By the Eastern European immigration the labor force has been cleft horizontally into two great divisions. The upper stratum includes what is known in mill parlance as the 'English-speaking' men; the lower contains the 'Hunkies' or 'Ginnies.' Or, if you prefer, the former are the 'white men,' the latter the 'foreigners.'

In 1980, Joseph Loguidice, an elderly Italian American from Chicago, sat down to give his life story to an interviewer. His first and most vivid childhood recollection was of a race riot that had occurred on the city's near north side. Wagons full of policemen with "peculiar hats" streamed into his neighborhood. But the "one thing that stood out in my mind," Loguidice remembered after six decades, was "a man running down the middle of the street hollering ... 'I'm White, I'm White!'" After first taking him for an African American, Loguidice soon realized that the man was a white coal handler covered in dust. He was screaming for his life, fearing that "people would shoot him down." He had, Loguidice concluded, "got caught up in ... this racial thing."[ 1]

Joseph Loguidice's tale might be taken as a metaphor for the situation of millions of Eastern and Southern European immigrants who arrived in the United States between the end of the nineteenth century and the early 1920s. The fact that this episode made such a profound impression is in itself significant, suggesting both that this was a strange, new situation and that thinking about race became an important part of the consciousness of immigrants like Loguidice. We are concerned here in part with the development of racial awareness and attitudes, and an increasingly racialized worldview among new immigrant workers themselves. Most did not arrive with conventional United States attitudes regarding "racial" difference, let alone its significance and implications in the context of industrial America. Yet most, it seems, "got caught up in ... this racial thing." How did this happen? If race was indeed socially constructed, then what was the raw material that went into the process?

We are also concerned with how these immigrant workers were viewed in racial terms by others--employers, the state, reformers, and other workers. Like the coal handler in Loguidice's story, their own ascribed racial identity was not always clear. A whole range of evidence--laws; court cases; formal racial ideology; social conventions; popular culture in the form of slang, songs, films, cartoons, ethnic jokes, and popular theater--suggests that the native born and older immigrants often placed these newer immigrants not only above African and Asian Americans, for example, but also below "white" people. Indeed, many of the older immigrants and particularly the Irish had themselves been perceived as "nonwhite" just a generation earlier. As labor historians, we are interested in the ways in which Polish, Italian, and other European artisans and peasants became American workers, but we are equally concerned with the process by which they became "white." Indeed, in the United States the two identities intertwined and this explains a great deal of the persistent divisions within the working-class population. How did immigrant workers wind up "inbetween"?

Such questions are not typical of immigration history which has largely been the story of newcomers becoming American, of their holding out against becoming American or, at best, of their changing America in the process of discovering new identities. To the extent, and it is a very considerable extent, that theories of American exceptionalism intersect with the history of immigration, the emphasis falls on the difficulty of enlisting heterogeneous workers into class mobilizations or, alternatively, on the unique success of the United States as a multiethnic democracy.[ 2] But the immigration history Robert Orsi has recently called for, one which "puts the issues and contests of racial identity and difference at its center," has only begun to be written. Proponents of race as an explanation for American exceptionalism have not focused on European immigrants, at best regarding their racialization as a process completed by the 1890s.[ 3]

Even with the proliferation of scholarship on the social construction of race, we sometimes assume that such immigrants really were "white," in a way that they were not initially American. And, being white, largely poor, and self-consciously part of imagined communities with roots in Europe, they were therefore "ethnic." If social scientists referred to "national" groups as races (the "Italian race") and to Southern and East European pan-nationalities as races (Slavonic and Mediterranean "races"), they did so because they used race promiscuously to mean other things. If the classic work on American exceptionalism, Werner Sombart's 1906 Why Is There No Socialism in The United States? has a whole section on "racial" division with scarcely a mention of any group modem Americans would recognize as a racial minority, this is a matter of semantic confusion. If Robert Park centered his pioneering early twentieth-century sociological theory of assimilation on the "race relations cycle," with the initial expectation that it would apply to African Americans as well as European immigrants, he must not have sorted out the difference between race and ethnicity yet.[ 4] Indeed, so certain are some modem scholars of the ability of "ethnicity" to explain immigrant experiences which contemporaries described largely in terms of race and nationality that a substantial literature seeks to describe even the African-American and native American experiences as "ethnic."[ 5]

Racial identity was also clearly gendered in important ways, and historians are just beginning to understand this gendered quality of racial language, conventions, and identity. It is apparent even in the sorts of public spheres privileged here--citizenship, the state, the union, the workplace. But we are most apt to find the conjunctions between gender and race in places that are not probed here--at those points where more intimate relations intersected with the rule of law.

The taboo against interracial sex and marriage was one obvious boundary between low-status immigrant workers and people of color with whom they often came in contact. As Peggy Pascoe has noted, "although such marriages were infrequent throughout most of U.S. history, an enormous amount of time and energy was spent in trying to prevent them from taking place ... the history of interracial marriage provides rich evidence of the formulation of race and gender and of the connections between the two." Yet we have little understanding of how this taboo was viewed by immigrant and African- or Asian-American workers. One obvious place to look is at laws governing interracial marriage and court cases aimed at enforcing such laws. Native-born women who became involved with immigrant men could lose their citizenship and, if the immigrant were categorized as non-white, they could be prosecuted for "race-mixup." "Race mixing" occurred in spite of all this, of course. Chinese men who lived under particularly oppressive conditions because of restrictions on the immigration of Chinese women, tended to develop relationships with either African Americans or Poles and other "new immigrant" women.[ 6] We have not attempted to unravel this fascinating and complex problem or the racial identity of immigrant women here. Except where clearly indicated, we are describing situations where racial identity was informed and shaped by, often even conflated with, notions of manhood.

Thus, we make no brief for the consistency with which "race" was used, by experts or popularly, to describe the "new immigrant" Southern and East Europeans who dominated the ranks of those coming to the United States between 1895 and 1924 and who "remade" the American working class in that period. We regard such inconsistency as important evidence of the "inbetween" racial status of such immigrants.[ 7] The story of Americanization is vital and compelling, but it took place in a nation also obsessed by race. For immigrant workers, the processes of "becoming white" and "becoming American" were intertwined at every turn. The "American standard of living," which labor organizers alternately and simultaneously accused new immigrants of undermining and encouraged them to defend via class organization, rested on "white men's wages." Political debate turned on whether new immigrants were fit to join the American nation and on whether they were fit to join the "American race." Nor do we argue that Eastern and Southern European immigrants were in the same situation as non-whites. Stark differences between the racialized status of African Americans and the racial inbetween-ness of these immigrants meant that the latter eventually "became ethnic" and that their trajectory was predictable. But their history was sloppier than their trajectory. From day to day they were, to borrow from E. P. Thompson, "proto-nothing," reacting and acting in a highly racialized nation.[ 8]

Overly ambitious, this essay is also deliberately disorderly. It aims to destabilize modern categories of race and ethnicity and to capture the confusion, inbetween-ness and flux in the minds of native-born Americans and the immigrants themselves. Entangling the processes of Americanization and of whitening, it treats a two-sided experience: new immigrants underwent racial categorizing at the same time they developed new identities, and the two sides of the process cannot be understood apart from one another. Similarly, the categories of state, class and immigrant self-activity, used here to explain how race is made and to structure the paper, can be separated at best arbitrarily and inconsistently. Expect therefore a bumpy ride, which begins at its bumpiest--with the vocabulary of race.

INBETWEEN IN THE POPULAR MIND

America's racial vocabulary had no agency of its own, but rather reflected material conditions and power relations--the situations that workers faced on a daily basis in their workplaces and communities. Yet the words themselves were important. They were not only the means by which native born and elite people marked new immigrants as inferiors, but also the means by which immigrant workers came to locate themselves and those about them in the nation's racial hierarchy. In beginning to analyze the vocabulary of race, it makes little sense for historians to invest the words themselves with an agency that could be exercised only by real historical actors, or meanings that derived only from the particular historical contexts in which the language was developed and employed.

