reviews
Andrew Gyory reviews a new study by Anthony W. Lee that uses photography to explore the impact of Chinese immigration on a New England factory town in the late-nineteenth century.
In 1870 shoe manufacturer Calvin T. Sampson brought 75 Chinese workers from California to break a strike called by the Knights of St. Crispin at his shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts. 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; it was the first major anti-immigration law in American history.
In A Shoemaker's Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town, Anthony W. Lee focuses not on the national impact of this incident, but on how it shaped the town and people of North Adams. The book's four chapters focus on four different subjects that comprise this "shoemaker’s story": Sampson, the Crispins, the Chinese, and the photographers who captured it all. The author's emphasis on photography cannot be overstated: Despite Lee's immersion in the written sources, it is his discovery and analysis of the illustrated record that makes this book so compelling.
Lee starts with a single picture of the Chinese posing in front of Sampson’s factory, some standing, some sitting, some hatted, some not, most wearing loose pants and simple jackets, all with "tight-lipped, unyielding expressions." He asks, "What understanding—of themselves, of the shoe manufacturer whose wall they stood before, of the shoemakers they displaced, of the photographer whose gaze they met—informed their appearance?" To answer this question, Lee examines more than 100 images—of the town, the factory, the Crispins, and the Chinese—few of which have ever been published and all of them beautifully reproduced. "The reasons to attend so carefully to pictures are many," Lee argues. "Apart from the fact that images, like texts, are complex carriers of meanings and provide histories and understandings that in the thickness of time would otherwise be lost, in the late 1860s and 1870s these many photographs . . . formed a remarkable, momentarily discrete, and analyzable visual culture."
In analyzing this culture, Lee recounts the history of photography itself, and how the emerging business of photography—from lone entrepreneurs eking out a living to large companies employing door-to-door salesmen to sell their pictorial wares—influenced how images were made and marketed, which in turn influenced how people posed and looked. Lee examines the positioning of people in local factories, in nearby hillsides, and in the Hoosac Tunnel, the massive engineering marvel of the era, built in North Adams. He also examines the postures and expressions of people who sat for their portraits—especially the "Chinese cobblers," many of whom may have never seen a camera before in their lives. Some posed for their portraits dressed in traditional garb; others surrounded themselves with "Orientalist"-inspired knickknacks like teacups, fans, and porcelain vases; still others dressed in American-style suits with watch fobs and fashionable hats. One of the book's most revealing images is not of the Chinese, but of a French-Canadian Crispin shoemaker dressed in blackface in 1877. While the Chinese could attempt to assimilate, they could not transcend the racial barrier to whiteness. Initially, neither could the French Canadians, who, like the Chinese, were scorned for their ignorance, clannishness, and foreignness. But as Lee argues, this changed in the ensuing decades, and this photograph provides evidence of this transition. By mocking the "other"—African Americans—in a way the Chinese could not, the French Canadians began to claim membership in the dominant group.
As different as these two groups of immigrants were, they also, Lee argues, had much in common. Both were recent arrivals in the United States, both came from declining rural areas oppressed by a ruling class, and both were composed heavily of young males. Both seemed rootless and unskilled, spoke English haltingly, and hoped, after earning some money, to return home. Both faced prejudices in America as "industrial invaders" who "care nothing for our institutions, civil, political, or educational." Both occupied the lowest rungs on the social ladder, and cementing their connection, New Englanders dubbed the French Canadians "the Chinese of the Eastern States." And both were considered nonwhite. But this changed in the 1870s and 1880s: As the Chinese faced increasing discrimination and were barred from citizenship by the Exclusion Act in 1882, the French Canadians became "whiter" and soon blended with the racialized working class. The Chinese, who had actually been treated well, if patronizingly, by the townsfolk, left North Adams by decade’s end, never to return. "After 1880," Lee concludes, "there was no Chinese community in the Berkshires to speak of. There has not been one since."
There are few shortcomings in this superb account of a New England industrial town facing a controversy involving manufacturers, natives, and competing groups of immigrant workers. One key concern is that Lee assumes that all the striking Crispins in Sampson’s factory were French Canadian, but never provides evidence. He also, on occasion, reads more into the images than they merit. In one example, he describes an illustration of Sampson’s factory with two mansions in the distant background. "Most signs of habitation are omitted;" he observes, "those that remain are mostly centered on the fancy multigabled house Sampson imagined he could build for himself on the hill above . . ." How does Lee know what Sampson imagined? For a businessman who lived in a sumptuous hotel in town, this is fanciful at best, as he gives no evidence of Sampson’s domestic imagination. Similarly, Lee identifies so intimately with the photographs that he sometimes jumps to unwarranted conclusions. After noting two photographs taken of the Chinese in front of Sampson’s factory around 1875, Lee states, "the Chinese never again stood before the factories, the streets, the hills, or any indeed [sic] other locale in the environs, probably much to everyone’s relief." That Lee found no photographs or written accounts of the Chinese after this date in these locales does not mean the Chinese never stood before them. Lack of evidence does not mean lack of activity.
These minor criticisms, however, needn’t detract from this unique and extraordinary book. G. M. Trevelyan once defined social history as "history with the politics left out." By that definition, this is social history at its finest. With its stunning photographs, original and incisive analysis, and elegant writing, A Shoemaker’s Story is a splendid, fascinating book.
Andrew Gyory is Executive Editor of History Reference at Facts On File and author of Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act.
