Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:55:47.941Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Workers and Politics in the Immigrant City in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Cecelia F. Bucki
Cecelia F. Bucki
Affiliation:
Fairfield University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Workers and Citizenship in Europe and North America
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 48 , Fall 1995 , pp. 28 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. The high partisan loyalty during the Gilded Age was marked by electoral turnouts in the North of 80–84 percent of eligible voters for presidential elections. After the critical contest of 1896, voter turnout in 1900–1916 declined to 77 percent in the North, and then to a dismal 56 percent for 1920–24. Voter participation in the South, always historically lower. reached a 1920–24 nadir of 20 percent after the political disfranchisement of poor and African–American citizens. Note that these percentages are calculated for ”eligible voters” only and so do not take into account the increasingly large adult male population of immigrant workers.Google ScholarKleppner, Paul, Who Voted? The Dynamics of Electoral Turnout, 1870–1980 (New York, 1982), 1–12, 55–82.Google Scholar

2. Burnham, Walter Dean, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1970), 175.Google Scholar

3. For an overview of the System of 1896, see Schattschneider, E. E., The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America (New York, 1960), 78–85;Google ScholarBurnham, Walter Dean, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe”, American Political Science Review 59 (03 1965): 7–28;Google Scholaridem, “The System of 1896: An Analysis,” in The Evolution of American Electoral Systems, ed. Paul Kleppner (Westport, Conn., 1981). Argersinger, Peter H., “‘A Place on the Ballot’: Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws”, American Historical Review 85 (04 1980): 287–306,Google Scholar argues that antifusion laws were consciously crafted in this era to disrupt opposition parties, revise traditional voting practices, and ensure Republican hegemony. Other aspects of the decay of traditional party politics are covered in McGerr, Michael E., The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

4. One clear example of the deliberate intent to limit participation was New York State's new personal registration laws which applied to New York City and other immigrant cities but not to upstate and rural areas. Burnham, “System of 1896.” 190. In addition, those states, mostly in the Midwest, that had permitted alien voting or so called alien–intent provisions (which allowed voting to those who had taken out first papers) had all now restricted voting to citizens. Kleppner, Who Voted? 1–12.Google Scholar

5. For an older account of AFL–Democratic party links, see Karson, Marc, American Labor Unions and Politics, 1900–1918 (Boston, 1965; orig. 1958);Google Scholar a new perspective is Greene, Julia, “‘The Strike at the Ballot Box’: The American Federation of Labor's Entrance into Electoral Politics, 1906–1909”, Labor History 32 (Spring 1991): 165–92.Google Scholar On the National Civic Federation, see Green, Marguerite, The National Civic Federation and the American Labor Movement 1900–1925 (Washington, D.C., 1956);Google ScholarMontgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, 1987), 275–81.Google Scholar

6. Rogin, Michael, “Voluntarism: The Political Functions of an Antipolitical Doctrine”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 15 (1962): 521–35;Google ScholarHays, Samuel P., “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era”, Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (10 1964): 157–69;Google ScholarHuthmacher, J. Joseph, “Urban Liberalism and the Age of Reform”, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (09 1962): 231–41;Google ScholarBuenker, John D., Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York, 1973);Google ScholarShover, John L., “The Progressives and the Working Class Vote in California”, Labor History 10 (Fall 1969): 584–601.Google Scholar

7. Fink, Leon, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, 1983);Google ScholarOestreicher, Richard Jules, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana, 1985);Google ScholarMontgomery, David, “Labor and the Republic in Industrial America: 1860–1920”, Le Mouvement Social 111 (04–06 1980): 201–215;Google Scholaridem, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993),145–57.

8. Bridges, Amy, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (Ithaca, 1984);Google Scholaridem, “Becoming American: The Working Classes in the United States before the Civil War”, in Working–Class Formation: Nineteenth–Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton, 1986); Shefter, Martin, “The Emergence of the Political Machine: An Alternative View”, in Theoretical Perspectives on Urban Politics, ed. Hawley, Willis D. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976);Google Scholaridem, “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization and Disorganization of the American Working Class in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Katznelson and Zolberg.

