far better than most public speakers of his day. I don't even know how many public speakers of his

day understood that concept. Kearney had basically developed a routine. Like I've been saying, he developed a character. What else do you think he's doing when he strips off the more formal coat and rolls up his shirt sleeves, If not, you know, making himself more similar in appearance, at least to the men he's addressing. What else do you think he's doing when he's issuing calls and responses, you know,

encouraging the crowd to get involved with his performance. He would even make direct claims of his own humility and humble status. He'd make extra effort to distance himself from the elites he that claimed they spoke for the working man. In his speech at Fanowell Hall in Boston, he proclaimed, quote my fellow countrymen, as the humble representative of the humble classes, the poor working classes. I appear before you tonight with no flowery phrases with which to garnish my speech,

no classical language with which to fool my hearers. The English language, I believe, contains in the neighborhood of sixty thousand words. I am in possession of a few hundred of those words, and I use them. This is a free country, and the people clamor for the liberty of speed, I use my clamor for the liberty of speech. I use my humble, plain unvarnished words to extol virtue and

condemn robbery unquote. All of these words, these quote unquote humble words of his, were interspersed with moments of uproarious clapping and applause from the crowd of thousands at this particular speech watching him speak, and it's not surprising given what he's saying. What he's saying here is that he's not like these other speakers, these elites with their stiff, rehearsed phrases about coming together when all they want to

do is keep us apart. Really, he's speaking quote unquote plainly and has no desire to talk down to these folk, because he actually cares about them and knows they're smarter than the elites think they are. Yet another thing that sounds familiar, wouldn't you say? Now, someone this aware of his own performance and of his own words is not a simple bigot looking for someone to blame all of his problems on. Sure, he might have had a legitimate chip on his shoulder. He might have had actually hated

the Chinese. But no one makes such an abrupt ideological about face unless they realize, as Kearney very obviously did, that his harangues about lazy workers and well deserving immigrants weren't getting through to anybody at this debate club, at the Lyceum for Self Culture, or in the unions, or to really anyone at all. He needed to change tactics, and he knew that, and that's exactly what he did.

And wouldn't you know it, shortly after this change of tax who started becoming a household name, not just in those sandlots in San Francisco, but in California itself and then even the entire West Coast. Yeah, Dennis Kearney. Again, this is not historical. Twenty twenty hindsight goggles. Henry George understood Kearney's skill and appeal all too well in this flowery conclusion of the piece that he wrote about the

guy quote. Whatever be his future career, Kearney has already made what will be regarded by thousands and thousands of men, many of them have much greater abilities as a dazzling, brilliant success. An unknown dray man, destitute of advantages, without following or influence, he has simply by appealing to popular discontent and arousing the uneasy timidity with which is its correlative, risen to the rank of a great leader, and drunk

the suites of power and fame. He knows what it is to be the hero and the master of surging multitudes, To draw forth their applause by a word, to hush them into silence with a wave of his hand, to be garlanded with flowers, to be drawn in triumph through the crowded streets, to be attended wherever he went by a retinue of reporters and correspondents. To rise every morning

to find the newspapers filled with him. To have men who would not have noticed him if he had stuck to his dray, slink by night to his house, or solicit his favors by go betweens. To look upon high officials as the creatures of his making. To be known and talked about, not merely through the whole country, but over the world. Whatever becomes of Kearney, and it would be rash to predict that his career is yet over. This lesson will not be lost. The wave rises, curls,

and subsides, and where was its white crest? Are but some spumes of foam. But the impulse is perpetuated, and another wave swells up. A good demagogue, indeed, and also like any good demagogue hungry for power and influence, whose impulse is perpetuated in another wave is swelling up, Kiarni would not be content keeping this household name confined to one region, the shores of the Pacific. In this case,

he needed to expand his brand. This is why in July of eighteen seventy eight, Kearney took his show on the road and landed first in Boston, where a lot of the choice quotes of his that we've gone through earlier in our story came from when he got to Boston. When he got to the East Coast, he wasn't welcomed by everybody, including all of the working men that he addressed.

A lot of them actually held very little sympathy for his anti Chinese message, since, as historian Andrew Goory, who had been quoting Astuteley and frequently points out in his book Closing the Gate when talking about Kearney's tour out east, East Coast laborers and most laborers and union members in general were actually opposed to contract immigration rather than immigration in general. They were opposed to the Cooley trade that

we talked about a little while ago. Now, this would change over time as times remained hard and got harder in some cases, but this distinction between contract labor and immigrant labor was something that gave a lot of the smaller populist movements out east more moral integrity and nuance in their West Coast counterparts. However, I do think that Gory misses a crucial point in probing the big why of these East Coast laborers being more tolerant despite frequently

referencing this fact. However, I do think Goory misses a very crucial point in probing the sort of big why of these East Coast laborers being more tolerant. Despite frequently referencing this fact, There were hardly any Chinese laborers east of the Rockies during the eighteen seventies and even into the eighteen eighties. I mean I mentioned this before. I mean it's not even just Chinese laborers. Chinese people in