The word guinea, for example, had long referred to African slaves, particularly those from the continent's northwest coast, and to their descendants. But from the late 1890s, the term was increasingly applied to southern European migrants, first and especially to Sicilians and southern Italians who often came as contract laborers. At various times and places in the United States, guinea has been applied to mark Greeks, Jews, Portuguese, Puerto Ricans and perhaps any new immigrant.[ 9]

Likewise, hunky, which began life, probably in the early twentieth century, as a corruption of "Hungarian," eventually became a pan-Slavic slur connected with perceived immigrant racial characteristics. By World War One the term was frequently used to describe any immigrant steel-worker, as in mill hunky. Opponents of the Great 1919 Steel Strike, including some native-born skilled workers, derided the struggle as a "hunky strike." Yet Josef Barton's work suggests that for Poles, Croats, Slovenians, and other immigrants who often worked together in difficult, dangerous situations, the term embraced a remarkable, if fragile, sense of prideful identity across ethnic lines. In Out of this Furnace, Thomas Bell's 1941 epic novel based on the lives of Slavic steelworkers, he observed that the word hunky bespoke "unconcealed racial prejudice" and a "denial of social and racial equality." Yet as these workers built the industrial unions of the late 1930s and took greater control over their own lives, the meaning of the term began to change. The pride with which second- and third-generation Slavic-American steelworkers, now women as well as men, wore the label in the early 1970s seemed to have far more to do with class than with ethnic identity. At about the same time the word honky, possibly a corruption of hunky, came into common use as Black nationalism reemerged as a major ideological force in the African-American community.[ 10]

Words and phrases employed by social scientists to capture the inbetween identity of the new immigrants are a bit more descriptive, if a bit more cumbersome. As late as 1937, John Dollard wrote repeatedly of the immigrant working class as "our temporary Negroes." More precise, if less dramatic, is the designation "not-yet-white ethnics" offered by Barry Goldberg. The term not only reflects the popular perceptions and everyday experiences of such workers, but also conveys the dynamic quality of the process of racial formation.[ 11]

The examples of Greeks and Italians particularly underscore the new "immigrants'" ambiguous positions with regard to popular perceptions of race. When Greeks suffered as victims of an Omaha "race" riot in 1909 and when eleven Italians died at the hands of lynchers in Louisiana in 1891, their less-than-white racial status mattered alongside their nationalities. Indeed, as in the case of Loguidice's coal handler, their ambivalent racial status put their lives in jeopardy. As Gunther Peck shows in his fine study of copper miners in Bingham, Utah, the Greek and Italian immigrants were "nonwhite" before their tension-fraught cooperation with the Western Federation of Miners during a 1912 strike ensured that "the category of Caucasian worker changed and expanded." Indeed, the work of Dan Georgakas and Yvette Huginnie shows that Greeks and other Southern Europeans often "bivouacked" with other "nonwhite" workers in Western mining towns. Pocatello, Idaho, Jim-Crowed Greeks in the early twentieth century and in Arizona they were not welcomed by white workers in "white men's towns" or "white men's jobs." In Chicago during the Great Depression, a German-American wife expressed regret over marrying her "half-nigger," Greek-American husband. African-American slang in the 1920s in South Carolina counted those of mixed American Indian, African American and white heritage as Greeks. Greek Americans in the Midwest showed great anxieties about race, and were perceived not only as Puerto Rican, mulatto, Mexican or Arab, but also as non-white because of being Greek.[ 12]

Italians, involved in a spectacular international diaspora in the early twentieth century, were racialized as the "Chinese of Europe" in many lands.[ 13] But in the United States their racialization was pronounced and, as guinea's evolution suggests, more likely to connect Italians with Africans. During the debate at the Louisiana state constitutional convention of 1898, over how to disfranchise blacks, and over which whites might lose the vote, some acknowledged that the Italian's skin "happens to be white" even as they argued for his disfranchisement. But others held that "according to the spirit of our meaning when we speak of 'white man's government,' [the Italians] are as black as the blackest negro in existence."[ 14] More than metaphor intruded on this judgment. At the turn of the century, a West Coast construction boss was asked, "You don't call the Italian a white man?" The negative reply assured the questioner that the Italian was "a dago." Recent studies of Italian and Greek Americans make a strong case that racial, not just ethnic, oppression long plagued "nonwhite" immigrants from Southern Europe.[ 15]

The racialization of East Europeans was likewise striking. While racist jokes mocked the black servant who thought her child, fathered by a Chinese man, would be a Jew, racist folklore held that Jews, inside-out, were "niggers." In 1926 Serbo-Croatians ranked near the bottom of a list of forty "ethnic" groups whom "white American" respondents were asked to order according to the respondents' willingness to associate with members of each group. They placed just above Negroes, Filipinos, and Japanese. Just above them were Poles, who were near the middle of the list. One sociologist has recently written that "a good many groups on this color continuum [were] not considered white by a large number of Americans."[ 16] The literal inbetween-ness of new immigrants on such a list suggests what popular speech affirms: The state of whiteness was approached gradually and controversially. The authority of the state itself both smoothed and complicated that approach.

WHITE CITIZENSHIP AND INBETWEEN AMERICANS: THE STATE OF RACE

The power of the national state gave recent immigrants both their firmest claims to whiteness and their strongest leverage for enforcing those claims. The courts consistently allowed "new immigrants," whose racial status was ambiguous in the larger culture, to be naturalized as "white" citizens and almost as consistently turned down non-European applicants as "nonwhite." Political reformers therefore discussed the fitness for citizenship of recent European immigrants from two distinct angles. They produced, through the beginning of World War One, a largely benign and hopeful discourse on how to Americanize (and win the votes of) those already here. But this period also saw a debate on fertility rates and immigration restriction which conjured up threats of "race suicide" if this flow of migrants were not checked and the fertility of the native-born increased. A figure like Theodore Roosevelt could stand as both the Horatio warning of the imminent swamping of the "old stock" racial elements in the United States and as the optimistic Americanizer to whom the play which originated the assimilationist image of the "melting pot" was dedicated.[ 17]

Such anomalies rested not only on a political economy, which at times needed and at times shunned immigrant labor, but also on peculiarities of United States naturalization law. If the "state apparatus" both told new immigrants that they were and were not white, it was clearly the judiciary which produced the most affirmative responses. Thus United States law made citizenship racial as well as civil. Even when much of the citizenry doubted the racial status of European migrants, the courts almost always granted their whiteness in naturalization cases. Thus, the often racially based campaigns against Irish naturalization in the 1840s and 1850s and against Italian naturalization in the early twentieth century aimed to delay, not deny, citizenship. The lone case which appears exceptional in this regard is one in which United States naturalization attorneys in Minnesota attempted unsuccessfully to bar radical Finns from naturalization on the ethnological grounds that they were not "caucasian" and therefore not white.[ 18]

The legal equation of whiteness with fitness for citizenship significantly shaped the process by which race was made in the United States. If Southern and Eastern European immigrants remained "inbetween people" because of broad cultural perceptions, Asians were in case after case declared unambiguously non-white and therefore unfit for citizenship. This sustained pattern of denial of citizenship provides, as the sociologist Richard Williams argues, the best guide to who would be racialized in an ongoing way in the twentieth-century United States. It applies, of course, in the case of Native Americans. Migrants from Africa, though nominally an exception in that Congress in 1870 allowed their naturalization (with the full expectation that they would not be coming), of course experienced sweeping denials of civil status both in slavery and in Jim Crow. Nor were migrants from Mexico truly exceptional. Despite the naturalizability of such migrants by treaty and later court decisions, widespread denials of citizenship rights took place almost immediately--in one 1855 instance in California as a result of the "Greaser Bill"--as the Vagrancy Act was termed.[ 19]

Likewise, the equation between legal whiteness and fitness for naturalizable citizenship helps to predict which groups would not be made non-white in an ongoing way. Not only did the Irish, whose whiteness was under sharp question in the 1840s and 1850s, and later the "new immigrants" gain the powerful symbolic argument that the law declared them white and fit, but they also had the power of significant numbers of votes, although naturalization rates for new immigrants were not always high. During Louisiana's disfranchising constitutional convention of 1898, for example, the bitter debate over Italian whiteness ended with a provision passed extending to new immigrants protections comparable, even superior, to those which the "grandfather clause" gave to native white voters. New Orleans' powerful Choctaw Club machine, already the beneficiary of Italian votes, led the campaign for the plank.[ 20] When Thomas Hart Benton and Stephen Douglas argued against Anglo-Saxon superiority and for a pan-white "American race" in the 1850s, they did so before huge blocs of Irish voters. When Theodore Roosevelt extolled the "mixture of blood" making the American race, a "new ethnic type in this melting pot of the nations," he emphasized to new immigrant voters his conviction that each of their nationalities would enrich America by adding "its blood to the life of the nation." When Woodrow Wilson also tailored his thinking about racial desirability of the new European immigrants, he did so in the context of an electoral campaign in which the "foreign" vote counted heavily.[ 21] In such a situation, Roosevelt's almost laughable proliferation of uses of the word race served him well, according to his various needs as reformer, imperialist, debunker and romanticizer of the history of the West, and political candidate. He sincerely undertook seemingly contradictory embraces of Darwin and of Lamarck's insistence on the hereditability of acquired characteristics, of melting pots and of race suicide, of an adoring belief in Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic superiority and in the grandeur of a "mixed" American race. Roosevelt, like the census bureau, thought in terms of the nation's biological "stock"--the term by now called forth images of Wall Street as well as the farm. That stock was directly threatened by low birth rates among the nation's "English-speaking race." But races could also progress over time and the very experience of mixing and of clashing with other races would bring out, and improve, the best of the "racestock." The "American race" could absorb and permanently improve the less desirable stock of "all white immigrants," perhaps in two generations, but only if its most desirable "English-speaking" racial elements were not swamped in an un-Americanized Slavic and Southern European culture and biology.[ 22]

