Abstract
In 1980, Joseph Loguidice, an elderly Italian-American from Chicago, sat down to give his life story to an interviewer. His first and most vivid childhood recollection was of a race riot that had occurred on the city’s near north side. Wagons full of policemen with ‘peculiar hats’ streamed into his neighbourhood. But the ‘one thing that stood out in my mind’, Loguidice remembered after six decades, was ‘a man running down the middle of the street hollering … “I’m White, I’m White! ” ’ After first taking him for an African-American, Loguidice soon realised that the man was a white coal-handler covered in dust. He was screaming for his life, fearing that ‘people would shoot him down’. He had, Loguidice concluded, ‘got caught up in … this racial thing’.1
Such a sprawling essay would be impossible without help from students and colleagues, especially regarding sources. Thanks go to David Montgomery, Steven Rosswurm, Susan Porter Benson, Randy McBee, Neil Gotanda, Peter Rachleff, Noel Ignatiev, the late Peter Tamony, Louise Edwards, Susan Hirsch, Isaias McCaffery, Rudolph Vecoli, Hyman Berman, Sal Salerno, Louise O’Brien, Liz Pleck, Mark Leff, Toby Higbie, Micaela di Leonardo and the Social History Group at the University of Illinois.
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Notes
The epigraph is from John A. Fitch, The Steel Workers (New York, 1910), 147. Interview with Joseph Loguidice, 25 July 1980, Italians in Chicago Project, copy of transcript, Box 6, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN.
See, for example, Gerald Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers: Their Impact on American Labor Radicalism (New York, 1973);
C.T. Husbands, ‘Editor’s Introductory Essay’, to Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (White Plains, NY, 1976), xxix.
Robert Orsi, ‘The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned “Other” in Italian Harlem, 1920–1990’, American Quarterly, 44 (September 1992), 335;
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York and London, 1986), 64–5;
Gary Gerstle, ‘Working Class Racism: Broaden the Focus’, International Labor and Working Class History, 44 (1993), 38–9.
Sombart, No Socialism, 27–28; Stanford M. Lyman, ‘Race Relations as Social Process: Sociology’s Resistance to a Civil Rights Orientation’, in Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr, Race In America: The Struggle for Equality (Madison, 1993), 374–83; see also Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 15–17, for useful complications on this score;
Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, 1963);
Barbara Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants (Cambridge, MA, 1956);
Gloria A. Marshall, ‘Racial Classification: Popular and Scientific’, in Sandra Harding, ed., The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1993), 123–4. On Park, race and ethnicity, see also Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 15–17; Stow Persons, Ethnic Studies at Chicago, 1905–1945 (Urbana, IL, 1987), 602.
For historical invocations of ‘ethnicity’ to explain situations experienced at the time as racial, in otherwise brilliant works, see Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley, 1990), 79, and
Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity; Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, 1986), 38–9. See also
Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge, 1988), and
David Theo Goldberg, ‘The Semantics of Race’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 15 (October 1992), esp. 554–5. The most devastating critique of the ‘cult of ethnicity’ remains Alexander Saxton’s review essay on Nathan Glazer’s Affirmative Discrimination, in Amerasia Journal, 4 (1977), 141–50. See also Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development (Ithaca, NY, 1986), esp. 46, n. 1.
We borrow ‘inbetween’ from Orsi, ‘Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People’, passim, and also from John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York, 1974), 169.
Herbert Gutman with Ira Berlin, ‘Class Composition and the Development of the American Working Class, 1840–1890’, in Gutman, Ira Berlin, eds, Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class (New York, 1987), 380–94, initiates vital debate on immigration and ‘remaking’ of the US working class over time.
Lawrence Glickman, ‘Inventing the “American Standard of Living”: Gender, Race and Working-Class Identity, 1880–1925’, Labor History, 34 (SpringSummer, 1993), 221–35;
David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (Urbana, 1981), 254;
Richard Williams, Hierarchical Structures and Social Value: The Creation of Black and Irish Identities in the United States (New York, 1990);
Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1993), 320.
