An Irish Attempt to Acculturate: White Identity Politics, Denis Kearney and the Workingmen's Party of California

Abstract

This thesis looks at Denis Kearney and the Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC) in the mid-late 1800s to examine how Irish migrants acculturated, rather than assimilated, to white American society by recycling racist tropes and tactics that had been used against Irish migrants in the past against Chinese migrants. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, this thesis argues that Kearney and his followers followed a racist ‘playbook’ that demonized Chinese migrants as biologically inferior, culturally deviant and economically burdensome in the same way that the Irish were depicted by white Americans. Many Irish in East Coast urban centers appropriated those same racially based arguments to distinguish themselves from Black Americans, and in doing so were deemed to be somewhat more acceptable, but certainly not assimilable, to white Protestant American society. In emulating this on the West Coast, Denis Kearney and the WPC were for a while, and to a point, political power brokers in California which facilitated their own acculturation to white American society at the expense of Chinese migrants.