Walter Buckley

Walter Franklin Buckley was the Democratic Mayor of San Francisco from 1878, succeeding Samuel Blake. As mayor, Buckley adopted a staunchly anti-Chinese platform in line with the views of his patron, US Senator Robert Crestwood, and he supported a Chinese Exclusion Act to recover unskilled labor jobs for white (especially Irish) voters. To this end, the shrewd Buckley - as Deputy Mayor and later Mayor - manipulated the Long Zii Tong boss Mai Ling, Mayor Blake, the press, the Workingmen movement, and the city's industrial community to stoke tensions between San Francisco's white and Asian communities, taking advantage of the Tong Wars and the 1878 San Francisco riots to push for stronger anti-Chinese measures.

Biography[]

Walter Buckley was born in Tennessee, and he served in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. He lost a leg in combat, forcing him to walk with a prosthetic leg and a cane for the rest of his life. After the war, he settled in San Francisco, California and became involved in Democratic politics. Under the tutelage of Senator Robert Crestwood, Buckley rose in the ranks of the city's Democratic Party while concealing his Confederate past; he became Deputy Mayor during the administration of Mayor Samuel Blake. In 1878, Deputy Mayor Buckley and Chief Russell Flannagan formed the Chinatown Squad of the San Francisco Police Department in response to the murder of two Chinese immigrants by nativists, and he regularly met with Long Zii Tong member Mai Ling with the objective of encouraging a war with the Hop Wei Tong. Buckley also exercised his influence with Mayor Blake himself, attempting to pressure him to pick a side in regard to Chinese labor and the Chinese in general. Buckley's efforts to encourage a war succeeded after the attempted assassination of Hop Wei leader Father Jun in a Chinatown bombing, and Senator Crestwood promised Buckley a future in Washington DC due to their shared agenda; at the same time, he clashed with populist leader Dylan Leary, as Buckley believed that Leary's thuggery could not influence state politics with threats and a pocket knife.

As Blake's reputation began to be destroyed due to his hypocritical political views, Buckley encouraged Mai Ling to create more chaos. At the same time, he stoked tensions between the Irish and Chinese communities by deceiving industrialist Byron Mercer into replacing his Irish laborers with Chinese immigrants, resulting in increased anti-Chinese violence and white militancy. Ultimately, Buckley persuaded Blake to throw in his lot with the nativist Crestwood, but, after Blake's murder by a Chinese immigrant, Buckley became the acting Mayor of San Francisco and issued a statewide manhunt for the murderer, Jacob Fok, whom he scapegoated as a deliberate killer (when Fok had actually killed the Mayor to defend his widow, Penelope Blake, from the Mayor's drunken abuse). Buckley still refused Leary's offer to deputize Workingmen and extend his reach, but he tacitly failed to prevent Leary from lynching Fok. A riot broke out in Chinatown as Irish Workingmen ravaged the community, and Buckley blamed the riot of Blake's weak position on the Chinese problem, openly adopting anti-Chinese views. He also committed Penelope Blake - who had attempted to reveal his scapegoating of Fok to the press - to an insane asylum after framing her for stabbing him, and he (in collaboration with Mai Ling) utilized long-neglected city ordinances to crack down on Hop Wei. At the same time, he appointed Benjamin Atwood as the new Chief of Police. Buckley was later challenged for re-election by the Republican Franklin Thayer, but Atwood's successful raid on Chinatown boosted his chances of re-election. With the help of political operative Stewart Gumm and political booster Catherine Archer (who became his lover), Buckley won re-election after Thayer dropped out. Buckley proceeded to take Archer as his wife, as she encouraged him to continue to set his sights higher, including for the governorship.

Walter Buckley

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