The neo-Lamarckianism which allowed Roosevelt to use such terms as "English-speaking race" ran through much of Progressive racial thinking, though it was sometimes underpinned by appeals to other authorities.[ 23] We likely regard choosing between eating pasta or meat, between speaking English or Italian, between living in ill-ventilated or healthy housing, between taking off religious holidays or coming to work, between voting Republican or Socialist as decisions based on environment, opportunity and choice. But language loyalty, incidence of dying in epidemics, and radicalism often defined race for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers, making distinctions between racial, religious and anti-radical varieties of nativism messy. For many, Americanization was not simply a cultural process but an index of racial change which could fail if the concentration of "lower" races kept the "alchemy" of racial transformation from occurring.[ 24] From its very start, the campaign for immigration restriction directed against "new" Europeans carded a strong implication that even something as ineluctable as "moral tone" could be inherited. In deriding "ignorant, brutal Italians and Hungarian laborers" during the 1885 debate over the Contract Labor Law, its sponsor framed his environmentalist arguments in terms of color, holding that "the introduction into a community of any considerable number of persons of a lower moral tone will cause general moral deterioration as sure as night follows day." He added, "The intermarriage of a lower with a higher type certainly does not improve the latter any more than does the breeding of cattle by blooded and common stock improve the blooded stock generally." The restrictionist cause came to feature writings that saw mixing as always and everywhere disastrous. Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916), a racist attack on recent immigrants which defended the purity of "Nordic" stock, the race of the "white man par excellence," against "Alpine," "Mediterranean" and Semitic invaders, is a classic example.[ 25]

Professional Americanizers and national politicians appealing to immigrant constituencies for a time seemed able to marginalize those who racialized new immigrants. Corporate America generally gave firm support to relatively open immigration. Settlement house reformers and others taught and witnessed Americanization. The best of them, Jane Addams, for example, learned from immigrants as well and extolled not only assimilation but the virtues of ongoing cultural differences among immigrant groups. Even progressive politicians showed potential to rein in their own most racially charged tendencies. As a Southern academic, Woodrow Wilson wrote of the dire threat to "our Saxon habits of government" by "corruption of foreign blood" and characterized Italian and Polish immigrants as "sordid and hapless." But as a presidential candidate in 1912, he reassured immigrant leaders that "We are all Americans," offered to rewrite sections on Polish Americans in his History of the American People and found Italian Americans "one of the most interesting and admirable elements in our American life."[ 26]

Yet Progressive Era assimilationism, and even its flirtations with cultural pluralism, could not save new immigrants from racial attacks. If racial prejudice against new immigrants was far more provisional and nuanced than anti-Irish bias in the antebellum period, political leaders also defended hunkies and guineas far more provisionally. Meanwhile the Progressive project of imperialism and the Progressive non-project of capitulation to Jim Crow ensured that race thinking would retain and increase its potency. If corporate leaders backed immigration and funded Americanization projects, the corporate model emphasized standardization, efficiency and immediate results. This led many Progressives to support reforms that called immigrant political power and voting rights into question, at least in the short run.[ 27] In the longer term, big business proved by the early 1920s an unreliable supporter of the melting pot. Worried about unemployment and about the possibility that new immigrants were proving "revolutionary and communistic races," they equivocated on the openness of immigration, turned Americanizing agencies into labor spy networks, and stopped funding for the corporate-sponsored umbrella group of professional Americanizers and conservative new immigrant leaders, the Inter-Racial Council.[ 28]

Reformers, too, lost heart. Since mixing was never regarded as an unmitigated good but as a matter of proportion with a number of possible outcomes, the new immigrants' record was constantly under scrutiny. The failure of Americanization to deliver total loyalty during World War One and during the postwar "immigrant rebellion" within United States labor made that record one of failure. The "virility," "manhood" and "vigor" that reformers predicted race mixture would inject into the American stock had long coexisted with the emphasis on obedience and docility in Americanization curricula.[ 29] At their most vigorous, in the 1919-1920 strike wave, new immigrants were most suspect. Nationalists, and many Progressive reformers among them, were, according to John Higham, sure that they had done "their best to bring the great mass of newcomers into the fold." The failure was not theirs, but a reflection of the "incorrigibly unassimilable nature of the material on which they had worked."[ 30]

The triumph of immigration restriction in the 1920s was in large measure a triumph of racism against new immigrants. Congress and the Ku Klux Klan, the media and popular opinion all reinforced the inbetween, and even non-white, racial status of Eastern and Southern Europeans. Grant's Passing of the Great Race suddenly enjoyed a vogue which had eluded it in 1916. The best-selling United States magazine, Saturday Evening Post, praised Grant and sponsored Kenneth Roberts's massively mounted fears that continued immigration would produce "a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe." When the National Industrial Conference Board met in 1923, its director allowed that restriction was "essentially a race question." Congress was deluged with letters of concern for preservation of a "distinct American type" and of support for stopping the "swamping" of the Nordic race. In basing itself on the first fear and setting quotas pegged squarely on the (alleged) origins of the current population, the 1924 restriction act also addressed the second fear, since the United States population as a whole came from the northern and western parts of Europe to a vastly greater extent than had the immigrant population for the last three decades. At virtually the same time that the courts carefully drew a color line between European new immigrants and non-white others, the Congress and reformers reaffirmed the racial inbetween-ness of Southern and Eastern Europeans.[ 31]

Americanization therefore was never just about nation but always about race and nation. This truth stood out most clearly in the Americanizing influences of popular culture, in which mass market films socialized new immigrants into a "gunfighter nation" of Westerns and a vaudeville nation of blackface; in which popular music was both "incontestably mulatto" and freighted with the hierarchical racial heritage of minstrelsy; in which the most advertised lures of Americanized mass consumption turned on the opportunity to harness the energies of black servants like the Gold Dust twins, Aunt Jemina and Rastus, the Cream of Wheat chef, to household labor. Drawing on a range of anti-immigrant stereotypes as well, popular entertainments and advertisements cast newcomers as nationally particular and racially inbetween, while teaching the all-important lesson that immigrants were never so white as when they wore blackface before audiences and cameras.[ 32]

Occasionally, professional Americanizers taught the same lesson. In a Polish and Bohemian neighborhood on Chicago's lower west side, for example, social workers at Gads Hill Center counted their 1915 minstrel show a "great success." Organized by the Center's Young Men's Club, the event drew 350 people, many of whom at that point knew so little English that they could only "enjoy the music" and "appreciate the really attractive costumes." Young performers with names like Kraszewski, Pletcha and Chimielewski sang "Clare' De Kitchen" and "Gideon's Band." Settlement houses generally practiced Jim Crow, even in the North. Some of their leading theorists invoked a racial continuum which ended "farthest in the rear" with African Americans even as they goaded new immigrants toward giving up particular Old World cultures by branding the retention of such cultures as an atavistic clinging on to "racial consciousness."[ 33]

"INBETWEEN" JOBS: CAPITAL, CLASS AND THE NEW IMMIGRANT

Joseph Loguidice's reminiscence of the temporarily "colored" coal hauler compresses and dramatizes a process that went on in far more workaday settings as well. Often while themselves begrimed by the nation's dirtiest jobs, new immigrants and their children quickly learned that "the worst thing one could be in this Promised Land was 'colored.'"[ 34] But if the world of work taught the importance of being "not black," it also exposed new immigrants to frequent comparisons and close competition with African Americans. The results of such clashes in the labor market did not instantly propel new immigrants into either the category or the consciousness of whiteness. Instead management created an economics of racial inbetween-ness which taught new immigrants the importance of racial hierarchy while leaving open their place in that hierarchy. At the same time the straggle for "inbetween jobs" further emphasized the importance of national and religious ties among immigrants by giving those ties an important economic dimension.

