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 The Order of the Knights of St. Crispin was an American labor union of shoe workers formed in Wisconsin in 1867. It soon reached a membership of 50,000 or more, largely in the Northeast. However it was poorly organized and faded away by 1874. The ...

, against Calvin T. Sampson's Shoe factory, in

North Adams, Massachusetts North Adams is a city in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. Its population was 12,961 as of the 2020 census. Best known as the ...

. 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 California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. 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.

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 The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law excluded merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplom ...

was the first major anti-immigration law in American history.

References

Sources

*{{cite book, title=A Shoemaker's Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town, author=Anthony W. Lee, publisher=Princeton University Press, year=2008, isbn= 9780691133256 Labor disputes in Massachusetts 1870 labor disputes and strikes North Adams, Massachusetts History of Berkshire County, Massachusetts Asian-American culture in Massachusetts 1870 in Massachusetts 1870s strikes in the United States