9. Oestreicher, Richard, “Urban Working–class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940”, Journal of American History 74 (03 1988): 1257–86;Google ScholarKatznelson, Ira, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York, 1981); Shefter, “Emergence of the Political Machine.”Google Scholar

10. While each of the explanations given for the “no socialism” question has some explanatory merit, the answer inexorably leads to a consensus view of American political development that cannot adequately address the realities of conflict in American history. Redefining class consciousness has provided a new perspective on the exceptionalism argument. Two excellent overviews and critiques are Foner, Eric, “Why is There No Socialism in the United States?,” History Workshop Journal 17 (1984): 57–80;Google Scholar and Wilentz, Sean, “Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement”, International Labor and Working–Class History 26 (Fall 1984): 1–24, along with critiques by Nick Salvatore and Michael Hanagan, 25–36.Google Scholar

11. Keyssar, Alexander. “The Free Gift of the Ballot The American Working Class and the Right to Vote,” Plenary address, Fifteenth Annual North American Labor History Conference, Detroit, October, 1993; Montgomery, Citizen Worker, 13–25;Google ScholarSteinfeld, Robert J., “Property and Suffrage in the Early American Republic”, Stanford Law Review 41 (01 1989): 335–76.Google Scholar

12. McCormick, Richard L., “Public Life in Industrial America. 1877–1917”, in The New American History, ed. Foner, Eric (Philadelphia, 1990).Google Scholar

13. McDonald, Terrence J., “The Burdens of Urban History: The Theory of the State in Recent American Social History” and Ira Katznelson, Comment”, Studies in American Political Development 3 (1989): 3–55;Google ScholarTeaford, Jon C., “Finis for Tweed and Steffens: Rewriting the History of Urban Rule”, Reviews in American History 10 (12 1982): 133–49;Google ScholarMcDonald, Terrence J. and Ward, Sally K., eds., The Politics of Urban Fiscal Policy (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1984);Google ScholarBrown, M. Craig and Halaby, Charles N., “Machine Politics in America, 1870–1945”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (Winter 1987): 587–612.Google Scholar

14. Scobey, David, “Boycotting the Politics Factory: Labor Radicalism and the New York City Mayoral Election of 1884”, Radical History Review 28–30 (1984): 280–326;Google ScholarStave, Bruce M., ed., Socialism and the Cities (Port Washington, N.Y. 1975);Google ScholarJudd, Richard W., “Socialist Cities: Explorations into the Grass Roots of American Socialism” (Ph.D.diss., University of California, Irvine, 1979);Google ScholarPratt, William C., “The Reading Socialist Experience: A Study of Working Class Politics” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1969);Google ScholarNash, Michael, Conflict and Accommodation: Coal Miners, Steel Workers, and Socialism, 1890–1920 (Westport, Conn., 1982).Google Scholar

15. Barrett, James R., “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States. 1880–1930”, Journal of American History 79 (12 1993): 996–1020;Google ScholarMontgomery, David, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, 1979), 32–47, 91–112;Google ScholarLane, A. T., “American Unions, Mass Immigration, and the Literacy Test: 1900–1917”, Labor History 25 (Winter 1984): 5–25;Google ScholarAsher, Robert, “Union Nativism and the Immigrant Response”, Labor History 23 (Summer 1982): 325–48.Google Scholar The classic study of nativism and immigration restriction is Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York, 1965).Google Scholar

16. Subsequent points are covered in more detail in Bucki, Cecelia F., “The Pursuit of Political Power: Class, Ethnicity, and Municipal Politics in Interwar Bridgeport, 1915–1936” (Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 1991), chap. 3.Google Scholar Similar points about the historicizing of ethnic identity are raised in Conzen, Kathleen Neils et al. , “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.”, Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (Fall 1992): 3–41.Google Scholar

