USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Lawrence > Immigrant city: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 > Part 12
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IMMIGRANT CITY
Europeans, who could boast of no one in professional service. As the immigrant cycle worked, the whole city raised its level of employment because of the efforts of the most recent arrivals.
Since at first the Irish were laborers and domestics, they out- ranked the other nationalities in personal service and were eco- nomically at the bottom of city employment. By 1880 they were working in the factories instead of building them. Twenty years later in 1900 they were much better off with one out of six employed professionally or in trade. While it required only two occupations to employ two-thirds of the Irish in 1880, showing how dependent they were upon menial labor, nine jobs were necessary to account for two-thirds of them in 1900. Though the total em- ployed had doubled, the number of laborers and servants did not change. Many more had become salesmen, merchants, and clerks. The percentage of Irish workers in their leading occupations in both years are in the following chart. Only the occupations neces- sary to employ two-thirds are listed.
Irish
%
6,7
100
1880
Textile Workers 55%
L 13 %
1900
Textile 42 %
L 8%
L -- Laborers
-- Other leading occupations 1900: servants 5%; merchants 3%; teamsters 2%; clerks 2%; bleachery and dye workers 2%; tailors and dressmakers 2%; machinists 2%.
The British meanwhile showed a much smaller percentage of laborers and servants and a much larger proportion in the mills. Between 1880 and 1900 the latter went down while that in trade and transportation rose. Like the Irish, the British spread out into a wider range of jobs and were placed more frequently in stores and other businesses. The British percentages:
125
SECURITY IN THE MILLS
British
%
6,7
100
1880
Textile Workers 67 %
1900
Textile 50%
Other leading occupations 1900: machinists 5%; clerks 3%; carpenters 3%; salesmen 2%; merchants 2% ; bleachery and dye workers 2%.
German occupations formed a pattern similar to those of the British: the percentage in trade and transportation, low at first, rose steadily; that in manufacturing, originally high, dropped; and the proportion in personal services was minimal. The Germans could not match the Irish in trade, but they were ahead of them in manufacturing because so many German wool weavers came to Lawrence. While the percentage of Germans in the textile mills dropped, the percentage in manufacturing remained relatively high because of an increase in German carpenters and machinists. As was the case with the Irish and the British, the variety of German occupations increased greatly between 1880 and 1900. The Ger- man statistics:
German
%
6,7
100
1880
Textile Workers 70 %
1900
Textile 59 %
Other leading occupations 1900: carpenters 4%; salesmen 3%; merchants 3%.
The Canadians had a high percentage in trade and transporta- tion. Like the other early immigrants many were in the mills at first, but the proportion dropped by 1900. The large percentage
126
IMMIGRANT CITY
doing personal service placed the Canadians down with the Irish on the economic scale. While their range of occupations increased by 1900, many Canadians were still servants and laborers, under- scoring their low economic status. Canadian occupations:
Canadian
%
6,7
100
1880
Textile Workers 62%
L
7%
1900
Textile 46 %
L
6%
Other leading occupations 1900: carpenters 6%; salesmen 3%; servants 3%; dressmakers 3%.
For the later immigrants there was a similar pattern. Like the early Irish they had almost none in the professions and few in trade and transportation; most of their workers were in the textile mills. Only the Russians, with their numerous junk dealers, could claim many merchants. The large number of southeastern Europeans in manufacturing indicated that they had replaced the older immigrants in the mills. The Italians, Poles, and Russians combined had 64 per cent of their workers in the textile mills in 1900 and 8 per cent doing day labor-two occupations accounting for 72 per cent of those employed. The majority of the Syrians, too, found work in the mills, but there were also many Syrian grocers and restaurant keepers. As the southeastern Europeans took the jobs once held by the shanty Irish, the effect of the immi- grant cycle was clearer than ever before.
