Summary
The statute’s official title is “An Act to add a new section to the Penal Code, to be known as section three hundred and seven, relating to opium smoking.” I will refer to it as Section 307 of the California Penal Code (1881), or Section 307 for short on this page.
Broadly, it expanded an 1875 local ordinance in San Francisco that outlawed opium smoking and opium dens with the intention of giving law enforcement the ability to disrupt Chinese communities that were seen as a threat by both white business owners and white labor groups. Liquid opium was still available over-the-counter at pharmacies in white neighborhoods. The real competition was over white working-class men and youth who seemed to prefer smoking opium in dens, and as a result frequenting Chinatown establishments generally, over the alcoholic drinks sold in white saloons run by European immigrants.
Context
The San Francisco Opium-Smoking Ordinance of 1875 caused a flight of opium dens and operators out of Chinatown to Oakland across the bay and inland towards the rural Central Valley.
The Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC) was an anti-Chinese labor coalition that had called for a boycott of all Chinese businesses and Chinese-made goods. The WPC echoed a growing public sentiment that Chinese communities were responsible for a rough labor economy that was actually the result of a contraction from excess speculation in railroad companies and a Second Industrial Revolution that was driving down the cost of goods internationally. Instead, labor organizations claimed Chinese workers were driving down wages and trapping white workers into drug dependencies, even “white slavery,” where young white women were supposedly lured by Chinese men into opium dens to be trafficked.
Much of the anti-Chinese sentiment resulted in violence. In July 1877, San Francisco white workers broke into more than twenty Chinese-owned laundries and set fire to company docks across a riot that lasted two days. The local police had been overpowered, and an impromptu army of 4000 volunteers was formed under William T. Coleman to restore order.
During the California Constitutional Convention of 1878-1879 to update the 1849 Constitution that oversaw the initial Gold Rush, the WPC won massive support through two main planks: anti-Chinese and anti-monopoly sentiment. The anti-immigrant xenophobia became such a strong part of the political culture that it became a defining schism between Western and Eastern faction of labor organizations, including the Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS) that followed traditional Marxist theory into universal working-class solditary. Unfortunately for the WPC, this nativist populism was short-lived.
Their most prominent leader, Denis Kearney, was routinely ignored by Eastern labor and socialist groups who saw his emphasis on nativist racial divisions to be a non-starter. This meant a national coalition for the WPC was impossible, and the most radical voices openly called for clauses that would violate the U.S. Constitution and federal treaties. They reportedly claimed to want a federal crisis over “the Chinese question”, as they put it, in a revolutionary style.
Frank Roney led another faction of the WPC which was more traditionally Marxist and comprised of experienced trade unionists, like the WPUS, but still held anti-Chinese sentiment. The notable distinction is that Roney’s faction blamed capitalist monopolies for importing cheap Chinese laborers to exploit. The members believed that focusing on racial exclusion and targeting individual workers would only divide the labor factions in the face of corporate monopolies.
The issue was resolved through brute force. Kearney accused Roney’s faction of trafficking in overly intellectual European theory for the problems of American working-class labor, of being corporate spies undermining the labor movement, of being in league with Chinese interests, etc. His faction voted to expel Roney and other socialist organizers from the convention and systematically shut down local clubs that supported Roney. The Eastern WPUS had made official statements condemning Kearney as an “unprincipled demagogue” hijacking labor solidarity movements. Nevertheless, in the short-term, the WPC won 51 seats and had the power to write anti-Chinese exclusion legislation.
In 1881, Assemblyman Thomas Frewen, a WPC delegate from San Francisco, introduced Assembly Bill No. 181 (A.B. 181), which would be Section 307. The strength of the nativist populist movements gave it virtually unanimous support from the legislature and policymakers. There was hardly any pretense that opium itself was a public health issue that just happened to involve trade relations with China or Chinese-owned businesses. Governor George C. Perkins signed it into law, giving every sheriff the power to raid opium dens and arrest smokers.