The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California

Winner, Silver Medal, California Book Awards—Commonwealth Club of California With a foreword by William Deverell The Indispensable Enemy examines the anti-Chinese confrontationon the Pacific Coast as it was experienced and rationalized by the white majority. Focusing on the Democratic party and the labor movement of California through the forty-year period after the Civil War, AlexanderSaxton explores aspects of the Jacksonian background which proves crucial to an understanding of what occurred in California. The Indispensable Enemy looks beyond the turn of the 19th century to traceresults of the sequence of events in the West for the labor movement as a whole, influencingevents that led to the crystallization of an American concept of national identity.