they are. We have always needed the immigrant to aid us in amassing wealth, and we shall need him in the future, for the United States has now become the great labor mart of the world.

238. The Industrial Menace of the Immigrant2"

BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS

The facts assembled by the Immigration Commission shatter the rosy theory that foreign labor is drawn into an industry only when native labor is not to be had. The Slavs and Magyars were introduced into Pennsylvania forty-odd years ago by mine operators looking for more tractable miners. Agents were sent abroad to gather up labor, and frequently foreigners were brought in when a strike was on. The first instance seems to have occurred at Drifton in 1870 and resulted in the importation of two shiploads of Hungarians. In 1904, during a strike in the coal-fields, near Birmingham, Alabama, many southern Europeans were brought in. In 1908 "the large companies imported a number of immigrants," so that the strike was broken and unionism destroyed in that region. During the 1907 strike in the iron mines of northern Minnesota, “one of the larger companies imported large numbers of Montenegrins and other Southeastern races as strike-breakers."

The hegira of the English-speaking soft-coal miners shows what must happen when low-standard men undercut high-standard men. The miners of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, finding their unions wrecked and the lot growing worse under the floods of men from southern and eastern Europe, migrated in great numbers to the Middle West and the Southwest. But of late the coal fields of the Middle West have been invaded by multitudes of Italians, Croatians, and Lithuanians, so that even here American and Americanized miners have their backs to the wall. As for the displaced tradeunionists who sought asylum in the mines of Oklahoma and Kansas, the pouring in of raw immigrants has weakened their bargaining power, and many have gone on to make a last stand in the mines of New Mexico and Colorado.

Each exodus left behind an inert element which accepted the harder conditions that came in with the immigrants, and a strong element that rose to better conditions in the mines and in other occupations. As for the displaced, the Iliad of their woes has never been sung-the loss of homes, the shattering of hopes, the untimely set

29Adapted from "The Old World in the New," in The Century Magazine, LXXXVII, 29-33. Copyright (1913).

ting to work of children, the struggle for a new foothold, and the turning of thousands of self-respecting men into day laborers, oddjob men, down-and-outers, and "hobos."

. During the last fifteen years the flood of gold has brought in a spring-tide of prices. Since 1896 the retail cost to Americans of their fifteen principal articles of food has risen 70 per cent. Wages should have risen in like degree if the workman is to maintain his old standard, to say nothing of keeping his place in a social procession which is continually mounting to higher economic levels. But the workingman has been falling behind in the procession. In the soft-coal field of Pennsylvania, where the Slav dominates, the coal-worker receives 42 cents a day less than the coal-worker in the mines of the Middle West and Southwest, where he does not dominate. In meat-packing, iron and steel, cotton manufacture, and other foreignized industries the inertia of wages has been very marked. The presence of the immigrant has prevented a wage advance which otherwise must have occurred.

What a college man saw in a copper mine in the Southwest gives in a nutshell the logic of low wages. The American miners getting $2.75 a day are abruptly displaced without a strike by a train load of five hundred raw Italians brought in by the company and put to work at from $1.50 to $2.00 a day. For the Americans there is nothing to do but to "go down the road." At first the Italians live on bread and beer, never wash, wear the same filthy clothes night and day, and are despised. After two or three years they want to live better, wear decent clothes, and be respected. They ask for more wages, the bosses bring in another train load from the steerage, and the partly Americanized Italians follow the American miners "down the road."

"The best we get in the mill now is greenhorns," said the superintendent of a tube mill. "When they first come, they put their heart into it and give a full day's work. But after a while they begin to shirk and do as little as they dare." It is during this early innocence that the immigrant accepts conditions that he ought to spurn. The same mill had to break up the practice of selling jobs by foremen. On the Great Northern Railroad the bosses mulcted each Greek laborer a dollar a month for interpreter. The "bird of passage" who comes here to get ahead rather than to live, not only accepts his seven-day week and the twelve-hour day, but often demands them. Big earnings blind him to the cost of overwork. It is the American or the half-Americanized foreigner who rebels against the eightyfour-hour schedule.

When capital plays lord of the manor, the Old World furnishes the serfs. In some coal districts of West Virginia the land, streets, paths, roads, and miners' cabins, the store, the school, and the church are all owned by the coal company. The company pays the teacher, and no priest or clergyman objectionable to it may remain on its domain. One may not step off the railroad's right of way, pass through the streets, visit mine or cabin, without permission. There is no place where miners meeting to discuss their grievances may not be dispersed as trespassers. Any miner who talks against his boss or complains is promptly dismissed and ejected from the 35,000 acres of company land. Hired sluggers, known as the "wrecking-gang," beat up or even murder the organizer who tries to reach the miners. It is needless to say that the miners are all negroes or foreigners.

After an industry has been foreignized, the notion becomes fixed in the minds of the bosses that without the immigrants the industry would come to a standstill. "If it wasn't for the Slavs," say the superintendents of Mesaba mines, "we couldn't get out this ore at all, and Pittsburgh would be smokeless. You can't get an American to work here unless he runs a locomotive or a steam shovel. We've tried it; brought 'em in carloads at a time, and they left."