general were basically an alien race from another planet. East of the Rockies, people knew what they were in the most general sense. But again, most people east of the Rockies had never even seen a Chinese person period. In fact, over ninety nine percent of all Chinese immigrants in the United States were on the West Coast. I'm not making excuses, by the way, for the abject bigotry of Californians and other West Coast populis, but we do have to be

real here. For a second, the East Coast populace and laborers had no incentive to blame their woes on the Chinese people coming to America. They were often being threatened by their employers that they would be replaced with cheap, cooly labor, for sure, but there were very few cheap coolies, so it was just easier for them to see straight and understand that the real villain in these circumstances was indeed the owner of the company trying to screw them

out of decent pay. So, in other words, the inherent vulnerability of an aggrieved laboring class of populace to cheap appeals of natism and racism was less inherent with the East Coasters because they just simply had no group to easily other eyes like their West Coast cousins did so, like I was saying, the concept of cheap Chinese labor was essentially as alien as the Chinese were themselves to

the East Coast Americans. So while Kearney initially drew crowds supportive of his racist invective during his East Coast tour, this wasn't to say that he or his racist rhetoric was largely embraced by the organized working class. And it wasn't just the inability for the working class out east to sympathize with his rhetoric's racist overtones. It was actually the lack of precision in his goals that they found

most frustrating. He kept his rhetoric pretty vague throughout his tour, occasionally shouting about quote taking the life of any man who attempts to debar the voters from exercising their right of suffrage and quote hunting down and shooting unquote and he elected official who went back on its promises. All very clear and obvious ways at playing into the political corruption ingredient of the populace backlash, by the way, but

he very rarely offered specific policy prescriptions. It was all about ensuring the victory of the working Man's Party in the upcoming eighteen seventy eight elections. Or, as he would put it, quote, put all of your issues into one pot, screw a cover on it, and tie it so tightly that nobody could lift it until you elect working men to office. Unquote. Pretty familiar, vague stuff, right, And while he was indeed ostensibly speaking for them, labor leaders out

east started asking questions. Historian Andrew Gyori again. He describes a scene between Kearney and labor leaders in the following quote. Precisely what issues Kearney wanted workers to pool he never spelled out. In Cincinnati, labor leaders asked what he meant by the slogan Yury quotes from various eight August eighteen seventy eight issues of newspapers. Here, knock the first man down who disagrees with you. He told them, capture the state.

But asked one of the labor leaders, suppose you were asked some plan or reason for pooling issues. Damn such conundrums, Kearney retorted, the people are starving. Ain't that enough? For many? It was not in God's name. When newspaper pleaded give us some ideas, propose something, but Kearney refused, offering neither

programs nor solutions unquote. This is yet another very important mark of a demagogue, appeals to emotion, singling out the enemy and proposing very little specifically at least except victory, a general sense of victory for the cause. This is why the closest thing to a policy prescription that Kearney had while on his East Coast tour was ensuring the election of Representative Benjamin F. Butler in the gubernatorial race for message who sits in the eighteen seventy eight election

under the Greenbacker banner. Though one of the many third parties of the era, Kearney would continually endorse the quote unquote chivalrous Butler in his speeches because his game, his ultimate goal in all this this is important, was very simple. Kearney wanted to establish a power base for himself through Butler and what Andrew Giory calls quote an alliance among workers and Greenbackers. With Butler and himself at the helm unquote.

This part of our story is pretty fun because during his East Coast adventures, Kearney was even less welcomed by most of the press at the time. And this is where, and this is why it's fun. This is where, in my view, the parallels between Dennis Kearney and Donald Trump, and really any parallels between any populist, ostensible populist and another come into laser sharp focus. For most people I've talked to about this man and what I've admittedly like I was saying, this is fun. I've been the most

excited to play with this stuff. So, like both president and candidate t Dennis Kearney had nothing but the most poisonous contempt for the press, both in his rhetoric and in his heart. I think this is actually something he

did believe. The level of integrity possessed by the press, both in the eighteen seventies and in the twenty tens, incidentally, can certainly be debated, and I do have my own personal hot takes on all that, but that's a different story for a different day and probably a different podcast. The point is that Kearney's and usually most populous contempt for the press was shared by them in kind, since he was locked in what felt like a perpetual war of words with them during the entirety of his East

Coast tour. For all of the current US president's contemptuous comments about the press being fake news or being unfairly treated by partisan pundits, after reading about Dennis Kearney's relationship with the press, specifically the East Coast press, I think that not only did his invective ten to leave President Trump's miles in the dust, but I think he basically laid the groundwork for how demagogus would talk about the press for the next century and a half in the

United States. Donald Trump has probably never heard of Dennis Kearney, but you'd be forgiven for not thinking for a second that he might have somehow gotten a hold of some of the quotes that we're about to get into here and then maybe crafted his own more modern versions of them, Because without missing a beat during his first speech in Boston from which we quoted earlier, Kearney started going out of his way to mock and smear the press when

he said the following quote, First and foremost, I will pay my respects to the newspapers. The newspapers from the earliest history of printing have been running the interest, take it down, reporters of cutthroats, political bilks, daylight thieves, and midnight assassins. A newspaper is an enterprise like all other business enterprises. For the villainous serpent like slimy imps of hell that run these newspapers, I have the utmost contempt unquote.

