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A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP:
THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIALISTS AND THE
NEW IMMIGRANTS, 1870-1920
A Thesis
Presented to the faculty of the Department of History
California State University, Sacramento
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
History
by
Anthony R. Folcarelli
SPRING
2013
ii
©2013
Anthony R. Folcarelli
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
iii
A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP:
THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIALISTS AND THE
NEW IMMIGRANTS, 1870-1920
A Thesis
by
Anthony R. Folcarelli
Approved by:
__________________________________, First Reader
Patrick Ettinger, Ph.D.
__________________________________, Second Reader
Scott Lupo, Ph.D.
____________________________
Date
iv
Student: Anthony R. Folcarelli
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University
format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to
be awarded for the thesis.
________________________________ Graduate Coordinator________________
Mona Siegel, Ph.D. Date
Department of History
v
Abstract
of
A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP:
THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIALISTS AND THE
NEW IMMIGRANTS, 1870-1920
by
Anthony R. Folcarelli
During the period of 1870-1920, America was transformed into an industrial
nation and elevated itself to the status of being a world power economically, politically,
and militarily. With an abundance of coal and iron ore, the United States moved slowly
and deliberately toward achieving self-sufficiency in the production of iron, steel, and
associated products. These industries laid the foundation for a broad transformation in
the manufacturing of a variety of goods. Two major forces came together to play
essential partnership roles necessary for the extraordinary production of iron and steel.
Private entrepreneurs organized capital to acquire and develop mines and mills. They
required an abundant supply of labor in order to manage labor costs as they sought to
satisfy the growing demand from America's expanding manufacturing sector. Millions of
immigrants, predominantly from Southern and Eastern Europe, immigrated to the United
States between 1870 and 1920, moving in large numbers into unskilled positions in these
key industries. These immigrants were eager to join the industrial revolution for jobs,
increased wages, and economic riches.
vi
This thesis draws on extensive primary and secondary sources to demonstrate a
direct correlation in the production of iron and steel, the inflow and increase of immigrant
labor, and the rise of production. Immigrant laborers and entrepreneurs in the mining and
steel industries established a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship that served the
economic needs of each.
_______________________, First Reader
Patrick Ettinger, Ph.D.
_______________________
Date
vii
DEDICATION
To my wife Diane whose unwavering support, patience,
continuous encouragement,
and love made this challenging adventure a rewarding one.
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the many professors in the California State University at
Sacramento Department of History for their exciting seminars, required readings, and
shared knowledge which has enriched my life. I am particularly grateful to those who
assisted me in the fulfillment of my desire to produce this thesis. Dr. Patrick Ettinger
whose steadfast encouragement, support, patience, and editing guided the thesis to its
completion. I also wish thank Dr. Scott Lupo who, at a critical part in the process, gave
generously of this time and skills to help me organize the composition as a logical,
unified argument. I am grateful to Dr. Mona Siegel whose guidance throughout the
program and the completion of this thesis was superb. Dr. Tom Adams, although not a
member of the faculty, was an invaluable mentor who provided additional assistance,
guidance, and editing.
ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication ......................................................................................................................... vii
Acknowledgement ........................................................................................................... viii
List of Tables ................................................................................................................... xiii
List of Figures .................................................................................................................. xiii
Chapter Page
1. INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................1
2. AN OVERVIEW OF THE ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION IN THE UNITED
STATES, 1870-1920........................................................................................................7
Railroads ..................................................................................................................8
Manufacturing ........................................................................................................10
The Growth of a Military Power ............................................................................14
The Creation of the Atlantic Freeway ....................................................................15
The Growth of the Modern City:Transformation of a Rural to Urban Society .....17
The Social Revolution of Personal Transportation: The Automobile ...................22
The Tin Can ...........................................................................................................23
3. LEGISLATIVE AND COMMERCIAL INITIATIVES FOR THE PURPOSE OF
ENCOURAGING IMMIGRATION OF FOREIGN LABOR INTO THE AMERICAN
ECONOMY ...................................................................................................................26
Legislation and Political Actions in the Fulfillment of Hamilton's Guidelines .....32
4. DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSFORMATION WHICH CAUSED A RADICAL CHANGE
IN THE ETHNIC AND RACIAL COMPOSITION OF THE COAL, IRON, AND
STEEL INDUSTRIES WORK FORCE: 1870-1920 .....................................................35
x
The Civil War and the Loss of a Viable Labor Supply..........................................37
Birth Rate Decline and Population ........................................................................38
5. ACCEPTANCE OF WORKING AND LIVING CONDITIONS BY NEW
IMMIGRANTS ..............................................................................................................44
Accidents and Deaths .............................................................................................45
Working Conditions and the Native Worker's Discrimination ..............................53
Living and Housing Conditions .............................................................................56
6. ATTRIBUTES THAT MADE THE NEW IMMIGRANTS AN APPEALING LABOR
FORCE FOR AMERICAN MANAGEMENT AND INDUSTRY...............................61
Literate or Illiterate -- No Matter ...........................................................................64
Tractable ................................................................................................................66
Eager and Desperate Job Seekers ..........................................................................66
Mobility..................................................................................................................68
Endurance and Physical Strength...........................................................................69
Stable Work Force .................................................................................................71
Piecework ...............................................................................................................73
Unorganized Labor ................................................................................................76
Financially Indebted Worker .................................................................................78
Frugal .....................................................................................................................81
Cheap Labor ...........................................................................................................82
7. SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP: THE BENEFIT TO THE INDUSTRIALIST ..........86
Coal Production and Ethnic Composition of the Work Force ...............................88
xi
Iron Ore Mining and the Ethnic Composition of the Work Force .........................94
Iron and Steel Production and the Ethnic Composition of the Work Force ..........96
8. SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP:THE BENEFIT TO THE NEW IMMIGRANT ......103
Immigrant Banks ..................................................................................................105
Remittances ..........................................................................................................107
Property ................................................................................................................108
The New Entrepreneurs .......................................................................................110
9. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................112
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................115
xii
LIST OF TABLES
Tables Page
1. Growth of the Textile Fabric Industry in America, 1859-1914.................................13
2. The Dramatic Shift in the Production of Tinplate and Terne Plate: 1895-1920........25
3. Immigration and White Population Demographics of America: 1790-1920.............40
4. Birth Rates of Selective Countries:1871-1921..........................................................41
5. Comparative Population Growth in Selective Western Countries: 1790-1930.........42
6. Widows and Orphans Report - 1892.........................................................................48
7. Accidents in Coal Mining: 1889 to 1908...................................................................50
8. Percent of Employees in Major Industries by Nativity: 1905-1910..........................55
9. Illiteracy of Old Immigrants versus New Immigrants...............................................65
10. The Cultural Transformation of So. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.................................73
11. Ethnic Composition of Coal Mining Work Force by Areas: 1899............................93
12. Ethnic Composition of the Workforce in American Coal Industry...........................93
13. Ethnic Composition in the Workforce of Iron Ore Mining: 1899.............................95
14. United States Transformation to a Positive Trade Balance: 1880-1889....................97
15. Iron Production of United States, Great Britain, and Germany: 1870-1898.............98
16. Steel Production in America: 1887-1920...................................................................99
17. Ethnic Employee Composition of Carnegie Steel Company in 1907......................100
18. Ethnic Composition of the Iron and Steel Workforce in the United States: 1880-
1900..........................................................................................................................101
xiii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figures Page
1. The Railway System Expansion in America;1850-1914............................................9
2. America's Increasing Independence on Imported Iron and Steel:1865-1890............10
3. A Cotton Spinning Machine Operated by Children...................................................12
4. Growth of Textile Industry in America: 1859-1914..................................................14
5. The Steel Skeleton of the Flatiron Building, New York,1901...................................18
6. Construction of New Buildings in New York and Chicago: 1870 -1900..................19
7. United States Tinplate and Terneplate Manufacturing: 1895-1920...........................25
8. Persons Employed, Gross Tons Mined, and Corollary Deaths: 1870-1887..............51
9. Families Drew their Water Supply from Community Town Pump...........................58
10 Steel Town where Community and Mill Co-Existed.................................................59
11 Coal Production United States versus Germany and United Kingdom.....................91
12. Relative Per Capita Production: Coal versus Agriculture..........................................92
13. Ethnic Composition of the Workforce in America's Coal Industry in 1899..............94
14 Ethnic Composition of the Iron Ore Mining Workforce:1899..................................96
15. Iron and Steel Workers in the United States by Nativity; 1880 - 1900...................101
1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
During the era of 1870-1920, America was transformed from an agrarian-
based economy to an industrial one. The industrial based economic transformation
was an extraordinary accomplishment. It propelled America into the number one
position in the world with regards to the production of coal, iron, and steel, the
expansion of its railroad system miles, the rise of its skyscraper cities, the enormous
increase of consumer products, the manufacturing of automobiles, and the
production of an impressive array of military weapons.
Also during this period, one of the momentous events in the history of
America’s immigration was recorded. Following the end of the Civil War, the flow
of immigrants to the shores of America increased with each year. From 1870 to
1920, 26.6 million foreigners traveled over great distances to find their beacon for a
better life in America. In some of those years, the annual figure exceeded a million
immigrants processed through Ellis Island.
During this period, the engines of America’s industrial revolution fueled by
an ever increasing source of American capital, was constantly and chronically in
need of labor. In the early stages, not unlike what E.P.Thompson presents in his The
Making of the English Working Class, the labor source primarily came from the
agrarian economy’s excess labor supply, the import of skilled workers, and the
growing lack of opportunity in traditional occupations.
The industrial revolution changed the process of production, which made it
2
attractive to the commerce of any nation able to make such a transformation. The
division of tasks, coupled with the increasing use of mechanization, stimulated
expansionism that was very appealing to capitalists and entrepreneurs. No longer
were skilled workers needed; unskilled labor was less expensive and could easily be
trained to do a task or operate a simple machine. This was the attractive position the
American capitalist found themselves with the abundance of coal and iron ore.
The immigrant drama that was played out in America during this period
essentially evolved around what became a symbiotic relationship between the
industrialist and the immigrant. They held a firm position on the center stage, as
this thesis will argue. Political and religious motivations, which stimulated many
immigrants to flee to America in prior years, gave way to economic realities facing
both the industrialist and the immigrant. That drama, in this thesis, will focus
primarily on the coal, iron, and steel industries and its effect on the transformation
of America.
The historiography of American immigration, of course, goes beyond the narrow
scope of this thesis. It includes, and encompasses, the many facets of immigration to the
United States. Monographs, books, articles, theses and dissertations have explored the
subject immigration from a myriad of perspectives. The general synthesis of immigration
history has usually pursued an overall examination of events. Maldwyn Jones’s American
Immigration, for example, relying substantially on secondary sources, presents such a
synthesis that spans a time-line from the colonial days to the mid 1920s, with an added
chronology as an addendum. Rodger Daniels' Coming to America and his Guarding the
3
Golden Door, although restricting itself to a shorter time period, focuses on the
immigrant and their migratory causes, the perils they faced in migration, and the
opposition to their prominence in America by public and legislative policies.1 Astride R.
Zolberg's A Nation by Design incisively traces, from the early colonial days up until the
late twentieth century, the governmental policies, that dictated the width, breadth, and
aperture of the "Golden Door."2
The argument of this thesis is that immigrants were directly a critical factor in the
industrial development of America. Kathryn Coman's The Industrial History of the
United States, published in 1905, may well be one of the earliest monographs which
began to take notice of immigrants in relationship to the economics and industrial
development of America. It was Isaac Hourich's Immigration and Labor, The Economic
Aspects of European Immigration to the United States, published in 1922, however,
which presented data and statistics from primary sources that specifically defined and
documented that relationship. Hourich, like several other authors of that time, utilized the
findings of the Dillingham Commission to support what they had gathered with personal
analytical observations and secondary sources.
The Dillingham Commission's reports provide the major primary research and
source material in support of the argument of this thesis. The reports are contained in 43
volumes, averaging about 700 pages, as presented to U.S. Congress by the Commission
in 1911. Founded in 1905 by order of President Theodore Roosevelt, it was a response to
1 Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004) and Roger Daniels, Coming
to America (New York: Perrenial, 2002). 2 Astride R. Zolberg, A Nation of Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
4
the increasing groundswell of native-born hysteria about the increasing number of
immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe. The Commission appointed by
the President included not only members of the House and Senate but also scholars from
the academic world. Past data collected on the subject was not considered, as the
Commission did not want their reports to be tainted by any possible bias perspectives.
The Commission's field investigators collected census data, industrial statistics, and
conducted on location industrial and family investigations. Members of the academic
community oversaw the developments and production of the final reports.
In the historiography of immigration, at the early part of the twentieth century,
there began to appear more monographs investigating the relationship of immigrants to
industry. Charlotte Erickson's American Industry and the European Immigration to
United States was one of the post-WWII treatises that specifically began to focus the
immigrant's interconnection with the industrial development of the United States.3 In
Erickson's treatment of the subject, she explores the recruitment of labor from Europe
and the commercial and legislative policies and practices. The aggressive pulling of
immigrant labor, as she records, resulted in chronic and continuous confrontational
situations that arose because of the unskilled labor of immigrants vying for the jobs
protected by organized labor.
David Montgomery, in his The Fall of the House of Labor, examines more
intensely the underlying causes of the confrontational environment emanating from the
3 Charlotte Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860-1885 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1957).
5
in-flow of immigrant labor.4 Surprisingly, Montgomery notes that the piecework method
of determining wages, was a very significant issue. Unskilled immigrants, who were
always on the low end of the hourly scale of wages, welcomed the method of payment for
the amount of pieces they produced. They could earn more money being paid in that
manner than relying on the hourly method which usually found them at the lowest end of
the pay scale. The older immigrants, usually skilled, and organized labor held firm on
their historical method of payment based on hours expended on the job. Management
preferred piecework simply because they could exert the work pressures, which resulted
in higher production performances.
There are other works, which examine the work relationships in the industrial
organizations of management, older immigrants, organized labor and the new
immigrants. Among them: Dirk Hoerder, ed., American Labor and Immigration History,
1877-1920s: Recent European Research.; Edwin Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, A
Case Study; Richard L. Erlich, ed., Immigrants in Industrial America; 1850-1920; John
Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization; Vernon M. Briggs, jr., Immigration Policy
and the American Labor Force; and Robert D. Parmet, Labor and Immigration in
Industrial America.5 As each in their own way explores the history of immigration and
4 David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York; Cambridge University Press, 1987).
5 Dirk Hoerder,ed. American Labor and Immigration History, 1877-1920s: Recent European Research
(Urbana, Il: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Edwin Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, A Case Study (New
York: Arno Press, 1975); Richard L. Erlich,ed., Immigrants in Industrial America; 1850-1920
(Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1977); John Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization
(Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977); Vernon M. Briggs, jr., Immigration Policy and the
American Labor Force (Baltimore, MD:The John Hopkins University Press, 1984); Robert D. Parmet,
Labor and Immigration in Industrial America (Boston, MA:Twayne Publishers,1981)
6
the importance of immigrants in the industrial development of America. None, however,
present any detailed economic production data to the massive infusion of immigrants into
America's industries from 1870-1920.
This thesis argues that the direct correlation of extraordinary industrial
production and the utilization of immigrant labor, as presented in the coal, iron, and steel
industries, is irrefutable. Furthermore it also created a symbiotic relationship, in which
both depended on each other for the achievement of their respective goals. The symbiotic
relationship, although it benefitted each party, produced products that benefitted the
economic, social, and political status of the nation. As a result, my thesis fits, and adds,
into the body of historiography of American history as it relates to industry and the
immigrant.
7
Chapter 2
AN OVERVIEW OF THE ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION IN THE UNITED
STATES, 1870-1920
In order for the symbiotic relationship to be worthy of any significant attention, its
affect on the environment which it inhabited has to be evaluated. Was it a relationship
which only satisfied the needs of both parties, sustaining itself by only nourishing each
other with their sustenance? Or was it a relationship which was energized and sustained
by outside economic forces? The former would have provided a short but relatively swift
relationship; it was the latter that gave the relationship a long, continuous reason for
being. The products, from the natural resources of coal and iron ore and created by the
relationship of capital with an abundant supply of labor, initiated an economic expansion
unparalleled in the history of America.
During the period of 1870 to 1920, America witnessed a phenomenal growth
precipitated by its entry into the industrial revolution. With an abundant supply of the
necessary natural resources embedded in accessible locations, they created an
unprecedented transformation in the nation's economic base unparalleled in its history, a
transformation that resulted in the emergence of America as a world power. Those
resources, transformed by capital and labor, provided the cheaper domestic products that
were the infrastructure of America’s economic transformation.
Frederick J. Turner, a leading scholar of America's western history, was so
impressed with what he was observing, that he proclaimed in his book The Frontier in
American History the following:
8
The transformations through which the United States is passing
in our own day are so profound, so far-reaching, that it is
hardly an exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the birth of a
new nation in America. The revolution in the social and economic
structure of this country during the past two decades is comparable
to what occurred when independence was declared and the Constitu-
tion was formed. 6
In order to understand the transformation, it is important to visit the emergence of
some key industries that were essentially the vanguards that led the way for the creation
of a new nation. The new nation was built on an agricultural economy established in the
colonial days and expanded westward. There were others but the following industries had
one thing in common, the need for critical products produced by the coal, iron, and steel
industries in order to emerge, develop, and rise.
Railroads
In 1830, only forty miles of railroad lines had been laid in America. By the eve of
the Civil War in 1860, 31,246 miles of iron rails had been laid down connecting rural and
urban areas of population.7 This was to be surpassed in 1915 with an achievement of
253,811 miles of iron/steel rails laid from coast to coast. It also represented an increase of
222,565 miles of rails, utilizing American produced iron and fabricated steel, carrying
American-made trains fueled by coal mined in the United States.8 Writing in 1911,
Turner also recorded that:
Railroad statistics tell the same story of unprecedented develop-
ment, the formation of a new industrial society. The number of
6 Frederick J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1920), 311.
7 Edward C. Kirkland, A History of American Economic Life (New York NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
1951.): 244. 8 Ibid.
9
passengers carried one mile more than doubled between 1890 and
1908; freight carried one mile has nearly trebled in the same period
and has doubled in the past decade.9
The quantum leap in the fabrication of steel into railroad lines, railroad cars,
running frames, and powerful steam engines made possible the explosive expansion of
rail services for freight and passengers. The railroad companies, and their aggressive
expansionism, were no longer restricted by the high cost of importing iron and steel.
America's industries were meeting their demands while successfully competing with
foreign imports in costs and quality.
Figure 1 The Railway System Expansion in America; 1850-1914
What is of similar importance, if not greater, was the fact that America began to
rely less and less on iron and steel imports as domestic production increased. Graphic 2
9 Turner, "Social Forces in American History", 219.
10
shows how dramatic that inverse reliance became as the country increased its rail lines.
By the late nineteenth century, the nation no longer needed to import foreign iron or steel
for its railroads, skyscrapers, machinery, or automobiles.