The native Americans had always held the best jobs, many of them in the professions and in trade and transportation. But even they benefited from the immigrant cycle. Trades and crafts as well as teaching were among their most numerous occupations in 1880, but these were joined by manufacturing and banking in 1900. As early as 1880 two-thirds of the native-born were spread among seven jobs. By 1900 the same proportion of natives with native parents needed sixteen types of work. The leading occupa- tions were as follows:
127
SECURITY IN THE MILLS
American
%
617
100
1880
Textile Workers 47 %
1900
Textile 18 %
Other leading occupations 1880: tailors 4%; clerks 4%; traders 4%; machinists 3%; carpenters 3%; domestics 3%.
Other leading occupations 1900: bookkeepers 7%; sales- men 6%; carpenters 6%; merchants 4%; machinists 4%; steam railroad workers 4%; dressmakers 3%; servants 3%; teachers 2%; painters 2%; draymen 2%; laborers 2%; shoe workers 2%; manufacturing 2%; policemen and firemen 2%.
Not only did the native Americans with native parents have better jobs than the immigrants, but they also had better jobs than the native Americans with foreign-born parents. In this respect the census report of 1900 revealed the same order of economic success as the Immigration Commission figures on wages in the mills in 1909. Those with the best occupations were the native-born with native parents; next were the natives with foreign parents; last were the foreign-born. The following chart demon- strates the differences among the three groups:
Percentage of Each Group Engaged in Certain Pursuits, 1900
Native-born with
Native-born
Native Parents Foreign Parents
Professional Services
8
4
1
Trade and Transportation
29
17
10
Manufacturing and
Mechanical Pursuits
48
71
74
Personal Service
14
8
14
with
Foreign- born
The number of occupations necessary to employ two-thirds of each group also showed the same order. The more recent arrivals in America were confined to a small number of jobs, while the early immigrants had begun to spread out into many more occupa- tions.
128
IMMIGRANT CITY
Number of Occupations
1880
1900
16-20
Native-born with Native Parents 16
11-15
6-10
Native-born 7->Native-born with Foreign Parents 8 Foreign-born (No. Eur. & Canada) 7
1- 5
Foreign-born 4 (No. Eur. & Can.)
Foreign-born (Southeastern Eur.) 2
The arrows demonstrate the progress made by each group in twenty years. As each group lived in America longer and longer its occupational range widened. It is likely that the later nationali- ties found jobs for two-thirds of their workers in six or eight oc- cupations by 1929 and that those from Germany, Ireland, Great Britain, and Canada needed fifteen or more. The natives of long standing by that time had probably spread into at least twenty-five jobs for two-thirds of their workers.18
Still further evidence appeared in a 1935 history of Essex Coun- ty, Massachusetts, which carried biographies of its prominent citi- zens. Only 14 of the 130 "successful" men connected with Law- rence were foreign-born, 67 were second-generation Americans, and 49 were native-born with native parents. Most of the 130 had been young men in Lawrence at the turn of the century. There were more natives with foreign parents than those with native parents because the former group was much larger in Lawrence. Proportionately the native-born with native parents were the most "successful." The longer one's family had been in America the more likely he was to get a good job.19
The earlier immigrants and natives dominated government
18. Cole, "Lawrence," pp. 237-38, 436-40, has material derived from a study of the death records of 1912, which gave the occupations of those who died and their parents. These figures provided the basis for comparing the occupations of first and second generation Americans with those of native-born Americans with native-born parents. They revealed the same pattern of economic success as that established by the 1900 figures. City of Lawrence, Deaths, XII (1911-13), 67-133.