On guinea’s history, see Roediger, ‘Guineas, Wiggers and the Dramas of Racialized Culture’, American Literary History (forthcoming). On post-1890 usages, see William Harlen Gilbert, Jr, ‘Memorandum Concerning the Characteristics of the Larger Mixed-Blood Islands of the United States’, Social Forces, 24 (March 1946), 442; Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1989), 6: 937–8; Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, eds, Dictionary of American Regional English (Cambridge and London, 1991), 2, 838; Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (New York, 1975), 234; and Peter J. Tamony, research notes on guinea, Tamony Collection, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia.
Tamony’s notes on hunky (or hunkie) speculate on links to honkie (or honky) and refer to the former as an ‘old labor term’. By no means did Hun refer unambiguously to Germans before the First World War. See e.g. Henry White, ‘Immigration Restriction as a Necessity’, American Federationist, 4 (June 1897), 67;
Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture and Steel (Pittsburgh, 1992), 216–17;
Stan Kemp, Boss Tom: The Annals of an Anthracite Mining Village (Akron, 1904), 258;
Thames Williamson, Hunky (New York, 1929), slipcover; Bell’s Out of this Furnace (Pittsburgh, 1976; originally 1941), 124–5; David Brody, Steelworkers in America (New York, 1969), 120–1; Josef Barton, Peasants and Strangers (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 20; Theodore Radzialowski, ‘The Competition for Jobs and Racial Stereotypes: Poles and Blacks in Chicago’, Polish American Studies, 22 (Autumn, 1976): n. 7; Sinclair, Singing Jailbirds (Pasadena, 1924). Remarks regarding Mill Hunky in the 1970s are based on Barrett’s anecdotal observations in and around Pittsburgh at the time. See also the Mill Hunk Herald, published in Pittsburgh throughout the late 1970s.
Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Garden City, NY, 1949), 93; John Bukowczyk, as cited in Barry Goldberg, ‘Historical Reflections on Transnationalism, Race, and the American Immigrant Saga’ (unpublished paper delivered at the Rethinking Migration, Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Historical Perspective Conferences, New York Academy of the Sciences, May, 1990).
Albert S. Broussard, ‘George Albert Flippin and Race Relations in a Western Rural Community’, The Midwest Review, 12 (1990), 15 n.42;
Gunther Peck, ‘Padrones and Protest: “Old” Radicals and “New” Immigrants in Bingham, Utah, 1905–1912’, Western Historical Quarterly (May 1993), 177;
Georgakas, Greek America at Work (New York, 1992), 12 and 16–17; Huginnie, Strikitos: Race, Class, and Work in the Arizona Copper Industry, 1870–1920 (forthcoming); Ruth Shonle Cavan and Katherine Howland Ranck, The Family and the Depression: A Study of One Hundred Chicago Families (Chicago, 1938), 38–39; Isaiah McCaffery, ‘An Esteemed Minority? Greek Americans and Interethnic Relations in the Plains Region’ (unpublished paper, University of Kansas, 1993); see also Donna Misner Collins, Ethnic Identification: The Greek Americans of Houston, Texas (New York, 1991), 201–11. For the African-American slang, Clarence Major, ed., From Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (New York, 1994), 213.
Donna Gabaccia, ‘The “Yellow Peril” and the “Chinese of Europe”: Italian and Chinese Labourers in an International Labour Market’ (unpublished paper, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, c. 1993).
George E. Cunningham, ‘The Italian: A Hindrance to White Solidarity in Louisiana, 1890–1898’, Journal of Negro History, 50 (January 1965), 34, includes the quotes.
Higharn, Strangers in the Land, 66; Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Urbana, 1987), 241;
DiLeonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience (Ithaca, 1984), 24 n.16; Georgakas, Greek Americans at Work, 16. See also Karen Brodkin Sacks’ superb, ‘How Did Jews Become White Folks?’ in Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek, eds, Race (forthcoming from Rutgers University Press).
Quoted in Brody, Steelworkers, 120; W. Lloyd Warner and J.O. Low, The Social System of the Modern Factory, the Strike (New Haven, 1947), 140;
Gershon Legman, The Horn Book (New York, 1964), 486–7; Anecdota Americana: Five Hundred Stories for the Amusement of Five Hundred Nations that Comprise America (New York, 1933), 98; Nathan Hurvitz, ‘Blacks and Jews in American Folklore’, Western Folklore, 33 (October, 1974), 304–7; Emory S. Borgardus, ‘Comparing Racial Distance in Ethiopia, South Africa, and the United States’, Sociology and Social Research, 52 (January 1968), 149–56; F. James Davis, Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park, PA, 1991), 161.
Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, 1980), 131, 143–44;
Mirian King and Steven Ruggles, ‘American Immigration, Fertility and Race Suicide at the Turn of the Century’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 20 (Winter, 1990), 347–69. On ‘stock’, see M.G. Smith’s ‘Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups in America: The View from Harvard’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 5 (January 1982), 17–18.
On race and naturalisation law, see David Roediger, ‘“Any Alien Being a Free White Person”: Naturalization, the State and Racial Formation in the U.S., 1790–1952’, in Ramon D. Gutierrez, ed., The State and the Construction of Citizenship in the Americas (forthcoming); D.O. McGovney, ‘Race Discrimination in Naturalization, Parts I–III’, Iowa Law Bulletin, 8 (March 1923); and
‘Race Discrimination in Naturalization, Part IV’, Iowa Law Bulletin, 8 (May 1923), 211–44;
Charles Gordon, ‘The Race Barrier to American Citizenship’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 93 (March 1945), 237–58;
Stanford Lyman, ‘The Race Question and Liberalism’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 5 (Winter 1991), 203–25. On the racial status of Finns, A. William Hoglund, Finnish Immigrants in America, 1908–1920 (Madison, 1960), 112–14; Peter Kivisto, Immigrant Socialists in the United States; The Case of Finns and the Left (Rutherford, NJ, 1984), 127–8. The whiteness of Armenians was also sometimes at issue, even if they lived on ‘the west side of the Bosphorus’. See In Re Halladjian et al, C.C.D. Mass., 174 Fed. 834 (1909), and U.S. v. Cartozian, 6 Fed. (2nd) (1925), 919.
U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204; Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven, 1988), 246–69. On the now white status of Asians, see ibid., and In Re Ah Yup, 1 Fed. Cas. 223 (1878); In Re Saito, C.C.D. Mass., 62 Fed. 126 (1894); Ozawa v. U.S., 260 U.S. 178 (1922); Williams, Hierarchical Structures; David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin, 1987); Sharon M. Lee, ‘Racial Classifications in the U.S. Census, 1890–1990’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 16 (January 1993), 79; Almaguer, Racial Faultlines, 55–7; George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American; Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (Oxford, 1993), 29–30.
Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston, 1957), 205; Cunningham. ‘Hindrance to White Solidarity’, 33–5, and esp. Jean Scarpaci, ‘A Tale of Selective Accommodation: Sicilians and Native Whites in Louisiana’, Journal of Ethnic Studies, 3 (1977), 44–5 notes the use of ‘dago clause’ to describe the provision. For the Irish, see Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York and London, 1991), 140–3, and Steven P. Erie, Rainbow’s End: IrishAmericans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985 (Berkeley, 1988), 25–66 and 96, Table 10.
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981), 250–3; Dyer, Idea of Race, 131; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 224–7.
Dyer, Idea of Race, 29–30 and 10–44, passim. Stephen Thernstrom, Ann Orlov and Oscar Handlin, eds, Harvard Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 379; quotations, Dyer, Idea of Race, 55, 66, 132.
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York, 1910); Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 223 and 226 for the quotes.
James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston, 1968).
Stephen Meyer III, The Five-Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany, 1981), 176–85; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 138, 261–2, and 316–17.
See also Dyer, Idea of Race, 42–4, 63, 130–1; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 317; John F. McClymer, ‘The Americanization Movement and the Education of the Foreign-Born Adult, 1914–1925’, in Bernard J. Weiss, ed., American Education and the European Immigrant, 1840–1940 (Urbana, 1982), 96–116;
Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in Working-class and Social History (New York, 1976), 7–8 and 22–5. On the curricula in factory-based Americanization programmes, see Gerd Korman, ‘Americanization at the Factory Gate’, Labor and Industrial Relations Review, 18 (1965), 396–419.
Quotes from ibid., 273 and 321. See also 300–30, passim. On the triumph of terror and exclusion and the consequent turn by leading liberal intellectuals to a defeatism regarding ‘race and ethnicity’, see Gary Gerstle, ‘The Protean Character of American Liberalism’, American Historical Review, 99 (October 1994), 1055–67.