Figure 2 America's Increasing Independence on Imported Iron and Steel: 1865-1890
By 1905, America had surpassed Europe in the development of its railway
systems. It constituted "about two fifths of the railway mileage of the world, and some
ten percent more than that of all Europe."10
Manufacturing
In manufacturing, cottage industries employing several people gave way to
factories which operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and employed
thousands of workers. The machinery that increased the productivity and number of
employees was composed of iron frameworks and steel parts. The textile industry, for
example, depended on the new inventions from England such as the Arkwright textile
10
Ernest Ludlow Bogart, The Economic History of the United States (London: Londmans, Green, and Co,
1908), 118.
11
machines, which improved the process of converting cotton into thread and thence into
finished woven textile cloth. Utilizing the new and ever improving iron and steel
machinery, factories were able to increase and expand their facilities and employees for
greater production.
The English had led the way in the transformation of textile production from
village-based skilled artisans with their wooden spinning wheels to massive factories
employing hundreds of people, twenty-four hours a day, operating iron and steel made
machinery. This transition to textile machinery, as shown in photo 1, was made possible
by the availability of iron and steel. It also made possible the use of unskilled workers,
who needed only some minimal basic training to perform a repeated task. The tasks were
so repetitive and simple that even a child could operate the equipment and produce far
more than an artisan in the seventeenth century could ever have believed possible.
12
Figure 3 A Cotton Spinning Machine Operated by Children
The textile industry in New England was also a magnet for immigrants. As in
other manufacturing industries, children and wives of immigrants were also sought as a
cheap labor and utilized in certain areas of operation where training was feasible for such
repetitive tasks. In 1859 there were 3,104 textile facilities in the United States with
191,952 wage earners producing a total product value of $211,707,000 [5.9 billion].11
By
11
Isaac Lippincott, Economic Development of the United States. (New York, NY: D. Appleton and
Company, 1921.), 456. NOTE: The figure bracketed is a translation into its purchasing economic power
value in 2011. This conversion, and all others such figures bracketed throughout the thesis, was
13
1914 the textile facilities had increased to 4,991 facilities with 874,702 wage earners
producing a total product value of $1,761,711,000 [40.9 billion].12
Of the 260,000
additional workers employed by 1900, sixty four per cent were immigrants and their
families. 13
The astounding growth of the textile industry, following the Civil War, as shown
in Table 1, demanded a labor force which was simply not available from the post-colonial
population.
Table 1 Growth of the Textile Fabric Industry in America, 1859-1914
Number of Number of Value of the 2011
Year Establishements Wage Earners Product Value
1859 3,104 191,152 $211,707,000 $5.9 billion
1869 4,709 367,321 $418,527,000 $7.1 billion
1879 4,290 387,554 $534,674,000 $12.4 billion
1889 4,056 497,822 $730,567,000 $18.4 billion
1899 4,099 631,676 $886,882,000 $24.8 billion
1909 4,825 834,087 $1,591,736,000 $40.6 billion
1914 4,991 874,702 $1,761,711,000 $40.9 billion
Source : Isaac Lippincott, Economic Development of the United States
(New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1921), 456.
Growth of the Textile Fabric Industry in America, 1859 - 1914
accomplished by utilizing the web site http://www.measuringworth.com. For the credentials of those who
created and oversee the web site, as well as their definition of purchasing power please go to Addendum A. 12
Ibid., 456. 13
U.S. Congress, Senate, 61st, 3rd sess, doc. 747., Reports of the Immigration Commission. Abstracts of
Reports of the Immigration Commission. vol 2 (Washington,D.C.: GPO, 1911), 811.
14
$0
$200
$400
$600
$800
$1,000
$1,200
$1,400
$1,600
$1,800
1859 18691879
18891899
19091914
I
n
M
i
l
l
i
o
n
s
Source: Isaac Lippincott, Economic Development of the United
States(New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1921), 456 .
Growth of Textile Industry, 1859-1914
Diplayed in Value of Product
Figure 4 Growth of Textile Industry in America: 1859-1914
It should be noted that while the number of establishments increased by sixty-one
percent from 1859 to 1914, the number of wage earners increased at a rate of three
hundred and fifty-eight percent. It was the increase in textile machinery that increased the
need for unskilled labor. The mechanization of industry increased the demand for
unskilled labor and unskilled labor could be easily trained to operate such equipment.
The Growth of a Military Power
In A Nation of Steel, Thomas J. Misa relates how the United States Navy was
transformed from a "loosely organized array of small coast defenders and light cruisers
into a unified battle fleet of offensive capability."14
Ships that were once made of timber
and carried three inch cannons were replaced by armor plated steel juggernauts with
14
Thomas Misa. A Nation of Steel: the Making of Modern America, 1865-1925 (Baltimore: The John
Hopkins University Press, 1995), 90.
15
eighteen-inch armor plate and fourteen inch guns all domestically produced. In a display
of sea power, President Theodore Roosevelt launched his Great White Fleet in 1907,
consisting essentially of sixteen battleships. It was, as Misa called it, the "Politics of
Armor."15
America became a second England in its new capacity to manufacture field
artillery, repeater rifles, machine guns, tanks, and other such military armament with
domestically produced steel. It became one of the superior military forces in the world.
This also prepared the United States to be victorious in both World Wars I and II with its
ability to out produce not only its enemies but its allies as well.
The Creation of the Atlantic Freeway
Originally, commercial and passenger ships were made primarily of timber and
were propelled by wind, oar, or simply constructed steam engines. After the
development of fabricated steel particular with regards to steel sheeting, it became
possible to build steamships that had the ability to haul a considerable increase in tonnage
of goods or people. The machined steel and interchangeable tooled parts increased the
horsepower of new engines that could propel these massive water vehicles across the
Atlantic Ocean and Great Lakes with increased efficiency. This made the transportation
of passengers and products increasingly profitable.
For example, the tonnage of ships engaged in domestic trade increased from
2,600,000 in 1880 to 6,700,000 in 1911. The Great Lakes became an area of activity as
iron ore and other natural resources were shipped to the iron and steel mills on the
15
Ibid., 91.
16
Eastern seaboard and the upper middle states. On the Great Lakes there were only six
steel vessels in 1886, but by 1899 the number had grown to 296. In approximately the
same period of time, however, the tonnage of those vessels engaged in foreign trade
showed a decline of 1,352,810 in 1880 to 829,694 in 1900.16
This was an indication that
the United States was now becoming more of a self-supporting and self-sustaining nation.
The shipbuilding industry continued to increase its productivity, becoming a
billion-dollar industry. It replaced the need for old commercial freighters, which carried a
few passengers, and began to meet the demand for ocean liners that could carry
thousands. Immigration from Europe, which started with the transporting of early settlers
by way of wooden ships capable of carrying one hundred passengers, increasingly
became inadequate over the course of the seventeenth to the nineteenth century in the
face of mounting flows of Europeans coming to the "golden door."
From 1819 - 1840, 2,455,000 immigrants traveled from Europe to the United
States. In the period from 1841 to 1870 that figure increased to 7,725,000, only to be
surpassed by 23,466,000 in the period of 1871 to 1910.17
The fabrication of steel,
produced ironically by the labor of immigrants, made possible ocean liners that could
cross the Atlantic Ocean in approximately seven days and carry "550 first-class, 350
second-class, 300 third-class, and 2,300 steerage passengers."18
The economic "push and
16
Bogart, 334-335 17
Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, eds. A Population History of North America.(Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 315. 18
Bogart, 379.
17
pull" circle of American industry that needed immigrant laborers worked in tandem as
each fulfilled the needs of the other.
The Growth of the Modern City: Transformation of a Rural to an Urban Society
In the growth of American cities, once dominated by wooden and masonry
commercial structures limited to a few stories, there emerged in the late nineteenth
century multi-storied steel skyscrapers. The availability of steel provided the new
builders of cities the metal strength to build super-structures well beyond the four to-six-
level structures that had previously contained the commerce centers of the country. The
skylines of cities would be changed forever as architects and contractors with the new
structural steel option could now create buildings of seemingly unlimited heights. Figure
5 of the Flatiron Building in New York gives an excellent example of steel constructed
buildings, which began to zoom past the old iron ones.
18
Figure 5 The Steel Skeleton of the Flatiron Building, New York, 1901
Major quantities of cheap steel became the fuel that stimulated the explosive
growth of cities, forever changing their skylines and providing the attractive magnet for
Americans seeking a better way of life. No longer the old centers of dusty roads,
unconnected clusters, and static movement, cities were transformed into networks of
subways, elevated trains, bridge linkages across wide rivers, and paved streets (for the
emerging increase in automobiles). It was the tensile strength of iron and steel capable of
19
supporting "loads almost greater than the mind can conceive" which made it absolutely
essential in the new physical configurations of America's modernization of its cities.19
The increased availability of steel for the structuring of modern buildings attracted
investors to the big cities. In 1890 alone (with dollars adjusted for 1913 according to the
author) Chicago and New York witnessed an investment of some $160 million dollars in
such real estate construction. In 2011 dollar purchasing power value that would represent
$3.9 billion dollars.20
Figure 6 Construction of New Buildings in New York and Chicago: 1870 -1900
19
J.M. Camp and C.B. Francis, The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel (Pittsburg, PA: The Carnegie
Steel Company, 1920), 1. 20
Thomas A. Misa, A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins
University Press. 1995),62.
20
In the meantime, America's population was shifting from an agrarian society
sparsely inhabited by those of primarily northern European backgrounds, to an urban-
centered society congested with multiple ethnic groups. As Turner states "it is evident
that the ethnic21
elements of the United States have undergone startling changes; and
instead of spreading over the nation these immigrants have concentrated especially in the
cities and great industrial centres in the past decade."22
Historian June Grantir Alexander elaborates with detail that:
During the half-century from 1870 to 1920 the United States underwent
spectacular urban growth. The process included villages evolving into towns
and small towns developing into larger ones. The growth of medium-sized
towns was especially robust. In fewer than 50 years, the number of
municipalities with populations ranging from 10,000 to 25,000 tripled,
from 116 to 465.23
Alexander further elaborates:
The internal rural-to-urban migration, which helped boost the population
of America's 'urban territory' by slightly more than fifty five percent
between 1870 and 1890, could not alone satisfy the rising demand for
common laborers. Instead, as the 1890s gave way to the 1900s and
America's industries continued to clamor for cheap labor, more and more
it was immigrants who filled the need. The foreign-born contribution to
industrialization extended over time as immigrants, and later their wives
and children, joined America's industrial labor force.24
21
NOTE: Throughout this thesis the immigrants will be referred to and categorized as ethnic and racial.
The term racial will only appear in the data, tables, and information provided by the Dillingham
Commission reports as that was their choice of categorizing immigrants because of the method used by
immigrant entry records. Racial as a classification was appropriate because Europe was literally on the
move following the turmoil of the nineteenth century. Many of the immigrants immigrated to America
from the country of last inhabitance and not their native country. 22
Turner, "Social Forces in American History," 221. 23
June Granatir Alexander. Daily Life in Immigrant America, 1870-1920. (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee,
2009.), 150-151. 24
Ibid., 99.
21
The migration of immigrants to areas of job opportunity also contributed
considerably to the explosive growth of America's cities. The inclusion of immigrants in
the ethnic population of such urban areas soon turned them into international centers
which lost all semblance of the English-speaking culture of the early nineteenth century.
The population growth of New York City offers one of the most dramatic examples of
that cultural change.
William Stone Leete in, The Centennial History of New York City: From the
Discovery to the Present Day, made this observation about his contemporary society of
the 1870:
In some respects, the city itself is a majestic organism, and we
have light, water, streets, and squares, much to our mind, always
excepting the dirt. The scarcity of houses, the costs of rent, living,
and taxation are grievous, and driving a large portion of our
middling class into the country. Yet the city is full and
overflowing, and is likely to be. The work of assimilation is going
on, and every debate, controversy, and party, brings the various
elements together; and we are seeing each other, whether we differ
or agree. Great progress has been made in observing and
appreciating our situation and population. Probably New York
knows itself better to-day than at any time since its imperial
proportions began to appear. In politics, police, philanthropy,
education, and religion, we are reckoning our classes, numbers,
and tendencies, and feeling our way towards some better harmony
of ideas and interests.25
The dirt and living conditions did not deter the immigrants from swarming to
cities like New York. The United States Commission on Industrial Relations in 1901
presented statistics about New York City and its ethnic composition. The commission
25
William Stone Leete, The Centennial History of New York City : From the Discovery to the Present Day
(New York: R. D. Cooke, 1876), 249. http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-
idx?c=moamono;idno=ston0054 (accessed August 7, 2012).
22
identified 80.46 percent of the population as foreign elements. New York City was
essentially an international city of immigrants. Some were naturalized as Americans,
others waiting to be naturalized and some would eventually find themselves returning to
their native countries.
The Social Revolution of Personal Transportation: The Automobile
In what became a major leap in personal transportation, as well as a social
revolution, the increased ability of human beings to travel faster and farther from their
villages, towns, and cities was accomplished with the development and introduction of
the automobile in the early twentieth century. American automobile makers were able to
exercise creativity with the abundance of iron and steel now readily available from
American manufacturers.
With the increasing availability of steel, the automobile industry became a major
contributor to the American economy. As Thurman Van Metre states in his 1921
monograph The Economic History of the United States:
Of the new manufacturing industries which developed between
1897 and 1914 the automobile industry was easily the most
important. Starting in a modest way almost at the beginning of the
twentieth century this remarkable industry grew at such a rate that
in 1914 it was holding promise of becoming the leading
manufacturing industry of America.26
26
Thurman W. Van Metre, Economic History of the United States (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1921), 545.
23
The Tin Can
The increased domestic production of coal, iron, and steel provided the basic
material that made possible the tinplate and terneplate which was used to produce many
consumer and commercial products. The manufacture of tin cans to contain prepared
foods, eating plates, oil lamps, milk cans, watering cans, kitchen pans, and cooking
stoves were just a few of the everyday items crafted with the use of tinplate and
terneplate. Internal demands from other American industries became the driving force,
relying on the increase productivity of the steel industries that propelled the growth of the
product. Standard Oil Company alone became a major driving force in the demand for
tinplate as it became the world’s largest tinplate user with its blue five gallon kerosene
can.
As late as 1890, America was importing 678.9 million pounds of tinplate and
terneplate from England because the United States could only produce 42.1 million
pounds to meet the total needs of its commercial enterprises and consumers. It was a
trade deficit of 636.8 million pounds at a value of $28.9 million dollars, which in a
relative shorter period of time was curtailed, dramatically resulting in a positive trade
balance.27
By 1920, America was producing 3.2 billion pounds of tinplate and terneplate
for consumption and export, while importing from England a mere 757,000 pounds.28
As
D. E. Dunbar exclaimed in his investigation of the industry:
27
American Iron and Steel Institute, Annual Statistical Report of the American Iron and Steel Institute for
1920 (New York: American Iron and Steel Institute, 1921), 76. 28
Ibid., 52.
24
In 1890 this country did not produce any tin plate at all; to-day
(1915) it turns out about 1,000,000 tons per year. At that time
America imported all she used; now all she uses she makes, and in
addition exports increasing quantities to foreign markets. Truly this
has been a spectacular industrial transition.29
Table 2 illustrates the dramatic reversal in America's import and export of tinplate
and terneplate. In a relatively short period of manufacturing time, 25 years, the
importation and production of tinplate in America were dramatically reversed. During
that period the importation of tinplate dropped from 508 million to 844 thousand pounds.
At the same time production in America rose from 254 million to 3.2 billion pounds with
exports to the rest of the world.
Table 2 The Dramatic Shift in the Production of Tinplate and Terne Plate: 1895-1920
Import in Percent + or - Production in Percent + or -
Year Pounds From 1895 Pounds From 1895
1895 508,038,038 254,611,395
1900 147,963,804 -70.88% 850,004,495 233.84%
1905 161,066,820 -68.30% 1,105,440,000 334.17%
1910 154,566,599 -69.58% 1,619,005,000 535.87%
1915 10,642,237 -97.91% 2,365,295,700 828.98%
1920 844,585 -99.83% 3,218,177,730 1163.96%
Source: American Iron and Steel Institute, Annual Statistical Review for 1920
(New York: American Iron and Steel Institute), 52, 76.
Import and Production of Tinplates and Terne Plates; United States, 1895-1920
29
D. E. Dunbar, The Tin-Plate Industry: A Comparative Study of its Growth in the United States and in
Wales (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), 14.
25
0
500
1,000
1,500
2,000
2,500
3,000
3,500
1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 1920
(
0
0
0)
p
o
u
n
d
s
Tinplate and Terneplate: United States Imports versus Production.
Import
U.S. Production
Source: American Iron and Steel Institute, Annual Statistical Review for 1920 (New York: American Iron and Steel Institute), 52, 76.
Figure 7 United States Tinplate and Terneplate Manufacturing: 1895-1920
What were the conditions, elements, and factors which came together to create
such an unusual commercial explosion that elevated the United States into a political,
economic, and military world power? This thesis primarily deals with immigrants and
their labor in the coal, iron, and steel industries. The conditions that made immigrant
labor a critical and needed factor have to be examined before any conclusion can be made
as to its importance.
26
Chapter 3
LEGISLATIVE AND COMMERCIAL INITIATIVES
FOR THE PURPOSE OF ENCOURAGING
IMMIGRATION OF FOREIGN LABOR INTO THE AMERICAN ECONOMY
The legal forces which allowed the symbiotic relationship of industry and world-
wide immigrants possible in the period of 1870-1920 were initiated years before with the
leaders of a new experiment and a new nation. The foundation for immigration trends to
America began in the early colonial period when essentially the need and demand for
labor exceeded what was available from the existing population. It is a legal legacy that
started with a unique revolution led by the wealthy elitists of the British colonies, but
continues to this very day.
The American Revolutionary War was, among other things, an effort of the
commercial elitists to unshackle themselves from the mercantile system of England in
order for them to be able to trade American manufactured goods with other foreign
countries. It was also a fortuitous time, when political, economic, social, and literary
events came together in a revolutionary period where its leaders were, for the most part,
elites of literate backgrounds. Philosophers like David Hume influenced their thinking
about the humanistic aspects of founding a new country. It did establish a humanistic
view of all mankind that would serve to be appealing for immigrants who would come to
America. They were also, however, opportunists who saw the economic potential of the
vast resources contained within the virgin lands of America. Samuel Peter Orth in his
1919 book, The Armies of Labor, probably best summarizes this time in a succinct
manner with the following:
27
Three momentous things symbolize the era that begins its cycle
with the memorable year of 1776: the Declaration of
Independence, the steam engine, and Adam Smith's book, "The
Wealth of Nations." The Declaration gave birth to a new nation,
whose millions of acres of free land were to shift the economic
equilibrium of the world; the engine multiplied man's productivity
a thousand fold and uprooted in a generation the customs of
centuries; the book gave to statesmen a new view of economic
affairs and profoundly influenced the course of international trade
relations.30
Once the separation was completed, a transition from an association of colonial
states, The Continental Congress, to a federated arrangement with a centralized
government would help overcome the economic barriers amongst states that prevented
the equitable flow of commerce among the states of the new union. A convention
dedicated to the constructing of a new set of laws that would be the architect of a new
government was called to order. It was apparent by who was in attendance that the
economy of the new order was a key concern of the new leaders. The delegates were not
chosen by the people or through an election of representatives but appointed by the state
legislative political and economic powers. Roy Smith, in his publication Adam Smith and
the Origins of American Enterprise, categorizes the delegates by their professions and
interests:31
30
Samuel Peter Orth, The Armies of Labor (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1919), 1. 31
Roy Smith, Adam Smith and the Origins of American Enterprise (New York: Truman Talley Books,
2002), 106-108.