The bitterness of job competition between new immigrants and African Americans has rightly received emphasis in accounting for racial hostility, but that bitterness must be historically investigated. Before 1915, new immigrants competed with relatively small numbers of African Americans for northern urban jobs. The new immigrants tended to be more recent arrivals than the black workers, and they came in such great numbers that, demographically speaking, they competed far more often with each other than with African Americans. Moreover, given the much greater "human capital" of black workers in terms of literacy, education and English language skills, immigrants fared well in this competition.[ 35] After 1915, the decline of immigration resulting from World War One and restrictive legislation in the 1920s combined with the Great Migration of Afro-Southerners to northern cities to create a situation in which a growing and newly arrived black working-class provided massive competition for a more settled but straggling immigrant population. Again, the results were not of a sort that would necessarily have brought bitter disappointment to those whom the economic historians term SCEs (Southern and Central Europeans).[ 36] The Sicilian immigrant, for example, certainly was at times locked in competition with African Americans. But was that competition more bitter and meaningful than competition with, for example, northern Italian immigrants, "hunkies," or white native-born workers, all of whom were at times said to be racially different from Sicilians?

The ways in which capital structured workplaces and labor markets contributed to the idea that competition should be both cutthroat and racialized. New immigrants suffered wage discrimination when compared to the white native born. African Americans were paid less for the same jobs than the immigrants. In the early twentieth century, employers preferred a labor force divided by race and national origins. As the radical cartoonist Ernest Riebe understood at the time, and as the labor economists Richard Edwards, Michael Reich and David Gordon have recently reaffirmed, work gangs segregated by nationality as well as by race could be and were made to compete against each other in a strategy designed not only to undermine labor unity and depress wages in the long run but to spur competition and productivity every day.[ 37]

On the other hand, management made broader hiring and promotion distinctions which brought pan-national and sometimes racial categories into play. In some workplaces and areas, the blast furnace was a "Mexican job"; in others, it was a pan-Slavic "hunky" job. "Only hunkies," a steel industry investigator was told, worked blast furnace jobs which were "too damn dirty and too damn hot for a white man." Management at the nation's best-studied early twentieth-century factory divided the employees into "white men" and "kikes." Such bizarre notions about the genetic "fit" between immigrants and certain types of work were buttressed by the "scientific" judgments of scholars like the sociologist E. A. Ross, who observed that Slavs were "immune to certain kinds of dirt ... that would kill a white man." "Scientific" managers in steel and in other industries designed elaborate ethnic classification systems to guide their hiring. In 1915 the personnel manager at one Pittsburgh plant analyzed what he called the "racial adaptability" of thirty-six different ethnic groups to twenty-four different kinds of work and twelve sets of conditions and plotted them all on a chart. Lumber companies in Louisiana built what they called "the Quarters" for black workers and (separately) for Italians, using language very recently associated with African-American slavery. For white workers they built company housing and towns. The distinction between "white" native-born workers and "non-white" new immigrants, Mexicans and African Americans in parts of the West rested in large part on the presence of "white man's camps" or "white man's towns" in company housing in lumbering and mining. Native-born residents interviewed in the wake of a bitter 1915 strike by Polish oil refinery workers recognized only two classes of people in Bayonne, New Jersey: "foreigners" and "white men." In generalizing about early twentieth-century nativism, John Higham concludes: "In all sections native-born and Northern European laborers called themselves 'white men' to distinguish themselves from Southern Europeans whom they worked beside." As late as World War Two, new immigrants and their children, lumped together as "racials," suffered employment discrimination in the defense industry.[ 38]

There was also substantial management interest in the specific comparison of new immigrants with African Americans as workers. More concrete in the North and abstract in the South, these complex comparisons generally, but not always, favored the former group. African-Americans' supposed undependability "especially on Mondays," intolerance for cold, and incapacity of fast-paced work were all noted. But the comparisons were often nuanced. New immigrants, as Herbert Gutman long ago showed, were themselves counted as unreliable, "especially on Mondays." Some employers counted black workers as more apt and skillful "in certain occupations" and cleaner and happier than "the alien white races." An occasional blanket preference for African Americans over immigrants surfaced, as at Packard in Detroit in 1922. Moreover, comparisons carried a provisional quality, since ongoing competition was often desired. In 1905 the superintendent of Illinois Steel, threatening to fire all Slavic workers, reassured the immigrants that no "race hatred" [against Slavs!] motivated the proposed decision, which was instead driven by a factor that the workers could change: their tardiness in adopting the English language.[ 39]

The fact that recent immigrants were relatively inexperienced vis-a-vis African-American workers in the North in 1900 and relatively experienced by 1930 makes it difficult for economic historians to measure the extent to which immigrant economic mobility in this period derived from employer discrimination. Clearly, timing and demographic change mattered alongside racism in a situation in which the immigrant SCEs came to occupy spaces on the job ladder between African Americans below and those who were fed into the economic historians' computers as NWNPs (native-born whites with native-born parents). Stanley Lieberson uses the image of a "queue" to help explain the role of discrimination against African Americans in leading to such results.[ 40] In the line-up of workers ordered by employer preference, as in so much else, new immigrants were inbetween.

In a society in which workers did in fact shape up in lines to seek jobs, the image of a queue is wonderfully apt. However, the Polish worker next to an African American on one side and an Italian American on the other as an NWNP manager hired unskilled labor did not know the statistics of current job competition, let alone what the results would be by the time of the 1930 census. Even if the Polish worker had known them, the patterns of mobility for his group would likely have differed as much from those of the Italian Americans as from those of the African Americans (who in some cities actually out-distanced Polish immigrants in intra-working-class mobility to better jobs from 1900 to 1930).[ 41] Racialized straggles over jobs were fed by the general experience of brutal, group-based competition, and by the knowledge that black workers were especially vulnerable competitors who fared far less well in the labor market than any other native-born American group. The young Croatian immigrant Stephan Mesaros was so struck by the abuse of a black coworker that he asked a Serbian laborer for an explanation. "You'll soon learn something about this country," came the reply, "Negroes never get a fair chance." The exchange initiated a series of conversations which contributed to Mesaros becoming Steve Nelson, an influential radical organizer and an anti-racist. But for most immigrants, caught in a world of dog-eat-dog competition, the lesson would likely have been that African Americans were among the eaten.[ 42]

If immigrants did not know the precise contours of the job queue, nor their prospects in it, they did have their own ideas about how to get on line, their own strategies about how to get ahead in it, and their own dreams for getting out of it. These tended to reinforce a sense of the advantage of being "not nonwhite" but to also emphasize specific national and religious identifications rather than generalized white identity. Because of the presence of a small employing (or subcontracting) class in their communities, new immigrants were far more likely than African Americans to work for one of "their own" as an immediate boss. In New York City, in 1910, for example, almost half of the sample of Jewish workers studied by Suzanne Model had Jewish supervisors, as did about one Italian immigrant in seven. Meanwhile, "the study sample unearthed only one industrial match between laborers and supervisors among Blacks."[ 43]

In shrugging at being called hunky, Thomas Bell writes, Slovak immigrants took solace that they "had come to America to find work and save money, not to make friends with the Irish." But getting work and "making friends with" Irish-American foremen, skilled workers, union leaders and politicians were often very much connected, and the relationships were hardly smooth. Petty bosses could always rearrange the queue.[ 44] But over the long run, a common Catholicism (and sometimes common political machine affiliations) gave new immigrant groups access to the fragile favor of Irish Americans in positions to influence hiring which African Americans could not achieve. Sometimes such favor was organized, as through the Knights of Columbus in Kansas City packinghouses. Over time, as second-generation marriages across national lines but within the Catholic religion became a pattern, kin joined religion in shaping hiring in ways largely excluding African Americans.[ 45]

Many of the new immigrant groups also had distinctive plans to move out of the United States wage labor queue altogether. From 1880 to 1930, fully one-third of all Italian immigrants were "birds of passage" who in many cases never intended to stay. This pattern likewise applied to 46 percent of Greeks entering between 1908 and 1923 and to 40 percent of Hungarians entering between 1899 and 1913.[ 46] Strong national (and sub-national) loyalties obviously persisted in such cases, with saving money to send or take home probably a far higher priority than sorting out the complexities of racial identity in the United States. Similarly, those many new immigrants (especially among the Greeks, Italians and Jews) who hoped to (and did) leave the working class by opening small businesses, set great store in saving, and often catered to a clientele composed mainly of their own group.