He did make in that speech an olive branch distinction of sorts, but between reporters and the owners of the newspapers. But this was a case like it's often said in the Game of Thrones books, his words were wind. In the same speech he called the Associated Press quote a villainous, thieving, infamous band of scallowags that aim to control public opinion unquote, and in another he called them a quote unquote old prostitute.

In another speech, when he mentioned the Boston Herald, a paper critical of him, the crowd started hissing, responding in kind, Kearney then shouted, quote, I now proposed three groans for that slimy sheet unquote, which was followed by three loud groans from the crowd. And in a speech in Cincinnati, he actually took a few moments to browbeat the quote

line venial venereal press of the United States unquote. But and this is actually a little less funny because, in perhaps one of the most symbolic moments of the whole tour, while he was in New York City, he held up a cop of the New York Tribune. He called its editor quote the organ of the plunderers unquote, and then he tore the paper to pieces. This is where it's

less funny, because the entire crowd erupted into cheers. The press did indeed respond in kind, with some pretty choice descriptions, including the New York Times calling him quote an eminent blatherskite unquote, and the Chicago Times referring to him as

a quote flatulent little brat unquote. The Boston Transcript said, quote, he is simply a blatant booby with a profane and bullying rigamarole of epithets unquote, while the Philadelphia Inquirer said that quote Kearney's only talent is the billionsgate fishwife's talent for vituperation, and his head is as empty of ideas

as his mouth is full of oaths and rivalry. Unquote, and the nation which we now ironically in this case associate with more left leaning, supposedly anti racist branded politicking, actually went for the racially charged at hominem jugular by saying that he looked like quote a naked bushman unquote end quote, the lowest type of demagogue that has yet

appeared in history unquote. But I do think my favorite insult throwing Kearney's way during this time actually came from a guy who will come into play toward the end of our story, and not necessarily in the way you might think given what he says here, Senator James G. Blaine from Maine, when he called Kearney quote an unduly inflated sack of very bad gas unquote. Now I won't pretend that I understand every term throwing Keiarney's way by the press. I'm not even sure Google knows what a

blatherskite is, and I've never met a Billionsgate fishwife. But I think the parallels between the New York Times coverage of Dennis Kearney and Donald Trump hasn't changed much in

the intervening century and a half. But there's something more striking here that Andrew Gyory, in a very important reading of this story, says of the New York Tribune's coverage of Kearney that, quote, although they lavish column after column on his tour, it called him a quote particularly stupid and uninteresting creature unquote, who appealed only quote to those who like profanity, indecency, and coarse, vulgar and savage brutishness unquote.

Not only are the Trump Kearney parallels obvious when looking at how the Tribune was going out of their way to insult Kearney's supporters and fans in some pretty base terms as a means of retaliating against him for all the awful things he was saying about them, but the parallels are also pretty obvious when you consider the symbiotic relationship between the press and the demagogue. How nothing in

that respect changes. Jory also notes that the mainstream media's attacks on Kearney were actually motivated by a desire to skewer the labor movement. Whether or not Kearney really was a man of the people was irrelevant to them. He claimed that he spoke for workingmen. Crowds of thousands showed up to cheer for him. If so, facto, the working

man was at fault for this man's popularity. As we've covered with a lot of things in this story, and specifically with labor movement, it wasn't quite so simple, but it never is with a demagogue. As it turns out, Kearney's audiences during his East Coast tour were in the

class sense, pretty diverse. Some publications indicated that the crowds who appeared to see Kearney were part of the quote unquote best known citizens of their respective cities, and that quote judging from their dress and appearance, was composed of

business or professional men unquote. Yori makes some very nuanced observations about Kearney's success as a speaker on his East Coast tour, and I want to get into them here because he explains that, based on the volumes of testimony and varied opinions given at the time, most of what drove Keierney's popularity on the East Coast was sort of a nice combo of boredom, curiosity, and the drive to

seek novel enters. Taman, It's why we browse YouTube for hours on end and suddenly it's four in the morning. As Gjory says, quote, theater and concert halls could hardly compete with the excitement of a compelling, never before seen speaker. Quote. Jory then goes on to quote the Boston transcript who wrote of Kearney, quote, he was a circus and clown combined, and the attraction proved great enough to hold the spectators

pretty well together. Unquote, despite the fact that many people saw and in some cases still see President Trump as a circus and clown combined, to quote the Boston transcript. There again, this is also where you could say where we kind of come to a small hiccup in our comparison between Donald Trump and Dennis Kearney. This treatment of Kearney as essentially a side show by the public didn't result in an overwhelming victory of his cause, unlike the