28
Categories of Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 Number
Farmers, Laborers, Craftsman 0
Merchants, Manufacturers, Shippers 11
Large Landholders, Land Speculators 14
Slave Holders 15
Bankers, Money Dealers, Investors 24
Those transacting in government securities 40
Charles Beard, in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United
States, also makes a compelling case that economic interests were forever present in the
constructing of that document which was to be the supreme law of the land.32
The
slavery compromise alone is an indication that no laws would be established which
would hinder commerce to the detriment of the entrepreneur.
The leading politicians of that era were also learned scholars. They, along with
other capitalists of the day, read Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations.33
The influence was evident in the fact that the new constitution
included not only laws for the regulation and structure of the new government but of
commerce as well, treading carefully to adhere to the general intent as expressed by
Jefferson's warning that "Agriculture, manufactures, commerce and navigation, the four
pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual
enterprise."34
Congress did not hesitate to keep the commercial agenda moving forward
as they prepared to foster and build an environment conducive to their original intent of
becoming a productive partner in world trade. The English, because of their oppressive
32
Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: The
Macmillian Company, 1913), 253-291. 33
Roy Smith, Adam Smith and the Origins of American Enterprise, 112-120. 34
Ibid., 149.
29
laws to preserve their mercantilism, had denied the colonists the right to develop any
manufacturing capabilities or create any businesses that would directly compete with
British businesses.
The Revolutionary War came at a cost to the colonies. Population had dropped by
some 100,000 as loyalists fled to England, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. In addition
to that, British shipments of manufactured goods continued to land in American ports,
tipping the balance of payments heavily to the side of their old nemesis. The average for
the years 1784-1790 had shown that while the colonies had an export balance of trade of
£949,500, its import trade with England was £2,491,898.35
The British were well on their
way to the mechanization and development of the factory system that was beginning to
show the increased productive powers of the new manufacturing revolution.
The revolutionary leaders knew that their country "with little accumulated wealth
could not long stand such a drain on her resources as was indicated by the export and
import figures."36
They also realized that if they were to become competitive that they
had to introduce into their economy Britain's "many marvelous new machines and
processes."37
This resulted in a history of clandestine operations where American
entrepreneurs copied the machinery and processes developed for England's industrial
revolution.
35
Edwin C. Eckel, Coal, Iron, and War: A Study in Industrialism Past and Future (New York: Henry
Holts and Company, 1920), 23. 36
Ibid., 23.
37 Ibid.
30
On January 15, 1790, the U.S. House of Representatives made a request of the
Secretary of the Treasurer, Alexander Hamilton, to report on the subject of manu-
facturing. They were seeking guidelines on how they could build that capability in order
to compete on the world market. Hamilton was a respected scholar and politician who
had been the creator of the new federal financial system that had unified the states behind
the Federalist structure, yielding their independence to a new central authority. Dutifully,
Hamilton studied "Adam Smith and then wrote the Report on Manufactures,
developing the theory as to the protection of nascent industries in its application to the
United States." 38
In his report to the United States House of Representatives on December 5, 1791,
Hamilton's reliance on Smith is apparent. Hamilton focused on the need of labor as
critical to the economic equations of creating wealth. This was a subject to which Smith
devoted a major portion of his book: "Of the Causes of Improvement in the productive
Powers of Labour, and of the Order according to which its Produce is naturally
distributed among the different Ranks of the People." 39
America, throughout its history of expansionism, chronically experienced a need
for more labor, skilled and unskilled. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Hamilton
included a source of immigrant labor as important to help the new country attain its goal
as an economic power. Hamilton, while convincing the agrarianists that they too would
38
Henry Cabot Lodge, ed. The Works of Alexander Hamilton, Vol. I (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons,
1904), vi.
39 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1910.), 5.
31
benefit, listed the following areas of importance that needed to be addressed if the
country hoped of ever becoming a major industrial independent economy:
1. The division of labor.
2. An extension of the use of machinery.
3. Additional employment to classes of the community not ordinarily
engaged in the business.
4. The promoting of emigration from foreign countries.
5. Furnishing greater scope for the diversity of talents and dispositions
which discriminate men from each other.
6. The affording a more ample and various field for enterprise.
7. The creating in some instances a new, and securing in all, a more
certain and steady demand for the surplus produce of the soil. 40
Essentially this laid down the framework for a federal government to stimulate, regulate,
concentrate, and subjugate a spirit of entrepreneurship that would help the new country
become the greatest capitalistic society the world has ever known. All of the seven
principles, guidelines, and suggestions would in some way be implemented by the
government or the private sector to achieve that status in world history.
In what could be considered a prophetic statement that describes one of the chief
causes of immigration to America from 1791 until the post World War II era, Hamilton
further elaborated on how and why the promotion of emigration would benefit the
agrarian and industrial growth of the new country:
The disturbed state of Europe inclining its citizens to
emigration, the requisite workmen will be more easily
acquired than at another time; and the effect of multiplying
the opportunities of employment to those who emigrate,
may be an increase of the number and extent of valuable
40
Lodge, 87.
32
acquisitions to the population, arts, and industry of the
country.41
The vision of the Americans, in which their country would become a world leader
in manufacturing freeing itself from a burden of an unhealthy trade balance, was not to be
realized until some one hundred years later. But it would be the increased use of
machinery and the inflow of millions of immigrants that would be an important factor in
causing America's surge to a world power. It was Smith’s concept and Hamilton’s
guidelines that would be necessary to achieve the dreams of final economic freedom from
England and Europe.
Legislation and Political Actions in the Fulfillment of Hamilton's Guidelines
It was not long before Congress began to enact legislation directed toward the
control, management, restriction, and encouragement of immigration to America. The
Naturalization Acts of 1790, 1795, and 1798 established basic rules of how and who
could become an American citizen. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 was passed to
prevent enemies of the country from residing in America. It was during the Lincoln
Administration, despite its immersion in the policies and administration of a bloody
internal conflict, that the encouragement for more immigration received a major
promotion. Free of the previous tactics of the obstructionist Southern congressional
leaders (whose goals were always to introduce slavery into new territories), Lincoln and
his congressional leaders set upon a course of pro-development in a collaborative
41
Ibid.,143.
33
partnership of the public and private sector. The expansionist policies that were intended
to link the entire country together paved the way for commercial development of major
communications links, such as the railroad and wireless telegraph. It was during this
period of progressive legislation that an immigration law was enacted on July 4, 1864,
which was very clear in its intent, purpose, and title: "An Act to Encourage Immigration."
The act contained some of the following precedent-setting measures in
formulating policies of a public and private partnership: it established the position of
Commissioner of Immigration who reported to the Secretary of State; it allowed and
validated labor contracts with immigrants while they were still natives of their countries
allowing employers to pay their travel and settling expenses; it exempted immigrants
from compulsory military service (to remove a deterrent for immigrants who were
leaving their countries for the same reason); it established in New York City an office
known as the United States Emigrant Office; and appropriated the sum of $25,000 for
carrying out the provisions of the act. The money allocated indicated Congress's
seriousness of implementing the act.
The act was repealed in 1868, it did however establish a precedent of an agency
which would give its full attention to immigration. The repeal did not deter Congress
from pursuing its agenda focused on the entering of aliens into America. What followed
was a continuous history of legislative actions whose main focus was the monitoring,
controlling, encouragement, and discouragement of immigration into the United States. It
also included acts which made exceptions to the law because of special reasons for
special interests. Many of the acts were influenced by the availability, or lack thereof, of
34
a labor supply. That also included the control of the labor supply by the actions of
organized labor to protect their membership from the free market influence that normally
damaged their bargained wage scales.
The early colonial days of indentured servitude and involuntary slave immigration
were primarily for the utilization of the agricultural resources in an agrarian-based
economy. The Hamiltonians, and the entrepreneurs who followed, were more interested
in the development of an industrial society. For that, they needed a new source of labor,
one that was willing to move out of their agrarian past into new types of employment that
would emerge in America's expanding industrial revolution.
35
Chapter 4
DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSFORMATION WHICH CAUSED A RADICAL CHANGE
IN THE ETHNIC AND RACIAL COMPOSITION OF THE COAL, IRON, AND
STEEL INDUSTRIES WORK FORCE: 1870-1920
In the symbiotic relationship, which this thesis is addressing, the economic tenet
accepted by scholars was that capital, land, and labor was essential for the creation of
wealth. The capitalist in this economic triad needed an abundant supply of labor and the
laborer needed the capitalist to earn their share of the wealth. This was especially true, in
the infant stages of the industrial revolution, where mechanization of the manufacturing
process increased the potential production of the product but it also demanded an
increased need for the manual operation of the process. A testimony to that fact, and the
interdependency, was the effect of World War I on the industrial economy of America.
World War I severely disrupted the flow of immigrant labor creating much
consternation among the industrial leaders. Their anxiety was about the disruption the
war would cause on the present and future flow of immigrant labor needed by their
industries and whether the nation could sustain the requirements of the military. The Wall
Street Journal, in a lengthy article that praised the contributions of immigrant labor to the
industrial development of America, expressed their concern about future industrial
development as a result of World War I. On February 17, 1915, months before American
entered the war, the lengthy article titled "Who Will Do Our Chores" stated the
following:
The war has checked the flow of immigration, and it will be a long
time till the tide turns our way. The god of war will take his toll.
Immigration statistics compiled by the American railroads for ten
36
years ended June 30, 1915, indicate an effect of the European war
which will be felt for years to come in the industrial, economic and
social life of this nation through a check which will be placed on
development as a result of a scarcity of immigrant labor and slow
growth of population.42
The Journal was not alone about its viewpoint. There were many industrial and
political leaders who echoed the same sentiments regarding the entry of fewer immigrant
laborers. Articles such as those that appeared in the Wall Street Journal from 1911 to
1922 are an example of the public expression of such concerns. The titles which
introduce the content of those articles were: "Labor Situation Becomes More and More
Serious;"43
"Our Labor Handicap;"44
"Labor Scarce In All Sections of Country;"45
and
"Labor Scarcity Threatens Iron and Steel Industry."46
Probably no other Wall Street Journal article describes such pragmatic sentiments
as the speech given by Mr. Joseph J. Butler to the convention of the American Iron and
Steel Institute. Mr. Butler is quoted as stating that:
Of course the shortage of labor in this country will result from the
falling off of immigration which has been under way since the
beginning of the European war. The furnaces, mills and mines can
no longer depend on Europe to supply labor. Heretofore we have
employed a large percentage of the immigrants arriving in this
country annually. This source of supply has been out off, and due
to the slaughter of men and destruction of wealth in the great
European war, we cannot expect much of an increase in
immigration until a long time after the conflict has been settled.47
42
"Who Will Do Our Chores," Wall Street Journal, February 17, 1915. 43
Ibid., Dec, 15, 1917. 44
Ibid., Dec. 28, 1911. 45
Ibid., Sept. 9, 1922. 46
Ibid., May 28, 1915. 47
Ibid., May 28, 1915.
37
The concern about a sufficient amount of available labor became a major topic of
discussion in the early part of the twentieth century. Charles Eliot, President Emeritus of
Harvard University, in a New York Times article of February 26, 1914 titled "Need
Immigrants Badly" was reported as making the following statement:
Not a single argument for further restriction of immigration have I
yet seen which does not violate the plainest principles of sound
American industrial development.48
It is evident that there was much concern on the eve of WWI, a sense of
desperation. The need for immigrants in the systems of the industrial sector could not be
denied. The question then is, why such a reliance on foreign labor?
The population was increasing each year as more and more immigrants came to
America looking for jobs. Where were all the native-born who had earlier settled the
country? Where were all the strong hearty native-born workers who had cleared the land,
opened the west to settlements, and help build a viable commerce that could trade with
the rest of the world? Where were they and where were their descendants?
The Civil War and the Loss of a Viable Labor Supply
The Civil War was the most deadly conflict in the history of America. It has been
estimated by many reliable sources that some 600,000 men were killed in the conflict;
more than all the other United States military conflicts combined to the present date.
This also meant a great loss in the labor supply (slaves excluded) at a time when the
industrial revolution was expanding in America. The loss of lives, and the subsequent
48
"Need Immigrants Badly, Says Eliot," New York Times, February 26, 1914.
38
loss of a young labor supply, was not lost on the economic and political powers of the
emerging industrial nation. In the midst of the turmoil which had engulfed the nation,
Congress acknowledged the impending disaster for the future commerce of the country
by initiating the Immigration Act of 1864, appropriately entitled "An Act to Encourage
Immigration."
The potential and real loss of a labor supply also did not escape the attention of
those who financed and operated the textile, iron, and transportation industries. As
industrialists, they initiated a private sector organization called the Foreign Aid Emigrant
Society whose primary purpose was to recruit European labor. Independent
entrepreneurs also founded, at the same time, the Foreign Aid Emigrant Society for the
same purpose.49
Birth Rate Decline and Population
The amount of available labor supply is directly affected by the amount of
available population from which it is drawn. In America an interesting phenomena was
occurring in that the base population, that population which represented those native born
of one or more generations, was suffering from a declining birth rate. Edward Ross
argued simply that the old stock of post-Colonial populace was simply reducing itself
because of its own cultural practices:
As the bulk of our recent immigration comes from the more
prolific European peoples, certain New England states
which are rapidly filling with aliens show a slight rise in
fecundity. If, however, the contribution of the native
49
Robert D. Parmet, Labor and Immigration in Industrial America (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers,
1981), 18.
39
women be separated from that of the foreign born women,
it appears that the old American stock there is dying out.50
Ross's lamenting was not a cry in the wilderness. The declining birth rate among
native parents had become a growing concern, and topic of discussion in the political and
academic world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Warren
S.Thompson and P.K. Whelpton's Population Trends in the United States, published in
1933, an analysis is provided with regards to population projections regarding the inflow
of immigrants into America.51
Chapter 3 of that monograph, "National Origins of the
White Population," is focused on the white population as recorded in 1920 when
projected from what they define as the colonial stock. In the demographics as presented
in that publication, there are only two categories which they track, white (including
immigrants) and black (African-Americans).
Table 3 illustrates the effect of immigrants and their descendants on the white
population of America as of 1920. By 1920, 56.4 percent of the white population was
from post-colonial stock.
50 Edward A. Ross, Changing America: Studies in Contemporary Society (New York, NY: The Century
Company,1909), 35. 51
Warren S. Thompson & P.K. Whelpton, Population Trends in the United States (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1933), 91.
40
Table 3 Immigration and White Population Demographics of America: 1790-1920
Oscar Handlin argues in his Immigration as a Factor in American History that the 227
percent increase from 1790 to 1830 was "substantially all out of the loins of the four
millions of our own people living in 1790." 52
The turning point in the history of
population and immigration in America, according to Handlin, was the turning point in
the history of population and immigration in America. What had been an insignificant
amount of immigrants to America up until that time soon became a flood that directly
affected the population growth. The offspring of foreign countries have to be credited
with the dramatic population increases, as the base of 1790 remained relatively static.
Handlin supports his argument by asking a question and providing his own answer:
The question now of vital importance is this: Was the
population of the country correspondingly increased? I
answer, No! The population of 1840 was almost exactly
what by computation it would have been had no increase in
foreign arrivals taken place. Population showed no increase
over the proportions established before immigration set in
like a flood. In other words, as the foreigners began to
come in larger numbers, the native population more and
more withheld their own increase.53
52
Handlin, Immigration as a Factor in American History,72. 53
Ibid., 72.
41
World-wide statistics as presented in Alfred J. Lotka's article, The America
People: Studies in Population, dramatically indicates the birth rate problem as faced by
the the Western World, which at that time was the center of the Industrial Revolution.
Table 4 shows that the birth rate decline was as severe in the United States as it was in
other European countries. The average birth rate per 1,000 population for the selected
countries in 1871-1875 was 34.1, while the average for 1921 sank to 24.1.
Table 4 Birth Rates of Selective Countries: 1871-1921
Country 1871 - 1875 1881 - 1885 1896 - 1900 1915 1921
Sweden 30.66 29.36 26.86 21.59 21.54
England & Wales 35.5 33.5 29.3 21.8 22.4
United States 37 33.2 29.8 25.1 24.2
Italy 36.8 38 34 30.5 30.3
France 25.5 24.7 22 11.6 20.7
Germany 39 37 36 20.4 25.3
Source: Alfred J. Lotka, "The American People: Studies in Population," Annals of the American
Academny of Political and Social Science 188 (1936): 1-13.
Birth Rates per 1,000 Population in Selected Countries for Available Years
Interestingly, while the Western world was experiencing a relatively normal
increase in population, the United States was experiencing an exceptional population
increase. The industrialized countries had to rely on their shrinking labor force while the
United States experienced a population boom. Table 5 presents a very positive population
increase for the United States while other industrializing countries were experiencing a
much lower growth rate.
42
Table 5 Comparative Population Growth in Selective Western Countries: 1790-1930
For the industrialized countries such as England, France, and Germany, whatever
labor supply that was available would of course be aggressively recruited for their own
industrial needs. On the contrary, the countries in Southern Europe and Eastern Europe,
because of sparse reserves of coal and iron ore resources, remained essentially societies
relying on agricultural products as the main source of their economy. Such agrarian
societies provided an overabundance of labor supply primarily because land ownership
rested in the hands of relatively few from whom unskilled laborers depended for
employment. The progenitor tradition where the eldest son inherited the father's land,
also created generations of excess labor supply from the remaining children.
As a result, the many landless immigrants who came to America were in their
most productive period of their lives. The Dillingham Commission confirmed this in its
data collecting process of immigrants as they entered the United States. From 1899 to
YEAR Percent YEAR Percent YEAR Percent YEAR Percent YEAR Percent YEAR Percent YEAR Percent
Increase Increase Increase Increase Increase Increase Increase
1790 1801 1800 1820 1810 1820 1830
1810 35.1 1811 13.5 1816 6.98 1830 12.64 1820 3.41 1830 11.8 1840 8.69
1820 36.4 1821 13.51 1825 7.07 1840 10.88 1830 6.93 1840 2.35 1850 10.96
1830 33.12 1831 14.76 1840 11.68 1850 8.28 1840 5.25 1850 5.73 1860 10.82
1840 33.49 1841 11.62 1850 10.45 1860 6.52 1850 4.4 1860 -2.44 1870 8.01
1850 80.26 1851 2.23 1861 2.88 1870 8.51 1860 2.53 1870 0.56 1880 9.52
1860 35.58 1861 5.82 1862 -12.8 1871 0.74 1870 1.1 1880 5.87 1890 4.8
1870 25.05 1871 8.59 1870 18.81 1880 9.98 1880 1.63 1890 8.97 1900 7.34
1880 27.56 1881 10.76 1880 8.88 1890 9.29 1890 2.4 1900 9.44 1910 7.52
1890 25.5 1891 8.29 1890 7.45 1900 14.17 1900 1.3 1910 9.51 1920 6.92
1900 20.73 1901 9.76 1900 6.93 1910 15.07 1910 1.54 1914 6.06
1910 21.02 1911 9.13 1910 6.17 1913 3.24 1920 -1.27
1920 14.94 1921 -5.73 1920 5.81 1922 -7.61 1930 6.67
1930 16.14 1931 4.67 1930 12.36 1930 5.17
Sources : United States statistics column [Thompson, Warren S. & P.K. Whelpton. Population Trends in the United States
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933),1; B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics : Europe, 1750-2000
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3-8.