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America (New York, 1992);
Michael Rogin, ‘“The Sword Became a Flashing Vision”: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation’, in Ronald Reagan: The Movie and Other Essays in Political Demonology (Berkeley, 1987), 190–235. ‘Incontestably mulatto’ comes from Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans (New York, 1983), 22; Zena Pearlstone, ed., Seeds of Prejudice: Racial and Ethnic Stereotypes in American Popular Lithography, 1830–1918 (forthcoming). See esp. Michael Rogin, ‘Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice’, Critical Inquiry, 18 (Spring 1992), 417–53; Rogin, ‘Making America Home: Racial Masquerade and Ethnic Assimilation in the Transition to Talking Pictures’, Journal of American History, 79 (December 1992), 1050–77.
Gads Hill Center, ‘May Report’ (1915) and ‘Minstrel Concert’ flyer. Thanks to Steven Rosswurm for identifying this source. See also Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill, 1993), esp. 14–30, quote 22; Lyman, ‘Assimilation-Pluralism Debate’, 191; Krause, Battle for Homestead, 218.
Kathleen Neils Conzen, David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta and Rudolph J. Vecoli, ‘The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 12 (Fall 1992), 27.
Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie; Black and White Immigrants since 1880 (Berkeley, 1980), 301–59; Bodnar, Simon and Weber, Lives of Their Own, 141–49; Suzanne Model, ‘The Effects of Ethnicity in the Workplace on Blacks, Italians, and Jews in 1910 New York’, Journal of Urban History, 16 (November 1989), 33–39.
See note 34. See also Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker (New York, 1969; orig. 1931), 149–81 and 221; and David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity and the American City, 1840–1925 (Cambridge, 1989), 211.
Harold M. Baron, The Demand for Black Labor (Cambridge, MA, n.d.), 21–3; Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 174–7; Edward Greer, ‘Racism and U.S. Steel’, Radical America, 10 (September–October 1976), 45–68;
Paul F. McGouldrick and Michael Tannen, Did American Manufacturers Discriminate against Immigrants before 1914?’, Journal of Economic History, 37 (September 1977), 723–46;
Allan Kent Powell, The Next Time We Strike: Labor in Utah’s Coal Fields, 1900–1933 (Logan, 1985), 92;
John R. Commons, ‘Introduction to Volumes III and IV’, in Commons et al., History of Labor in the United States, 4 vols (New York, 1966; orig. 1935), 3: xxv. Bodnar, Simon and Weber, Lives of Their Own, 5; quote, Montgomery, Fall, 243. See also Gordon, Edwards and Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge, 1982), 141–3.
Ross, as quoted in Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie, 25; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 120; Peter Speek, ‘Report on Psychological Aspect of the Problem of Floating Laborers’, United States Commission on Industrial Relations Papers (25 June 1915), 31. Thanks to Tobias Higbie for the citation. Huginnie, Strikitos (forthcoming); Georgakas, Greek Americans at Work, 17; John Bukowczyk, ‘The Transformation of Working-Class Ethnicity: Corporate Control, Americanization, and the Polish Immigrant Middle Class in Bayonne, New Jersey, 1915–1925’, in Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson, eds, Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor Struggles, 1835–1960 (Albany, NY, 1990), 291; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 173. See also, Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 281; Richard W. Steele, ‘No Racials: Discrimination Against Ethnics in American Defense Industry, 1940–42’, Labor History, 32 (Winter 1991), 66–90.
Jean Scarpaci, ‘Immigrants in the New South: Italians in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1880–1910’, Labor History, 16 (Spring 1975); Lieberson, Piece of the Pie, 346–50. The judgement changed briefly in African-Americans’ favour in the early 1920s. See Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–30 (Urbana, 1987), 126 and 162; Baron, Demandfor Black Labor, 22; quotes from Lieberson, Piece of the Pie, 348; Radzialowski, ‘The Competition for Jobs’, 16.
Lieberson, Piece of the Pie, 299–327; John Bodnar, Roger Simon and Michael Weber, ‘Blacks and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1930’, Journal of American History, 66:3 (1979), 554.
Steve Nelson, James R. Barrett and Rob Ruck, Steve Nelson, American Radical (Pittsburgh, 1981), 16.