victory Trump scored in twenty sixteen. While the Kearney endorsed Benjamin F. Butler, who we were talking about a moment ago, he did capture a strikingly high number of votes for a third party in the eighteen seventy eight election. It was a one hundred and nine thousand or so compared to the Republican victors one hundred and thirty five thousand, So that's not bad for a third party, but Butler still lost, and this left Kearney without a sort of

official power broker on the East Coast. Not that this mattered anyway, though, since he was starting to be seen as a toxic element by both his political supporters and even his crowds, not to mention just sort of starting to be seen as tiresome and predictable. And while many of his political allies simply started quietly turning their backs on him, the crowds were much more obvious in their dismissal of him. They were bored, They were simply bored,

and they wanted something new. This is because the crowd participation at Kearney's rallies had been gradually turning less into enthusiastic support and more into a back and forth heckel fest between him and his onlookers, which had in turn started to become a simple source of entertainment for many in the crowd, who were looking for a laugh at this point more than they were for a source of

validation for social grievances related to unemployment and whatnot. Again, remember, they didn't really care about Chinese immigration on the East Coast. So he wasn't going to really be able to whip them up into a frenzy with that, So really it was just a sort of source of entertainment for them, of live of free live entertainment, because he didn't charge

for these speeches. He actually did pass a hat around for people to give donations, like a suggested donation kind of thing like that you see at a community theater. But in the end, these were free events. It was free entertainment for a very bored populace. So this populace they would cheer every time Kierney would let loose a swear at the time, like a hell or a thief or a bondholder, very like like strong terms. And they really love these terms though, because they kind of become

part of his routine. They were catchphrases. It's kind of like if you listen to those old stand up specials of Andrew dice Clay, you'll actually hear the people who really love his material shouting out the punchlines for him. Like it's just it's not common in stand up comedy, but it's definitely something that happens when you get to

a certain level of success. There was actually even but in the case of Kearney, there was actually even an account from the Boston transcript again that at the end of one of his Boston speeches quote, the laughter began to predominate over the applause, and people listened and thought it fun, getting amusement not only out of what was said, but out of the speaker's manner of saying it. Unquote.

No one was taking him seriously anymore, and there were even cases where his speeches had to be cut short due to the growing bored hostility of the crowd. This perfectly illustrates the problem with laughter on its own, at least as entertainment. If what's causing the laughter doesn't change its tune or its routine, that laughter is going to recede really fast, and eventually that will turn into boredom,

if not outright hostility. We actually saw this play out perfectly in this classic episod of The Simpsons that you might remember, where Bart becomes a sensation for causing a disaster and crusty the clowns set like knocking a bunch of stuff over and then simply saying I didn't do it. Sure enough, the culture couldn't get enough of the eye didn't do it boy, if you remember the episode, But the same culture that couldn't get enough of the I didn't do it boy couldn't care less after it was

oversaturated with his face, voice, essence, everything. So when the last no longer came Bart had a door slammed in his face. And this same thing essentially happened to Dennis Kearney. On November seventeenth, eighteen seventy eight, he gave a farewell speech, made some vague claim that he was needed by the workingman back in San Francisco, and left. As The Boston Globe reported, this farewell speech was I would say the

definition of a dud quote. During the speech, which occupied about an hour, the large crowd were exceedingly quiet and only a few interruptions were made. No enthusiasm was evinced, and the whole speech fell flat at the clothes. The large crowd quickly dispersed. Dennis Kearney's play for power and influence beyond the Rockies, I think it's safe to say had clearly failed. Now, wait, what I thought Dennis Kearney was the original Donald Trump. That's what you're thinking, right,

And you're right. The difference here is very much. Indeed, that where Donald Trump has succeeded, Dennis Kearney had failed. On the one hand, while Donald Trump may have slightly tweaked his speeches and statements and tweets, they have all

remained relatively one note. And while there is an element of unpredictability that people associated with candidate Trump, his unpredictability was actually pretty mundane and was in and of itself pretty predictable, much in the same way as Dennis Kearney's behavior became really predictable. And yet, on the other hand, Donald Trump became the president and Dennis Kearney became a walking joke to just about everybody east of the Rockies.

He became a punchline. So not so much of an original Donald Trump, right, was this all a bunch of hype? Not so fast? Like everything in our story, everything involving demagogues, Nothing is quite that simple. Because remember, even though he was a failure on the East Coast due to the crux of his arguments, Dennis Kearney was still the voice of the people out west, and he would continue to deliver hundreds of speeches in support of workers and back

to opposing the continued immigration of the Chinese. He would even be arrested for his trouble, making him kind of a folk hero. But again, this was all confined to the West Coast. And while it might sound silly given all the mockery he'd endured that drove him home to San Francisco and his subsequent confinement there, his rhetoric had been and would ultimately be, far more successful and influential than anyone could have possibly imagined. Andrew Giory, in summarizing

Kearney's impacts, says the following quote. In one crucial respect, Kearney was a dazzling success. He showed that a forceful speaker could stir a crowd to its feet in the