Comparative Population Growth in Selective Western Countries: 1790-1930
UNITED STATES UNITED KINGDOM ITALY GERMANY FRANCE AUSTRIA-HUNGARY SWEDEN
43
1910 (inclusive) 9,555,673 immigrants (male and female) entered the United States. Of
that number, 7,919,549 or 82.9 percent ranged in the ages of 14 and 44. 1,157,148 or
12.1 percent of the total amount of immigrants were under the age of 14; potential future
laborers in America's industries. Only 478,976 or 5 percent of the group was above the
age of 44, a period in an individual's life that was considered the least productive and the
most burdensome on the community.54
The majority was, therefore, an age group that could stand the rigors of the
working and living conditions one would experience in the coal, iron, and steel industries
of America. Such conditions deterred many potential workers, native or foreign, from
seeking employment in those industries. It was a factor, which contributed to the
demographic composition of the employees. It was also a necessary requirement in order
for labor to provide the energy for a symbiotic relationship, which would benefit
industry.
54
U.S.Senate, 61st Congress,3d session, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Statistical Review of
Immigration 1820-1910 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1911), 88.
44
Chapter 5
ACCEPTANCE OF WORKING AND LIVING
CONDITIONS BY NEW IMMIGRANTS
The capitalist and entrepreneurs provided the finances, knowledge, and early
infrastructure for the symbiotic relationship. The production of coal, iron, and steel,
however, needed manual unskilled labor. Labor needed to excavate the coal and iron ore.
Labor needed to operated and maintain the machinery, which helped to increase
production. Labor needed to fuel and operate the processes like the Bessemer Converter
and Open Hearth that produced the iron and the steel. Unskilled labor could be used in
any of the operations regardless of literacy boundaries they could be trained to do such
simple individualized tasks by gestures in the traditional "watch-what-I-do" method,
unless one of their own countrymen served as supervisor.
The skilled laborer, or older immigrants, was being either pushed up to
supervisorial positions or pushed out of their jobs. David Montgomery, in his The Fall of
the House of Labor, competently describes this period in which organized labor,
consisting of skilled and older immigrants, refused to accept the deteriorating working
and living conditions of industry. This was in conflict with the capitalist, entrepreneur,
and management’s productivity goals, where production rose with the rise of deaths and
accidents. Organized labor’s efforts collapsed because the available and abundant supply
of immigrant labor, eager for better economic opportunities, was always willing to accept
such conditions, thus providing industry the perfect symbiotic partner.
45
The working and living conditions that existed in and around the coal, iron, and
steel industries may well appear horrendous, almost fictitious, to today’s American
worker; nonetheless they have been documented in reports, data, and statistics. To the
naïve unskilled individual desperately seeking employment for purposes of survival, such
conditions would readily be accepted. To the worker who had other employment choices
because of an advantage of language skills, native birth, or work skills, such conditions
could be unacceptable.
Accidents and Deaths
There were in America up until the nineteenth and early twentieth century very
few laws to aid and protect the working citizen, and newly arrived immigrant regardless
of their occupation. Unemployment insurance did not exist. Employees out of work had
no income other than what they could eke out while waiting to be called back by their
main employer. Their only remedy for any family needs came primarily from private
charity or through their church. Workers compensation laws began to appear sparingly in
America at a state level after the turn of twentieth century.
The desperation of immigrants put them at the mercy of the industrial and mining
companies; they had no choices. The oral history from a Lithuanian immigrant probably
best summarizes the plight of the foreign worker in a strange country:
Soon after my arrival in this country, I knew that money
was everything I needed. My money was almost gone and I
thought that I would soon die unless I got a job, for this was
not like home. Here money was everything and a man
without money must die. One morning my friends woke me
up at five o'clock and said, "Now, if you want life, liberty
and happiness," they laughed, "you must push for yourself.
46
You must get a job. Come with us." And we went to the
yards. Men and women were walking in by thousands as
far as we could see...There was a crowd of about 200 men
waiting there for a job... That night I told my friends that I
would not do this many days, but would go some place
else. "Where?" they asked me, and I began to see then that I
was in bad trouble, because I spoke no English.55
Thomas Kessner, in his book The Golden Door, describes what was a
typical scene, whether the immigrant entered through Castle Gardens or Ellis
Island:
Few of the newcomers could sit back to weigh their options. As quickly as
they settled, often within days and sometimes within hours of landing,
they had to take their first jobs.56
What awaited many immigrants was not a refuge for their tired, poor, and hungry
beings unto the land of milk and honey, but jobs that most native born of native-parent
sons and daughters would not seek or want. Jobs in the coal, iron, and steel industries
were fraught with danger; they were jobs that literally became daily a chance at life or
death.
Workers in the coal, iron, and steel industry faced a daily possibility of dying or
being involved in an accident that would render them incapable of ever earning a
meaningful income for their families for the rest of their lives. Compensation decisions
for any deaths or injuries rested entirely with the corporation for which they worked, and
in most instances monetary compensations were trivial or nil.
55
Eli Ginzberg & Hyman Berman, The American Worker in the Twentieth Century (New York: The Free
Press of Glencoe, 1963), 47-48. Those who live in the twenty first century must keep reminding
themselves, as they read this thesis, that there was no such thing as a government unemployment insurance
program, social security or workmen’s compensation. If one did not earn an income, the prospects for
purchasing basic sustenance was extremely dim. 56
Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door (New York: Oxford Press, 1977), xii.
47
The newspaper became the chief printed media source of news and commercial
advertising for the public and its expansion continued throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, making it a readily accessible communications vehicle for the
public. For those who could read English, of course, it was a communicator of news; for
those who could not it was literally foreign. Along with other news, deaths and
accidents occurring in the coal, iron, and steel industry were also reported, alerting the
literate English reading common worker of the dangers inherent in such employment.
Death and accidents reports, sometimes appeared in a dramatic fashion such as
what appeared in the Carbon Advocate in September 1883:
The number of accidents in the anthracite coal mines of Luzerne
and Carbon counties during 1882 were 258, of which seventy-three
were fatal, making thirty-five widows and ninety one orphans.57
A matter of fact business report, connecting the amount of tonnage produced for lives
lost, appeared in the Scranton Tribune in February of 1900:
During 1898, 15,851 persons were employed in the mines of the
district: 5,469,150 tons of coal were produced, resulting in 31 fatal
and 154 non-fatal accidents: therefore, 177,295 tons was produced
per life lost, and 29,169 per accident.58
In an article appearing on January 5, 1899 in the Evening Herald (Shenandoah, PA), the
dead were identified by nationalities: Poles, Americans, Irish, Italians, Germans, Welsh,
English and Scotch. In another, the toll for five districts were presented as something
similar to a score card or tally sheet. The Carbon Advocate on Christmas Eve, December
57
The Carbon Advocate (Lehighton, PA), September 1, 1883, 2. 58
The Scranton Tribune (Scranton, PA), February 20, 1900, pa1.
48
24, 1892, reported that the year 1892 would bring to a close "one of the most heart
rendering chapters in the inspector's reports." It listed the tragic record of coal mining in
five districts around the Lehigh area.59
Table 6 Widows and Orphans Report - 1892
DISTRICT Accidents Fatal Widows Orphans
First 162 50 22 73
Second 199 31 13 48
Third 196 49 18 44
Fourth 240 74 36 122
Fifth 144 39 19 31
Totals 941 243 108 318
Source : The Carbon Advocate (Lehighton, PA), December 24, 1892, 1,
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83032231/1892-12-24/ed-1
(accessed June 15, 2011).
Widows and Orphans Report: December 24, 1892
The opportunities to report such casualties were many and often. In an article that
appeared in the Scranton Tribune on February 23, 1901 titled “Figures For Last Year,”
the 1900 annual report of the mine inspector for the state of Pennsylvania was reviewed.
In addition to the production figures, it was reported that there were forty fatal and one
hundred and eighteen non-fatal accidents listed individually by coal companies.60
So
severe was the number of fatalities during the later part of the nineteenth and early part of
the twentieth century that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, organized efforts to
curb the incidences began to emerge with full-page ads sponsored by insurance
59
The Carbon Advocate (Lehighton, PA), December 24, 1892, pa1. 60
Scranton Tribune, Scranton PA, February 23, 1901.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026355/1901-02-04/ed-1/seq-1// (accessed 12/11/2010.
49
companies, corporations, public service organizations, financial institutions and
individuals "in the interest of humanity."61
A better understanding and appreciation of such hazardous working conditions
could be acquired by reviewing the information that came out of official coal industry
reports. In the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania from 1870 to 1902, there were
10,841 deaths, or an average of 328 deaths per year.62
In the bituminous coal mines of the
United States and Canada from 1889 to 1908, there was a total of 29, 293 deaths or an
average of 1,464 deaths per year.63
Such deaths included children, as they became an
integral part of the work force in the coal and iron industry as early as ten years old.
Twelve-hour days (including day and evening shifts that continued around the
clock) were the norm. A survey funded by the Russell Sage Foundation found that with
"nearly four-fifths of the workmen on a twelve-hour schedule, working longer hours
from time to time" that it was fair to say that the "twelve-hour day prevails."64
Such
demands on the physical stamina of immigrants and the long working hours produced
horrific accident and death records for companies in the coal, iron, and steel industries.
Chrystal Eastman reported in her 1910 findings as published in Work-Accidents and the
Law that:
This work demands so much of eyes and nerves and muscles, and
61
Evening Ledger, Philadelphia PA, August 31, 1917
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045211/1917-08-31/ed-1/seq-5/ accessed 07/21/2010, 62
James E. Roderick, Report of the Bureau of Mines, 1902 (Pennsylvania State: W. Stanley Ray, 1903),
23. 63
Hourwich, Immigration and Labor, The Economic Aspects of European Immigration to the United
States, 557. Figures for table taken from U. S. Statistical Abstract, 1910, Tables 180 and 181, p. 284, also
Table 168, p. 265; U. S. Bureau of Labor Bulletin 90, Table xxiv., pp. 655-659; Bulletin 32, p. 8. 64
John A. Fitch, The Steel Workers (Pittsburgh, PA: Russell Sage Foundation, 1910), 171.
50
is done in such intense heat, that the men work in half-hour shifts,
six hours of work during a twelve-hour day. Even so, it is only
exceptional men who will attempt it, and with all their skill and
agility, there are frequent accidents among them.65
There are literally thousands of stories about young boys being injured or killed in
mining accidents if one took the time to read the investigative reports of the State of
Pennsylvania. Men and children, father and sons, sometimes were injured or died
together.
Table 7 presents the case that dangers lay in waiting for the worker in the coal
industries. The reduction of deaths and accidents received more attention in the
European countries than in the United States during the same period of time, possibly
because the workers were native to their countries.
Table 7 Accidents in Coal Mining: 1889 to 1908
Anthracite Mines 9,665
Bithuminous Mines (U,S, and Canada) 29,293
Source : Issac A. Hourwich's, Immigration and Labor:
The Economic Aspects of European Immigration
to the United States . (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912).
Noted by author: Figures for 1891-1908 from
U. S. Statistical Abstract, 1910
Number of Fatal Accidents in Coal Mining: 1889-1908
The management pressures for increased productivity, however, with the
increasing inclusion of non-American citizens into the labor force, continued to create a
general disregard for safety in these American industries. Production was the master.
65
Crystal Eastman, Work-Accidents and the Law (Pittsburgh, PA: Russell Sage Foundation,1910), 55.
51
Figure 8 Persons Employed, Gross Tons Mined, and Corollary Deaths: 1870-1887
The complexity of the operations, the multitude of machine operations, and the
same general disregard for safety in deference to production schedules generally created a
work environment waiting for accidents to happen.66
Graphic 6 is a dynamic illustration
of how the drive for increase production influenced the deaths of employees. From July
1, 1906 to June 30, 1907, there were 195 fatalities in steel plants located in the Pittsburgh
area from the following causes; hot metal explosions, asphyxiation by furnace gas,
operation of rolls, operation of broad gauge railroad, operation of narrow gauge railroad,
66
John A. Fitch, The Steel Workers (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), 64.
52
falling from height or into pit, and loading and piling of steel and iron products.67
Ignorance of the English language could be a detriment to the safety immigrant
laborer. This was because signs warning of danger or instructing safety procedures were
commonly in English. In some cases, however, knowledge of the language made no
difference as the process of making iron and steel was always a risky process. In Work
Accidents and the Law, Paul Underwood Kellogg gives a vivid description of how
dangerous such a working environment was regardless of any language abilities: "If,
however, the fall is excessive, or the furnace defective, the sides may give way and the
molten metal burst out at the bottom, bringing death to all who are working near."68
The Bessemer and Siemens steel processes, which required a range of 1700 to
2300 degrees Fahrenheit in order to produce marketable iron or steel products, also
created an environment that caused deaths other than by accidents. Occupational health
hazards were as deadly as industrial accidents. Pneumonia was the scourge of the iron
and steel worker and generally accounted for as many or more deaths per year than
accidents. As Horace B. Davis reported in his 1933 book Labor and Steel:
Excess deaths from pneumonia alone were nearly as
numerous in the industry in 1929 as all deaths from
accidents and the severity rate for non-fatal cases of
sickness has been higher than the severity rate for non-fatal
accidents 69
67
Ibid. 68
Paul Underwood Kellogg, ed, Work Accidents and the Law (Pittsburgh, PA: Russell Sage Foundation,
1910), 50. 69
Horace B. Davis, Labor and Steel (New York: International Publishers, 1933), 51.
53
Working Conditions and the Native Worker's Discrimination
A 1929 joint occupation study of the Actuarial Society of America and the
Association of Life Insurance Medical Directors found that the ratio of iron and steel
workers' deaths to average deaths of all men in society of same age was higher.70
It
showed that "accidental deaths for iron and steel workers" were "far above normal for
mechanics, 396 percent of normal; for laborers 334 percent; rollers and roll hands 162
percent; and semi-skilled operatives generally 144 percent."71
The work time for a factory employee in these industries during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century was twelve hours, six days a week, as a crew
member assigned to a particular rotating shift. These industries tended to operate twenty-
four hours a day, seven days a week, particularly as the demand for their products by
ancillary industries continued to increase during the late nineteenth and early half of the
twentieth century. If nothing else the sheer exhaustion of such a work schedule, which
demanded a considerable amount of physical energy, easily contributed to making the
worker susceptible to accidents. It is no wonder that an individual of native parents,
especially one who was literate in English, would choose to seek employment in
industries where the safety and health conditions were considerably better than in the
coal, iron, and steel.
For some native whites, their prejudicial attitude about the new immigrants
influenced them in their choices of employment. Robert D. Parmet in his Labor and
70
Ibid., 283. 71
Ibid., 37.
54
Immigration in Industrial America records that:
So antagonistic were the Irish that they initially refused to work in
the same gangs with the Italians. The more irritated they became,
the easier it was to force them out and replace them with additional
Italians. Shrewd foremen regularly exacerbated friction between
the Irish and the "Guineas" or "Dagoes," as the Italian competitors
were called. Consequently, not only the Irish, but Germans and
Scandinavians, too sought employment elsewhere.72
The same antagonism existed between the older immigrants and the new entries into the
job market: Slavs, Hungarians, Poles, Austrians, Russians, and Slovaks. Other shrewd
foremen made sure to take advantage of the situation as they were able to take advantage
of the desperate immigrants. Unwillingness on the part of native-born workers was easily
disposed of by replacing them with willing immigrant laborers:
The seams changed, there was more brawn needed, more powder
per ton of coal must be burned, and " white men " refused to work
under conditions that meant more labor, more expense, and less
pay. Then they called in the willing Slav and submissive
Lithuanian, and the work was done. They bent their strong young
backs under the load, and black diamond has been dug from deeper
depths, from smaller seams, and from more dangerous places by
men of the new immigration than was done by the men of the
old.73
There were also incidences where the native whites simply refused to work alongside an
immigrant or take a job, in time of recession, normally performed by immigrant labor.
John Bodnar in his monograph Immigration and Industrialization writes of a situation
created by the depression of 1908 when the plant manager "offered his skilled men jobs
that were normally performed by immigrants," but they instead "preferred to be laid
72
Robert D. Parmet, Labor and Immigration in Industrial America (Boston. MA: Twayne Publishers,
1981), 136. 73
Peter Roberts, The New Immigration (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913), 55.
55
off."74
The following table shows that there was a majority of newly immigrated workers
in such dangerous industries as: iron and steel (86.6 percent), slaughter house and meat
packing (85.5 percent), oil refining (88.2 percent), and sugar refining (93.7 percent).
While those natives, born of native fathers, were more likely to migrate to less hazardous
occupations such as: collar, cuff, and shirt manufacturing (50.1 percent); glove
manufacturing (50.8 percent); cigars and tobacco (52 percent); and boots and shoes
manufacturing (47 percent). In only three of sixteen manufacturing employments do
native-born workers of native parents hold a majority, and then by a very slight edge. In
the hazardous occupations such as iron, steel, and coal, the percentages for the foreign-
born and native-born of foreign parents display an overwhelming majority of workers.
Table 8 Percent of Employees in Major Industries by Nativity: 1905-1910
Native Native
Total Born of Born of Foreign Born and
Employees Foreign Foreign Native Native Born of
Surveyed Born Fathers Fathers Foreign Parents
IRON AND STEEL MANUFACTURING 86,089 57.7% 28.9% 13.4% 86.6%
SLAUGHTERING AND MEAT PACKING 43,502 60.7% 24.8% 14.5% 85.5%
BITUMINOUS COAL MINING. 88,368 61.9% 9.5% 28.5% 71.4%
GLASS MANUFACTURING. 11,615 39.3% 18.4% 42.3% 57.7%
WOOLEN AND WORSTED MANUFACTURING. 23,388 61.9% 24.4% 13.7% 86.3%
SILK GOODS MFG & DYEING 12,994 34.3% 44.9% 20.8% 79.2%
COTTON GOODS MANUFACTURING 66,800 68.7% 21.8% 9.4% 90.5%
CLOTHING MANUFACTURING. 19,502 72.2% 22.4% 5.3% 94.6%
BOOTS AND SHOES. 19,946 27.3% 25.6% 47.0% 52.9%
FURNITURE MANUFACTURING. 4,295 59.1% 19.6% 21.2% 78.7%
COLLAR, CUFF, AND SHIRT MANUFACTURING. 1,508 13.4% 36.5% 50.1% 49.9%
LEATHER TANNING, CURRYING, AND FINISHING 12,839 67.0% 15.7% 17.4% 82.7%
GLOVE MANUFACTURING. 908 33.5% 15.7% 50.8% 49.2%
OIL REFINING. 6,123 66.7% 21.5% 11.8% 88.2%
SUGAR REFINING. 5,826 85.3% 8.4% 6.3% 93.7%
CIGARS AND TOBACCO. 36,564 32.6% 15.5% 52.0% 48.1%
Source: U.S. Congress, 61st, 3d Session, Senate Documents, doc. 747,
Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission,
(Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office., 1911), 297-314.
