We have given a webinar recently at the invitation of the Bristol Bay Historical Society. The subject of our talk was the book “The Price of Salmon,” by Max Stern. It is a collection of 37 articles penned by Stern and published by the San Francisco Daily in 1922. It was an expose of the west coast salmon canning industry, and according to San Francisco Daily News, “Gambling, bootlegging, profiteering, exploitation, disease, even death, marked the voyage that Stern took for the readers of the Daily…”and “…work in the Alaska salmon canneries under conditions as near to slavery as anything since antebellum days.”

It all appears that Stern had successfully penetrated the Chinese gang, and experienced the indignity and inhumanity the cannery workers had to face. He had became the spokesperson of the Chinese gang and cried out against the despicable labor practices of the Chinese contractors and the white subcontractors and above all the Chinese contract system. He was most effective in speaking to the physical sufferings of the “workers” as a collective group, and “man’s inhumanity to man.”

However, Stern’s empathy did not appear to extend to the canary workers themselves, especially the Chinese. After all, Stern was and represented the white elite of the white society, and lived in the pervasively anti-Chinese era. He described the Chinese as weak, backwards and obidient coolies, who could not be assimilated into the American nation. However, he did not seem to see that the Chinese Exclusion Act itself contributed much to the doom of the Chinese.

Mostly, Stern assumed a moral high ground; and it is interesting to see a double moral standard. It is for this reason, Stern’s writing is valuable in that it illustrates the complicated and conflicting relationships among different races and cultures in America in the 1920s.

Image source: The Price of Salmon, SF Daily News, Max Stern, 1922, public domain, Internet Archive.