East by mouthing virulent, racist, anti Chinese epithets. No matter that the crowd embraced many classes and segments of society, No matter that people came to laugh and shout, No matter that numerous workers in labor leaders had renounced Kearney and his anti Chinese message to people trying to gauge public opinion, the spontaneous agitation of the quote unquote rabble carried more weight than all of the scattered voices from the working class community that rose up in protest the

divergence between public opinion and perceptions of public opinion would

have tragic consequences in the years to come unquote. Before you think this is overstating it, consider this one of Dennis Kearney's stops on his East Coast tour earlier on, in fact, before he was reduced to a quote unquote laughing stock, as a number of sources at the time put it, and probably his most important stop was with none other than the President of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, while meeting with Hayes, or a meeting between Denny and

Ruthy or Denny and Ruthie. I'm not sure how they pronounced it. As one newspaper pudd it at the time, Kearney really only spoke about one issue, which was really because it was the only issue he knew anything about as a West Coast populist demagogue in the eighteen seventies,

the issue of Chinese immigration. Hayes's response to Kearney's concerns on the issue, though he said, quote, I think Congress next winner will come to a definite conclusion favorable to your people on this question unquote, and unlike Kearney's words ninety nine percent of the time the president's words were

not winned. One month after Keiarney's unceremonious exodus out west, the San Francisco Chronicle reported the following quote, the Chinese question has of late excited a great deal more interest among public men at the Capitol than it has ever before been possible to arouse. Unquote. Only one month after that, the tiny snowball began rolling down the hill. On January twenty eighth, eighteen seventy nine, the House of Representatives passed

something called the fifteen Passenger Bill. This restricted the number of Chinese immigrants on ships bound of the US, as the name of the bill suggests, to fifteen maximum. Any number over that would subject the owner of the ship to one hundred dollars a head per person over the fifteen limit. This act and the acts and treaties to come would be justified in purely racial terms that senators and congressmen would speak of as if they were foregone conclusions.

The Republican senator from California, Newton Booth, would say, quote, the darkest passages of human history have been enacted when alien races have been brought into contact unquote. Democratic Senator Lafayette Grover from Oregon would say, attempting to evoke scary, horrifying images that were the result of misagenation, quote, we want no more mixture of races. No strong nation was

ever hone of mongrel races of men unquote. Oregon's Republican counterpart, John H. Mitchell would describe Chinese immigration as a quote unquote great anaconda while trying to give face to quote the contaminating, corroding, and destructive effects of the Asiatic barbarians in his home and in neighbor states out west, and Republican John P. Jones of Nevada, along with many other senators in Congressman over the next few years, would pretty much give Kearney a run for his money in racist

rhetoric by explaining the real reason for opposing Chinese immigration when he said, quote, we oppose their coming because our sturdy Aryan tree will wither in root, trunk, and branch if this noxious vibe be permitted to entwine itself around

it unquote. But here's the striking thing. In the wake of the fifteen Passenger Bill and in the years that followed it, wasn't just the Western members of Congress who took to the podium to decry the evils of Chinese immigration, because out West, Kearney and his brand of racist rhetorics still had influence. Like I was saying before, so it's pretty unsurprising that they'd be pushing for a bill like

the fifteen Passenger Bill and everything that came afterward. Right, But how does that explain the multitudes of East Coast politicians expressing similar sentiments. Republican James G. Blaine of Maine, who we mentioned earlier and also partly famous for supporting Chinese immigration earlier in the eighteen seventies, had suddenly made a politically convenient about face, especially with the eighteen eighty election looming on the horizon and talk of who was

going to replace Ruther Fraud as he was being called. Still, I mean, that does matter. It might be cynical, but that does play a part for why James G. Blaine decided to make this about face, because he addressed Congress in February of eighteen seventy nine invoked images of quote the vast and calculable hordes in China unquote that would quote throttle and impair the prosperity of the United States unquote.

And this is really key here, that the West Coast was facing the choice, the supposed choice of living in quote the civilization of Christ or the civilization of Confucius. Further justifying the violation of the treaty that the United States had long established with China and pushing closer toward a complete halt of immigration, he concluded his speech to Congress with the following quote, The Asiatic cannot go on

with our population and make a homogeneous element. The idea of comparing European immigration with an immigration that has no regard for family, that does not recognize the relation of husband and wife, that does not observe the tie of parent and child, that does not have, in the slightest degree, the ennobling and civilizing influences of the Hearthstone and the Fireside. I am opposed to the Chinese coming here. I am opposed to making them citizens. I am opposed to making

them voters. Quote. The point here is this, all of these men knew an opportunity to take advantage of racial tensions to get things done, because when it came down to it, this was never actually about race for the United States Congress. The fact that it wasn't was why things got as bad as they did. The fact that there was no principle is why things got as bad as they did. This was all about fear, Washington's fear,

fear of the working class. Because remember, we're in the middle of a populist backlash, one that resulted from everything wretched and violent and awful that we got into earlier in this story. Almost all American politicians were terrified of another working class revolt, similar to the one that had occurred a few years before, in which the rumblings of the populist backlash that had been brewing reached their breaking point.