Percent of Employees in Major Industries by Nativity: 1905-1910.
74
John Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977),
40.
56
The communities, in which the workers lived, given their limitations on private
transportation, offered no drastic environmental change from their working conditions.
Such communities existed in contiguous areas situated in close proximity to their place of
work. With more employment opportunities available to the older English-speaking
immigrants, they did not have to accept such living conditions.
Living and Housing Conditions
The urban areas in America became magnets for immigrants because of the
greater possibilities for employment in the industrial sector. In 1790, 4.3 percent of the
population in America resided in areas of 8,000 persons or more; that figure jumped to
43.8 percent by 1920.75
It was in those urban areas, stimulated by its main industry of mining coal or
processing of iron or steel, where the percent of immigrant population eventually
became the majority. Places like South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for example, started
off as a small colonial village of early settlers whose lineage went back to the early years
of pre-revolutionary America. The accessibility of surface coal and iron ore started the
early production of iron by skilled artisans. Eventually the evolutionary development of
the Bethlehem Steel Company changed the social, cultural, ecological, and
demographical composition of the area. As immigrants were directed to the area for
their unskilled labor, the percentage of the native-born population dwindled in
comparison.
75
P. K. Whelpton, "Industrial Development and Population Growth," Social Forces, 6, no. 3. (Mar., 1928):
460.
57
Housing and living conditions were configured by the policies of the company,
and the once pastoral landscape was converted into congested, poorly planned,
communities. For the immigrant and his family, such living conditions were tolerable.
The majority of immigrants, who came from the agrarian-based societies of Southern and
Eastern Europe, lived in communities that offered only the basic of accommodations for
them, their families, and their livestock. The German peasant farmer strove to have the
biggest manure pile in front of his house because it brought him prestige in his village.76
In Russia, housing typically consisted of a little wooden hut with a thatched roof. It had
one room, which included the kitchen, dining area and bedrooms. During the winter it
was also shared with the animals as a calf-pen, pig-sty and horse stall. 77
In Bulgaria they
practiced what they called "zadruga" in which several married brothers and their families
lived in the same house. In Poland the houses were made of stone, logs, or planks
covered with mud and a thatched roof. The interior consisted of two halves: on one side
the family slept, ate, and cooked, and on the other the live stock and poultry of the farm
were given shelter. 78
The majority of European peasants lived for centuries in such base housing and
living conditions. The work ethic was the core value of their existence because it always
meant survival of the individual and the family. A low-income existence meant the
necessity of living together as families and in many instances in the same dwelling(s)
that had been occupied for centuries by their past generations. The crowded industrial
76
Hannibal Gerald Duncan, Immigration and Assimilation (New York: D.C. Heath and Company, 1933),
60. 77
Ibid., 271. 78
Ibid., 287.
58
town and/or city was acceptable to the desperate immigrant despite the added burden of
soot-filled air that covered everything with a black dust.
Health conditions in such industrial towns were always substandard and usually
out of bounds to any outside inspections. Outdoor toilets were the norm in such
communities.
Figure 9 Families Drew their Water Supply from Community Town Pump
59
Figure 10 Steel Town where Community and Mill Co-Existed
The working and living conditions associated with the coal, iron, and steel
industries were not what one would consider a decent quality of life. With an increasing
abundance of immigrant labor that was willing to endure such conditions, doing so after
traveling thousands of miles, it is not difficult to conclude why the ethnic composition of
the workforce changed. New immigrants would accept those arrangements because albeit
60
the conditions, working or living, the opportunity existed for the fulfillment of their
economic goals.
There was also no doubt that the capitalistic entrepreneur needed their work ethic,
enduring labor skills, and generally compliant natures. Together they would form a
symbiotic relationship both of them in achieving their economic goals. With increasing
demands for iron and steel by America’s industries, productivity was key to the
capitalist's hope of achieving a positive return on their investments. We will now explore
the interdependency of industry and immigrant labor in the achievement of ever-
increasing productivity levels.
61
Chapter 6
ATTRIBUTES THAT MADE THE NEW IMMIGRANTS AN APPEALING LABOR
FORCE FOR AMERICAN MANAGEMENT AND INDUSTRY
America’s entrepreneurs brought capital and fixed assets into the symbiotic
relationship. The natural resources of America were there for the exploitation by
whomever was willing to invest in their excavation. What was needed to complete the
formula for the creation of wealth was labor. Without labor, the symbiotic relationship
would not be complete because the manual energy needed to produce the saleable
product during this period of the industrial revolution would be insufficient to meet the
ever increasing demands.
The era of 1870-1920 witnessed a major immigration event in the history of the
United States. Previous immigration, and the labor they provided, from colonial days to
the early nineteenth century, was lured to occupy and settle the vast amounts of new land;
a treasure unavailable in the native countries from where they had emigrated. The
immediate use of such lands was primarily for agriculture and the reaping of natural
resources such as timber, animal pelts, fish, and food.
As the new capitalists in America turned their attention to the possibilities of
producing new products that were in demand and made possible by the evolution of the
industrial revolution, the labor sought gradually changed to accommodate this new
industrial era. Skilled artisans gradually disappeared as unskilled maintainers of
machinery increased as needed by the industrial sector. In addition, those northern
European countries that had provided the bulk of immigrant labor for the development of
62
the land were also well into the industrialization of their economy and far less
cooperative in sending over any labor that they needed for their own commerce.
As the demands, domestic and foreign, for the products of the coal, iron, and steel
industries increased, so did the need for an increasing supply of available labor. The
doors were open for a source that had already taken advantage of job opportunities in the
new country, the land laborers from Southern and Eastern Europe. These were
immigrants who had been enmeshed in an agrarian society for generations where public
education was provided in a limited manner to the lower working class.
The characteristics of this immigrant labor force are not being presented to
denigrate, demean, or debase these courageous individuals. It is merely a presentation of
the truth, as also recorded by others, of those qualities that made them attractive to the
industrialists. Their work ethic stands equally with other American examples as the early
colonists, land settlers, and pioneers. Their characteristics also explain why the
industrialists considered them an important asset.
The often used phrase “cheap labor" was undoubtedly an attractive motivator for
industrial actions in recruiting the immigrants. The phrase itself, convenient for many
reasons, nevertheless does not begin to present the human qualities of such individuals
that made them an integral part of the industrial production. Cheap labor alone did not
provide those necessary qualities; it was still the fact that "The fittest survive; that is,
those that fit the conditions best."79
79
Prescott F. Hall, Immigration and its Effects upon the United States (New York: Henry Holt and
Company,1906), 126.
63
Elaborating on the immigrant's qualities, Kitty Calavita in her monograph U.S.
Immigration Law and the Control of Labor: 1820-1924 stated in the language of Marxist
didactic materialism:
This necessitates the continued immigration of cheap labor, a
condition that contributes to the class-conflict nature of the
situation as this tactic is protested. This irony, that the same
national groups that now advance the class struggle had once been
elements of its resolution, is not only intuitively appealing, as it
paints human faces into the abstract dialectic, but it underlines the
fact that the dialectical process is not propelled by personal
attributes of individuals or individual ethnic groups, but is
structurally driven.80
These are some of the same characteristic qualities recorded in other histories of
America as the epitome of pioneer potency. It was a work ethic, highly touted, which
established the colonies and expanded the United States to its western shores. As Turner
recognized, however, it was a new era and a different set of resources to be exploited for
an emerging new society but the characters had not changed. In his Presidential speech to
the American Historical Association, he stated:
When we turn to consider the effect upon American society and
domestic policy in these two decades of transition we are met with
palpable evidences of the invasion of the old pioneer democratic
order. Obvious among them is the effect of unprecedented
immigration to supply the mobile army of cheap labor for the
centres of industrial life. In the past ten years, beginning with
1900 over eight million immigrants have arrived.81
80
Kitty Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law and the Control of Labor: 1820-1924 (New York: Academic
Press, 1984),49. 81
Frederick J. Turner, "Social Forces in American History," The American Historical Review 16, no. 2
(1911): 220. Note: The article is the speech he gave to the American Historical Association in Indianapolis
on December 28, 1910.
64
Literate or Illiterate -- No Matter
The ability of the immigrants from Southern and Easton Europe to read or write in
their own language, or English for that matter, became a major contention regarding the
qualifications for entry into the country. In most major industries, particularly in the coal,
iron, and steel industries, the jobs for which the immigrant was recruited could be learned
without literacy, much as they had learned how to plow land, grow crops, and reap the
harvest. Tasks in the coal, iron, and steel industries were usually simple and repetitive.
William Hamilton of the Wall Street Journal noted in a 1915 speech given to the
Patria Club that :
There is one important way in which we must be seriously affected
in the matter of production. This is in the effect upon immigration.
We are dependent upon Europe for a mobile army of unskilled
labor. It does not matter to us economically whether the immigrant
can read and write his own language. It does matter that he shall
have the physique to do that bullock labor which is indispensable
for all enterprise in its initial stages.82
In addition, experienced immigrants who acquired the ability of understanding
rudimentary English were usually elevated to a position of foreman and assigned to the
ethnic group whose language he could speak. Essentially, he became the translator.
Northern European immigrants had higher literacy rates than those from Southern and
Eastern Europe. The earlier transformation on Northern countries to industrialized society
and the influence of the Protestant Reformation had a positive affect on the education of
82
“Economic Aspects of the Great European War, Address by William P. Hamilton of the Wall Street
Journal before the Patria Club” Wall Street Journal, March 15, 1915.
65
their citizens. The literacy rate among the Southern and Eastern Europeans was much
lower.
The 1899-1909 data collected at the point of immigration entries showed that the
rate of literacy of the Southern and Eastern European group ranged from a low of 68
percent among the Rumanians to a high of 1.1 percent among the English. The general
average was 26 percent, which included such ethnic groups as: Greek - 27.5 percent;
Hebrew - 25.7 percent; Southern Italians - 54.2 percent; Ruthenians - 51 percent; and
Turkish - 58.9 percent.83
In a further comparison, Table 9 illustrates the considerable difference with
regards to literacy abilities of the old versus the new immigrants.
Table 9 Illiteracy of Old Immigrants versus New Immigrants
Total Number
14 Years or
Over Number Percent
Old Immigration 1,983,618 52,833 2.7
New Immigration 5,215,442 1,859,298 35.6
TOTAL 7,199,060 1,912,131 26.6
Source: U.S. Senate, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission:
Emigration Conditions in Europe , (Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911), 30.
Persons 14 Years of Over
Who Could not Read or WriteClass
Illiteracy of Immigrants 14 Years of Age or Older
Data Collected from 1899 to 1909 Inclusive and Compared to Earlier Immigration.
This was a characteristic, which, when immigrants and their offspring were given
the opportunity of the public educational system was generally remedied; in fact their
children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren eventually inhabited the halls of
83
Source: U.S. Senate, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Emigration Conditions
in Europe (Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911), 30.
66
academia. President Woodrow Wilson exposed the false logic of the anti-immigrationers
when he stated in his veto of the Literacy Bill on January 28, 1915 "and it excludes those
to whom the opportunities of elementary education have been denied, without regard to
their character, their purposes, or their natural capacity."84
Tractable
Although rarely used today, the word "tractable" still has the meaning of easily
managed or controlled; a quality that was a manager's desire of an ideal employee. "All
of the immigrants were easier to handle, and were more tractable than the natives"85
reported the Dillingham Commission. This observation was documented by many
industrial employers, investigators, and historians.86
Eager and Desperate Job Seekers
Whether it was in the early part of the nineteenth century when the "old"
immigrants, as they are generally labeled by historians, in the era of 1840 to 1870 or the
later part when they "new" immigrants from 1870 to 1920 came to America, the primary
focus was to seek better economic opportunities. Since the majority of the immigrants
84
Philip Davis, ed., Immigration and Americanization (New York: Ginn and Company, 1920) 378. 85
U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Senate Documents, vol. 69 (Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911), 227. 86
See Also:U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Senate Documents, vol. 69 (Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911),
226, 227; U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Senate Documents, doc. 633. Immigrants in Industries: Part 18
& Part 20, (Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911), 341,419,430, 800, 807; Edwin Fenton, Immigrants and Unions
(New York: Arno Press, 1975), 79; Prescott Hall. Immigration and its Effects Upon the United States (New
York: Henry Holt and Company, 1907) 57; Edith M Phelps, Restriction of Immigration (New York: The
H.W. Wilson Company, 1920), 48; John Higham, Strangers in the Land:Patterns of American Nativism
1869-1925 (New York: Antheneum, 1967), 115; Frederic J. Haskin, The Immigrant: An Asset and a
Liability (London: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1913), 117; Joseph McGarity Perry, The Impact of Immigration
on Three American Industries, 1865 - 1914. (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 115; and Edward Alsworth
Ross, The Old World and the New (New York: The Century Co., 1814), 207.
67
were generally classes of laborers, skilled to unskilled, their opportunity lie wherever
someone was willing to pay them more for their services.
The Dillingham Commission reported that:
The immigrants are also generally said to manifest much greater
perseverance in their endeavors to secure work than is shown by
natives. An American who applies for work when told that there is
none available lets the matter drop. On the other hand, the
immigrant who is refused employment on one day goes back the
next and besieges the employer until cause is shown why there is
no work or a place is secured. The same general disposition marks
the immigrant's efforts to secure work for his fellows. The native
will go so far as to introduce his friend to the foreman, but the
immigrant does not stop at this point. He pleads with the foreman
and assumes responsibility for the satisfactory working qualities of
his fellow countryman.87
It was a perfect marriage between the nascent capitalistic entrepreneur in America
and the flood of immigrants who poured daily into the eastern ports looking for jobs. The
method and means by which they were able to transverse the Atlantic Ocean and the
many states could vary but the ultimate goals never waivered. An employer, whether in
the public or private sector, needed a labor supply to operate his project and the
immigrant willing to provide that supply.
Each morning, the employer who was seeking labor for their operation could
expect a new source of immigrants at their gates eager to be hired. As Don Leschoier in
his article "Immigration and Labor Supply" presents the scene:
Inasmuch as there was no organized labor market, and as
immigration continually replenished the labor-supply, each
87
U.S. Senate, 61st Congress, 2d session. Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in
Industry. Part 1: Bituminous Coal Mining (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1911), 650.
68
American employer and each locality developed a local labor-
reserve. Each employer expected as a matter of course that there
would be idle men at his factory-gate to-morrow morning--every
morning. And there were. He based his production policy upon that
expectation.88
Mobility
For the needs of industry, especially in a period of dramatic expansionism, a
workforce that would travel to meet the needs of their labor force was indeed an
attractive resource for management. The marketing and business cycles in the capitalistic
system had a history of periods of recession and prosperity. A floating labor supply that
was willing to travel any distance to offer their labor at any given time was an attribute
most managers desired to fulfill their timely needs which changed with the business
cycles.
The Dillingham Commission reported this salient quality of recent immigrants
and their fulfilling the needs of local labor markets regardless of where they originated
from:
Another salient quality of recent immigrants who have sought
work in American industries has frequently been that they have
constituted a mobile, migratory, wage-earning class, constrained
mainly by their economic interest, and moving readily from place
to place according to changes in working conditions or fluctuations
in the demand for labor. This condition of affairs is made possible
by the fact that so large a proportion of the recent immigrant
employees, as already pointed out, are single men or married men
whose wives are abroad, and by the additional fact that the
prevailing method of living among immigrant workmen is such as
to enable them to detach themselves from a locality or an
occupation whenever they may wish. Their accumulations are also,
88
Don D. Leschoier "Immigration and the Labor-Supply" Atlantic Monthly. April 1919
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/immigrat/lescof.htm (accessed: June 11, 2011).
69
as a rule, in the form of cash or quickly convertible into cash. In
brief, the recent immigrants have no property or other restraining
interests which attach them to a community, and a large proportion
are free to follow the best industrial inducements.89
Endurance and Physical Strength
In Edward Slavishak's "Bodies of Work: Industrial Workers' Bodies in
Pittsburgh, 1880-1915," he explores in-depth the physiological requirements of
workers who had to fulfill their requirements of tasks in order to retain their
employment and receive their wages:
Employers believed that the much-valued combination of strength,
endurance, and docility could be found much more readily in
immigrants from southern and eastern Europe than in western
Europeans and native-born Americans. New immigrants, with their
"splendid physiques and powers of endurance," were "apparently
insensible to the rigors of January" and could withstand the
summer heat as well.90
Peter F. Roberts also attests to the physical strengths of the immigrant labor:
The Slav is a good machine in the hands of competent director. He
is obedient and amenable to discipline, courageous and willing to
work, prodigal of his physical strength and capable of great
physical endurance.91
The immigrant worker received high marks for possessing the physical abilities
that were so important to the attainment of production goals. Those qualities of endurance
89
U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Senate Documents, doc. 747, Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration
Commission, (Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911), 500. 90
Edward Steven Slavishak, "Bodies of Work: Industrial Workers' Bodies in Pittsburgh, 1880-1915"
(dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2002), 67. 91
Peter Roberts, Peter Roberts, The New Immigration (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913), 36.
70
and physical strength were reported by the Dillingham Commission as well as the
observations of many scholars and historians.92
The introduction of mechanization to the coal and iron-making process did not
lessen the need for such physiological abilities. In fact the care and feeding of such
machinery, in some cases, intensified the physiological demands from labor.
Charles Reitell, in his 1917 book "Machinery and its Benefits to Labor in the
Crude Iron and Steel Industries" defines the physical endurance and strength needed to
perform in such industries:
Their duty is to take the stock in the barrows from the elevator,
haul them twenty to twenty-five feet to the bell, where they dump
the contents into the furnace. They also operate the mechanism
which lowers the bell and drops the charge into the furnace proper.
This latter operation permits the escape of large quantities of gas,
which makes it both disagreeable, and often dangerous, to the
workers. Top-fillers are common, unskilled laborers, and receive
ordinary laboring wages. Their work demands tremendous physical
endurance.93
92
For additional testimonies to the endurance and physical strength of immigrants see: Andrew Roy, A
History of the Coal Miners of the United States (Columbus, OH: Trauger Printing Co., 1907), 303, 414,
452; Kellogg, 17,98; Robert F. Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics:The Dillingham
Commission, 1900-1927 (DeKalb,IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004), 55; Peter Roberts, The New
Immigration (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913) 20, 61, 219; Paul Fox, The Poles in America
(New York: George H Doran Company, 1922) 69, 75; William P. Shriver, Immigrant Forces : Factors in
the New Democracy (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1913)
84; U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, doc. 633. Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in
Industries, Part 2 Iron and Steel Manufacturing (Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911.) 611; Emily Greene Balch,
Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (Philadelphia, PA: Wm. F. Fell Co.,1910) 301, 365, 377; Frank Julian Warne,
“The Effect of Unionism upon the Mine Worker," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, Vol. 21 (1903), 23; Erickson, 23,127; and Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New
(New York: The Century Company, 1914), 102, 228. 93
Charles Reitell, Machinery and its Benefits to Labor in the Crude Iron and Steel Industries
(Menasha, WI: The Collegiate Press, 1917), 12.
