Abstract
Chicago was the quintessential Gilded Age city, and the south side was its nerve center. As German and Czech immigrants filtered into the neighborhoods surrounding the meatpacking industry, Scottish, Irish, and German immigrants drove stakes into the soil of steelmaking Southeast Chicago. Yet new arrivals soon eclipsed their numbers and cultural influence. Throbbing with industrial vitality, Gilded Age America drew millions of southeastern European newcomers to its shores. By 1930, one out of every ten Americans in a total population of 123 million was foreign born.1
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Notes
David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 14.
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 25–6.
Ernest W. Burgess and Charles Newcomb, Census Data of the City of Chicago, 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), pp. 59–63, cited in Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 18–19;
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Edith Abbot, The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936; Arno Press, reprinted 1970), pp. 139–51, quote on p. 150.
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William M. Tuttle Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), chs. 1 and 2; Kornblum, Blue Collar Community, pp. 13–14.
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James Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union in the Calumet Region, 1933 to 1945,” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998, 49–50.
John B. Appleton, “The Iron and Steel Industry of the Calumet District,” University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences 13 (March 1925): 93, quoted in Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union,” pp. 41–2; Arredondo, Mexican Chicago, pp. 62–3.
Ruth Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters in Steel (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2003), pp. 38–40.
Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 102–4, 184; Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), p. 80; Davis, Labor and Steel, p. 92.
Dumenil, The Modern Temper, pp. 65–66; Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 105–29; Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 66–70.
On the connection between the bohemian hobo subculture and the Industrial Workers of the World, see Todd Depastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 97–111.
Quoted in Raymond L. Hogler, “Worker Participation, Employer Anti-Unionism, and Labor Law: The Case of the Steel Industry, 1918–1937,” Hofstra Labor Law Journal 7 (Fall 1989): 14.
Dumenil, The Modern Temper, pp. 67–9; David J. Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 71–2; Kollros, “Creating a Steel Workers Union,” pp. 64–6.
Donald Sofchalk, “The Little Steel Strike of 1937,” PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1961, pp. 20–1.
Tom Girdler in collaboration with Boyden Sparkes, Bootstraps: The Autobiography of Tom Girdler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), p. 288.
Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 97.
Dumenil, The Modern Temper, pp. 64–5; Barbara Warne Newell, Chicago and the Labor Movement: Metropolitan Unionism in the 1930s. (Urbana: University Press of Illinois, 1961,) pp. 116, 122;
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 453–4.
Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, p. 87; Cohen, Making a New Deal, p. 217; John F. Bauman and Thomas H. Coode, In the Eye of the Great Depression: New Deal Reporters and the Agony of the American People (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 40–1;
T. H. Watkins, The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), p. 45.
Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), pp. 38–9.
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© 2010 Michael Dennis
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Dennis, M. (2010). Fire, Steel, and the Coming Crisis: The 1920s in Chicago and America. In: The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114722_2
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