19. Scott H. Paradise and Claude M. Fuess, The Story of Essex County (New York, 1935), III, IV, passim.
129
SECURITY IN THE MILLS
service and the professions, the best jobs the city offered. The politicians elected to office were almost invariably native-born citizens or Irish. In thirteen administrations selected out of the decades of promise, three-quarters of the officials were native citizens, over an eighth were Irish, and most of the rest English.20 The same pattern appeared in the census reports of 1900, which showed the birthplace of the parents of the workers:
%
50
100
Watchmen, policemen, and firemen
American Parents 31%
Irish Parents 34%
Other Aparents
Bankers, brokers
61%
19%
Manufacturers
36%
14%
Doctors
44%
26 %
Teachers
40%
40%
While few immigrants could hope to become bankers or doctors, the immigrant cycle made it possible for the next generation to do so. Even the poorest Italians or Poles were willing to exist in the slums of a city that brought immigrants from the bottom to the top within a few generations.21
And even if he and his sons never advanced beyond the mills, the immigrant liked to think that he was better off than he would
20. Lawrence American, Jan. 9, 1864, Jan. 7, 1865, Jan. 5, 1866, Jan. 11, 1884, supplement; The Lawrence Sentinel, Dec. 7, 1867, Jan. 7, 1871, Jan. 6, 1872, Jan. 3, 1874; The Essex Eagle, Jan. 10, 1874, Jan. 2, 1875; Lawrence Jour- nal, Jan. 12, Dec. 7, 1878, Jan. 11, 1879, Dec. 31, 1881; Carroll D. Wright, The Census of Massachusetts: 1885, I, Part 2 (Boston, 1888), 124; City Marshal, "Re- port, 1903," pp. 13-22, Lawrence City Documents 1903-1904, showed 50 native policemen, 10 Irish, and 15 others.
21. The material for 1900 came from the same census reports cited in footnote 17. A Lawrence school manual lists the teachers for 1913 and the names show that the Irish were prominent in that profession. Of the 416 names 194 appeared to be Irish. In the high school all thirty-one teachers had Irish names. City of Lawrence, Manual of the Public Schools (Lawrence, 1913), pp. 26-41. Of the lawyers in 1912, 70 per cent American or British names, 18 per cent Irish. Lawrence Directory, 1912 (Boston, 1912), pp. 800-1.
130
IMMIGRANT CITY
have been in the old country. The Courier cheered the early ar- rivals by stating that wages were 33 to 50 per cent lower in Manchester and Leeds, England, than in New England. Later the American carried lurid descriptions of the squalid conditions in the British factories. While some responded that hours in England were shorter and prices lower and others doubted that conditions could be anywhere worse than in the "dirty, dusty, miserable human pens" in Lawrence, no one could challenge the superiority of American wages.22
Since wages were higher, workers were better able to save. Patrick Murphy left an estate of $50,000; a French Canadian named Coté left $10,000. At the end of the Civil War the Essex Bank had over seven thousand deposits in one year, many from mill workers. Half a century later immigrants ranging from Irish- men to Italians held a large number of the accounts at the Essex. One Saturday afternoon in 1910, a time when mill workers cus- tomarily deposited their wages, the Essex had almost 400 deposits, aggregating over $10,000. Back in the 1880's the revelations during the Augustinian bank failure showed about seven hundred accounts, totalling over $400,000. But not all the money went into banks because money orders issued in Lawrence for sending money abroad amounted to $150,000 a year about 1910. And many newspaper articles spoke of immigrants who carried about large sums of money.23
The savings were soon invested in property. When the Essex Company offered land at auction before the Civil War, so many
22. The Lawrence Courier, Nov. 19, 1859, Municipal Records, VI; Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Third Annual Report ... 1872, p. 399; The Evening Tribune, Oct. 14, 1893; Lawrence American, Aug. 31, Sept. 14, Oct. 12, 1888; Board of Trade of London, Cost of Living, p. Ixi.
23. Lawrence Journal, Mar. 3, 17, Oct. 4, 1883; Essex County, Mass., Registry of Probate, Nos. 92541, 71887; The Essex Eagle, Oct. 12, 1867; Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Fifth Annual Report ... 1874, Mass. Pub. Doc. 31, p. 167; Le Progrès, April 19, 1906; The Strike at Lawrence, Mass. Hearings before the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives . .. 1912, 62 Congress, 2 Session, House Doc. 671 (Washington, 1912), p. 409; Neill, Report, p. 210; The Evening Tribune, Aug. 30, 1894. Newspaper articles depicted fairly affluent immigrants. A weaver was robbed of $69. An Italian foreman was found dead with $80 to $100 on him. Two Armenians had $800 and $600. Another Armenian had bankbooks with accounts totaling $500. Lawrence Journal, Aug. 27, 1881; The Evening Tribune, April 3, 1891, Feb. 21, 1894, Nov. 5, 1903. Ninety-two of the accounts at the Augustinian Bank were over $1,000.