71
Stable Work Force
In the case of those immigrants who eventually decided to stay and provide the
means for their families to join them, mobility was no longer one of their characteristics
as they settled in industrial cities and towns. The one-town, one-company arrangements
guaranteed to the manufacturer a stable supply of labor that would be available with the
ebb and flow of production demands. It also provided a labor supply of women and
children, since such immigrants families were always in need of additional income,
particularly in times of layoffs due to downside business cycles.
The community, in most instances, became part of the industrial complex as its
provision of an available labor supply when needed was of great importance to the
company. It is no wonder then that the Dillingham Commission, in its fieldwork of data
collection, went beyond the walls of the factory and into the contiguous community. W.
Jett Lauck in his 1917 article, "The Economic Investigations of the United States
Immigration Commission", explains the data collecting methodology used by the
investigators in collecting the data. Lauck, one of several academic members of the
commission, reported on those criteria that were used in the investigation of families in
the community. They were:
(1) household conditions; (2) living arrangements; (3) rent; (4)
residence and birthplace of children; (5) ability to speak English;
(6) literacy; (7) schooling in United States and abroad; (8) language
spoken at home, at work, at school, and at church; (9) annual
earnings of members of households at work; (10) months worked
during past year; (11) amount and sources of annual family income;
(12) property owned in the United States; (13) affiliations with
labor and fraternal organizations; (14) money sent abroad; (15)
money on landing in the United States; (16) reasons for coming to
72
the United States; (17) occupation in which engaged since landing
in the United States; (18) periodicals and newspapers read. 94
With particular relevance to this thesis, Laucks completes his reporting with the
following footnote:
In several industries, such as coal mining and iron and steel, family
budgets showing annual family income and expenditures were also
collected. It was planned to do this for employees for all industries,
but time was not available.95
The companies often crossed the line in consolidating some relationship with the
employees in their communities.
South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania is a good example of the one company, one-town
development in America during this period of time. Originally founded by the Moravians
as a farming community, the development and expansion of the Bethlehem Steel
Company, following the Civil War, turned the area into an industrial complex. By 1910,
the inflow of immigrants needed to fill the demands of the company turned the area into a
multi-ethnic community. In the approximate area of some 25 miles, contiguous to the
giant industrial complex, before 1880 only six Protestant and one Catholic church
existed. By the year 1920, there were now twenty-one churches and a synagogue.
94
W. Jett Lauck, "The Economic Investigation of the United States Commission," The Journal of Political
Economy 18, no. 7 (1910): 529-530. 95
Ibid., 530.
73
Table 10 The Cultural Transformation of So. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Ethnic Transformation of So. Bethlehem, PA. as Indicated by the Construction of Religious Places of Worship
Year
Established
The First Moravian Church of South Bethlem Moravian 1862
Saint Peter's Lutheran Church German 1864
Episcopal Church of the Nativity English 1865
Holy Infancy Roman Catholic Church Irish 1883
Saint Bernard's Roman Catholic Church German 1886
Saints Cyril and Methodius Roman Catholic Church Slovak 1891
Fritz Memonal Methodist Church multi-ethnic 1893
First Reformed Church of South Bethlehem German 1896
Church of the Holy Rosary Italian 1902
Saint John Capistrano Roman Catholic Church Hungarian 1903
Saint Mathew's Lutheran, (missionary) multi-ethnic 1904
Saint Mark's Evangelical (missionary) multi-ethnic 1904
Saint Stanislaus Roman Catholic Church Polish 1906
Holy Ghost Roman Catholic Church German/Ausrian 1910
Saint John's Evangelical Lutheran Slovenian Congregation Lutheran 1910
Saint Josaphat's Ukrainian (Byzantine) Catholic Church Ukrainian 1916
Saint John's Windish Evangelical Lutheran Church multi-ethnic 1916
Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church Greek 1917
Saints Peter and Paul Byzantine Catholic Ruthenian- 1917
Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church Russian 1917
Source: Woodward Christian Carson "South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1880-1920:
Industrialization, Immigration and the Development of a Religious Landscape"
(master's thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2000), 10 - 92.
Church Congregation
The significance of such a transformation is that the worker and employer were
located in a contiguous relationship to each other. There was, essentially, a supply of
labor literally at the doorstep of the industry. As the families settled in the community
with the purchase of homes and funding of churches, it was a work force that was stable
and literally beholden to the company for employment.
Piecework
For centuries and generations, the European peasant laborer was paid for what
they achieved or accomplished for the employer. There were no time clocks, union
contracts, labor arbitrators, or paid vacations or holidays. If the land laborer picked four
bushels of olives the landlord would only pay him for those bushels. If he sowed seven
74
acres of wheat, he received payment for that specific amount of work. If the artisan made
a new pair of shoes for the purchaser he was paid for what he produced, not on how much
time he spent making them.
It was therefore not a radical change for the immigrant to enter an industrial world
that preferred utilizing, in most cases, the system of piecework that compensated the
employees based on what they had produced, not on how much time they spent at their
job 96
So prevalent was the practice, which of course rewarded the worker on the basis of
production, that Frederick Winslow Taylor devoted some seventy-nine pages of his one-
hundred page treatise on The Principle of Scientific Management on the investigation of
such a practice. Taylor's purpose was to illuminate management on methods by which
they could obtain increased production from the worker by revolutionizing those current
methods and practices.
The method of paying the worker for the tasks, or pieces, he had accomplished
was commonplace during the period covered by this thesis. Scott Nearing and Frank
Watson in their 1911 economics book produced for their classes at the Wharton School of
Finance at the University of Pennsylvania simplify the manufacturer's reason why he
preferred to pay the worker on a piecework basis:
96
For further information on the subject of "piece work" see also: Edward Young, Labor in Europe and
America (Philadelphia, PA: S.A. George and Company, 1875) 205-724; State of New York, Reports of the
Factory Investigating Commission volumes 1- 5(Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, 1915); U.S.
Commissioner on Labor, Cost of Production : Iron, Steel, Coal (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1891); U.S.
Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in Industries, Part
23:Summary Report on Immigrants in Manufacturing and Mining, Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911.),
71,404.
75
The boss does not use the whip to keep his laborers at work, but he does
employ various means which are even more effective. He puts his men
on a system of "piecework;" that is, they are paid so much per piece of
work that they do, instead of so much per hour. For example, a man may
solder the bottom to the frame of a lantern at three cents per lantern or
thirty cents per hour. If he works by the hour, there is no incentive to
work hard, but if by the piece, he will do his best to solder at least ten
lanterns an hour, and perhaps eleven or twelve, for each additional one
means an addition to the pay envelope. Then it is tacitly understood that
a man must solder ten lanterns an hour or leave. So the piece-work
system sets a rapid standard and places every incentive before the wage
worker to exceed that standard.97
David Montgomery in his The Fall of the House of Labor explores the reasons
why organized labor lost its battle against management. As Montgomery explains
throughout his book, piecework became the contentious and cathartic issue that created
confrontational battles between management and organized labor. The older immigrants,
usually skilled, who made up the core of organized labor would not accept the method of
piecework as a basis for their compensation. They fought to maintain the hourly system
for compensation of their time.98
The new immigrant, however, preferred the piecework method of compensation
because as laborer usually at the bottom of the pay scale they could earn much more than
their usual hourly wage. The willingness of the immigrant to accept that arrangement
made him the preferred employee of management because it helped them to control costs
while increasing production. Since the immigrant was so willing, and there were many
97
Scott Nearing and Frank Watson, Economics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911), 183. 98
David Brody, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 216, 218,
226, 227, 235, 244, 246.
76
always looking for a job, labor was not only unsuccessful in their demands they lost their
power as more and more immigrants migrated to America looking for employment.99
In an investigative report by the State of Illinois it is noted simply that, "Most of the men
work on a tonnage basis, so that, as for all piecework, the saying is 'the miner is paid what
he earns.'"100
Further references, as indicated in the footnote, clearly indicates that the
employer has established a system whereby they could control the rate of production by
compensating the employee based on "piecework."
Immigrants, whose major motivation was to accumulate as much cash as possible
in order to send remittances back to his family in Europe, save enough to finance the
passage of his family and/or relatives to America, or return to his native land to buy the
land he always dreamed of, was eager to produce as much as he could accomplish to
achieve his personal financial goals. It was a quid pro quo that the capitalistic American
entrepreneur delighted in accommodating.
Unorganized Labor
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the active rise of organized
labor led generally by those workers whose parentage were born in America, began to
agitate against the dangerous work environments of American industries; this was
especially true in the coal, iron and steel industries. Their educational levels made them
99
David Brody, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 18, 48,
66, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79. 100
State of Illinois, The Immigrant and the Coal Mining Communities of Illinois (Springfield, IL: Bulletin
of the Immigrants Commission No. 2, 1920), 20.
77
more aware of civil and legal rights embodied within the laws of the country, in particular
Amendment Fourteen of the U.S. Constitution.
The era gave rise to some of the bloodiest conformations of labor against industry
in American history which involved thousands of workers resulting in deaths and
destruction: the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 (200,000 strikers); the Pullman
Strike of 1894 (250,000 strikers); the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 (147,000
strikers); and the Steel Strike of 1919 (350,000 strikers) to mention only those which
involved a huge amount of workers.101
There were many local skirmishes like the
Homestead strike of 1892, which pitted the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel
Workers against the Carnegie Steel Corporation. Sever strikers were killed in that
confrontation.102
This disruptiveness to the actual or planned production goals of the
corporations was decidedly devastating by such strikes or work slowdowns. The
availability of an unorganized, unaffiliated source of labor supply was extremely
appealing to the industrial sector. Immigrants were used in many instances to supply the
labor needs when the older employees decided to go on strike or organize as unions for
the purpose of arbitrating their grievances with management. It was only a matter of time,
however, when the immigrants began to join the unions as they began to understand their
rights in America.
101
http://247wallst.com/2010/09/03/the-ten-biggest-labor-strikes-in-american-history/2/ (accessed
11/09/2011) 102
Edward W. Bemis, “The Homestead Strike,” Journal of Political Economy, 2, no. 3 (1894): 369-396.
78
The increased use of mechanization also benefitted the company as it helped rid
itself of skilled workers who tended to be members of labor organizations. As Priscilla
Long tells us in her treatise Where the Sun Never Shines, "The undercutting machine
benefited the coal operator only ... The machine became the means to political ends,
inasmuch as the skilled workers it eliminated were also the most pro-union segment of
the work force."103
Financially Indebted Worker
Immigrants were almost always burdened with a financial obligation that
continued the pressure of maintaining their employment, whatever the circumstances. An
immigrant was therefore vulnerable to the management's dictates as to working and
living conditions.
From the moment immigrants decided to courageously venture out from their
villages and travel to America for a better life for themselves or their families, they would
incur indebtedness to one or more parties along the way. The payment of those one time
and reoccurring debts made the immigrant an attractive employee for management. There
were no public sector services; one either worked or they relied on the limited resources
of churches, friends, or the income of their wife and/or children.
The immediate obligation of immigrants in their venture to America usually
entailed some sort of financial remittance to their immediate family for their continued
support or savings intended for their eventual joining then in America, friends who had
helped them with finances needed for their voyage, or debtors who had loaned them the
103
Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 136.
79
money for their trip to America. It was in a sense an investment, which was usually done
with young men since they were the most attractive candidates for industrial work in
America. But it was a moral obligation, as well, witnessed by the amounts of remittances
that they sent back to families throughout Europe. From January 1, 1907 to June 30,
1909, $245.9 million dollars were remitted by the immigrant via their "correspondent
banking houses of their immigrant banks" to their homelands.104
Once employed, and particularly in an industrial complex commonly known as a
"mill town" or "company town," immigrants and their families had no choice but to
utilize those living arrangements owned and operated by the company either directly or
indirectly. One of the arrangements for employment was that immigrants must patronize
the company store. Since some states prevented the practice of companies operating a
company stores, they used various legal methods to avoid that violation with formation of
a separate corporation. It was well worth it for the industrial sector to do so because
besides holding the worker in a state of financial bondage, it was also a very lucrative
arrangement for the company.
The company usually purchased most of the land surrounding its manufacturing
establishment and controlled the building of any structures including lodging facilities. It
would then rent out such facilities to the workers as groups of men living together or
104 U.S. Congress, 61
st, 3d Session, Abstracts of the Reports of the Immigration Commission (Washington,
D.C: GPO, 1911), 425.
80
families. According to the Federal Bureau of Labor estimate, the rent amounted each
year to more than 200 per cent of the company's original investment."105
The company store was virtually the only place where most workers could
purchase whatever they needed to work, eat, clothe themselves, or buy necessities for
their lodgings or houses. Miners, for instance, leased their tools (picks and axes) and had
them sharpened occasionally at the company store where they were also "compelled to
purchase their powder and other explosives."106
The family bought its groceries from the company store. Credit was available to
the families but such a financial arrangement ended if the worker was fired. One could
also pay in company scrip, which he received as pay in lieu of money, but such scrip was
only cashable at the company store. Deductions from the pay of workers were
commonplace, used to pay for rentals and purchases at the company store. This
arrangement also applied to health benefits, including local physician services, deducted
from the worker's pay in the form of monthly dues.
The worker's entire life was tied into the company. Union organizers attempted
not only to change working conditions but often times to dissolve this state of semi-
slavery with the financial indebtedness that had a hold on their entire life. The company
had no incentive to change the situation:
The companies were not compelled as a result of agitation or
protest to increase wages, shorten hours, make their mines safer,
improve their houses, or free their operatives from trading at the
105
Brody, 111. 106
U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in Industries,
Part 1: Bituminous Coal Mining (Washington, D.C., 1911), 95.
81
company stores, in order to hold the natives and former workmen
since they were able to full their places without difficulty with
recent immigrants107
For the immigrant worker such living conditions, in most cases, were a step up
from their previous life. A convenient store existed where they had a variety of choices in
food, they now had health care, they no longer were subject to the whims of despotic
rulers and no longer subject to the agricultural landlords power of paying them or not
paying them for the work they performed. For the non-immigrant worker, however, who
had choices there were other opportunities in a rapidly expanding economy.
Frugal
Whatever their national origin, Southern or Eastern Europe, the lower class
citizens of those countries learned how to live on very limited budgets. The agrarian
economy offered little opportunity for the common land laborer to possess any significant
amount of spendable income. Dependency on crops, which could be affected by a
numerous amount of calamities (insects, weather, droughts), had over the centuries
trained them to be frugal. It was basically a question of their survival. It was a trait which
would help them to survive the business cycles which affected their terms of
employment. Richmond Mayo Smith recorded that the immigrant worker was "extremely
industrious, frugal and peaceable."108
Prescott Hall, who generally wrote about
immigrants in tones of distaste, stated that "they lived in the cheapest locations and in the
107
Ibid, 424. 108
Richmond Mayo Smith, Emigration and Immigration (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 144.
82
most frugal way."109
Frank Julian Warne lauded them for their attitude:"Here they have
the prospect by industry, frugality, and perseverance, of bettering their condition, and
raising themselves in society." 110
Edward A. Steiner, a supporter of immigration,
observed that they were "industrious, intelligent, honest, frugal, patriotic, and God-
fearing noble qualities for American citizenship."111
Frugality fit well with the goals and motives of the industrial operators, because
the immigrant would not demand much and would make do within the wage scale that
was most beneficial to the corporate entrepreneur and investor. Such frugality, however,
translated into the acceptance of bare essentials as a standard of living, which
unfortunately created a negative perception in the eyes of native-born Americans. As a
result, the traditional American chose not to live in the same neighborhoods as new
immigrants. With the encroachment of immigrants into the established neighborhoods,
what generally resulted was an exodus out of the area by earlier immigrants.
Cheap Labor
"Cheap labor" is probably the one term which most historians repeatedly use with
regards to immigration and its attractiveness to the industrial employers. It is a trite
expression that does not do justice to all the complexities of the immigrant and
employers' inter-relationship about market, wages, and labor pressures.112
Cheap labor
109
Prescott Hall, Immigration and its Effect Upon the United States (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1907), 110. 110
Frank Julian Warne, The Tide of Immigration (New York: Appleton & Co., 1916), 161. 111
Edward A. Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co, 1906), 109. 112
For the uses of cheap labor as the only reason for the explanation of the relationship between
immigrants and employers see the following: U.S. Congress, 42d, 1st session, Special Report on
83
was no doubt one of the main considerations but by far not the only one. In addition the
term itself connotes far more in the capitalistic rules of profit-making than the fact that
they were able to attract such immigrant workers at a lower wage scale than the current
employee or the traditional American worker.
The lowering of wage scales were not created merely by the availability of
immigrants. It was the result of the industrial revolution, which in its process of evolution
relied less on artisan skilled help and more on unskilled labor and machinery. This
evolution was caused by the increasing introduction of mechanization in the process of
production. According to Priscilla Long:
At the root of increased productivity was the undercutting
machine, introduced into the largest mines to mechanize the task
requiring the most skill. Even more fundamental, managers
attempted to reorganize the work so that unskilled men could do
it.113
The unskilled worker could be trained in a few days to perform a simple repetitive
task. According to the Dillingham Commission report:
Herein lies the chief value of the machine to the mine owner. It
relieves him for the most part of skilled labor and of all the
restraints which that implies. It opens to him the whole labor
market from which to recruit his force; it enables him to
concentrate the work of the mine at given points, and it admits of
the graduation of wages to specific work and payment of wages by
the day. The results of this introduction of machinery consist not
only in the greater execution of the machine, but in the subdivision
Immigration, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1871), 64, 120; U.S. Congress, 42d, 1st session, Special Report on
Immigration, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1871), 64, 120; Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines (New
York: Paragon House, 1989), 132, 133; Roberts, 33, 195, 343; Eckel, 247, 342; Van Metre, 358; Isaac A.
Hourwich, “The Economic Aspects of Immigration," The Academy of Political Science Vol. 26, No. 4
(1911), 634, 641; and William M. Leiserson, Adjusting Immigrant and Industry (New York Harper &
Brothers Publishers, 1924), 54, 129, 130, 184. 113
Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 119.