The Great Strike of eighteen seventy seven was a dark cloud hanging over Congress, and politicians were looking for any way too. As Michael Belile puts it, sidestep issues of class with simple racism. Class was not workable in the political realm as far as they were concerned, race was.

And since these Chinamen weren't the recently liberated and politically valuable former slave class of Black Americans, and since these Chinamen were really just an unassimilated, strange looking race of strangers, from across the sea. They were fair game, right, And if they could frame the loss of jobs and poor livelihood of the agitated working class as being one directly related to the spike in Chinese immigration, even if it was only confined to one part of the country, all

the better. Right. It wasn't the fault of corrupt business practices in backdoor legislation. It was the fault of these immigrants working on the cheap right. As our frequently cited historian Andrew Giori puts it, quote, rhetoric, bigotry, and national policy would at last converge as the Chinese temporarily replace blacks to become the most officially despised people in America. After a brief hiatus inspired by Civil War idealism, racism

was back and fashion. Only the target had shifted on quote. Such was the mentality of hundreds of scared, shitless cynical politicians in Washington. President Hayes would ultimately veto the fifteen Passenger Bill. But as we can see, members of Congress, both both prominent Easterners and devoted Westerners, they weren't about to let this issue die. They'd gone too far. Messages were being sent clearly by both politicians and their company

owning friends and cronies. As stated by Andrew Yori in his book, quote, you are replaceable and your replacements are ready unquote, referring to the hypothetical multitudes of cheaper, non unionized Chinese labor that would put all these white and frankly black and all other races, all these workers out of a job. This was designed to raise tensions, and it did work, because in the first month of eighteen eighty you actually start to see labor groups finally flip.

They begin to speak out against Chinese immigration in general, opposed to just imported contract labor, Congress's side stepping of class issues with appeals to racism. To use that phrase again, they were working and the alienated working classes could now rush to the comforting bosom of their representatives, who claimed

that they had the solution to all their problems. None of this was helped by typically hyperbolic and opportunistic press, who didn't miss a beat to completely forget all the criticism they had of Dennis Kearney and stir up the tension with quotes like this one from the Chicago News in early eighteen eighty quote the Mongolian is taking his cue and heading eastward well New York of Voca Dennis Kearney unquote. All of this fed into the presidential election

of eighteen eighty and beyond. Really James Garfield was elected president, all while being implored by the California Republicans, all of whom were emboldened to out Kearney, Dennis Kearney and his even more powerful Workingmen's Party to come out strong against

Chinese immigration. President Garfield didn't have much of a chance to act on the anti Chinese sentiments swarly to the country that he did sort of tepidly support, But he didn't really have a chance to do anything about it, seeing as he was assassinated in the summer of eighteen eighty one, leaving his vice President Chester A. Arthur in charge.

He was the one holding the reins on the Chinese immigration question, and after a treaty with China making immigration restriction legal, I'm part of the US government, so nothing illegal or untoward legally speaking, could happen if they decided to suddenly close immigration to China. Exclusion advocates within Congress just wasted no time in drafting what would become probably, if not the most infamous, one of the most infamous pieces of racist legislation in United States history. That's the

Chinese Exclusion Act. The obvious congressional supporters of the Chinese Exclusion Act came from out West, like California's Republican Senator John F. Miller, who made the argument during the deliberations that the Chinese living in his state were quote inhabitants of another their planet unquote, and that they were quote machine like of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron. They are

automatic engines of flesh and blood. They are patient, stolid, unemotional, and heard together like beasts. He continued to evoke images of an America quote resonant with the sweet voices of flaxen haired children unquote, and would call to maintain quote American Anglo Saxon civilization without the contamination or adulteration from

the gang green of Oriental civilization unquote. And when making his case for passing the act that would completely exclude the Chinese from entering the United States, Miller said, quote why not discriminate? Why aid in the increase and distribution over our domain of a degraded and inferior race and

the progenitors of an inferior sort of men unquote. You would think that there would be descent to sentiments like this in Congress by the time the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two entered the debate stage, and you'd be right. There was descent, but it was muted descent.

It was always preceded or closed with a lot of throat clearing about how the senator or congressman opposing the Act wasn't too fond of the Chinese, or their inability to assimilate, or their heathen or pagan ways, and was usually followed by more practical than moral reasons for allowing the continuity of immigration, like the one Southern Democrat who opposed the bill, Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, who simply said that the United States should continue its relationship with

China since it was a fertile market or as he put it, quote a wide open field for US unquote, and that there was quote unquote boundless trade, and that this was necessary. But some of the reasons for opposing the act were made. They were made as matters of moral principle, especially from the pro abolition types, the Republicans

who ostensibly still followed in Abraham Lincoln's footsteps. This is why the speech given by Ohio Republican Ezra Tailor, who is an important figure of the time because he represented the slain President Garfield's district, so people were paying extra attention to him at the time, But the fact that he was a pro abolition old school Republican in that sense makes his speech extra depressing because while giving his speech, Taylor initially invoked the images of walls being built as

he expressed his opposition to the bill, and even harangued against the racist tone being set by the overall discussion of exclusion. He said, quote, we know not when the next wall will be erected. I would deem the new country we will have after this bill becomes laws changed from the old country we have today, as our country would have been changed if the rebellion of eighteen sixty one had succeeded. We talk in regard to the differences between races, and I am astonished at the way we talk.

