Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

to the white workers and eventually ruinous to the
blacks. " (46)
The threat of a genocidal "race war" against
Afrikans unless they followed the orders of settler labor
makes it very clear just what kind of "unity" Foster and
his associates had in mind. We should say that once Foster
started dealing with the problem of how to build the Euro-
Amerikan "Left," he discovered that it was much more effective
to pose as an anti-racist and use "soft-sell" in promoting
a semi-colonial mentality in oppressed nationalities.
Foster the "communist" declared himself an
expert on Civil Rights, poverty in Puerto Rico, Afrikan
history, and so on.
The tragic failure of the new white industrial proletariat
to take up its revolutionary tasks, its inability to
rise above the level of reform, is not just a negative. The
failure was an aspect of a growing phenomenon - the
Americanization of the "foreign" proletariat from
Eastern and Southern Europe. By the later part of World
War I it was possible to see that these immigrants were
starting the climb upwards towards becoming settlers.
Revolutionary fervor, as distinct from economic activity,
declines sharply among them from this point on.
This was not a smooth process. The sharp repression
of 1917-1924, in which not only government forces
but also the unleashed settler mob terror struck out across
the U.S. Empire, was a clean-up campaign directed at the
European national minorities. Thousands were forced out
or returned home, many were imprisoned, killed or terrorized.
Historians talk of this campaign as a "Red
Scare," but it was also the next-to-final step in purifying
these "foreigners" so that Amerika could adopt them.
The Chairman of the Iowa Council of Defense
said: "We are going to love every foreigner who really
becomes an American, and all the others we are going to
ship back home." A leader of the Native Sons of the
Golden West said that immigrants "must live for the
United States and grow an American soul inside of him or
get out of the country." (47)
The offer was on the table. The "Hunky" and
"Dago" could become "white" (though barely) through
Americanization if they pledged their loyalty to the U.S.
Empire. In the steel mills World War I meant wholesale
Americanization campaigns. "Hungarian Hollow," the
immigrant slum quarter in Granite City, Ill. was renamed
"Lincoln Place" at the prompting of the steel companies
(with festive ceremonies and speeches). By 1918 the Gary,
Ind. U.S. Steel Works had over 1,000 men enrolled in
evening citizenship classes. Liberty Bond drives and Army
enlistment offices in the plants were common. Immigrants
were encouraged by their employers to join the U.S. Army
and prove their loyalty to imperialism. (48)
Americanization was not just a mental process. To
become a settler was meaningless unless it was based on the
promise of privileges and the willingness to become
parasitic. As "nativeborn" Euro-Amerikans continued to
leave the factories, the immigrant Europeans could now
advance. And the importation of hundreds of thousands
(soon to be millions) of Mexicano, Afrikan, Puerto Rican
and other colonial workers into Northern industry gave the
Americanized Europeans someone to step up on in his
climb into settlerism.
In the steel mills, Mexicanos and Afrikans made
up perhaps 25% of the workers in Indiana and Illinois by
1925. They were the bottom of the labor there, making up
for the immigrant European who had moved up or left for
better things. A steel labor history notes:
"Mean while, the Eastern Europeans were occupying
the lesser positions once held by the 'English-speaking'
workmen. As they rose, the numbers of Slavs in the mills
shrank. At one time 58 percent of the Jones and Laughlin
labor force, the immigrants comprised onb 31 per cent in
1930. There were 30 per cent fewer Eastern Europeans in
Illinois Steel Company mills in 1928 than in 1912. Now
largely the immediate bosses of the Negroes and Mexicans,
the immigrants disdained their inferiors much as the
natives had once disliked them.
"The bad feeling generated by the Red Scare
abated only gradually. In Gary, the Ku Klux Klan flourished.
But the respectable solidity of the immigrant communities
in time put to rest unreasoning fear. The children
were passing through the schools and into business and
higher jobs in the mills. Each year the number of
homeowners increased, the business prospered, and the
churches and societies became more substantial. The immigrants
were assuming a middling social and economic
position in the steel towns." (49)
The U.S. Empire could afford gradually expanding
the privileged strata because it had emerged as the big
winner in the First Imperialist World War. Scott Nearing
pointed out how in 1870 the U.S. was the fourth ranked
capitalist economy; by 1922 the U.S. had climbed to No. 1
position: "...more than equal to the wealth of Britain,
Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Belgium and Japan combined."
(50) Successful imperialist war was the key to
Americanization.
Throughout the Empire this movement of the immigrant
proletarians into the settler ranks was evident. A
history of Mexican labor importation notes: "In the beet
fields of Colorado, as elsewhere in the West, other immigrant
groups, such as the Italians, Slavs, Russians, or
Irish, found that they could move up from worker or tenant
to owner and employer through the use of Mexican
migrants." (5 1)
This point marks a historic change. Never again
would white labor be anti-Amerikan and anti-capitalist.
Although it would organize itself millions strong into giant
unions and wage militant economic campaigns, white
labor from that time on would be branded by its servile
patriotism to the U.S. Empire. As confused as the I.W.W.
might have been about revolution, its contempt for U.S.
national chauvinism was genuine and healthy. It was only
natural for an organization so strongly based on immigrant
labor - many of whose best organizers were not
U.S. Citizens and who often spoke little or no English -
to feel no sympathy for the U.S. Empire. It was a tragedy
that this strength was overturned, that this socialist
possibility faded into a reinforcement for settlerism. And
yet the contradiction between the reality of exploitation in
the factories and the privileges of settlerism still remained.
The immigrant masses could not be both settler and proletarian.
This was the historic challenge of the CIO and
75 New Deal.