Bell, Out of This Furnace, 124; Attaway, Blood on the Forge (New York, 1941; reprint 1987), 122–3.
Mark Wyman, Round Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, 1993), 10–12; see also
Michael J. Piore, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies (Ann Arbor, 1978), passim.
See Arnold Shankman, ‘This Menacing Influx: Afro-Americans on Italian Immigration to the South’, Mississippi Quarterly, 31 (Winter 1977–78), 82, 79–87; Scarpaci, ‘Immigrants in the New South’, 175; Robert Asher, ‘Union Nativism and Immigrant Response’, Labor History, 23 (Summer 1982), 328; Gabaccia, ‘Chinese of Europe’, 16–18; Scarpaci, ‘Sicilians and Native Whites’, 14.
See note 46, and, for the quotation, Harold David Brackman, ‘The Ebb and Flow of Race Relations: A History of Black—Jewish Relations Through 1900’ (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977), 450. See also Loewen, Mississippi Chinese, 58–72;
Youn-Jin Kim, ‘From Immigrants to Ethnics: The Life Worlds of Korean Immigrants in Chicago’ (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1991).
Adam Walaszek, ‘“For in America Poles Work Like Cattle”: Polish Peasant Immigrants and Work in America, 1880–1921’, in Marianne Debouzy, ed., In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880–1920 (Urbana, 1992), 86–8 and 90–1; Bodnar, Simon and Weber, Lives of Their Own, 5 and 60.
See note 48. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working-class History (London and New York, 1994), 163; Tamony Papers, on hunkie, excerpting American Tramp and Underworld Slang; Scarpaci, ‘Immigrants in the New South’, 174; Andrew Neather, ‘Popular Republicanism, Americanism and the Roots of Anti-Communism, 1890–1925’ (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 1993), 242; Model, ‘Effects of Ethnicity’, 33; Bodnar, Simon and Weber, Lives of Their Own, 60.
Neather, ‘Roots of Anti-Communism’, 138–223; James Barrett, ‘Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930’, Journal of American History, 79 (December 1992), 1009.
Peggy Pascoe, ‘Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Marriage’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 12 (1991), 5–17, quotes; Spickard, Mixed Blood, Appendix A, 374–5. In spite of all this, ‘race mixing’ occurred, of course. Chinese men who lived under particularly oppressive conditions because of restrictions on the immigration of Chinese women, tended to develop relationships with either African-Americans or Poles and other ‘in-between’ immigrant women. See Paul Siu, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation (New York, 1987), 143, 250–71.
Neather, ‘Roots of Anti-Communism’, 235–40; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 71–112; Messer-Kruse, ‘Chinese Exclusion and the Eight-Hour Day: Ira Steward’s Political Economy of Cheap Labor’ (unpublished paper, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, 1994), 13 and passim. The classic expression of both the biological and cultural racism and much else, is Samuel Gompers and Herman Guttstadt, ‘Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive?’ (San Francisco, 1902). On the distinction between opposition to coolies and to the Chinese ‘race’, see Andrew Gyory, ‘Rolling in the Dirt: The Origins of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Politics of Racism, 1870–1882’ (PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1991), esp. Ch. 4–6.
Neather, ‘Roots of Anti-Communism’, 242; White, ‘Immigration Restriction as a Necessity’, 67–69; A.A. Graham, ‘The Un-Americanization of America’, American Federationist, 17 (April 1910), 302, 303, 304.
Asher, ‘Union Nativism’, 328–72; Neather, ‘Roots of Anti-Communism’, 242, 267; Gompers as in Arthur Mann, ‘Gompers and the Irony of Racism’, Antioch Review, 13 (1953), 212; in Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 97; and in David Brody, In Labor’s Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (Oxford, 1993), 117. See also Prescott F. Hall, ‘Immigration and the Education Test’, North American Review, 165 (1897), 395;
Lydia Kingsmill Commander, ‘Evil Effects of Immigration’, American Federationist, 12 (October 1905).
McGovern, quoted in David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, 1987), 25; Asher, ‘Union Nativism’, 339 and 338–42. ‘Internal protectionism’ is Mink’s term, from Old Labor and New Immigrants, 203; Lieberson, Piece of the Pie, 341–4. See also the explicit Anglo-Saxonism of Railroad Trainmen’s Journal, discussed in Neather, ‘Roots of AntiCommunism’, 267–8.