I know our books speak of it learnedly. There are heaps of nonsense in some books. Others may say, throw sentiment aside. But the Republican Party is founded on sentiment, and it cannot throw sentiment aside. And that sounds great, right, noble even, And yet the noble principled Ezra Taylor couldn't help himself as he closed his speech with the following remarks quote, I hope my remarks have not been understood

as favoring a further immigration of the Chinese. I want no more of them, But I talk only of this bill, and I do not mean to be in the least understood as favoring that immigration. I deplore their presence here as much as any man. Unquote. This would be really funny in its irony if its implications weren't so cruel.

But in my view, it was probably the famous Republican abolitionist from really back in the day at the time and civil rights advocate George F. Edmonds, who gave probably the most telling speech of all for this part of our story, for this sort of epilogue, I guess, like the other two guys I've quoted, he came out in opposition of the bill, though his opposition was mostly over the specific of the initial time frame of the exclusion.

He suggested five years instead of ten. This gave his testimony a bizarre having his cake and eating it too, kind of stank on it. And believe me, the press took note of this too at the time, because he

still supported exclusion despite coming out against the bill. And yet I think Edmund's speech also had probably the most important representative point of view of what everything we've been talking about, this idea of a populist backlash, and what it all amounts to, what it all leads to, the policy that emerges in response to the malformed, malignant anger

of the people. The policy that gets formed by the elites, but whose responsibility can be conveniently passed on to the very people that demanded action from these elites, but didn't bother to hold them accountable for their cynicism. This was all made crystalline when Edmunds made his clothes remarks in the matter of the Chinese Exclusion Act quote, no republic can succeed that has not a homogeneous population. That was, for so long a time the curse of the Southern States.

It was the want of homogeneity that has promoted political discord and discontent among our fellow citizens. Every people and every church, every little community must decide what persons other than itself are to be received into it and become part of it unquote. In other words, this isn't our problem, and it isn't really our decision. This is what the people want. Populism I Principle zero, many sentiments supporting white labor,

and admissions that quote the gate must be closed unquote. Later, the Chinese Exclusion Act was approved on March twenty third, eighteen eighty two, at a vote of one hundred and sixty seven in favor to sixty six opposed, with with fifty seven members of Congress not even voting. Two months later, President Chester A. Arthur signed the bill. Through repeated renewals and additions to this act and its precedence, the Chinese would no longer be welcome in the United States for

another one hundred years. Those Chinese that remained in the United States, mostly on the West Coast, they be hounded and harassed out of their homes and many times openly murdered, mirroring the anti Chinese Los Angeles pogram of eighteen seventy one with which we opened our story, and or the Workingmen's Party ordained massacre of the Chinese miners in Chico

that we talked about earlier. Oregon Snake River masacer of eighteen eighty seven comes to mind, in which thirty one Chinese miners were as a federal official investigating it at the time, put it quote shot, cut up, stripped, and thrown into the river unquote by a mob of ranchers

and school aged boys. Historian David Stratton, when writing about the pogram, described victim's body parts having been taken as souvenirs by the mob, with quote, A Chinese skull fashioned into a sugar bowl graced the kitchen table of one ranch home for many years unquote. The Chinese Exclusion Act didn't cause this massacre, but the political realities that the acts passage had created certainly made it easier for the state to justify acquitting the three perpetrators of this mascre

that it brought to trial. Whether or not this was hardwired racism was irrelevant. Taking the side of some slain Chinaman in the years following the Exclusion Act and everything that had led up to it was politically inconvenient at best, but more likely political suicide at worst. It was a perfect political confluence, a populist backlash made useful by the elitist political class, But it wasn't that clear at the time,

and arguably still isn't. Andrew Giory very astutely points out that by the time the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in eighteen eighty two, and after its effects had begun to spread outward, it was increasingly difficult to see where this all came from. He writes, quote who was behind the Chinese Exclusion Act? Was it simply the work of politicians? Or were the nations elected leaders responding to the will

of the American people? After so many years of agitation on the subject, it was no longer easy to tell. Politicians angling for office had, no doubt, swung many people to their side, and the momentum, in turn, had forced other politicians to fall in line. Public opinion and politicians fed on each other, and by eighteen eighty two it

had become difficult to separate the two forces unquote. Here's the thing, though, If we examined this movement and the many other movements born from a populous backlash closely and together, we should realize that it will always be impossible to

say whose quote unquote fault. Things like the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Trump administration's twenty seventeen travel ban are seeking to find fault in stories like this is a fool's errand they come from a confluence of factors and forces that take place over a wide span of time.

