The foreign element: New immigrants and American industry, 1914--1924

This dissertation analyzes how new immigration workers changed industrial society through a comparative study of iron mining in Minnesota, the Calumet steel milling district of the south Chicago area, and coal mining in central Illinois.;The rise and fall in immigration radicalism and labor militancy was a transatlantic process. By 1914, new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe had come to dominate industry's dirtiest and most dangerous jobs. Such was the case in the iron, coal, and the steel industries of the western Great Lakes---the heart of industrial growth prior to W.W.I. The decade that followed was bookended by interruptions to mass immigration, first brought on by the eruption of war in Europe, and then in 1924 by the virtual banning of the new immigration through the Johnson Reed Act. The intervening years were characterized by acute economic and demographic change, on the one hand, and on the other by the saturation of new immigrant populations with ideology generated both in the U.S. and Europe, including the competing claims to loyalty of nationalism and various currents of radicalism. These changes coupled with the new immigrants' position at the bottom rungs of industrial hierarchy to advance a tendency toward interethnic labor militancy and to augment the audience for radicalism.;Many of the tendencies in government, industry, and society that emerged or intensified in the early 1920s were reactions against this immigrant militancy and radicalism of the preceding years. New immigrants then found themselves caught in a double envelopment of reaction, in their new land and old.;This dissertation advances on previous studies by synthesizing various elements of the labor, immigration, and political history of the period and comparatively analyzing different industries and immigrant groups in a global context, while recognizing new immigrants as actors in the period's crucial changes.