But immigrant saving itself proved highly racialized, as did immigrant small business in many instances. Within United States culture, African Americans symbolized prodigal lack of savings as the Chinese, Italians and Jews did fanatical obsession with saving. Popular racist mythology held that, if paid a dollar and a quarter, Italians would spend only the quarter while African Americans would spend a dollar and a half. Characteristically, racial common sense cast both patterns as pathological.[ 47]

Moreover, in many cases Jewish and Italian merchants sold to African-American customers. Their "middleman minority" status revealingly identifies an inbetween position which, as aggrieved Southern "white" merchants complained, rested on a more humane attitude toward black customers and on such cultural affinities as an eagerness to participate in bargaining over prices. Chinese merchants have traditionally and Korean merchants more recently occupied a similar position. Yet, as an 1897 New York City correspondent for Harper's Weekly captured in an article remarkable for its precise balancing of anti-black and anti-Semitic racism, the middleman's day-to-day position in the marketplace reinforced specific Jewish identity and distance from blacks. "For a student of race characteristics," the reporter wrote, "nothing could be more striking than to observe the stoic scorn of the Hebrew when he is made a disapproving witness of the happy-go-lucky joyousness of his dusky neighbor."[ 48]

Other immigrants, especially Slovaks and Poles, banked on hard labor, homeownership and slow intergenerational mobility for success. They too navigated in very tricky racial cross-currents. Coming from areas in which the dignity of hard, physical labor was established, both in the countryside and in cities, they arrived in the United States eager to work, even if in jobs which did not take advantage of their skills. They often found, however, that in the Taylorizing industries of the United States, hard work was more driven and alienating.[ 49] It was, moreover, often typed and despised as "nigger work"--or as "dago work" or "hunky work" in settings in which such categories had been freighted with the prior meaning of "nigger work." The new immigrants' reputation for hard work and their unfamiliarity with English and with American culture generally tended to lead to their being hired as an almost abstract source of labor. Hunky was abbreviated to hunk and Slavic laborers in particular treated as mere pieces of work. This had its advantages, especially in comparison to black workers; Slavs could more often get hired in groups while skilled workers and petty bosses favored individual "good Negroes" with unskilled jobs, often requiring a familiarity and subservience from them not expected of new immigrants. But being seen as brute force also involved Eastern Europeans in particularly brutal social relations on the shopfloor.[ 50]

Hard work, especially when closely bossed, was likewise not a badge of manliness in the United States in the way that it had been in Eastern Europe. Racialized, it was also demasculinized, especially since its extremely low pay and sporadic nature ensured that new immigrant males could not be breadwinners for a family. The idea of becoming a "white man," unsullied by racially typed labor and capable of earning a family wage, was therefore extremely attractive in many ways, and the imperative of not letting one's job become "nigger work" was swiftly learned.[ 51] Yet, no clear route ran from inbetweenness to white manhood. "White men's unions" often seemed the best path, but they also erected some of the most significant obstacles.

WHITE MEN'S UNIONS AND NEW IMMIGRANT TRIAL MEMBERS

While organized labor exercised little control over hiring outside of a few organized crafts during most of the years from 1895 until 1924 and beyond, its racialized opposition to new immigrants did reinforce their inbetweenness, both on the job and in politics. Yet the American Federation of Labor also provided an important venue in which "old immigrant" workers interacted with new immigrants, teaching important lessons in both whiteness and Americanization.

As an organization devoted to closing skilled trades to any new competition, the craft union's reflex was to oppose outsiders. In this sense, most of the AFL unions were "exclusionary by definition" and marshaled economic, and to a lesser extent political, arguments to exclude women, Chinese, Japanese, African Americans, the illiterate, the non-citizen, and the new immigrants from organized workplaces, and, whenever possible, from the shores of the United States. So clear was the craft logic of AFL restrictionism that historians are apt to regard it as simply materialistic and to note its racism only when direct assaults were made on groups traditionally regarded as non-white. John Higham argues that only in the last moments of the major 1924 debates over whom to restrict did Gompers, in this view, reluctantly embrace "the idea that European immigration endangered America's racial foundations."[ 52]

Yet Gwendolyn Mink and Andrew Neather demonstrate that it is far more difficult than Higham implies to separate appeals based on craft or race in AFL campaigns to restrict European immigration. A great deal of trade unions' racist opposition to the Chinese stressed the connection between their "slave-like" subservience and their status as coolie laborers, schooled and trapped in the Chinese social system and willing to settle for being "cheap men."[ 53] Dietary practices (rice and rats rather than meat) symbolized Chinese failure to seek the "American standard of living." All of these are cultural, historical and environmental matters. Yet none of them prevented the craft unions from declaring the Chinese "race" unassimilable nor from supporting exclusionary legislation premised largely on racial grounds. The environmentalist possibility that over generations Asian "cheap men" might improve was simply irrelevant. By that time the Chinese race would have polluted America.[ 54]

Much of anti-Chinese rhetoric was applied as well to Hungarians in the 1880s and was taken over in AFL anti-new immigration campaigns after 1890. Pasta, as Mink implies, joined rice as an "un-American" and racialized food. Far from abjuring arguments based on "stock," assimilability and homogeneity, the AFL's leaders supported literacy tests designed specifically "to reduce the numbers of Slavic and Mediterranean immigrants." They supported the nativist racism of the anti-labor Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, hoped anti-Japanese agitation could be made to contribute to anti-new immigrant restrictions, emphasized "the incompatibility of the new immigrants with the very nature of American civilization," and both praised and reprinted works on "race suicide."[ 55] They opposed entry of "the scum" from "the least civilized countries of Europe" and "the replacing of the independent and intelligent coal miners of Pennsylvania by the Huns and Slavs." They feared that an "American" miner in Pennsylvania could thrive only if he "Latinizes" his name. They explicitly asked, well before World War One: "How much more [new] immigration can this country absorb and retain its homogeneity?" (Those wanting to know the dire answer were advised to study the "racial history" of cities.)[ 56]

Robert Asher is undoubtedly correct in arguing both that labor movement reaction to new immigrants was "qualitatively different from the response to Orientals" and that AFL rhetoric was "redolent of a belief in racial inferiority" of Southern and Eastern Europeans. Neather is likewise on the mark in speaking of "semi-racial" union arguments for restriction directed against new immigrants.[ 57] Gompers' characterization of new immigrants as "beaten men of beaten races" perfectly captures the tension between fearing that Southern and Eastern Europe was dumping its "vomit" and "scum" in the United States and believing that Slavic and Mediterranean people were scummy. Labor sometimes cast its ideal as an "Anglo-Saxon race ... true to itself." Gompers was more open, but equivocal. He found that the wonderful "peculiarities of temperament such as patriotism, sympathy, etc.," which made labor unionism possible, were themselves "peculiar to most of the Caucasian race." In backing literacy tests for immigrants in 1902, he was more explicit. They would leave British, German, Irish, French and Scandinavian immigration intact but "shut out a considerable number of Slavs and other[s] equally or more undesirable and injurious."[ 58]

Such "semi-racial" nativism shaped the AFL's politics and led to exclusion of new immigrants from many unions. When iron puddlers' poet Michael McGovern envisioned an ideal celebration for his union, he wrote,

There were no men invited such as Slavs and "Tally Annes," Hungarians and Chinamen with pigtail cues and fans.

The situation in the building trades was complicated. Some craft unions excluded Italians, Jews and other new immigrants. Among laborers, organization often began on an ethnic basis, though such immigrant locals were often eventually integrated into a national union. Even among craftsmen, separate organizations emerged among Jewish carpenters and painters and other recent immigrants. The hod carders union, according to Asher, "appears to have been created to protect the jobs of native construction workers against competing foreigners." The shoeworkers, pianomakers, barbers, hotel and restaurant workers and United Textile Workers likewise kept out new immigrants, whose lack of literacy, citizenship, English-language skills, apprenticeship opportunities and initiation fees also effectively barred them from many other craft locals. This "internal protectionism" apparently had lasting results. Lieberson's research through 1950 shows new immigrants and their children having far less access to craft jobs in unionized sectors than did whites of northwestern European origin.[ 59]

Yet Southern and Eastern European immigrants had more access to unionized work than African Americans and unions never supported outright bans on their migration, as they did with Asians. Organized labor's opposition to the Italians as the "white Chinese," or to recent immigrants generally as "white coolies" usually acknowledged and questioned whiteness at the same time, associating whites with non-whites while leaving open the possibility that contracted labor, and not race, was at issue. A strong emphasis on the "brotherhood" of labor also complicated matters. Paeans to the "International Fraternity of Labor" ran in the American Federationist within fifteen pages of anti-immigrant hysteria such as A. A. Graham's "The un-Americanizing of America." Reports from Italian labor leaders and poems like "Brotherhood of Man" ran hard by fearful predictions of race suicide.[ 60]

Moreover, the very things that the AFL warned about in its anti-immigrant campaigns encouraged the unions to make tactical decisions to enroll Southern and Eastern Europeans as members. Able to legally enter the country in large numbers, secure work, and become voters, hunkies and guineas had social power which could be used to attack the craft unionism of the AFL from the right or, as was often feared, from the left. To restrict immigration, however desirable from Gompers' point of view, did not answer what to do about the majority of the working class which was by 1910 already of immigrant origins. Nor did it speak to what to do about the many new immigrants already joining unions, in the AFL, in language and national federations or under socialist auspices. If these new immigrants were not going to undermine the AFL's appeals to corporate leaders as an effective moderating force within the working class, the American Federation of Labor would have to consider becoming the Americanizing Federation of Labor.[ 61]

Most importantly, changes in machinery and Taylorizing relations of production made real the threat that crafts could be undermined by expedited training of unskilled and semi-skilled immigrant labor. While this threat gave force to labor's nativist calls for immigration restriction, it also strengthened initiatives toward a "new unionism" which crossed skill lines to organize recent immigrants. Prodded by independent, dual-unionist initiatives like those by Italian socialists and the United Hebrew Trades, by the example of existing industrial unions in its own ranks, and by the left-wing multi-national, multi-racial unionism of the Industrial Workers of the World, the AFL increasingly got into the business of organizing and Americanizing new immigrant workers in the early twentieth century. The logic, caught perfectly by a Lithuanian-American packinghouse worker in Chicago, was often quite utilitarian:

because those sharp foremen are inventing new machines and the work is easier to learn, and so these slow Lithuanians and even green girls can learn to do it, and the Americans and Germans and Irish are put out and the employer saves money ... This was why the American labor unions began to organize us all.

