EN220/IN250, American Identity, O'Conner

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Immigration and Unionism

"Industry, Perseverance and Frugality, make Fortune yield." -Benjamin Franklin

"Our movement is spreading like flames across a dry plain. We seek our basic, God-given rights as human beings. We shall do it without violence because it is our destiny." - Cesar Chavez

In some ways, social institutions like trade unions tended to run counter to an American culture that praised and worshipped the idea of hard working individualism, the single solitary person "pulling himself up by his bootstraps." Though the earliest concepts of America envisioned this land as a new Eden, a place without toil or labor, the realities of the early Puritans and, later, the Colonists and the citizens of the new Republic had to reshape the American dream into one where individual labor and hardship were characteristics of a moral person intent on advancement through taming and civilizing a new rugged land (Rodgers 4). Benjamin Franklin's many pithy aphorisms of hard work and individualistic rigor still remain in the American consciousness today. Yet by the time labor unions began to be formed in this country, the nation had started to shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy and it was the agrarian ideal that the old American values of toil were based upon. The capitalistic excesses of the Gilded Age and the rise of industrial robber barons, who benefited greatly at the expense of the common worker, helped to strip away pieces of the confidence people once held in the American dream and the capitalist economic system that were so much a part of this country. The themes of capitalism's excesses and drawbacks are illustrated in literary works such as Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age (1873), Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), William Dean Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901) and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906).

In the United States, the pattern of work and employment, moving from the agrarian to the industrial, imitated what had occurred in Europe, where industry first arose. Railroads, textiles, and the iron and steel industries all expanded greatly throughout the 19th century. A relative shortage in labor and relatively good wages spurred by this industrialization brought many immigrants to America, who were seeking a better life for themselves and their families. In effect, these people were some of the first migrant workers, though not in the sense that we think of migrant workers today. Two major waves of immigrants came from Europe in the 1840s and the 1880s and arrived on the East Coast during this time, the first including mostly Germans, English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. A second wave of immigration mostly included people from eastern Europe and the Balkans. This second wave of newly arrived Europeans ran into more prejudice and were treated as lower class citizens more than their predecessors. [future artifact reference - Irish as ape-like image?] By and large, assimilation into mainstream American culture was more difficult for them. This is perhaps best illustrated in literature in the treatment of the Rudkus family in Sinclair's The Jungle. On the West Coast, Asian and Latino immigrants were arriving in great numbers and also running into a great deal of prejudice and racism, as they sought work on the railroads and on large fruit and vegetable farms. We find these stories represented in literature by a number of writers, including Carlos Bulosan, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston and Tomas Rivera. Many of the immigrants arriving on both coasts found themselves working in industries that devalued them as easily replaceable commodities. They were treated very poorly by their employers and they found themselves often living in horrific housing conditions in segregated inner city neighborhoods, rejected by popular society as second-class citizens and rarely able to advance economically. [future artifact reference] Sometimes these conditions led toward socialistic solutions, such as the forming of trade unions.

The earliest trade unions arose in Europe and the United States in the 19th century; however it was not until the formation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), by a group of unions made up of skilled laborers in 1886, that large organized union activities in this country began. [future artifact reference] Union involvement and activity tended to increase throughout the beginning of the 20th century, depending upon the economic climate of the times. Originally, formally organized unions were made up almost exclusively of skilled workers. These unionized workers feared the influx of unskilled immigrants as they entered into the country and the workforce and they sought to limit their influence. Early on, the AFL opposed the unionization of these unskilled workers and expelled a small group of unions trying to organize these workers in 1935. These expelled unions soon formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which later had great successes in unionizing the auto and steel industries. The AFL and CIO would later merge in 1955.
Union activity in this country was often surrounded by violence and controversy. [future artifact reference] Influential industry leaders and large corporate farm owners often went to great lengths to prevent or break union activity through intimidation, fear, jailing leaders, hiring replacement workers and other means, both legal and illegal. They often feared that organized unions would lead to higher wages and more benefits for workers, which would make their products more costly and less competitive and cut into corporate profits.


Orientation to Immigration web site

American Immigration Home Page