84
of labor which it involves, and the greater per capita efficiency of
the force thus secured. The gain is consequently to the employer
rather than to the men. The mining machine is in fact the natural
enemy of the coal miner; it destroys the value of his skill and
experience, obliterates his trade, and reduces him to the rank of a
common laborer or machine driver if he remains where it is.114
Since the primary goal of capital investment is to maximize profits, the unskilled
worker, not expected to be on the same level of the wage scale as the skilled or semi-
skilled, proved to be the more desirable candidate for employment in the ever increasing
mechanized industrial evolution. Native-born American workers generally did not accept
those jobs on the lower wage scale in such unskilled positions:
The question of improved machinery and its bearing upon the labor
situation is of great importance everywhere, but nowhere more
than in the steel industry. There has been a policy of daring, almost
to the point of recklessness, that probably no other industry can
duplicate. No change has been overlooked that would put a
machine at work in place of a man; thousands of men have been
displaced in this way since 1892, and yet the industry has so grown
that more men, in the aggregate, are employed than ever before.115
As David Brody wrote in his monograph Steelworkers in America: the
Nonunion Era, "the market position of the skilled men was deteriorating under the
impact of technological advance."116
The immigrant was willing to sell their
unskilled services at the market price while the traditional American workers
were not inclined to do so. The immigrant, therefore, in the expanding coal, iron,
114
U.S. Congress, Session 2d, Senate Document 683, Immigrants in Industries:Bituminous Coal Mining,
Part 1 (Washington, D.C.:GPO, 1911), 657. 115
Fitch, 140. 116
Brody, 51.
85
and steel industries became a most welcomed commodity for the capitalist and the
entrepreneur. 117
With the attributes and work ethics as presented in this chapter, the
capitalists, entrepreneurs, and management had an able and competent working
partnership that would seal the symbiotic relationship. The benefits to America, in
its expansive era of 1870-1920, have been presented in the early chapters. We will
now see how interrelated that relationship became with direct correlative evidence
of the foreign-born ethnic composition of labor to the growth of major industries
that nurtured the symbiotic relationship.
117
For more information on mechanization in the industrial revolution and its affect on production, wages,
status of laborers and working conditions see the following: Lippincott; Kellogg,; Hourwich, "The
Economic Aspects of Immigration," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec. 1911), pp. 615-642;
and Willard I. Thorp, "Evolution of Industry and Organization of Labor," Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science, Vol. 184, (Mar., 1936), pp. 39-44.
86
Chapter 7
SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP: THE BENEFIT TO THE INDUSTRIALIST
Like the Möbius strip, the capital-labor relationship represented a continuous
reliance on each other for the achievement of their respective goals. Such a symbiotic
relationship of co-dependence existed in the coal, iron, and steel industries. They are the
industries that are recognized as the bedrock for the industrial revolution.
What will now be presented is statistical data that will show the importance of
that symbiotic relationship to the economic growth of America. Data on native-born
workers, those born of foreign parents or born in foreign countries, and production will
display the interdependent need of capital and labor for each other’s resources. Such
interdependence influenced the productive levels that determined the industrialist’s
success. I will also present that due to other factors presented in this thesis, the symbiotic
relationship of the immigrant laborer to the industrialist was a major determinant in the
industrialist’s production levels.
In the opening chapter of Burton J. Hendrick's The Age of Big Business published
in 1919, he states, with a certain amount of exhilarated pride, that America has
experienced enormous change since its Civil War days:
The America of Civil War days was a country without
transcontinental railroads, without telephones, without European
cables, or wireless stations, or automobiles, or electric lights, or
sky-scrapers, or million-dollar hotels, or trolley cars, or a thousand
other contrivances that today supply the conveniences and
comforts of what we call our American civilization.118
118
Burton J. Hendrick, The Age of Big Business (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919), 2.
87
He fails to mention, however, that each one of the achievements, from the railroads to the
trolley cars, which indicate the vast change in American society, would not have been
possible without the amazing advancements and production in the coal, iron, and steel
industries in America. His narrative focuses on the history of big business in America and
its startling growth during the post-Civil War era without too much detail as to how it
achieved such advancements.
The Dillingham Commission, on the contrary, dedicated most of its investigative
work to the details of what had created such a productive environment in the big business
frontier of America. But as Robert F. Zeidel points out in his monograph on the
Dillingham Commission, “Even those who have recognized the breadth of the
commission's investigation have criticized its methodology, asserting that it was intended
to show the so-called new immigrants at their worst."119
But one of their major
conclusions presented in the reports by the Dillingham Commission did not, however,
support that intended objective. Far from it:
It is undoubtedly true that the expansion in all branches of industry
between thirty and forty years ago was primarily responsible for
the original entrance of the southern and eastern Europeans into the
operating forces of the mines and manufacturing establishments.
They were found, from the standpoint of the employer, to be
tractable and uncomplaining. Although they were possessed of a
low order of industrial efficiency, it was possible to use them in a
more or less satisfactory way. Upon the ascertainment of this fact
by the employers and with the realization of the existence of this
large source of labor supply, a reversal of conditions occurred. The
industrial expansion which had originally caused the immigration
of southern and eastern Europeans was in turn stimulated by their
119
Robert F. Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham Commission, 1900-
1927 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004), 5.
88
presence, and new industrial undertakings were doubtless projected
on the assumption of the continuing availability of this class of
labor. At the same time, the influx of southern and eastern
Europeans brought about conditions of employment under which
there was no sufficient inducement to the races of Great Britain
and northern Europe to continue to seek work in those industries. It
may be said, therefore, that industrial expansion was the original
reason for the employment of races of recent immigration, but that
after the availability of this labor became known further industrial
expansion was stimulated by the fact of this availability, the
original cause thus becoming largely an effect of the conditions it
had created.120
Inherent in the Dillingham Commission’s statement is the fact that capital and
labor essentially collaborated in an informal but symbiotic manner to provide the impetus
for America’s industrial revolution at least during the period of 1870 - 1920. It is
difficult to understate such a conclusion, especially after the Dillingham Commission
produced forty-two volumes of at least five years’ investigated data. To assure the
importance of such a statement it is worth repeating what is the keynote sentence: “after
the availability of this (immigrant) labor became known further industrial expansion was
stimulated by the fact of this availability, the original cause thus becoming largely an
effect of the conditions it had created.”121
Coal Production and Ethnic Composition of the Work Force
Coal was the primary source of power during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early
twentieth centuries. It was essential as the energy supply if one wished to use the methods
and practices of production invented by the industrial revolution. Oil and electricity
120
U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission, Vol.1,
(Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911), 494. 121
Ibid., 494.
89
would eventually replace it in certain industries but for this period there were no other
efficient sources as coal. Fortunately, it was a resource readily available in the United
States in abundant and seemingly unlimited quantity.122
As in England and earlier pioneers of coal extracting, surface diggings eventually
led to tunnels, shaft development, and mines in order to excavate the precious fuel from
the depths of the earth. The process became more and more labor intensive as the
demands for coal continued to rise during this period. What started out as an artisan's
procedure of pick and shovel evolved into one that demanded more unskilled labor with
the introduction of machinery. Ironically, machines did not replace labor, but in fact
increased its demand as each step in the process was intensified in order to increase
production:
The use of machines, therefore, rendered unnecessary the securing
of experienced miners in large numbers ... In other words, it was
possible to employ unskilled and inexperienced labor to meet
demands arising from the rapidly increasing expansion in coal
mining and, under these conditions, more and more reliance was
placed on the immigrant seeking work in this country... The
inexperienced immigrant was more and more used to follow the
machines where machine mining could he employed and to do the
rough and unskilled work in hand-mining localities.123
In the efficiency of industrial evolution, unskilled workers were given specific
tasks to perform in order to get the optimal results for the overall production of the
product. In the coal-mining jobs for unskilled workers they were sub-specialists such as:
122
William McInnes et al, ed. The Coal Resources of the World, (Toronto, Canada: Morang & Co. Ltd,
1913). xix - xxix. Note: According to this geological report, United States had a reserve of 3.8 trillion tons
of coal. This was far more than all of Europe (east and west) which had a reserve of 784 billion tons. 123
U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Immigrants in Industries, Part 1 Bituminous Coal Mining, Vol.1,
(Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911.), 658.
90
tipple man, trapper, cager's helper, car coupler, car oiler, mule driver, motor trip rider,
check puller, slack shoveler, slate picker, pick carrier, bottom laborer, outside laborer,
spragging, and door tender.124
But all these tasks were not part of the old method.
Originally, one skilled miner would have done most of these tasks.
Coal was first excavated in the Appalachian Mountains. With the availability of
an immigrant labor supply and the increasing demand for energy (home and industry),
coal mining operations expanded westward. The immigrant labor supply, among other
positive characteristics, was very mobile as its focus was primarily on employment and
immigrants readily moved to places of opportunity. In fact such development of the
industry and expansion into new territories, according to the Dillingham Commission
report, would not have been possible without such a mobile supply of immigrant labor.
The Commission makes the point by concluding with an example that:
In considering the effects of immigration, the conclusion is irresistible that
the employment of immigrant labor has made possible the remarkable
expansion of coal mining in the Middle West. Whatever may have been
the other effects of the coming of the recent immigrant to the bituminous
fields of the Middle West, it is clear that the increase in the output of coal
within a comparatively short period would not have been possible without
resort to this source of labor supply. The operators would not have been
able to secure miners or laborers to develop the territory, and to the
employment of recent immigrants the rapid growth of the industry is to be
attributed. This fact is at once made evident by a comparison of the
increase in output and in number of employees in Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois during recent years.125
124
U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Immigrants in Industries, Part 1 Bituminous Coal Mining, Vol.1,
(Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911.), 626. 125
U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Immigrants in Industries, Part 1 Bituminous Coal Mining, Vol.1,
(Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911.),661.
91
Figure 11 Coal Production United States versus Germany and United Kingdom
Source: J.H. Ronaldson, Monograph on Mineral Resources with Special
Reference to the British Empire, (London: John Murray, 1920), 9.
92
Source: Issac A. Hourich, Ph.D. Immigration and Labor, The Economic Aspects of European
Immigration to the United States. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912), 105.
Figure 12 Relative Per Capita Production: Coal versus Agriculture
93
The astounding productive record of coal excavation would not have been
possible without the arrival of immigrants who were willing to accept
employment in coal mining:
Table 11 Ethnic Composition of Coal Mining Work Force by Areas: 1899
Table 12 Ethnic Composition of the Workforce in American Coal Industry
Racial Composition of the Workforce Number of Percent
in America's Coal Industry - 1899 Employees of Total
One or both parents are foreign born 213,330 64.41
Native Whites born of Native Parents 117,863 35.59
Colored/Negro 29,242 8.83
Total 331,193 100Source: U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session,
Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in Industries
Part 1:Bituminous Coal Mining,
(Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1911) 253, 589, 374-375.
Number of Percent Number of Percent Number of Percent Number of Percent Number of Percent
Employees to Total Employees of Total Employees of Total Employees of Total Employees of Total
Native White (native parents) 36,297 20.11 34,352 40.91 5,691 41.4 6,003 32.04 35,520 55.93
Native Born (foreign parents) 36,716 20.34 16,926 20.16 1,620 11.79 2,717 14.5 2,628 4.14
Foreign White 105,845 58.65 30,143 35.9 4,334 31.53 9,433 50.34 2,968 4.67
Colored/Negro 1,616 0.9 2,547 3.03 2,101 15.28 584 3.12 22,394 35.26
Total 180,474 100 83,968 100 13,746 100 18,737 100 63,510 100
One or both parents
are foreign born 142,561 78.99 47,069 56.06 5,954 43.31 12,150 64.84 5,596 8.81
Native Whites 36,297 20.11 34,352 40.91 5,691 41.4 6,003 32.04 35,520 55.93
Colored/Negro 1,616 0.9 2,547 3.03 2,101 15.28 584 3.12 22,394 35.26
Total 180,474 100 83,968 100 13,746 100 18,737 100 63,510 100
Source: U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in Industries, Part 1:Bituminous Coal Mining,
(Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1911) 253, 589, 374-375.
Racial Composition of the Work Force in the Bitumuonous Coal Mines by States, 1899.
Middle West SouthPennsylvania
and Ohio
Illinois, Indiana Kansas and
Oklahoma
94
0
50,000
100,000
150,000
200,000
250,000
Born of Foreign Parents Born of Native White Parents
Negro
N
u
m
b
e
r
o
f
W
o
r
k
e
r
s
Source: U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration
Commission: Immigrants in Industries Part 1:Bituminous Coal
Mining, (Washington, D.C: GPO, 1911) 253, 589, 374-375.
Racial Composition of the Workforce in America's Coal Industry - 1899
Figure 13 Ethnic Composition of the Workforce in America's Coal Industry in 1899
Iron Ore Mining and the Ethnic Composition of the Work Force
One of the essential ingredients in producing iron and steel was iron ore. The
intense, steady, and stable heat generated by coal increased the level of productivity of
creating the basic iron product. Charcoal had been the original energy source but it was
depleted with the overuse of the forests. In colonial America, iron ore was often found on
surface areas, especially swampy environments, and could be shoveled with little or no
excavation of the earth surface.
The iron makers in America soon discovered that there was even a more abundant
supply below the surface. The discovery of iron ore and the making of the basic metal
95
usually labeled as 'pig iron' (because the melted iron poured into a sand bottom and its
shapes reminded them of piglets) was an important advancement in America's industrial
development.
Iron became an essential product not only for the industrial revolution but also for
the agrarian revolution. Wooden implements which were fragile and had a short life of
use were replaced by iron ones that were stronger and lasted for a considerably longer
time. In the industrial revolution the first railroad lines were made with iron. The first
innovative manufacturing machinery of steel, which also made the transition away from
wood, were more durable, longer lasting, and stronger.
Table 13 Ethnic Composition in the Workforce of Iron Ore Mining: 1899
Racial Composition in Iron
Ore Mining in the United States Number of Percent Number of Percent Number of Percent
1899 Employees of Total Employees of Total Employees of Total
Native White (native parents) 58 2.5 60 3.51 907 25.46
Native (born of foreign parents) 257 11.07 100 5.85 0 0
Foreign 2004 86.34 1548 90.63 203 5.7
Colored/Negro 2 0.09 0 0 2452 68.84
TOTAL 2321 100 1708 100 3562 100
Source: U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission:
Immigrants in Industries, Part 18: Iron Ore Mining , (Washington, D.C., 1911) 510, 549, 563.
Michigan AlabamaMinnesota
96
0
500
1,000
1,500
2,000
2,500
3,000
3,500
4,000
4,500
Born of Foreign Parents Native White Negro
N
u
m
b
e
r
o
f
W
o
r
k
e
r
s
Source: U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission:Immigrants in Industries, Part 18: Iron Ore Mining (Washington, D.C.:GPO, 1911) 510, 549, 563.
Racial Composition of the Workforce In America's
Three Leading States in Iron Ore Mining - 1899
Figure 14 Ethnic Composition of the Iron Ore Mining Workforce:1899
Iron and Steel Production and the Ethnic Composition of the Work Force
When Alexander Hamilton outlined how the new country could free itself from
the mercantile system of Britain and become a major economic power in the world, he
gave a basic blueprint that would take years to complete. One major indicator that the
United States finally achieved that goal in the late nineteenth century was the major
increase in the production of iron.
Iron was the base metal from which almost all things were made possible in the
industrial development of America. More importantly, the decrease in importation of
iron, as in all economic equations, decreased the cost of the product and no longer held
America economic hostage to foreign countries. In the momentous leap in iron
production the United States was able to have a surplus sufficient enough to export,
despite the home demands for the product.
97
The trade balance placed America in a favorable manufacturing position as other
countries relied on imported iron in order to compete on the world market. It was not
until 1893 (more than 100 years after Hamilton's suggestions and Congress's vision) that
America turned the corner with a positive iron trade balance.126
By 1899 trade balance for
iron was shifted into a positive direction with a recorded $90,600,000, or a shift of 39
million dollars in the period of just nineteen years.
Table 14 United States Transformation to a Positive Trade Balance: 1880-1889
YEAR Exports Imports Trade Balance
1880 $15,400,000 $64,000,000 ($48,600,000)
1885 $16,600,000 $31,100,000 ($14,500,000)
1890 $27,000,000 $44,500,000 ($17,500,000)
1895 $35,100,000 $25,800,000 $9,300,000
1899 $105,700,000 $15,100,000 $90,600,000
Source: F. W. Taussig, "The Iron Industry in the United States,"
The Quarterly Jourrnal of Economics , Vol. 14, No. 4 (1900), 475-508.
United States and its Shift to a Positive Trade Balance
in Iron Imports and Exports: 1880-1899
The achievement of a positive trade balance in iron was due largely to the
increase in the production of pig iron. It is the base product that was used for conversion
into other iron products and steel and which recorded an amazing increase in output in
tandem with the increase in immigrant labor. It is evident that the post-Civil War era,
with the introduction of the Bessemer and Open Hearth systems into America's iron
industries, witnessed an astounding increase in pig iron. The two major systems,
however, needed a substantial increase in unskilled labor to feed, maintain, operate, and
126
F. W. Taussig, "The Iron Industry in the United States," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 14, no. 4
(Aug., 1900), pp. 475-508.
98
clean the operations in order to effectively increase production. In the forty-year period
of 1830 -1860, 1.8 million gross tons of pig iron was produced. In the forty-year period
of 1870- 1910, the era which this thesis is examining, 55.8 million gross tons of pig iron
was produced.127
This not only made the value of iron an important trade export but it also raised
the United States to the top position in the world. In 1850, America was trailing Great
Britain, Germany, and France; by 1898 America had overtaken them all.
Table 15 Iron Production of United States, Great Britain, and Germany: 1870-1898
Gross Increase % Increase Gross Increase % Increase Gross Increase % Increase
Tons Over Prior over Prior Tons Over Prior over Prior Tons Over Prior over Prior
YEAR (000) Year (000) Year (000) Year (000) Year (000) Year (000) Year
1870 5,963 1,665 1,391
1875 6,365 402 6.74 2,024 359 21.56 2,029 638 45.87
1880 7,749 1,384 21.74 3,835 1,811 89.48 2,729 700 34.5
1885 7,415 -334 -4.3 4,044 209 5.45 3,687 958 35.1
1890 7,904 489 6.59 9,203 5,159 127.57 4,658 971 26.34
1895 7,703 -201 -2.54 9,446 243 2.64 5,464 806 17.3
1896 8,563 860 11.16 8,623 -823 -8.71 6,375 911 16.67
1897 8,817 254 2.97 9,653 1,030 11.94 6,864 489 7.67
1898 8,681 -136 -1.54 11,774 2,121 21.97 7,216 352 5.13
Source : F.W. Taussig, "The Iron Industry in the United States", The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
Vol. 14, No. 2 (1900), pp. 143-170.
Iron Production of United States, Great Britain, and Germany: 1870-1898
Germany.United States.Great Britain
Iron itself had limited uses; but when converted into steel it was essential for the
commercial changes of the industrial revolution. Steel rails not only reduced the
maintenance of the old iron rail system but helped to accelerate the building of thousands
of new miles. Plates and sheets were necessary for the automobile and tin can industries,
127
Peter Temin, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: The M.I.T. Press, 1964), 264-267.
99
as well as many others which needed steel sheeting to create and produce their products.
Structural steel was necessary for the building of multi-story buildings, skyscrapers, and
bridges, which transformed America's towns into modern cities.
The following table shows the astonishing growth in the production of steel
products. From 1887-1920, a staggering 27.1 million tons (or 54.2 billion pounds) were
produced in America's steel mills.