17. The literature on immigrant patterns and community formation is vast. For example, see Bodnar, John, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, Ind., 1985);Google ScholarBodnar, John, Simon, Roger, and Weber, Michael P., Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh (Urbana, 1982);Google ScholarHigham, John, ed., Ethnic Leadership in America (Baltimore, 1978);Google ScholarSmith, Judith, Family Connections: A History of Italian & Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island 1900–1940 (Albany, N.Y. 1985);Google ScholarBarton, Josef F., Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians, and Slovaks in an American City, 1890–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975);Google ScholarCummings, Scott, ed., Self—Help in Urban America: Patterns of Minority Business Enterprise (Port Washington, N.Y. 1980), esp. the essays by Renkiewicz, Stolarik, and Stipanovich.Google Scholar

18. Wolf, Eric R., “Aspects of Group Relations in Complex Society: Mexico”, AmericanAnthroplogist 58 (12 1956): 1065–78, quotaion on 1076.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. See Kettering, Sharon, “The Historical development of Political Clientelism,” Journal of Interdiscilinary History 18 (Winter 1988): 419–47, esp. 425–26 on patron—brokerclient relationships;Google ScholarMorawska, Ewa, “The Internal Status Hierarchy in the East European Immigrant Communities of Johnstown, Pa., 1890–1930's,” Journal of Social History 16 (Fall 1982):75–107;Google ScholarBarton, Peasants and Strangers; Bucki, “Pursuit of Political Power,” chap. 3.Google Scholar

20. Balch, Emily Greene, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (New York, 1910), 419. Ironically, this idea was remarkably close to the argument that politicians and AFL leaders were using to limit immigration of undesirable ethnicities who were not capable of commanding and appreciating an American standard of living and thus not capable of becoming good citizens.Google ScholarDebouzy, Marianne, ed., In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880–1920 (Paris, 1988), 194–99.Google Scholar

21. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).Google Scholar The classic statement on ethnicity and assimilation is Park, Robert E. and Miller, Herbert A., Old World Traits Transplanted (New York, 1921), 259–308.Google Scholar Also see Greene, Victor, American Immigrant Leaders 1880–1 910: Marginality and Identity (Baltimore, 1977), 2–3;Google ScholarBarton, Josef, “Eastern and Southern Europeans,” in Ethnic Leadership in America, ed. Higham, John (Baltimore, 1978).Google Scholar

22. Quoted in Park and Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted, 137–38. Similar profiles could be assembled for most other “new–immigrant” groups, with the exception of Italians who were secular and fractured into small local or regional societies. Bucki, “Pursuit of Political Power,” 175–94.Google ScholarBuczek, Daniel S., in Immigrant Pastor: The Life of the Right Reverend Monsignor Lucyan Bójnowski of New Britain, Connecticut (Waterbury. Conn., 1974)Google Scholar, provides a fascinating account of one Polish priest's battles with community evils of all sorts, including atheists, socialists, and their trade–union causes. Given the prescriptive lengths to which Bójnowski went, it would seem that socialist and atheist appeals had more strength in Polonia than has been assumed.

23. Morawska, Ewa, “Return Migration:Theoretical and Research Agenda,” in A Century of European Migrations, 1830–1930, ed. Vecoli, Rudolph J. and Sinke, Suzanne M. (Urbana, 1991).Google Scholar

24. Historical Statiscs of the United Stares, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975), vol. 1, 116.Google Scholar

25. Bridgeport is located on Long Island Sound, near New York City. Of its population of 100,000–150,000 in this era, one–third were foreign–born, another 30–40 percent were their American–born children, and the African–American population hovered around 2 percent. Bucki, Cecelia F., “Dilution and Craft Tradition: Munitions Workers in Bridgeport, Connecticut 1915–1919,” in The New England Working Class and the New Labor History, ed. Gutman, Herbert G. and Bell, Donald M. (Urbana, 1987).Google Scholar

26. Bucki, , “Pursuit of Political Power,” 184–85.Google Scholar Also see Embardo, Robert J., “Summer Lightning,’ 1907: The Wobblies in Bridgeport,” Labor History 30 (Fall 1989):518–35,Google Scholar though my interpretation differs significantly. The outcome of the strike, far from being a repudiation of radicals as Embardo contends, actually established a strong radical presence in the Hungarian community. The subsequent active histories of the Socialist party, the Socialist Labor party, the IWW, and even the postwar Communist party in this community can be traced back to effects of this strike.