Lieberson, Piece of the Pie, 342–3; Gabaccia, ‘Chinese of Europe’, 17–19; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 108. See also Lane, Solidarity or Survival. Graham, ‘The Un-Americanizing of America’, 302–4, runs in the same 1910 issue of the American Federationist as ‘Where Yanks Meet Orientals’ and ‘The International Fraternity of Labor’. J.A. Edgerton’s ‘Brotherhood of Man’, American Federationist, 12 (April 1905), 213, runs an issue before Augusta H. Pio’s ‘Exclude Japanese Labor’. On ‘race suicide’ see Lizzie M. Holmes’ review of The American Idea in American Federationist, 14 (December 1907), 998.
Asher, ‘Union Nativism’, 345, for the quote. See also ibid., and Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 3 (New York, 1964), 256–81.
Asher, ‘Union Nativism’, 330; Covington Hall, ‘Labor Struggles in the Deep South’ (unpublished ms., Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, 1951), 122, 138, 147–8, 183; Voice of the People, 5 March 1914; Roediger, Abolition of Whiteness, 149, 150, 175 n.75. See also Peck, ‘Padrones and Protest’, 172.
New Majority, 22 November 1919, 11. See John Howard Keiser, ‘John Fitzpatrick and Progresssive Unionism, 1915–1925’ (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1965), 38–41;
William D. Haywood, Big Bill Haywood’s Book (New York, 1929), 241–2;
James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana, 1987), 138–42.
Du Bois, as quoted in Thomas Holt, ‘The Political Uses of Alienation: W.E.B. Du Bois on Politics, Race and Culture’, American Quarterly, 42 (June 1990), 313; Peck, ‘Padrones and Protest’, 173.
Dominic A. Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1930 (Columbus, 1991), 172; Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, 172–4. If newly-organised Poles read John Roach’s Packingtown Conditions’, American Federationist, 13 (August 1906), 534, they would have seen strike-breaking described as an activity in which ‘the illiterate southern negro has held high carnival’ and have wrongly learned that the stockyards strike was broken simply by black strike-breakers, ‘ignorant and vicious, whose predominating trait was animalism’.
Gompers, ‘Talks on Labor’, American Federationist, 12 (September 1905), 636–7.
Quoted in Allen with Allen, Reluctant Reformers, 213; Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920 (Madison, 1993); Higham, Strangers in the Land, 172; London’s animus was characteristically directed against both ‘racial’ and ‘semi-racial’ groups, against ‘Dagoes and Japs’. See his The Valley of the Moon (New York, 1913), 21–2.
Roediger, Abolition of Whiteness, 158–69; Powell, Next Time We Strike, 236 n.11; Barry Goldberg, ‘“Wage Slaves” and “White Niggers”’, New Politics (Summer 1991), 64–83.
Warren C. Whatley, ‘African-American Strikebreaking from the Civil War to the New Deal’, Social Science History, 17:4 (1993), 525–58; Allen with Allen, Reluctant Reformers, 183; Roach, ‘Packingtown Conditions’, 534; Radzialowski, ‘Competition for Jobs’, 8 n.7, passim; Leslie Fishel, ‘The North and the Negro, 1865–1900: A Study in Race Discrimination’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1953), 454–71; Ray Ginger, ‘Were Negroes Strikebreakers?’, Negro History Bulletin (January 1952), 73–4; on the niggerscab image, see Roediger, Abolition of Whiteness, 150–3.
Higham, Strangers in the Land, 321–2; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 234; James R. Barrett, ‘Defeat and Decline: Long Term Factors and Historical Conjunctures in the Decline of a Local Labor Movement, Chicago, 1900–1922’, unpublished manuscript in Barrett’s possession; Quinn, ‘Americanism and Immigration’, American Federationist, 31 (April 1924), 295; Gompers linked support for the 1924 restrictions to ‘maintenance of racial purity and strength’. See Brody, In Labor’s Cause, 117.
The first quote is from David Montgomery to Jim Barrett, 30 May 1995. On old-world prejudices, see Orsi, ‘Inbetween People’, 315; Mormino, Immigrants on the Hill: Italian-Americans in St. Louis (Urbana, 1986). For popular anti-Semitism in Poland in the era of massive Polish and East European Jewish immigration to the US, see Celia S. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars (New York, 1977), 38–76.
Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1900 (Lexington, KY, 1987), 110; Allen with Allen, Reluctant Reformers, 180. For a recent expression of the common oppression argument, see Paul Berman, ‘The Other and the Almost the Same’, introducing Berman, ed., Blacks and Jews (New York, 1994), 11–30.
Peck, ‘Padrones and Protest’, 172–3; ‘The Greatness of the Greek Spirit’ (Chicago) Saloniki 15 February 1919; Georgakas, Greek America, 17; Kivisto, Immigrant Socialists, 127–8; Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880–1930 (New York, 1978), 193–4.
Brackman, ‘Ebb and Flow of Conflict’, 461–4; Marilyn Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1965 (Urbana, 1993), 146–49; Mormino and Pozzetta, Ybor City, 241.
Rogin, ‘Making America Home’, 1053; Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (Oxford, 1989), 120;
Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago, 1981), 195; Rogin, ‘Blackface, White Noise’, 420, 437–48; Brackman, ‘Ebb and Flow of Conflict’, 486.
Collins, Ethnic Identification, 210–11; Georgakas, Greek Americans, 9–12; Hodding Carter, Southern Legacy, 106; John B. Kennedy, ‘The Knights of Columbus History Movement’, Current History, 15 (December 1921), 441–43;
Herbert Aptheker, introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk (Millwood, NY, 1975; originally 1924), 7–8; Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Free Country”: The American Republic Viewed by the Italian Left, 1880–1920’, in Debouzy, ed., Shadow of the Statue of Liberty, 38, 33 and 34, for the quotes from the Italian-American press; and (Chicago) Daily Jewish Courier (August 1912).
See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London, 1996).
Barrett, Work and Community, 219–23; see also William M. Tuttle, Jr, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1970); Roberta Senechal, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot (Urbana, 1990).
Luigi Villari, ‘Relazione dell dott. Luigi Villari sugli Italiani nel Distretto Consolare di New Orleans’, Bolletino Dell’ Emigrazione (Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Royal Commission on Emigration, 1907), 2439, 2499, and 2532. Thanks to Louise Edwards for the source and the translations.
Barrett, ‘From the Bottom Up’, esp. 1012–13; John McClymer, ‘Gender and the “American Way of Life”: Women in the Americanization Movement’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 11 (Spring 1991), 5–6.
Niles Carpenter with Daniel Katz, ‘The Cultural Adjustment of the Polish Group in the City of Buffalo: An Experiment in the Technique of Social Investigation’, Social Forces, 6 (September 1927), 80–82. For further evidence of such ‘indifference’, see Scarpaci, ‘Immigrants in the New South’, 175, and Edward R. Kantowicz, Polish American Politics in Chicago, 1888–1940 (Chicago, 1975), 149.
Gary Gerstle, Working Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City. 1914–1960 (Cambridge, MA, 1989);
Roger Horowitz, ‘Negro and White, Unite and Fight!’: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press, 1997);
Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–1954 (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press, 1997);
Michael Goldfield, ‘Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s’, International Labor and Working Class History, 44 (1993), 1–32.
Dominic Capeci, Race Relations in Wartime Detroit (Philadelphia, 1984); Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism, 290; Hirsch, Second Ghetto; see also Thomas Sugrue, ‘The Structures of Poverty: The Reorganization of Space and Work in Three Periods of American History’, in Michael B. Katz, ed., The Underclass Debate: The View From History (Princeton, 1993), 85–117; Russell A. Kazal, ‘Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History’, American Historical Review, 100:2 (1995), 468–70. The little information we have on hate strikes suggests that they more likely involved recent southern white migrants than ‘ethnics’. See Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge, 1982), 125–6; Joshua Freeman, ‘Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism in World War II’, in Daniel J. Leab, ed., The Labor History Reader (Urbana, 1985), 398–400.
David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta, ‘Race, Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy’, in David Farber, The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill, 1994), 130–8.
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Barrett, J.R., Roediger, D. (1997). Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the New Immigrant Working Class. In: Halpern, R., Morris, J. (eds) American Exceptionalism?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25584-9_9
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