Even so, especially in those where new immigrant women were the potential union members and skill dilution threatened mainly immigrant men, the Gompers' leadership at times refused either to incorporate dual unions or to initiate meaningful organizing efforts under AFL auspices.[ 62]

However self-interested, wary and incomplete the AFL's increasing opening to new immigrant workers remained, it initiated a process which much transformed "semi-racial" typing of recently arrived immigrants. Unions and their supporters at times treasured labor organization as the most meaningful agent of democratic "Americanization from the bottom up," what John R. Commons called "The only effective Americanizing force for the southeastern European."[ 63] In struggles, native-born unionists came to observe not only the common humanity, but also the heroism of new immigrants. Never quite giving up on biological/cultural explanations, labor leaders wondered which "race" made the best strikers, with some comparisons favoring the recent arrivals over Anglo-Saxons. Industrial Workers of the World leader Covington Hall's reports from Louisiana remind us that we know little about how unionists, and workers generally, conceived of race. Hall took seriously the idea of a "Latin race," including Italians, other Southern Europeans and Mexicans, all of whom put Southern whites to shame with their militancy.[ 64] In the rural west, a "white man," labor investigator Peter Speek wrote, "is an extreme individualist, busy with himself," a "native or old-time immigrant" laborer, boarded by employers. "A foreigner," he added, "is more sociable and has a higher sense of comradeship" and of nationality. Embracing the very racial vocabulary to which he objected, one socialist plasterer criticized native-born unionists who described Italians as guineas. He pointed out that Italians' ancestors "were the best and unsurpassable in manhood's glories; at a time when our dads were running about in paint and loincloth as ignorant savages." To bring the argument up to the present, he added that Italian Americans "are as manly for trade union conditions as the best of us; and that while handicapped by our prejudice."[ 65]

While such questioning of whiteness was rare, the "new unionism" provided an economic logic for progressive unionists wishing to unite workers across ethnic and racial lines. With their own race less open to question, new immigrants were at times brought into class conscious coalitions, as whites and with African Americans. The great success of the packinghouse unions in forging such unity during World War One ended in a shining victory and vastly improved conditions. The diverse new immigrants and black workers at the victory celebration heard Chicago Federation of Labor leader John Fitzpatrick hail them as "black and white together under God's sunshine." If the Irish-American unionists had often been bearers of "race hatred" against both new immigrants and blacks, they and other old immigrants also could convey the lesson that class unity transcended race and semi-race.[ 66]

But even at the height of openings toward new unionism and new immigrants, labor organizations taught very complex lessons regarding race. At times, overtures toward new immigrants coincided with renewed exclusion of nonwhite workers, underlining W.E.B. DuBois's point that the former were mobbed to make them join unions and the latter to keep them out. Western Federation of Miners (WFM) activists, whose episodic radicalism coexisted with nativism and a consistent anti-Chinese and anti-Mexican racism, gradually developed a will and a strategy to organize Greek immigrants, but they reaffirmed exclusion of Japanese mine workers and undermined impressive existing solidarities between Greeks and Japanese, who often worked similar jobs.[ 67] The fear of immigrant "green hands," which the perceptive Lithuanian immigrant quoted above credited with first sparking the Butcher Workmen to organize recent immigrants in 1904 was also a fear of black hands, so that one historian has suggested that the desire to limit black employment generated the willingness to organize new immigrants.[ 68]

In 1905, Gompers promised that "caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinamen, Japs, or any others."[ 69] Hearing this, new immigrant unionists might have reflected on what they as "caucasians" had to learn regarding their newfound superiority to non-whites. Or they might have fretted that guineas and hunkies would be classified along with "any others" undermining white standards. Either way, learning about race was an important part of new immigrants' labor education.

Teaching Americanism, the labor movement also taught whiteness. The scattered racist jokes in the labor and socialist press could not, of course, rival blackface entertainments or the "coon songs" in the Sunday comics in teaching new immigrants the racial ropes of the United States, but the movement did provide a large literature of popularized racist ethnology, editorial attacks on "nigger equality" and in Jack London, a major cultural figure who taught that it was possible and desirable to be "first of all a white man and only then a socialist."[ 70]

But the influence of organized labor and the left on race thinking was far more focused on language than on literature, on picket lines than lines on a page. Unions which opened to new immigrants more readily than to "nonwhites" not only reinforced the "inbetween" position of Southern and Eastern Europeans but attempted to teach immigrants intricate and spurious associations of race, strikebreaking and lack of manly pride. Even as AFL exclusionism ensured that there would be black strikebreakers and black suspicion of unions, the language of labor equated scabbing with "turning nigger." The unions organized much of their critique around a notion of "slavish" behavior which could be employed against ex-slaves or against Slavs, but indicted the former more often than the latter.[ 71] Warning all union men against "slave-like" behavior, unions familiarized new workers with the ways race and slavery had gone together to define a standard of unmanned servility. In objectively confusing situations, with scabs coming from the African-American, immigrant and native-born working classes (and with craft unions routinely breaking each others' strikes), Booker T. Washington identified one firm rule of thumb: "Strikers seem to consider it a much greater crime for a Negro who had been denied the opportunity to work at his trade to take the place of a striking employee than for a white man to do the same thing."[ 72]

In such situations, whiteness had its definite appeals. But the left and labor movements could abruptly remind new immigrants that their whiteness was anything but secure. Jack London could turn from denunciations of the "yellow peril" or of African Americans to excoriations of "the dark-pigmented things" coming in from Europe. The 1912 Socialist party campaign book connected European immigration with "race annihilation" and the "possible degeneration of even the succeeding American type." The prominence of black strikebreakers in several of the most important mass strikes after World War One strengthened the grip of racism, perhaps even among recent immigrants, but the same years also brought renewed racial attacks on the immigrants themselves. In the wake of these failed strikes, the American Federationist featured disquisitions on "Americanism and Immigration" by John Quinn, the National Commander of the nativist and anti-labor American Legion. New immigrants had unarguably proven the most loyal unionists in the most important of the strikes, yet the AFL now supported exclusion based on "racial" quotas. Quinn brought together biology, environment and the racialized history of the United States, defending American stock against Italian "industrial slaves" particularly and the "indigestion of immigration" generally.[ 73]

INBETWEEN AND INDIFFERENT: NEW IMMIGRANT RACIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

One Italian-American informant interviewed by a Louisiana scholar remembered the early twentieth century as a time when "he and his family had been badly mistreated by a French plantation owner near New Roads where he and his family were made to live among the Negroes and were treated in the same manner. At first he did not mind because he did not know any difference, but when he learned the position that the Negroes occupied in this country, he demanded that his family be moved to a different house and be given better treatment." In denouncing all theories of white supremacy, the Polish language Chicago-based newspaper Dziennik Chicagoski editorialized, "if the words 'superior race' are replaced by the words 'Anglo-Saxon' and instead of 'inferior races' such terms as Polish, Italian, Russian and Slavs in general--not to mention the Negro, the Chinese, and the Japanese--are applied, then we shall see the political side of the racial problems in the United States in stark nakedness."[ 74] In the first instance, consciousness of an inbetween racial status leads to a desire for literal distance from non-whites. In the second, inbetweenness leads to a sense of grievances shared in common with non-whites.

