The Great Horse Flu of 1872-1873

San Francisco’s Chinese American Wagon-Pullers, and the Trans-Pacific Struggle for Dignity and Personhood
Speaker
Thomas Andrews
Date
Thu May 4th 2023, 4:00 - 5:30pm
Event Sponsor
Bill Lane Center for the American West
Stanford Department of History
Location
Lane History Corner, Room 203, Building 200
450 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

In late April of 1873, the Great Horse Flu—a virulent form of equine influenza that sickened more than 90% of horses, mules, and donkeys in North America—reached San Francisco. Within just a few days, the outbreak had paralyzed the economy and upended everyday life in the West Coast's largest metropolis. The Central Pacific Railway and other large corporations attempted to keep the wheels of commerce turning by hiring Chinese American men to take the place of flu-stricken horses. Racist, dehumanizing spectacles swiftly spread from San Francisco's streets to its newspaper columns. In the process, they accentuated the challenges that California's flourishing anti-Chinese movement was posing to Chinese American claims to personhood—and hence to equal protection under the law—via the 14th Amendment. Chinese San Franciscans struck back, though, by challenging new municipal regulations that attempted to weaponize human burden-bearing and -pulling, as well as by reprimanding one of the contractors who provided laborers to white-owned firms. In the process, they anticipated broader Trans-Pacific discourses that would link rickshaw pulling, animalization, and anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist political movements. 

Thomas G. Andrews is Professor of History at the University of Colorado-Boulder. The author of Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press, 2008) and Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies (Harvard University Press, 2015), he is currently writing a book that explores the history of the northern Americas through the lens of the Great Horse Flu of 1872-1873.   

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