27. Richards interview by V. Frazzetta, December 1938, Box 114, RG 33, Works Project Administration Federal Writers Project Connecticut State Archives, Connecticut State Library, Hartford.Google Scholar

28. 1907 quotation from Bolletino della Sera, in Park and Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted, 240.Google Scholar

29. Andersen, Kristi, The Creation of a Democratic Majority 1928–1936 (Chicago, 1979), 40–41: Gavit, John P., Americans by Choice (New York, 1922), 236–38.Google Scholar

30. Gavit, , Americans by Choice, 255–95. The Falcons (Sokol) was a gymnastic society, engaged in “nationalistic physical culture.” In 1911, the Falcons set up a formal military school to train its members for eventual participation in the liberation of Poland.Google ScholarBorkowski, Joseph A., “The Role of Pittsburgh's Polish Falcons in the Organization of the Polish Army in France,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, 54 (10 1971):359–74;Google ScholarPienkos, Donald E., One Hundred Years Young: A History of the Polish Falcons of America, 1887–1987 (Boulder, Co., 1987), 91–104.Google Scholar

31. Bridgeport Herald October 22, 1916.Google Scholar

32. Bucki, , “Pursuit of Political Power,” 194–208;Google Scholaridem, “Dilution and Craft Tradition”; Joseph P. O'Grady, ed., The Immigrants' Influence on Wilson's Peace Policies (Lexington, Ky., 1967); Creel, George, How We Advertised America (New York, 1920), 166–83; 200–207;Google ScholarMontgomery, David, “Nationalism, American Patriotism, and Class Consciousness Among Immigrant Workers in the United States in the Epoch of World War I,” in “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working–class Immigrants, ed. Hoerder, Dirk (DeKalb, III., 1986);Google Scholaridem, Fall of the House of Labor, 370–464.

33. The phrase is from Barton, “Eastern and Southern Europeans,” 157.Google Scholar Also see Wolkovich, William, Bay State “Blue” Laws and Bimba (Brockton, Mass., n.d.), for and example of how Lithuanian communist leader Anthony Bimba became caught between two rival Lithuanian fraternal organizations in a dispute with anti–Soviet and secular versus clerical overtones.Google Scholar

34. Report on the PNA convention from Krzycki, L., “A Letter Not for Publication,” Advance, 09 30, 1927, 5.Google Scholar Krzycki was the ranking Polish organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and prominent in the Socialist party of America. For the debates in the PNA, see Pienkos, One Hundred Years Young, 119–50; Wytrwal, Joseph A., America's Polish Heritage: A Social History of the Poles in America (Detroit, 1961), 227–35.Google ScholarBukowczyk, John J., in “The Transformation of Working–Class Ethnicity: Corporate Control, Americanization, and the Polish Immigrant Middle–Class in Bayonne, NJ, 1915–1925,” Labor History 25 (Winter 1984):53–82Google Scholar, suggests that the search for customers and accommodation to corporate anti–unionism merged to create this conservative milieu in Polonia during and immediately after World War I. He contends that rivalries between Polish and Jewish grocers in their search for Polish customers during the war contributed to anti–Semitic activity in the Polish community. This suggests a parallel with later Hungarian and Slovak anti–Semitism in Bridgeport and elsewhere in the mid–1930s. Bucki, , “Pursuit of Political Power,” 210–43;Google ScholarBarton, , “Eastern and Southern Europeans”; also seeGoogle ScholarEwa, Morawska, For Bread with Butter: The Life–Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890–1940 (Cambridge, 1985), 171–79. In contrast,Google ScholarCohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago 1919–1939 (Cambridge, 1990), paints a portrait of immigrant communities in the 1920s that is politically monolithic.Google Scholar

35. Bucki, , “Pursuit of Political Power,” 267–84.Google Scholar

36. Lichtman, Alan J., Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (Chapel Hill, 1979);Google ScholarLubell, Samuel, The Future of American Politics (New York, 1952).Google Scholar

37. The phrase is from a pamphlet by the socialist mayor of Milwaukee. Hoan, DanielTaxes and Tax dodgers (Chicago, 1933), 3–4, 12.Google Scholar