131
SECURITY IN THE MILLS
immigrants bought land and built houses that Lawrence became known as the "city of homes." By 1882 Lawrence mill workers, mostly immigrants, owned as much property as those in Fall River and Lowell combined. Patrick Sweeney, owner of the Journal, bought large holdings and, when prices rose, made a great profit; his tax bill in 1884 was the highest of any resident. Joseph Saliba in 1900 was buying up all available real estate for the fast growing Syrian colony, and prosperous Italians invested heavily in Pleasant Valley. Other Syrians and Italians were assessed for over $400,000 in another area. The assessed valuation of real estate belonging to Armenians, Syrians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians was over a million dollars in 1912. French Canadians alone were assessed for another million.24
Immigrant churches and clubs were also prosperous. The Catholics collected about $3,000 on Easter in 1878 and the same at Christmas in 1880. As Father Devir left to visit Ireland, his parishioners gave him a purse of $1,000. When their convent became inadequate, 1,200 Catholics contributed an average of about $9.00 each to build a new one. The Germans easily raised $3,000 to alter Turn Hall and the French Canadians mustered $33,000 for the Saint Jean de Baptiste building in 1906. Even the Chinese laundrymen were able to gather a few dollars for a Fourth of July float. When immigrants contributed a large percentage of the $27,000 collected to aid the sufferers from the 1890 cyclone and a significant proportion of the San Francisco earthquake fund, it was only additional evidence of immigrant wealth.25
A few final examples indicate the manner in which some of the
24. Sunday Sun, June 2, 1907; Bureau of Statistics of Labor, "Fall River, Lowell, and Lawrence," pp. 296-97; United States Census Office, Eleventh Census of the United States ... 1890, Bulletin 31 (Washington, 1893), p. 9; Lawrence City Documents 1906-1907, p. 8; The Evening Tribune, Aug. 10, 1900; The Strike at Lawrence, pp. 409-10. Citizens' Association, Lawrence, Mass., Lawrence, Massachusetts: A Story of Protest, Patriotism, Thanksgiving, and Truth (Lawrence, 1912), pp. 8-11. For further references to immigrant property see Cole, "Lawrence," pp. 59-60, 272.
25. Lawrence Journal, April 27, 1878, Jan. 3, 1880, April 9, 1881, Jan. 31, 1885; The Evening Tribune, Feb. 17, 1892, May 5, 1903; The Essex Eagle, June 18, 1874; Le Progrès, May 31, 1906; Cyclone Relief Committee ... Lawrence, Mass. ... , Report April, 1891 (Lawrence, 1891); List of Contributors to the Fund for the Sufferers from the Earthquake that Destroyed . . . San Francisco .. . (Lawrence, 1906).
132
IMMIGRANT CITY
new Americans behaved. When Patrick McCarty got out of jail in 1873, he gave a reception for 200 people. The funeral of John Breen was the largest in the history of the city; and even the funeral procession for two little Syrian boys who drowned had thirty-two carriages. There were also happy occasions upon which the immigrants could display wealth: the gifts at Maurice Curran's marriage were particularly costly; Peter Holihan, the Breen sisters, and John Ford all built elegant homes; and many of the Irish went on expensive vacations in America and Europe. Wealth and an immigrant's station were not necessarily exclusive. While most were poor, there were sufficient examples of immigrant success to give the rest hope.
And most important, not all of the immigrants felt trapped. The half-rural setting of Lawrence, with open countryside but a mile or two in any direction, eliminated the closed-in feeling that frustrated European peasants in a metropolis such as Boston. Every miserable newcomer could escape for an afternoon to the wooded hills and fresh streams in the vicinity of Lawrence, and when a man was out of work the countryside offered a way of forgetting and occasionally a place to find food as well. The constant surge of new immigrants moved, as we have seen, the earlier immigrants up and out of the heart of the city. Some moved to Tower and Prospect Hills, others to South Lawrence, and the more fortunate to Pleasant Valley in Methuen and Shawsheen Village in Andover.
