In 1877 the labor situation in San Francisco became
acute because of the prevalence of unemployment. Grumblings of
dissatisfaction soon gave way to parades and informal meetings at
which imported Chinese labor and the rich "nobs," the supposed
dual cause of all the trouble, were denounced in lurid language.
The agitation, however, was formless until the necessary leader
appeared in Dennis Kearney, a native of Cork County, Ireland. For
fourteen years he had been a sailor, had risen rapidly to first
officer of a clipper ship, and then had settled in San Francisco
as a drayman. He was temperate and industrious in his personal
life, and possessed a clear eye, a penetrating voice, the
vocabulary of one versed in the crude socialistic pamphlets of
his day, and, in spite of certain domineering habits bred in the
sailor, the winning graces of his nationality.
Kearney appeared at meetings on the vacant lots known as the
"sand lots," in front of the City Hall of San Francisco, and
advised the discontented ones to "wrest the government from the
hands of the rich and place it in those of the people." On
September 12, 1877, he rallied a group of unemployed around him
and organized the Workingman's Trade and Labor Union of San
Francisco. On the 5th of October, at a great public meeting, the
Workingman's party of California was formed and Kearney was
elected president. The platform adopted by the party proposed to
place the government in the hands of the people, to get rid of
the Chinese, to destroy the money power, to "provide decently for
the poor and unfortunate, the weak and the helpless," and "to
elect none but competent workingmen and their friends to any
office whatever .
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