38. Bucki, , “Pursuit of Political Power,” 285–421;Google Scholaridem, “Defining the Public Good: Class, Taxes, and Municipal Finance in the Early Depression” (unpublished paper. 1994). I do not wish to imply that the Bridgeport Socialist party was a “radical” party (by contemporary standards it was not). Rather, as a party based in old-immigrant, AFL, skilled-worker communities (but with support from new-immigrant communities), it reflected an alternative to traditional patronage politics. The flurry of activity on behalf of a labor party in the 1930s has occupied much attention from labor historians, whose studies have usually ended in disappointment at the decision of the CIO Labor's Nonpartisan League to endorse FDR in his 1936 reelection bid. For one example, see Davin, Eric Leif and Lynd, Staughton, “Picketline and Ballot Box: The Forgotten Legacy of the Local Labor Party Movement, 1932–1936,” Radical History Review 22 (Winter 1979–1980):43–63.Google Scholar For the grassroots connection between CIO organizing and Democratic party organizing, see Power, George, Cradle of Steel Unionism:Monongahela Valley, Pa. (East Chicago, Ind., 1972);Google Scholarand Davin, Eric Leif, “The Littlest New Deal: SWOC Takes Power in Steeltown, A Possibility of Radicalism in the Late 1930s” (unpublished paper, 1989).Google Scholar

39. HeatonVorse, Mary, Labor's New Millions (New York, 1938), quotation 292; also see 275–84. for the CIO's political agenda.Google Scholar

40. Much New Deal literature has noted the persistence of the “machine.” Dorsett, Lyle W., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the City Bosses (Port Washington, N.Y., 1977);Google ScholarM.Allswang, John, Bosses, Machines and Urban Politics (Port Washington, N.Y., 1977);Google ScholarStave, Bruce M., The New Deal and the Last Hurrah: Pittsburgh Machine Politics (Pittsburgh, 1970).Google Scholar For examples of manipulation of New Deal relief funds for political advantage, see Trout, Charles H., Boston, the Great Depression, and the New Deal (New York, 1977), chaps. 7–8; and Bucki, “Pursuit of Political Power,” chap. 6.Google Scholar

41. Bridgeport Sunday Herald, October 23, 1932. The parallels went on: “There is a great deal in common between Americans and Poles. Neither union has fought for aggression and both nations have not only fought for their own liberty but also for the liberty of others.” Ibid., October 16, 1932.

42. Bridgeport Post, August 21 1932; Sunday Herald, October 30, November 6, 1932.Google Scholar

43. Vincent Frazzetta MSS, Bridgeport, December 21, 1939, Box 25, File 109:19; Interiview with CIO leader, New Britain, n.d., Box 49, File 153:7, both in Connecticut WPA Federal Writers Project Ethnic Groups Survey, Historical Manuscripts and Archives, University of Connecticut Libraries, Storrs.Google Scholar

44. Bucki, “Pursuit of Political Power,” chap. 6. For a further look at the contested discourse of “Americanism” in this era. see Gerstle, Gary, Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge, 1989).Google Scholar

45. Bridgeport Post, October 29, 1934; Bucki, , “Pursuit of Political Power,” 228Google Scholar

46. For another example of ethnic influences on right-wing and antitolerant attitudes. see Bayor, Ronald H., Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941 (Baltimore, 1978);Google Scholar and Maiale, Hugo V., The Italian Vote in Philadelphia Between 1928 and 1946 (Philadelphia, 1950).Google Scholar

47. Bridgeport Times–Star October 29 1937.Google Scholar

48. Bell, Thomas, Out of This Furnace (Pittsburgh, 1976; orig. 1941), 411.Google Scholar

49. Bodnar, John, “Immigration, Kinship, and the Rise of Working-class Realism in Industrial America,” Journal of Social History 14 (Fall 1980):45–59Google Scholar, argues that the search for security, rather than the search for power, was the goal of ethnic workers in the 1930s. Fraser, Steve, “The 'Labor Question,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary (Princeton, 1989), 55–84, offers a similar argument.Google Scholar