This rare
business card
was found in
the walls of
a log cabin
in the woods
of British
Columbia in
the 1980’s.
Western
Canada was
home to many
Chinese and
their history
is similar in
many ways.
[0000]
The President of the San Francisco Union Local traveled east and recruited a disappointing 400 rollers to come to California by offering reduced railroad fares. The imported workers discovered West Coast wages to be less than promised, rebelled, demanded raises from $2 to $4 per thousand cigars.
With few exceptions the Easterners were not successful, factories continued to employ Asians, and within a year most of the Union men returned to their homes in the East.
Ultimately, local harassment and the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882 drove many Chinese out of the cigar business, into more profitable and less contentious industries. It has been claimed by modern writers that when the Chinese left so did the vitality of the California cigar industry, but data doesn’t bear that out. Golden State production surpassed that of Florida until the 20th century, remaining in the top 15 cigar states until the machine age began after World War One.
Chinese were also employed in the cigar box industry, manufacturing about 1/6th of all California-made boxes in 1881. In 1904, there were five box factories in San Francisco, employing 140 workers,
80 of whom were Chinese.
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[0000] Walk races were a popular sport in the 1870’s, the decade of this card
ridiculing cigars made by Chinese or made in NYC tenement houses.