North Adams strike
"Chase's Chinamen"— Chinese workers
Date	1870
Location	North Adams, Massachusetts 42°42′7.44″N 73°6′49.97″W / 42.7020667°N 73.1138806°W / 42.7020667; -73.1138806
Goals	Eight-hour day
Methods	Strikes, Protest, Demonstrations
Resulted in	Chinese immigrants brought in from California, replacing union workers for more competitive wages
Parties
Order of the Knights of St. Crispin Mill management
Lead figures
Non-centralized leadership Calvin T. Sampson George W. Chase
Casualties and losses
Arrests: 2

The North Adams strike (also called North Adams Scandal) was a strike in 1870 by shoe workers of the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, against Calvin T. Sampson's Shoe factory, in North Adams, Massachusetts. The strike itself was broken when the factory superintendent, George W. Chase, fired the Irish workers, replacing them with newly employed seventy-five Chinese men from California.^[1] Bringing national attention to North Adams, the event started a nation-wide trend of bringing in scab labor and helped perpetuate the concept of immigrants coming to the United States to steal jobs, which led to much hostility towards Chinese immigrants across the nation. ^[2]

Legacy

The incident sparked widespread working-class protest across the country, shaped legislative debate in Congress, and helped make Chinese immigration a sustained national issue. Twelve years later, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring most Chinese immigrants from entering the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major anti-immigration law in American history.^[3][4][5]

References

Sources

• Anthony W. Lee (2008). A Shoemaker's Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691133256.