Inaccuracies in McKale’s columns

Editor: George McKale’s columns on the Chinese in Sonoma are somewhat off the mark. Indeed, he omitted what is probably the most important historical event that links Sonoma with the Chinese. When he claims the historical record of Chinese immigrants in Sonoma is almost non-existent, perhaps he means the Chinese left no records, but a historical record there is.

Although the Spanish missionaries were probably the first to use Chinese labor, it was Agoston Haraszthy, in establishing the Buena Vista Winery in the late 1850s, who saw the use of Chinese in viticulture. Haraszthy established his vineyards entirely through the labor of the Chinese. The dependability and low cost of Chinese labor was soon established throughout the Valley as Haraszthy hired out his Chinese laborers to others. Soon the Chinese were the dominant agricultural labor force in Sonoma County until the effects of the Exclusion Act began to take hold at the beginning of the twentieth-century. According to William Heintz, a Sonoma County historian and student of the wine industry, as well as other historians, Sonoma viticulture was built on the backs of the Chinese.
McKale also glosses over the violent anti-Chinese movement in Sonoma County in 1886. The goal of the movement was to starve out the Chinese by boycotting Chinese businesses and employers who employed Chinese help. Between January and June of that year, local historians report that the population of Santa Rosa fell from 600 to 100, with many of the remaining Chinese reportedly living on weeds near the river. While the climate of anti-Chinese feeling in Sonoma may have been less intense than in Santa Rosa, Healdsburg, Petaluma or Sebastapol there certainly is no reason to believe that a strong anti-Chinese sentiment did not exist in the Sonoma Valley.
According to some economists and historians, it is likely that the use of Chinese labor allowed the large landowners of the county to maintain their holdings.

And the Exclusion Act did not prohibit the immigration of wives. Court decisions held that the wives of merchants – an exempt class – were entitled to accompany their husbands.

The story of the Chinese in Sonoma County, as elsewhere throughout the state, during the last two decades of the twentieth century was extraordinarily harsh. As the prejudice toward the Chinese appeared to wane, perhaps because they were so few, the anti-Chinese sentiment fused into anti-Japanese sentiment in the early 1900s.

Gordon Phillips
Agua Caliente