But one thing is for sure. If you have head chef Neil Ferguson's five ingredients for a populous backlash, it is all but certain that things like this will happen, regardless of you, or your parties, or your country's political bias. It doesn't matter if you have a demogogue like Dennis Kearney or Donald Trump running around while you have the other four ingredients present the perception of rampant corruption, the gross inequality, the effects of an economic crisis, and a

rise in immigration. If those other ingredients are there, the demagogue shaped void will be filled by someone in the stead of those unwilling to fill it themselves. And even if that demagogue arrives and is quickly laughed off the stage, there's no reason to sit back and automatically breathe a sigh of relief. We can see from this story that the effects can linger on for a very very long

time without anyone being the wiser. After all, all of the politicians involved in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act had either completely distanced themselves from Dennis Kearney, forgotten him, or had never really even been his ally to begin with,

He'd essentially become a non entity in Washington. And yet during this whole legislative process, this march toward the exclusion of an entire race of people from entering the United States, a House representative named Martin Townsend out of New York was quoted as saying the following, Dennis Kearney is now represented in the National Halls. So, as you have probably noticed at various points actually throughout our story, Dennis Kearney is not a one to one carbon copy of the

forty fifth President of the United States. He is the original Donald Trump. But Donald Trump is not a clone of him. I mean, Kearney's origins were obviously far different. He wasn't American, and he was born quite poor and could very easily be described as a self made man who had no advantages granted upon him. He also, probably

most importantly, never became president. As I mentioned earlier, Ny continued his political activities with the California Workingmen's Party throughout the lead up to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which he did support, and he would make hundreds of relatively well

received speeches throughout the early eighteen eighties. But eventually he would return to operating his business, and he would buy himself a valuable plot of land where he would quietly retire until his death in nineteen oh seven, after which he would be largely forgotten by anyone without an interest in California labor history, at least quite a far cry from President of the United States. However, it's not simple biographical information that creates our story's main through line of

pinpointing this quote unquote original Donald Trump. It's the historical circumstances in which they both existed and of which they both took advantage that makes these men tethered through time.

Despite never becoming president, Kearney did set the tone. He created, the rhetoric, he crafted, the excuses and the justifications, and all of these things turned into more rhetoric from higher and higher offices and eventually turned into cold, hard policy policy that lasted well into the twentieth century and arguably affected the racial demographics and attitudes of the United States

for even longer. This isn't necessarily just about Donald Trump or Dennis Kearny, though the parallels are striking and fun even, But this is really about populism and its inherent vulnerabilities, whether we're watching it gained steam with the working class in the eighteen seventies or watching it gain traction with both political parties in the years since twenty sixteen, and without missing a beat, potentially being molded into something ugly. Populism is a force. It's not a person. It's a

culmination of circumstances and realities. We can see this with what happened in twenty sixteen, and we can see this happen in eighteen seventy eight. The language was there, the feelings were there, all of it was in place, and all it required was a strangely gifted outsider who could

whip the people listening up into a frenzy. Whether that person is a self made Irish American dray Man who whipped resentful broken in the end really just scared Americans into a nativist frenzy before fading into obscurity, or whether it's a coddled, thin skin new York or real estate magnate who did the same and became elected President of the United States. So yes, unlike Donald Trump, Dennis Kearney

never became president. But when we look at Dennis Kearney and the effects of his demagoguery that were the culmination of the populist backlash of the eighteen seventies, it shows us that you don't need to become president for your nativist, populist rhetoric to become policy. In fact, if that rhetoric is coming from the office of the president, one could even say that there is a certain disadvantage to that you, as a citizen, know where that rhetoric is coming from.

The spotlight is always on the guy saying it. Everything he says is quoted and requoted, tweeted, retweeted. It's always on display for the world to see and more importantly, to challenge, unlike when the rhetoric comes from someone smaller, from strikingly effective opportunist who knows how to speak to and ostensibly for the people, and who manages to fade into the obscurity of history. So when someone starts echoing his sentiments nearly a century and a half later, all

we can do is sputter and disbelief. And then when someone starts winning elections with those ancient, forgotten sentiments, all we can do is weep and moan and declare. But that's impossible. All right, Hey, everybody, glad to have you

still listening, if you're still here. I just want to give a quick shout out to all the people who've been supporting this show over on Patreon and substack at the comrades and friends level or a bar that includes Bob Downing, Eric Hodges, Greg Hunter, so so Skipachaco, Molly Pan, John Pisano, Anna r PJ Raider, Matthew m Rice, Emily Schmidt, and of course f you. I really appreciate all the support you guys have been giving me over the years.

In many cases it's been incredible, and I was really happy to share this old episode with all of you guys, as embarrassing as it might be to a certain degree to hear myself six years ago talking with any sort of authority, but you know, I had a good time with this episode at the time, and just thinking about this stuff these days. For obvious reasons, eighteen seventy six was a long time ago, but in the grand scheme of things, especially in the timescale I've worked with with

this show, not that long ago. It's kind of wild right anyway, Hope you're all staying safe out there, and please stay tuned for the next proper episode of History Impossible. Thanks again