Ethnic Insularity
ILLICK, JOSEPH E.
Ethnic Insularity Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town, 1870-1940 By John Bodnar Pittsburgh. 213 pp. $11.95. Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of...
...Thus was order established, and thus were the immigrants excluded from the mainstream...
...Neither geographically nor occupationally mobile, they continued to face inward, creating new ethnic organizations and still marrying within the group...
...The original settlers held on to the good jobs, however, either as company officials, professional men and merchants, or as superintendents and skilled laborers in the plant...
...But this upheaval had a positive side, many historians add, for the attendant social mobility advanced and integrated newcomers into the American mass...
...By the period after World War I, they were in a lower position...
...According to the traditional view, industrialization wreaked havoc on the cohesive preindustrial community, replacing order with a kind of chaos...
...Yet Bodnar does not close on an optimistic note...
...John Bodnar's book suggests that the whole of this argument is either too simplistic or incorrect...
...As the workers took power, the bosses tied to the suburbs—the new American frontier...
...Steelton was a community created by industrialization...
...Nevertheless, beneath this apparent sameness change was taking place...
...The story is familiar enough, though few historians have bothered to write about the immigrant Slavs, half of whom settled in Pennsylvania...
...they were criticized for being poor, given lessons in citizenship, and manipulated by the Republican machine...
...The formation of a labor union represented a further step in this direction, as common class interests were seen to supersede ethnic insularity...
...Blacks had an initial advantage over Southern Europeans that they gradually lost...
...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of history, San Francisco Slate University Steelton, Pennsylvania, a few miles southeast of Harrisburg, was a tiny community of eight families when the Pennsylvania Steel Company was founded there in 1866...
...Actually, ethnic organization in the early part of the century had shown the effectiveness of confronting social problems as a group instead of retreating into family...
...But the "Huns" or "Hunkies" (the large ore shovels in the plant were called "Hunkie banjoes") were resented and intrusively policed for drinking and celebrating on Sunday...
...The legacy of enforced isolation which characterized their historical experiences, however, left them unprepared to deal not only with these problems but with each other...
...The Pennsylvania Steel Company, always defended by the press, employed over half the residents and often donated educational facilities...
...During the 1919 strike at Steelton, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, which had taken over three years earlier from Pennsylvania Steel, the AFL Policy Committee contained no Slav, Italian or black representatives...
...Blacks, usually transient single males, and Southern Europeans, married but alone, in search of wages to take back to the homeland, were residentially segregated by design and occupation-ally segregated by choice: Within the ranks of unskilled labor, Croats manned the open hearth, Serbs stoked the blast furnace, blacks worked the splice bar mill, and so forth...
...Persons of English, Irish and German background, both Protestant and Catholic, as well as farmers and Southern blacks, streamed in to work at the mill, and by 1891 there were 10,000 people in Steel-ton...
...Abandoned by the affluent old stock, these two groups were left alone in the urban arena to face its awesome problems...
...These last sobering words, though, should not obscure this volume's achievement: In clearing away some of the myths that have clouded reality and made it difficult to recognize the nature of contemporary conflicts, John Bodnar has contributed to scholarship and provided a basis for intelligent social action...
...officials of the company delivered commencement addresses—to graduating classes that for years contained no Southern Europeans (blacks attended separate schools...
...Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of this study is its exploration of the relationship between these two groups—not in the social setting, where there was no interchange, but on the industrial scene...
...This development was spurred by the Depression and by the second generation's willingness to fight for better working conditions in Steelton, rather than move on to search for other jobs in the fashion of the more rootless members of the first generation...
...What is exciting about this study is its challenge to the conventional wisdom about industrialization and immigration—A challenge achieved by digging under easily observed events to more recondite matters, such as elements of the social structure (family, ethnicity, class, mobility, community) and their interrelationships...
...Bodnar comments: "The central event in precipitating this change in the town's social relationships and eventually in its social structure was the establishment of the local CIO...
...Ethnic Insularity Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town, 1870-1940 By John Bodnar Pittsburgh...
...Local 1688, was spearheaded by a Croat, a black, a Serb, an Italian, and an Irishman...
...Blacks accepted segregation...
...And residential segregations continued...
...Despite the fact that they composed almost half the white population during the inter-war period, immigrants did not enter city politics until the 1930s—40 years after their arrival...
...It is little wonder," he writes, "that modern America has witnessed the spectacle of working class ethnics and blacks struggling over the issues of urban housing, inadequate tax bases, and busing...
...They turned inward, establishing their own institutional framework—businesses (mainly Jewish groceries), churches, beneficial societies, holidays...
...Although their "persistence rate" increased (translation: they stopped moving to other communities in a vain search for better jobs), their employment situation did not improve...
...Workers were welcome as producing bodies, but not as social equals...
...Some recent studies partially dissent from the conventional wisdom by noting the perpetuation of cultures brought from abroad or by observing that mobility was not as rapid as Horatio Alger led us to believe...
...In 1939, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee...
...Bodnar, chief of the history division at the Historical and Museum Commission in Harrisburg, draws a graphic portrait of Boss Tom Nelley in action and his relations with Negro leader Peter Blackwell...
...While it is not clear why this happened, Bodnar leaves no doubt that it did occur, thereby dealing a blow to the theory that each arriving group was boosted on the shoulders of the following one...
...This is not to say that the Slavs and Italians were succeeding...
...blacks were segregated out of sight...
...In that year the company, implacably antiunion, broke a strike of skilled workers and began to encourage immigration from Southern Europe—first Croatians and Slovenians, then Serbs, Bulgarians and Italians...
Vol. 61 • April 1978 • No. 9