In moving from the racial categorization of new immigrants to their own racial consciousness, it is important to realize that "Europeans were hardly likely to have found racist ideologies an astounding new encounter when they arrived in the U.S.," though the salience of whiteness as a social category in the United States was exceptional. "Civilized" Northern Italians derided those darker ones from Sicily and the mezzogiorno as "Turks" and "Africans" long before arriving in Brooklyn or Chicago. And once arrived, if they spoke of "little dark fellows," they were far more likely to be describing Southern Italians than African Americans. The strength of anti-Semitism, firmly ingrained in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe meant that many immigrants from these regions were accustomed to looking at a whole "race" of people as devious, degraded, and dangerous. In the United States, both Jews and Poles spoke of riots involving attacks on African Americans as "pogroms." In an era of imperialist expansion and sometimes strident nationalism, a preoccupation with race was characteristic not only of the United States but also of many European regions experiencing heavy emigration to the United States.[ 75]

Both eager embraces of whiteness and, more rarely, flirtations with non-whiteness characterized these immigrants' racial identity. But to assume that new immigrants as a mass clearly saw their identity with non-whites or clearly fastened on their differences is to miss the confusion of inbetweenness. The discussion of whiteness was an uncomfortable terrain for many reasons and even in separating themselves from African Americans and Asian Americans, immigrants did not necessarily become white. Indeed, often they were curiously indifferent to whiteness.

Models that fix on one extreme or the other of immigrant racial consciousness--the quick choice of whiteness amidst brutal competition or the solidarity with non-white working people based on common oppression--capture parts of the new immigrant experience.[ 76] At times Southern and Eastern Europeans were exceedingly apt, and not very critical, students of American racism. Greeks admitted to the Western Federation of Miners saw the advantage of their membership and did not rock the boat by demanding admission for the Japanese American mine workers with whom they had previously allied. Greek Americans sometimes battled for racial status fully within the terms of white supremacy, arguing that classical civilization had established them as "the highest type of the caucasian race." In the company town of Pullman and adjacent neighborhoods, immigrants who sharply divided on national and religious lines coalesced impressively as whites in 1928 to keep out African-American residents.[ 77] Recently arrived Jewish immigrants on New York City's Lower East Side resented reformers who encouraged them to make a common cause with the "schwartzes." In New Bedford, "white Portuguese" angrily reacted to perceived racial slights and sharply drew the color line against "black Portuguese" Cape Verdeans, especially when preference in jobs and housing hung in the balance.[ 78] Polish workers may have developed their very self-image and honed their reputation in more or less conscious counterpoint to the stereotypical niggerscab. Theodore Radzialowski reasons that "Poles who had so little going for them (except their white skin--certainly no mean advantage but more important later than earlier in their American experience), may have grasped this image of themselves as honest, honorable, non-scabbing workers and stressed the image of the black scab in order to distinguish themselves from ... the blacks with whom they shared the bottom of American society."[ 79]

Many new immigrants learned to deploy and manipulate white supremacist images from the vaudeville stage and the screens of Hollywood films where they saw "their own kind" stepping out of conventional racial and gender roles through blackface and other forms of cross-dress. "Facing nativist pressure that would assign them to the dark side of the racial divide," Michael Rogin argues provocatively, immigrant entertainers like Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker and Rudolph Valentino, "Americanized themselves by crossing and recrossing the racial line."[ 80]

At the same time, immigrants sometimes hesitated to embrace a white identity. Houston's Greek Americans developed, and retained, a language setting themselves apart from i mavri (the blacks), from i aspri (the whites) and from Mexican Americans. In New England, Greeks worked in coalitions with Armenians, whom the courts were worriedly accepting as white, and Syrians, whom the courts found non-white. The large Greek-American sponge fishing industry based in Tarpon Springs, Florida, fought the Ku Klux Klan and employed black workers on an equal, share-the-catch system. Nor did Tarpon Springs practice Jim Crow in public transportation. In Louisiana and Mississippi, southern Italians learned Jim Crow tardily, even when legally accepted as whites, so much so that native whites fretted and black Southerners "made unabashed distinctions between Dagoes and white folks," treating the former with a "friendly, first name familiarity." In constructing an anti-Nordic supremacist history series based on "gifts" of various peoples, the Knights of Columbus quickly and fully included African Americans. Italian and Italian-American radicals "consistently expressed horror at the barbaric treatment of blacks," in part because "Italians were also regarded as an inferior race." Denouncing not only lynchings but "the republic of lynchings" and branding the rulers of the United States as "savages of the blue eyes," II Proletario asked: "What do they think they are as a race, these arrogant whites?" and ruthlessly wondered, "and how many kisses have their women asked for from the strong and virile black servants?" Italian radicals knew exactly how to go for the jugular vein in United States race relations. The Jewish press at times identified with both the suffering and the aspirations of African Americans. In 1912, Chicago's Daily Jewish Courier concluded that "In this world ... the Jew is treated as a Negro and Negro as a Jew" and that the "lynching of the Negroes in the South is similar to massacres on Jews in Russia."[ 81]

Examples could, and should, be piled higher on both sides of the new immigrants' racial consciousness. But to see the matter largely in terms of which stack is higher misses the extent to which the exposed position of racial inbetweenness could generate both positions at once, and sometimes a desire to avoid the issue of race entirely. The best frame of comparison for discussing new immigrant racial consciousness is that of the Irish Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Especially when not broadly accepted as such, Irish Americans insisted that politicians acknowledge them as part of the dominant race. Changing the political subject from Americanness and religion to race whenever possible, they challenged anti-Celtic Anglo-Saxonism by becoming leaders in the cause of white supremacy.[ 82] New immigrant leaders never approximated that path. With a large segment of both parties willing to vouch for the possibility of speedy, orderly Americanization and with neither party willing to vouch unequivocally for their racial character, Southern and Eastern Europeans generally tried to change the subject from whiteness to nationality and loyalty to American ideals.

One factor in such a desire not to be drawn into debates about whiteness was a strong national/cultural identification as Jews, Italians, Poles and so on. At times, the strongest tie might even be to a specific Sicilian or Slovakian village, but the first sustained contact between African Americans and "new immigrants" occurred during World War One when many of these immigrants were mesmerized by the emergence of Poland and other new states throughout eastern and southeastern Europe. Perhaps this is why new immigrants in Chicago and other riot-torn cities seem to have abstained from early twentieth-century race riots, to a far greater extent than theories connecting racial violence and job competition at "the bottom" of society would predict. Important Polish spokes-persons and newspapers emphasized that Chicago riots were between the "whites" and "Negroes." Polish immigrants had, and should have, no part in them. What might be termed an abstention from whiteness also characterized the practice of rank-and-file East Europeans. Slavic immigrants played little role in the racial violence which was spread by Irish-American gangs.[ 83]

Throughout the Chicago riot, so vital to the future of Slavic packing-house workers and their union, Polish-American coverage was sparse and occurred only when editors "could tear their attention away from their fascination with the momentous events attending the birth of the new Polish state." And even then, comparisons with pogroms against Jews in Poland framed the discussion. That the defense of Poland was as important as analyzing the realities in Chicago emerges starkly in the convoluted expression of sympathy for riot victims in the organ of the progressive, pro-labor Alliance of Polish Women, Glos Polek:

The American Press has written at length about the alleged pogroms of Jews in Poland for over two months. Now it is writing about pogroms against Blacks in America. It wrote about the Jews in words full of sorrow and sympathy, why does it not show the same today to Negroes being burnt and killed without mercy?[ 84]

Both "becoming American" and "becoming white" could imply coercive threats to European national identities. The 1906 remarks of Luigi Villiari, an Italian government official investigating Sicilian sharecroppers in Louisiana, illustrate the gravity and inter-relation of both processes. Villiari found that "a majority of plantation owners cannot comprehend that ... Italians are white," and instead considered the Sicilian migrant "a white-skinned negro who is a better worker than the black-skinned negro." He patiently explained the "commonly held distinction ... between 'negroes,' 'Italians' and 'whites' (that is, Americans)." In the South, he added, the "American will not engage in agricultural, manual labor, rather he leaves it to the negroes. Seeing that the Italians will do this work, naturally he concludes that Italians lack dignity. The only way an Italian can emancipate himself from this inferior state is to abandon all sense of national pride and to identify completely with the Americans."[ 85]

One hundred percent whiteness and one hundred percent Americanism carried overlapping and confusing imperatives for new immigrants in and out of the South, but in several ways the former was even more uncomfortable terrain than the latter. The pursuit of white identity, so tied to competition for wage labor and to political citizenship, greatly privileged male perceptions. But identity formation, as Americanizers and immigrant leaders realized, rested in great part on the activities of immigrant mothers, who entered discussions of nationality and Americanization more easily than those Of race.[ 86] More cast in determinism, the discourse of race produced fewer openings to inject class demands, freedom and cultural pluralism than did the discourse of Americanism. The modest strength of herrenvolk democracy, weakened even in the South at a time when huge numbers of the white poor were disfranchised, paled in comparison to the opportunities to try to give progressive spin to the idea of a particularly freedom-loving "American race."

