Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

workers from Southern and Eastern Europe.
In 1910 the U.S. Immigration Commission said:
"A large portion of the Southern and Eastern immigrants
of the past twenty-five years have entered the manufacturing
and mining industries of the eastern and middle
western states, mostly in the capacity of unskilled laborers.
There is no basic industry in which they are not largely
represented and in many cases they compose more than 50
per cent of the total numbers of persons employed in such
industries. Coincident with the advent of these millions of
unskilled laborers there has been an unprecedented expansion
of the industries in which they have been employed."
(4)
In the bottom layers of the Northern factory the
role of the new, non-citizen immigrants from Eastern and
Southern Europe was dominant. A labor historian writes:
"More than 30,000 were steelworkers by 1900. The
newcomers soon filled the unskilled jobs in the Northern
mills, forcing the natives and the earlier immigrants upward
or out of the industry. In the Carnegie plants* of
Allegheny County in March, 1907, 11,694 of 14,539 common
laborers were Eastern Europeans." (5)
This was not just the arithmetic, quantitative addition
of more workers. The mechanization of industrial
production qualitatively transformed labor relations,
reshaping the masses themselves. Instead of skilled craftsmen
using individual machines as tools to personally
make a tin sheet or an iron rod, the new mass-production
factory had gangs of unskilled workers tending semiautomatic
machines and production lines, with the worker
controlling neither the shape of the product nor the everincreasing
pace of production. This was the system, so well
known to us, whose intense pressures remolded peasants
and laborers into an industrial class.
This new industrial proletariat - the bottom,
most exploited foundation of white wage-labor - was nationally
distinct. That is, it was composed primarily of the
immigrant national minorities from Southern and Eastern
Europe. Robert Hunter's famous expose, Poverty, which
in 1904 caused a public sensation in settler society, pointed
this national distinction out in very stark terms:
"In the poorest quarters of rnany great A117erican
cities and industrial co11111tunities one is struck by a lnost
peculiar fact - the poor are al~nost entirely foreig11 born.
Great colonies, foreign in language, customs, habits, and
institutions, are separated frorn each other and fro117
distinctly Anierican groups on narional and racial
lines.. . These colonies often rnake up the l~iairl portion of
bur so-called 'slums'. In Baltimore 77 percent of the total
population of the slums was, in the year 1894, of foreign
birth or parenrage. I11 Chicago the foreign elelnent was 90
percent; in New York, 95 percent; and in Philadelphia, 91
percent. . . " (6)
*The Carnegie Steel Company was the leading firm in the
industry. In 1901, under the guidance of J.P. Morgan, it
became the main building block in the first of the giant
trusts (which was named the U.S. Steel Corporation).
The 9th Special Reporr of the Federal Bureau of
Labor revealed that immigrant Italian workers in Chicago
had average earnings of less than $6 per week; 57% were
unemployed part of the year, averaging 7 months out of
work. (7) For the new mass-production system found it
more profitable to run at top speed for long hours when
orders were high, and then shut down the factory completely
until orders built up again. In 1910, a year of high
production for the steel industry, 22% of the labor force
was unemployed for three months or longer, and over 60%
were laid off for at least one month. (8)
Even in an industry such as steel (where the work
week at that time was seven days on and on), the new immigrant
workers could not earn enough to support a family.
In 1910 the Pittsburgh Associated Charities proved that
if an immigrant steel laborer worked for 365 straight days
he still could "not provide a-family of five with the barest
necessities."
And these were men who earned $10-12 per week.
In the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, the 15,000
immigrant youth from age 14 who worked there earned only
12 cents per hour. A physician, Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh,
wrote: "A considerable number of boys and girls die
within the first two or three years after starting work ... 36
out of every 100 of all men and women who work in the
mills die before reaching the age of 25." (9)
The proletarian immigrants did not see Amerika as
a "Land of Freedom" as the propaganda says, but as a
hell of Satanic cruelty. One historian reminds us:
"The newcomers harbored no illusions about
America. 'There in Pittsburgh, people say, the dear sun
never shines brightly, the air is saturated with stench and
gas,' parents in Galicia wrote their children. A workman in
the South Works* warned a prospective immigrant: 'If he
wants to come, he is not to complain about me for in
America there are neither Sundays nor holidays; he must
go to work.' Letters emphasized that 'here in America one
must work for three horses.' 'There are different kinds of
work, heavy and light,' explained another, 'but a man
from our country cannot get the light.' An Hungarian
churchman inspecting Pittsburgh steel mills exclaimed bitterly:
'Wherever the heat is most insupportable, the flames
most scorching, the smoke and soot most choking, there
we are certain to find compatriots bent and wasted with
toil.' Returned men, it was said, were worn out by their
years in America." (10) In South Works nearly onequarter
of the new immigrant steelworkers were injured or
killed on the job each year. (1)
In the steel mill communities - company towns -
these laborers in the pre-World War I years were usually
single, with even married men having been forced to leave
their families in the "old country" until they could either
return or become more successful. They lived crowded into
squalid boarding houses, owned by "boarding-bosses"
who were fellow countrymen and often as well the foremen
who hired them (different nationalities often worked in
separate gangs, so that they had a common language.).
Sleeping three or four to a room, they spent much
of their free time in the saloons that were their solace. As
62 *U.S. Steel South Works in Chicago, Illinois.