For those whose future seemed completely hopeless there was the possibility of moving west. Although this was a difficult process, Lawrence was never cut off from the frontier. Letters from the west and advertisements for tickets to California reflected a continuing interest. When Boston emigration agents inserted articles in the Journal about settlements in Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, the editor urged his readers to go. The editor of another newspaper left in 1880 for Marshall, Minnesota, where he established a printing office. In 1890 the Lowell News said that after a Lawrence man made some money, he invested it in southern or western land speculation or went to a town in the middle west. When the San Francisco earthquake
133
SECURITY IN THE MILLS
and fire took place, at least eleven residents of Lawrence had relatives in the stricken city.26
Instead of going west other immigrants simply packed up and went home when conditions were too bad in Lawrence, and this possibility made some immigrants feel less trapped. Un- employment in the 1850's sent Irishmen to the agents for tickets home. French-Canadian departures, common in the 1880's, became an exodus by 1893, when "hundreds" of railway tickets to Canada were sold. Many left for homesteads that the Ca- nadian government offered in the west to attract the habitant back home from the United States. The Lawrence Congrégation des Dames listed forty-four former members living in Canada in 1912. But while many Canadians went home, the stereotype of the Canadian "birds of passage," who came to the United States only to raise a little money with no intention of staying, is not ac- curate. This impression dates back to the 1880's, when Carroll Wright of the Massachusetts Census Bureau dubbed them the "Chinese of the East." Actually the Canadians had no monopoly on permanent departures, and when they did go, it was because of unemployment in the textile mills. More than any other group the French Canadians were family conscious and they tried hard to make permanent homes for their families in Lawrence. When they took them back to Canada, it was generally a necessity. Italians more than Canadians were deserting Lawrence in 1907, 1908, and 1911, again because of mill difficulties. The chance of possibly going home made the city much more tolerable.27
But for the vast majority of immigrant workingmen, who were committed to Lawrence on a permanent basis, the only way to at-
26. Lawrence American, Aug. 2, 1862, Dec. 31, 1864, Feb. 11, 1865; The Lawrence Sentinel, July 17, 1869; The Essex Eagle, June 6, 1874; Lawrence Journal, April 5, 1879, Sept. 25, 1880, Aug. 18, 1883, Jan. 24, April 18, 1885, July 7, 1886. The announcements included references to Florida and Texas. The Evening Tribune, Oct. 23, 1890; Sunday Sun, April 22, 1906.
27. Lawrence Journal, Aug. 19, 1882; Lawrence Morning News, May 9, 1884; Lawrence American, Sept. 17, 1886; The Evening Tribune, Aug. 9, 1893; Le Progrès, Sept. 1, 1899, April 29, May 10, 1904, April 25, 1907; The Lawrence Sun, Feb. 6, 1912; Paroisse Sainte-Anne, Congrégation des Dames de Ste. Anne, 1912-13 (Salem, Mass., 1913); Amy A. Bernady, "The Aliens Rush Home," Immigration Restriction League, Scrapbook of Clippings, 1907, Widener Library, Harvard; Immigration Commission, "Community A," p. 652; Strike at Lawrence, p. 367; Sunday Sun, Oct. 22, 1911.
134
IMMIGRANT CITY
tain real security in the mills was to organize. For a long time, fear, ignorance, and inertia kept most of them out of the labor movement even though all of the national labor unions tried to organize the city. The Workingmen's party, which took part in the city elections of 1865-70, called for a ten-hour day and higher wages. In 1870, three thousand workers formed a branch of the National Labor Union in Lawrence and passed a resolution against coolie workers. The Knights of Saint Crispin met in 1869 and 1874. Formed shortly after the strike of 1882, the Knights of Labor grew slowly until 1886, when a district convention met in Lawrence. From then on its decline was as rapid in Lawrence as it was throughout the United States. The silversmiths combined against it, the corporations tore up its holiday petitions, and the police took its hall away, all by 1891. Its more radical demands, such as cooperatives, child labor restrictions, and an eight-hour day, were far too advanced for Lawrence. All it left behind was the Central Labor Union, a meeting place for most unions in the city.