In a fascinating quantified sociological study of Poles in Buffalo in the mid-1920s, Niles Carpenter and Daniel Katz concluded that their interviewees had been "Americanized" without being "de-Polandized." Their data led to the conclusion that Polish immigrants displayed "an absence of strong feeling so far as the Negro is concerned," a pattern "certainly in contrast to the results which would be sure to follow the putting of similar questions to a typically American group." The authors therefore argued for "the inference that so-called race feeling in this country is much more a product of tensions and quasi-psychoses born of our own national experience than of any factors inherent in the relations of race to race." Their intriguing characterization of Buffalo's Polish community did not attempt to cast its racial views as "pro-Negro" but instead pointed out that "the bulk of its members express indifference towards him." Such indifference, noted also by other scholars, was the product not of unfamiliarity with, or distance from, the United States racial system, but of nationalism compounded by intense, harrowing and contradictory experiences inbetween whiteness and non-whiteness.[ 87] Only after the racial threat of new immigration was defused by the racial restriction of the Johnson-Reed Act would new immigrants haltingly find a place in the ethnic wing of the white race.

This brief treatment of a particularly complicated issue necessarily leaves out a number of key episodes especially in the latter stages of the story. One is a resolution of sorts in the ambiguous status of inbetween immigrant workers which came in the late 1930s and the World War II era. In some settings these years brought not only a greater emphasis on cultural pluralism and a new, broader language of Americanism that embraced working-class ethnics, but also a momentary lull in racial conflict. With the creation of strong, interracial industrial unions, African-American local officials and shop stewards fought for civil rights at the same time they led white "ethnic" workers in important industrial struggles.[ 88] Yet in other settings, sometimes even in the same cities, the war years and the period immediately following brought riots and hate strikes over the racial integration of workplaces and, particularly, neighborhoods. Most second-generation ethnics embraced their Americanness, but, as Gary Gerstle suggests, this "may well have intensified their prejudice against Blacks, for many conceived of Americanization in racial terms: becoming American meant becoming white."[ 89]

During the 1970s a later generation of white ethnics rediscovered their ethnic identities in the midst of a severe backlash against civil rights legislation and new movements for African-American liberation.[ 90] The relationship between this defensive mentality and more recent attacks on affirmative action programs and civil rights legislation underscores the contemporary importance in understanding how and why these once inbetween immigrant workers became white.

NOTES

1. The epigraph is from John A. Fitch, The Steel Workers (New York, 1910), p. 147. Joe Sauris, Interview with Joseph Loguidice, 25 July 1980, Italians in Chicago Project, copy of transcript, Box 6, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minn. Such a sprawling essay would be impossible without help from students and colleagues, especially regarding sources. Thanks go to David Montgomery, Steven Rosswurm, Susan Porter Benson, Randy McBee, Neil Gotanda, Peter Rachleff, Noel Iguatiev, the late Peter Tamony, Louise Edwards, Susan Hirsch, isaiah McCaffery, Rudolph Vecoli, Hyman Berman, Sal Salerno, Louise O'Brien, Liz Pleck, Mark Left, Toby Higbie, Micaela di Leonardo, Dana Frank, and the Social History Group at the University of Illinois.

2. See, for example, Gerald Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers: Their Impact On American Labor Radicalism (New York, 1973); C.T. Husbands, "Editor's Introductory Essay," to Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism In The United States? (White Plains, New York, 1976), p. xxix.

3. Robert Orsi, "The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned 'Other' in Italian Harlem, 1920-1990," American Quarterly, 44 (September 1992): 335. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation In The United States: From The 1960s To The 1980s (New York and London, 1986), pp. 64-65; Gary Gerstle, "Working Class Racism: Broaden the Focus," International Labor And Working Class History 44 (1993): 38-39.

4. Sombart, No Socialism, pp. 27-28; Stanford M. Lyman, "Race Relations as Social Process: Sociology's Resistance to a Civil Rights Orientation," in Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr., Race In America: The Struggle For Equality (Madison, Wisc. 1993), pp. 374-83; cf. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, pp. 15-17, for useful complications on this score; Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History Of An Idea in America (Dallas, 1963); Barbara Solomon, Ancestors And Immigrants (Cambridge, Mass., 1956); Gloria A. Marshall, "Racial Classification: Popular and Scientific," in The "Racial" Economy Of Science, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind., 1993), pp. 123-24. On Park, race and ethnicity, see also Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, pp. 15-17; Stow Persons, Ethnic Studies at Chicago, 1905-1945 (Urbana, Ill., 1987), p. 602.

5. For historical invocations of "ethnicity" to explain situations experienced at the time as racial, in otherwise brilliant works, see Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities In America (Berkeley, 1990), p. 79, and Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity; Consent And Descent In American Culture (New York, 1986), pp. 38-39. See also Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge, 1988), and David Theo Goldberg, "The Semantics of Race," Ethnic And Racial Studies, 15 (October 1992): esp. 554-55. The most devastating critique of the "cult of ethnicity" remains Alexander Saxton's review essay on Nathan Glazer's Affirmative Discrimination in Amerasia Journal, 4 (1977): 141-50. See also Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor And New Immigrants In American Political Development (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), esp. p. 46, n. 1.

6. Peggy Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth Century America," Journal of American History, 83 (June 1996): 44-69; Peggy Pascoe, "Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Marriage," Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, 12 (1991): 5-17, quotes); Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood, Appendix A, pp. 374-75; See Paul Siu, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study Of Social Isolation (New York, 1987), pp. 143, 250-271.

7. We borrow "inbetween" from Orsi, "Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People," passim and also from John Higham, Strangers In The Land: Patterns Of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York, 1974), p. 169. Herbert Gutman with Ira Berlin, "Class Composition and the Development of the American Working Class, 1840-1890," in Gutman, Power And Culture: Essays On The American Working Class, ed. Ira Berlin, (New York, 1987), pp. 380-94, initiates vital debate on immigration and the "remaking" of the United States working class over time. We occasionally use the phrase "new immigrants," the same one contemporaries sometimes employed to distinguish more recent--and "less desirable"--from earlier immigrant peoples, but we do so critically. To use the term indiscriminately tends not only to render Asian, Latin, and other non-European immigrants invisible, but also to normalize a racialized language we are trying to explicate.

8. Lawrence Glickman, "Inventing the 'American Standard of Living': Gender, Race and Working-class Identity, 1880-1925," Labor History, 34 (Spring-Summer, 1993): 221-35; David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor And The Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (Urbana, Ill.: 1981), p. 254. Richard Williams, Hierarchical Structures And Social Value: The Creation Of Black And Irish Identities In The United States (New York, 1990); Thompson, Customs In Common: Studies In Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1993), p. 320.

9. On guinea's history, see Roediger, "Guineas, Wiggers and the Dramas of Racialized Culture," American Literary History, 7 (Winter 1995): 654-68. On post-1890 usages, see William Harlen Gilbert, Jr., "Memorandum Concerning the Characteristics of the Larger Mixed-Blood Islands of the United States," Social Forces, 24 (March 1946): 442; Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1989), 6: 937-38; Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, eds., Dictionary Of American Regional English (Cambridge and London, 1991), 2: 838; Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (New York, 1975), p. 234 and Peter J. Tamony, research notes on guinea, Tamony Collection, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia.

10. Tamony's notes on hunky (or hunkie) speculate on links to honkie (or honky) and refer to the former as an "old labor term." By no means did Hun refer unambiguously to Germans before World War I. See, e.g., Henry White, "Immigration Restriction as a Necessity," American Federationist, 4 (June 1897): 67; Paul Krause, The Battle For Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture And Steel (Pittsburgh, 1992), pp. 216-17; Start Kemp, Boss Tom: The Annals Of An Anthracite Mining Village (Akron, Ohio: 1904), p. 258; Thames Williamson, Hunky (New York, 1929), slipcover; Thomas Bell's Out Of This Furnace (Pittsburgh, 1976; originally 1941), pp. 124-25; David Brody, Steelworkers In America (New York, 1969), pp. 120121; Josef Barton, Peasants And Strangers (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p. 20. Theodore Radzialowski, "The Competition for Jobs and Racial Stereotypes: Poles and Blacks in Chicago," Polish American Studies, 22 (Autumn 1976): n. 7. Sinclair, Singing Jailbirds (Pasadena, 1924). Remarks regarding mill hunky in the 1970s are based on Barrett's anecdotal observations in and around Pittsburgh at the time. See also the Mill Hunk Herald, published in Pittsburgh throughout the late 1970s.

11. Dollard, Caste And Class In A Southern Town (Garden City, N.Y., 1949), p. 93; Barry Goldberg, "Historical Reflection