Table 16 Steel Production in America: 1887-1920
Andrew J. Carnegie and his steel company, along with other steel companies,
were actively involved in hiring immigrant labor. The following statistics validated the
above statement. The recruitment of foreign labor enabled Carnegie steel to embark on its
program of expansion. Through mergers and acquisitions, and thanks to the availability
of an immigrant labor supply that was willing to work in such industrial conditions,
capitalization was available to create the United States Steel Corporation. United States
Steel eventually became the world's largest steel producer and Carnegie became a famous
figure in America's industrial history.
Iron and Plates and Nail Wire Structural All Other Total
Year steel Rails sheets plate rods shapes Rolled Products Gross tons.
1887 2,139,640 603,355 308,432 0 0 2,184,279 5,235,706
1900 2,385,682 1,794,528 70,245 846,291 815,161 3,575,526 9,487,443
1910 3,636,031 4,955,484 45,294 2,241,830 2,266,890 8,475,750 21,621,279
1920 2,604,116 9,337,680 20,577 3,136,907 3,306,748 13,941,835 32,347,863
Tonnage Increase 464,476 8,734,325 -287,855 3,136,907 3,306,748 11,757,556 27,112,157
Percent Increase 21.71 1,447.63 -93.33 ND ND 538.28 517.83
Tonnage Produced 10,765,469 16,691,047 444,548 6,225,028 6,388,799 28,177,390 68,692,291
Source : American Iron and Steel Institute, Annual Statistical Report for 1920
(New York: American Iron and Steel Institute, 1921), 34.
Total Production of Finished Rolled Iron and Steel in Gross Tons : 1887-1920
1887 to 1920 Comparitive Growth in Production
1887 to 1920 Total Production
100
Table 17 shows the ethnic composition of its employees in 1907 during the period
of time when Carnegie began his business strategy of acquisitions, mergers, and buy-
outs. At the time, 69.52 per cent of the workforce was comprised of foreign labor.
Table 17 Ethnic Employee Composition of Carnegie Steel Company in 1907
Number of Percentage
Workers of Labor Force
American Born - total 6,036 25.86
White 2,316 9.92
Colored 331 1.42
Foreign Born - total 16,224 69.52
Teuton 1,820 7.8
Celt 1,401 6
Slav 13,003 55.72
Other Races 1,077 4.61
TOTAL 23,337 100
Source: John A. Fitch, The Steel Workers, The Pittsburgh Survey.
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1910), 349.
Racial Composition of Labor Force
Carnegie Steel Company - 1907
Carnegie was not alone. The entire steel industry came to rely on immigrant labor. The
ethnic composition throughout the iron and steel industry mirrored the statistics of the
Carnegie Steel Company.
101
Table 18 Ethnic Composition of the Iron and Steel Workforce in the United States: 1880-1900
Number of Percent Number of Percent Number of Percent
Employees of Total Employees of Total Employees of Total
Native White (native parents) 72,931 63.67 44,813 31.43 94,228 32.78
Native Born (foreign parents) 34,240 24.01 77,665 27.02
Foreign 41,608 36.33 57,754 40.5 103,214 35.91
Negro 5,778 4.05 12,320 4.29
Total 114,539 100.00 142,585 100.00 287,427 100.00
Foreign and Native Born of Foreign Parents 41,608 36.33 91,994 64.52 180,879 62.93
Native Whites 72,931 63.67 44,813 31.43 94,228 32.78
Negro na 0.00 5,778 4.05 12,320 4.29
Total 114,539 100.00 142,585 100.00 287,427 100.00
Source: U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission : Immigrants in Industries,
Part 2: Iron and Steel Manufacturing ( Washington, D.C., 1911), 21-23. [information compiled from U.S. Census]
Iron and Steel Workers in the United States by Nativity: 1880 - 1900
1890 19001880
Figure 15 Iron and Steel Workers in the United States by Nativity; 1880 to 1900
From 1880 to 1900 the number of workers more than doubled, driven by the
needs of the industry, with an increase of 150.94 per cent or 172,888 workers. Of that
increase, immigrant labor and their immediate descendents increased in the workforce by
0
50,000
100,000
150,000
200,000
250,000
300,000
18801890
1900
N
u
m
b
e
r
o
f
W
o
r
k
e
r
s
Source: U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in Industries, Part 2: Iron and Steel Manufacturing (Washington, D.C., GPO,1911), 21-23.
Iron and Steel Workers in the United States by Nativity: 1880 - 1900
Negro
Native Whites
Born of Foreign Parents
102
148.06 per cent or 139,271. From 1870 - 1900, they became the majority (62.93 per
cent) of the workforce at a time and represented 80.5 percent of the increase in additional
workers. At the same time production of all forms of fabricated steel increased from 5.2
to 9.4 millions gross ton. The increase continued into 1920 achieving a level of 32.3
millions tons.128
Ironically, these production achievements came at a time when Congress
began to enact laws restricting immigration based on national origin quotas. In 1924, the
“Golden Door” was closed to the very people who had comprised the major source of
laborers in the coal, iron, and steel industries. The doors were golden to immigrants
because in the symbiotic relationship with industry their lives were transformed for the
most part as land laborers and shopkeepers to capitalists themselves. They were elevated
into a higer economic status, in America and their homeland.
128
U.S. Congress, 61st, 2d Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in Industries,
Part 2: Iron and Steel Manufacturing (Washington, D.C., 1911), 21-23.
103
Chapter 8
SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP: THE BENEFIT TO THE NEW IMMIGRANT
The immigrants in their venture to another country and culture faced unparallel
obstacles in their travel and settlement. The trip alone from various sectors of southern
and eastern Europe offered perilous, dangerous, and unsafe conditions, which could end
their lives or the lives of their families. The acclimation process in the new country
presented the immigrants with a series of challenges. They found it difficult to assimilate
into the culture with little or no knowledge of the language. Predominantly employment
opportunities for the unskilled immigrant laborer were those that only needed physical
endurance, strength, and stamina. The living conditions in most of the industrial cities
were substandard, unhealthy, and dirty. In the coal, iron, and steel industries, the
immigrant's possibility of never seeing their families again due to dangers in their
employment was above average.
So why would the immigrant chance such a major disruption of life to venture to
a new land, a life to which they knew would never return? Why would they chance a
new interdependence on an economic system of which for which they had no previous
skills? Why would they disengage themselves from a culture which had centuries of
identification to enter a new one with which they had no heritage connection? Why
would they increase their chance of never seeing again their loved ones, wives, children,
parents, and elders? Why would they forge a new symbiotic relationship with an
industrial environment, which placed themselves and their families in considerably
greater hardships than they were used to?
104
This chapter will show that such a new symbiosis with industrial America offered
monetary rewards beyond their wildest dreams. Those monetary rewards would benefit
not only themselves but their families as well. It would also benefit their condition in the
village or town from where they came, as well as economy of the society they left. It
would benefit their own economic quality of life in their new country compared to what
they left in the old country. It would transform many of them from poor agrarian laborers
to property-owning capitalists, with liquid assets in banks.
Letters by immigrants to their native lands were a major means of communicating
those potential economic elevations of anyone wishing to take the chance, the gamble,
and the challenge. The return of immigrants who left poor and came back to retrieve
their families of course impressed the natives. As Marcus Lee Hansen, notes in his book
The Atlantic Migration, 1907-1860:
Letters, remittances and legacies attested that emigrants
were making a success, but the most convincing and un-
answerable evidence was the reappearance of the expatriate
himself. Sometimes he returned in so short a space of time
as to be scarcely credible, as when the emigrant of one spring
came back the following winter with earnings sufficient to
transport the rest of his family.129
According to the Immigration Commission reports of 1911:
The word comes again and again that "work is abundant and wages
princely in America." In an Italian village near Milan the
Immigration Bureau's inspectors found an English-speaking peasant
acting as receiver and distributer of letters from America. Letters are
sent from village to village by persons having friends in the United
129
Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 54.
105
States, and one letter may influence in this way a score of
peasants.130
Immigrant Banks
One of the peculiar financial institutions which began to appear in America were
those created and supported by the earnings of the new immigrants. They became known
as immigrant banks, which came into being for a variety of reasons. A major one was the
language barrier, which kept immigrants away from the front door of established
American financial institutions. Another was the failue of those institutions to cater to the
needs of immigrants other than the depositing and withdrawl of their funds. The
immigrants distrust of placing their money in the control of people from another culture
was another factor.
The Dillingham Commision in its investigations found that there were 2,625
immigrant banks, which they could locate, throughout the United States. In their
investigation they found that many of them were closely connected with an ethnic group.
Many of the immigrant banks were operated as part of an enterprise or business which
could also serve the needs of the immigrant. Such business enterprises that were
conducted along with the immigrant banks included: real estate agencies, insurance and
collecting agencies, notarial offices, labor agencies, postal substations, book, jewelry, and
foreign novelty stores; saloon keepers, grocers, butchers, and fruit venders; general
merchants, wholesalers and importers, barbers, boarding bosses or room renters,
130
U.S. Congress, Senate, 61st, 3d sess., doc. 748. Reports of the Industrial Commission. Emigration
Conditions in Europe (Washington, DC: GPO, 1911), 57.
106
printers, pool-room keepers, furniture dealer, and undertakers.131
Such establishments
offered the immigrant additional services, such as writing letters to their families, reading
such responding letters, interpretation and completion of official forms required by the
federal or local governments, and job referrals.
Established financial institutions were also used by the immigrants once they
began to learn the native language and became more comfortable with dealing with such
banks. The failure, as well as perpetrated frauds by some immigrant banks, also helped to
hasten the immigrants move to such facilities. As the Dillingham Commission in one of
its main conclusion stated, "Immigrant banks are usually unauthorized concerns,
privately owned, irresponsibly managed, and seldom subject to any efficient supervision
or examination." 132
Regulations were eventually legislated as bankruptcies, fraud, and
absconding with immigrant savings made the major ones less reliable and untrustworthy
even for the immigrants.
What had developed, in this symbiotic relationship with the American economy,
was the creation of new wealth among those who previously had little or none. This new
wealth, whether or not they intended to stay in America or return home, gave them the
financial power they had never previously possessed. This wealth was expendable above
the necessities of life with which they could support their families, acquire new
possessions, relieve old debts, and invest for future returns.
131
Ibid.,416. 132
Ibid., 301.
107
Remittances
Remittances to the countries abroad was not new to this period in American
history. Since the earliest colonial settlers, such form of wealth sharing by an immigrant,
indenture servant, or colonist to their home of origin was an integral part of their lives. It
remains the same to this day as the wave of new immigrants monthly send millions of
dollars to such countries as Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Phllippines, among
others.
The millions of dollars that were remitted to the European countries by the
immigrants provides some astounding figures. From January 1907 to June 1909, for
example, a total of $243,878,478 or a little more than $20 million dollars a month was
sent to the following European countries: Austria-Hungary, Finland, Germany, Italy,
Russia, Balkan and Scandinavian States. In addition, remittance to other European
countries and Asian nations totaled $5,615,583.
Immigrants also transmitted their funds through international money orders.
From 1900 to 1909 a total of $419 million dollars by international money orders were
sent to European countries. Some of the leading countries, with the figure in millions of
dollars following the name in parenthesis, were Great Britain (82), Austria (41), Russia
(41), Germany (34), and Italy (28).
Remittance not only served to pay for immigrants families to come to America
but were also instrumental in boosting the economy of their native land with their
infusion of needed cash. Immigrants were able to pay off past debts, buy property,
support extended families, and generally improve their lives. The possibilities of
108
remittances provided a lure for other immigrants who knowingly were prepared to suffer
harsh working conditions where "...the long shifts meant greater earnings." This would
enable them to send their new wealth to families back home.133
It may well have been
one of the major stimuli for the recruitment of immigration labor to America. As Hansen
points out in The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1869, "From America came a swelling stream
of remittances that firmly established the principle that "emigration begets emigration."134
Property
Whether or not the immigrant laborer stayed in America or was merely a "bird of
passage" seeking to earn enough money to improve his economic well being in the old
country, property was, and had always been, his most important asset.135
The ownership
of property was a major social, as well as an economic, driving force in the immigrants
life. Mark Wyman sums it up well in his book Return to Europe:
Thus the peasant, with mortgage payments which he could not
meet or with children for whom he could not provide an adequate
patrimony, saw himself face to face with an intolerable decline of
social status for himself or for his children; namely, reduction to
the position of a property less day laborer. This is the sting which
induces many a man among the Slovaks, the Poles, the Ruthenians,
to fare overseas or to send out his son to the new land from which
men come back with savings.136
133
June Granatir Alexander, Daily Life in Immigrant America, 1870-1920 ( Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), 141. 134
Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), 270. 135
Astride R. A Zolberg, Nation by Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 6. NOTE:
"bird of passage" was a generic name given to immigrants, thanks to the relatively cheap steamship tickets,
whose only goal was to work in America but eventually return to their native land. They provided an
abundant supply of labor to America that usually coincided with the business cycles. 136
Mark Wyman, Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 37.
109
Such traditional pressures were not lost on the immigrant who came to
stay in America. Ethnic enclaves were the norm as those who did stay usually
migrated toward those clusters of cultures that were most in line with theirs. Once
established, the purchase of property, regardless of size, became one of their
primary goals. An unskilled laborer was relatively the same status as a landless
peasant in their country of native origin.
For the new immigrant who settled in urban America, the ownership of a home was
their means to property wealth since land was scarce or to expensive for their budgets.
The Dillingham Commission studied the home ownership of immigrants and non-
immigrants in the following cities: Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee,
New York, and Philadelphia. The data collected in their study gave a decided edge to the
recent new immigrants. Of the 10,526 families researched only 5.7 percent of the native-
born owned their homes, of the native-born of foreign parents 11.0 percent owned their
homes, and of the foreign-born, 10.4 percent owned their homes. The symbiotic
relationship with American industry was providing the rewards they were seeking.
Pauperism was slowly being left behind. It was also a testimony to the immigrant’s
frugality and eagerness to be Americans, considering that the native born had
considerably more time to accumulate wealth with which they could purchase a home.137
137
U.S. Congress, Senate, 61st, 2d sess., doc. 338., Reports of the Industrial Commission. Immigrants in
Cities, vI.(Washington, DC: GPO, 1911), 105.
110
The New Entrepreneurs
The immigrants entered the world of American commerce usually as small business
operators. In industrial towns there was a tendency for ethnic enclaves to be served by a
business owned and operated by one of their culture or from their country. In major cities
where the opportunity existed to serve a greater diverse population, the immigrant had the
opportunity to cater to a much wider range of customers.
The opportunities to start a business were significantly greater in this period
because the population of urban America was accelerating due to immigration from its
rural areas as well as foreign countries. In a survey conducted by the Dillingham
Commissions field staff regarding the employment of the head of households in six major
cities, interesting statistics emerged about immigrants operating businesses for profit. Of
the 2,337 male-heads of households surveyed, 420 of those were in business for profit. Of
that number only 18 were native born of native fathers. The remaining were either native-
born of foreign fathers while the majority, 397, were foreign born. The Syrians led the
group with 139 in business for profit, followed by Hebrews, Italians, Germans,
Bohemians and Moravians, Magyars, and Slovaks.
The same entrepreneurial spirit was evident in those communities general known
as industrial town because they were located contiguously to the major place of
employment for the populace. In one of the communities (designated as Community A)
that was located in the bituminous coal region, small businesses emerged, owned and
operated by local immigrants. The field investigators of the Dillingham Commission
uncovered some 17 small businesses that included bankers, barbers, butchers, contractors,
111
grocers, lumbermen, merchants, photographers, and steamship agent. The range of 11
ethnic groups operating such businesses included Hebrews, Italians, Poles, Swedes,
Slovaks, and Syrians.138
The immigrants, regardless of racial or ethnic background or societal status in
their country of origin, began to reward themselves with their expendable wealth by
entering into business. They now possessed land, properties, savings, remittance power,
surplus wages and businesses, which made them an active player in the American
capitalist economy. And, in addition, with public education opportunities available to
their children, the progenitor traditions of their old country no longer held them, or their
siblings, captive to the land or family. They were free to seek unlimited opportunities in
the new country unencumbered by the economic restrictions in their former countries
held by the rich and powerful; sometimes for centuries. The change in their economic
status changed them socially, politically, economically, and culturally.
138
U.S. Congress, Senate, 61st, 2d sess, doc. 633., Reports of the Immigration Commission. Immigrants
in Industry, Bituminous Coal Mining, vI (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1911), 517.
112
Chapter 9
CONCLUSION
Between 1870 and 1920, America made its transformation from post-colonial
agrarian communities to a modern industrial society. Its record of achievements in this
transformation is a thing of wonderment. Although preceded by the initial, but slow
growing, industrial development following the Civil War, America was able to exceed
the production records of leading European countries. Those countries, which also had
natural resources and a century head start, were relegated to a lower global ranking with
regards to the coal, iron, and steel production.
As cited in this thesis, primary and secondary sources are available to quantify the
increasing productivity beyond the average norm during this period of 1870-1920. Also
with these primary and secondary sources the immigration inflow into the critical
industries of coal, iron, and steel has also been documented with the use of a research
methodology overseen by the Dillingham Commission.
This thesis has presented the data and facts that there was a direct correlation
between the increased growth of immigrant labor in the workforce and a parallel growth
in the coal, iron, and steel industry. A commercial and political agenda for the
recruitment of immigrant labor was established from the very early days of the new
Republic. Particularly in this period of 1870-1920, a partnership of commerce and
immigration was formed that was a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. This
relationship helped both the entrepreneur of the coal, iron, and steel industries and the
immigrants to achieve their respective economic goals. In this period because of
113
demographic factors in Europe and America, a major source of labor power was drawn
largely from southern and eastern European immigrants. The creation of such a
symbiotic relationship not only benefitted industry and immigrants but also produced
products that benefitted the rest of the American populace.
A symbiotic relationship was a perfect partnership for that time and place, the
capitalist had an available supply of labor-individuals whose attributes made them
perform well under the most hazardous conditions created by the increasing utilization of
machinery, without complaint, and in conformity with management's wishes. It was a
labor supply that was an asset, which helped the capitalists to expand the production in
the coal, iron, and steel industries, guaranteeing an attractive return on their investment. It
was a return that made possible profits that were used for further investment in the
advancement and expansion of the coal, iron, and steel industries.
Immigrants also profited in this symbiotic relationship. They left their native
countries where for generations, and even centuries, hope of extracting themselves from
the quagmire of poverty was minimal. They came to America and offered their labor as
an asset to the formation of a symbiotic relationship, which benefitted industry as well
them and their families. The immigrant's economic well being, in the relationship,
accelerated beyond their wildest dreams, as many later became capitalists with their
increased savings, property holdings, business investments, and ability to share their
wealth with others in America and in their native land.
The symbiotic relationship also proved to be a bountiful partnership for America.
The products produced were necessary for the phenomenal economic growth of America
114
in this period. It also transformed America into a global economic and political power,
which made it a leading player in the shaping our modern world.
115
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Slavishak, Edward Steven "Bodies of Work: Industrial Workers' Bodies in Pittsburgh,
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