Through the help of the C.L.U. the American Federation of Labor came to Lawrence about 1900, but it made little progress and few of its unions lasted any length of time. While there were references to almost 150 different unions in the city press and the Bureau of Statistics of Labor reports, only four were mentioned ten times or more and lasted more than twenty-five years: the Moulders, Mule Spinners, Loom Fixers, and Barbers.28
Even less successful were efforts to establish a union of all textile operatives. Early in the 1890's the National Union of Textile Workers set up a local, which in 1898 joined the A.F.L. Samuel Gompers, president of the A.F.L., and John Golden, head
28. Lawrence American, Mar. 11, Sept. 15, 1865, Feb. 23, 1866; Lawrence Journal, Nov. 17, 1877, Feb. 9, Nov. 30, 1878, Nov. 29, 1879; The Lawrence Sentinel, Sept. 10, 1870; The Essex Eagle, Feb. 27, 1869, Jan. 10, 1874. For Knights of Labor see the Lawrence American, Sept. 15, 1882; Lawrence Journal, Aug. 12, Sept. 23, 1882, July 26, 1884, Oct. 30, 1886, April 23, Oct. 29, Nov. 12, 1887, Jan. 28, June 9, 1888, Mar. 16, 1891. For C.L.U. and A.F.L. see ibid., Nov. 12, 1887. The Central Labor Union was far more active before 1900 than after. The Lawrence Sun, Sept. 24, 1906; Anzeiger und Post, Oct. 13, 1906, Nov. 16, 1907. The statistics on labor unions were derived from Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Annual Reports, I-XLIV (1870-1913), passim, particularly the special sections entitled variously, "Hours," "Wages," "Labor Chronology," "Benefits," and "Working Rules and Agreements," which appeared 1893-1913, and from all the Lawrence newspapers.
135
SECURITY IN THE MILLS
of the Textile Workers, marched in parades and held conventions as they struggled to organize the city. Gompers tried to appeal to the innate conservatism of the workers by warning them against anarchism and socialism. Competing with the A.F.L. was the more radical National Industrial Union of Textile Workers of the Industrial Workers of the World, which set up a local in 1905 and five years later held a convention in Lawrence. The I.W.W. local disapproved of the wage system and was far to the left of the A.F.L. Although the I.W.W. boasted 1,000 members in Lawrence at the start of 1912, only 300 were paid up. The total membership of the various A.F.L. textile craft groups was about 2,500. Whether the A.F.L. or the I.W.W. would secure the loyalty of the remaining 30,000 textile operatives depended upon their ability to appeal to the immigrant worker. The Lawrence strike of 1912 held the answer.29
Within these labor unions the immigrant played only a modest role. The most important immigrant labor leader after the Civil War was Robert Bower, an Englishman, who fought for the ten- hour day through his Lawrence Amalgamated Short Time Com- mittee. In 1869 the Labor Reform party nominated him for the House of Representatives and in 1870 he organized the National Labor Union in Lawrence. As the 1870's developed he became editor of a Lawrence labor weekly, worked at the Boston Customs House, and was president of the Massachusetts Ten-Hour Asso- ciation. Associated with Bower were two other Englishmen, Richard Hinchcliffe, brother of an Illinois miners' leader and editor of Bower's newspaper, and Duncan Wood, the exporter. Still other English immigrants were active in the Weekly Payments movement and the Engravers and Printers Union. While the Irish had no outstanding labor leaders, they were strongly en- trenched in the Workingmen's party, and John Breen came out vigorously for weekly wage payments. The Germans did their bit for the Workingmen's party by sponsoring an address by Dennis
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