"Wouldn't they stay for $3.00 a day?" I suggested.

"No, it's not a matter of pay. Somehow Americans nowadays aren't any good for hard or dirty work."

Hard work! And I think of Americans I have seen in their last asylum of the native born, the far West, slaving with ax and hook, hewing logs for a cabin, ripping out the boulders for a road, digging irrigation ditches, drilling the granite, or timbering the drift— Americans shying at open-pit, steam-shovel mining!

The secret is that with the insweep of the unintelligible bunkhouse foreigner there grows up a driving and cursing of labor that no self-respecting American will endure. Nor can he bear to be despised as the foreigner is. It is not the work or the pay that he minds, but the stigma. That is why, when a labor force has come to be mostly Slav, it will be all Slav. But if the supply of raw Slavs were cut off, the standards and status of the laborers would rise, and the Americans would come into the industry.

Does the man the immigrant displaces rise or sink? The theory that the immigrant pushes him up is not without some color of truth. In Cleveland the American and German displaced iron-mill workers seem to have been absorbed in other growing industries.

They are engineers and firemen, bricklayers, carpenters, structural iron workers, steamfitters, plumbers, and printers. Leaving pick and wheelbarrow to Italian and Slav, the Irish are now meter-readers, wire-stringers, conductors, motor-men, porters, caretakers, nightwatchmen, and elevator men. I find no sign that either the displaced workmen or his sons have suffered from the advent of Pole and Magyar. On the other hand, in Pittsburgh and vicinity, the new immigration has been like a flood sweeping away the jobs, homes, and standards of great numbers, and obliging them to save themselves by accepting poorer employment or fleeing to the West. The cause of the difference is that Pittsburgh held to the basic industries, while in Cleveland numerous high-grade manufacturers started up which absorbed the displaced workmen into the upper part of the laboring force.

Unless there is some collateral growth of skill-demanding industries, the new immigrants bring disaster to many of the workingmen they undercut. The expansion of the industry will create some new jobs, but not enough to reabsorb the Americans displaced. Thus in the iron mines of Minnesota, out of the seventy-five men kept busy by one steam shovel, only thirteen get $2.50 a day or more, and $2.50 is the least that will maintain a family on the American standard. It is plain that the advent of sixty-two cheap immigrants might displace sixty-two Americans, while it would create only thirteen decent-wage jobs for them. Scarcely any industry can grow fast enough to reabsorb into skilled or semi-skilled positions the displaced workmen.

Employers observe a tendency for employment to become more fluctuating and seasonal because of access to an elastic supply of aliens, without family or local attachments, ready to go anywhere or to do anything. In certain centers immigrant laborers form, as it were, visible living pools from which the employer can dip as he needs. Why should he smooth out his work evenly throughout the year in order to keep a labor force composed of family men when he can always take "ginnies" without trouble and drop them without compunction? Railroad shops are coming to hire and to "fire" men as they need them instead of relying upon the experienced regular employees. In a concern that employs 30,000 men the rate of change is 100 per cent a year and is increasing. Labor leaders notice that employment is becoming more fluctuating, that there are fewer steady jobs, and the proportion of men who are justified in founding a home diminishes.

239. Immigration and Unionism 3"

BY W. JETT LAUCK

A significant result of the extensive employment of southern and eastern Europeans in mining and manufacturing is seen in the general weakening and, in some instances, in the entire demoralization of the labor organizations which were in existence before the arrival of the races of recent immigration. This condition of affairs has been due to the inability of the labor-unions to absorb within a short time the constantly increasing number of new arrivals. The southern and eastern Europeans, as already pointed out. because of their tractability, their lack of industrial experience and training, and their necessitous condition on applying for work, have been willing to accept, without protest, existing conditions of employment. Their desire to earn as large an amount as possible within a limited time has also rendered the recent immigrant averse to entering into strikes which involved a loss of time and a decrease in earnings. The same kind of thriftiness has led the immigrant wage-earner to refuse to maintain his membership in the laborunions for an extended period and has consequently prevented the complete unionization of certain occupations in some cases, and, in others, the accumulation of a defense fund by the labor organizations. The high degree of illiteracy among recent immigrants and the inability of the greater number to speak English have also caused their organization into unions by the native Americans and older immigrants to be a matter of large expense. The difficulty of the situation, from the standpoint of the labor organizations, is further increased by the conscious policy of the employers of mixing races in certain departments or divisions of industries and thus decreasing the opportunities for any concerted action because of a diversity of language in the operating forces. In mining operations, by way of illustration, in many sections, no one race is permitted to secure a controlling number in the operating forces of a single mine or mining occupation because of the fear that a common language would enable them to be readily organized for the purpose of seeking redress for real or fancied grievances.

80

Adapted from "The Real Significance of Recent Immigration," in the North American Review, CXCV, 2008-2009. Copyright (1912).