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Steel Mill Life For The New Immigrants
A strike in 1891 by the
skilled workers challenged the power of the
Pennsylvania Steel company but was
quickly put down. In the aftermath of the
strike the company encouraged massive
immigration from southern and eastern Europe
including the Austro-Hungarian Empire and did so
through recruiting agents. These men were often
local freelance operators living among their own
people and who were also working for the
steamship companies receiving their fees from
both on the basis of the numbers of immigrants
they enlisted. The arrival of thousands of
these Croats, Serbs, Italians, Bulgarians,
Slovaks, Hungarians and the so-called Banaters
(as the first arriving Danube Swabians were
known locally) forever changed the character and
composition of the population of Steelton.
There was a segregation
policy in effect within the company in the face
of this social diversity so that the skilled
high paying jobs and leadership positions in all
departments remained in the hands of Anglo
Saxons, primarily the Irish and the blast
furnace jobs were assigned to the new south east
European immigrants with little opportunity for
them to advance into any kind of leadership role
or train for a skilled position. It was a given
that the new work force recognized and simply
accepted which was also true of the community at
large. As a consequence, the immigrants
gathered together in ethnic enclaves,
neighbourhoods and residential areas both due to
external pressures and by personal intent. The
reasons for this were associated with the
resentment they experienced from the "old stock"
residents as well as their need for social
contact with individuals who shared a similar
background, language, life style, customs,
traditions and religious faith. In effect they
became locked into their ethnic community both
due to prejudice on the outside and their inner
need to find and build a sense of community.
The ethnic diversity of the
community had its beginnings in 1885 and would
last for a quarter of a century with the south
eastern Europeans arriving en masse in the
1890s. Most of the immigrants in the 1880s and
1890s returned back to their homes in Europe
within two or three years of coming to the
United States. It was never their intention to
make it a permanent move. Those who remained
were those who brought their families with
them. Very often these families established
boarding houses to serve their relatives,
friends and countrymen and provided extra income
and allowed the women to assist with the family
income. All of the immigrants had a similar
background; they were agricultural workers,
landless and unskilled. There were basically
three types of immigrants who arrived in
Steelton. First, there were men with their
families seeking a new life and a permanent
home. Secondly, there were highly transient
young single men in search of good wages.
Thirdly, there were middle-aged men seeking a
temporary source of income and were usually also
supporting a family back home in Europe. It was
the third group in particular that was most
representative of the men from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. In most cases they
became what the community referred to as “the
boarders” because they congregated in the
numerous ethnic boarding houses. They probably
counted for nine out of every ten of the men in
the steel mill. Most of them had been married
for less than ten years. They were not dreamers
or romantics in search of adventure. They were
men on a mission and serious about it in order
to establish themselves economically for their
future life back home. Few of them planned to
stay. Very few of them did. |
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