sakaisettlersocr
sakaisettlersocr
sakaisettlersocr
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
to the white workers and eventually ruinous to the<br />
blacks. " (46)<br />
The threat of a genocidal "race war" against<br />
Afrikans unless they followed the orders of settler labor<br />
makes it very clear just what kind of "unity" Foster and<br />
his associates had in mind. We should say that once Foster<br />
started dealing with the problem of how to build the Euro-<br />
Amerikan "Left," he discovered that it was much more effective<br />
to pose as an anti-racist and use "soft-sell" in promoting<br />
a semi-colonial mentality in oppressed nationalities.<br />
Foster the "communist" declared himself an<br />
expert on Civil Rights, poverty in Puerto Rico, Afrikan<br />
history, and so on.<br />
The tragic failure of the new white industrial proletariat<br />
to take up its revolutionary tasks, its inability to<br />
rise above the level of reform, is not just a negative. The<br />
failure was an aspect of a growing phenomenon - the<br />
Americanization of the "foreign" proletariat from<br />
Eastern and Southern Europe. By the later part of World<br />
War I it was possible to see that these immigrants were<br />
starting the climb upwards towards becoming settlers.<br />
Revolutionary fervor, as distinct from economic activity,<br />
declines sharply among them from this point on.<br />
This was not a smooth process. The sharp repression<br />
of 1917-1924, in which not only government forces<br />
but also the unleashed settler mob terror struck out across<br />
the U.S. Empire, was a clean-up campaign directed at the<br />
European national minorities. Thousands were forced out<br />
or returned home, many were imprisoned, killed or terrorized.<br />
Historians talk of this campaign as a "Red<br />
Scare," but it was also the next-to-final step in purifying<br />
these "foreigners" so that Amerika could adopt them.<br />
The Chairman of the Iowa Council of Defense<br />
said: "We are going to love every foreigner who really<br />
becomes an American, and all the others we are going to<br />
ship back home." A leader of the Native Sons of the<br />
Golden West said that immigrants "must live for the<br />
United States and grow an American soul inside of him or<br />
get out of the country." (47)<br />
The offer was on the table. The "Hunky" and<br />
"Dago" could become "white" (though barely) through<br />
Americanization if they pledged their loyalty to the U.S.<br />
Empire. In the steel mills World War I meant wholesale<br />
Americanization campaigns. "Hungarian Hollow," the<br />
immigrant slum quarter in Granite City, Ill. was renamed<br />
"Lincoln Place" at the prompting of the steel companies<br />
(with festive ceremonies and speeches). By 1918 the Gary,<br />
Ind. U.S. Steel Works had over 1,000 men enrolled in<br />
evening citizenship classes. Liberty Bond drives and Army<br />
enlistment offices in the plants were common. Immigrants<br />
were encouraged by their employers to join the U.S. Army<br />
and prove their loyalty to imperialism. (48)<br />
Americanization was not just a mental process. To<br />
become a settler was meaningless unless it was based on the<br />
promise of privileges and the willingness to become<br />
parasitic. As "nativeborn" Euro-Amerikans continued to<br />
leave the factories, the immigrant Europeans could now<br />
advance. And the importation of hundreds of thousands<br />
(soon to be millions) of Mexicano, Afrikan, Puerto Rican<br />
and other colonial workers into Northern industry gave the<br />
Americanized Europeans someone to step up on in his<br />
climb into settlerism.<br />
In the steel mills, Mexicanos and Afrikans made<br />
up perhaps 25% of the workers in Indiana and Illinois by<br />
1925. They were the bottom of the labor there, making up<br />
for the immigrant European who had moved up or left for<br />
better things. A steel labor history notes:<br />
"Mean while, the Eastern Europeans were occupying<br />
the lesser positions once held by the 'English-speaking'<br />
workmen. As they rose, the numbers of Slavs in the mills<br />
shrank. At one time 58 percent of the Jones and Laughlin<br />
labor force, the immigrants comprised onb 31 per cent in<br />
1930. There were 30 per cent fewer Eastern Europeans in<br />
Illinois Steel Company mills in 1928 than in 1912. Now<br />
largely the immediate bosses of the Negroes and Mexicans,<br />
the immigrants disdained their inferiors much as the<br />
natives had once disliked them.<br />
"The bad feeling generated by the Red Scare<br />
abated only gradually. In Gary, the Ku Klux Klan flourished.<br />
But the respectable solidity of the immigrant communities<br />
in time put to rest unreasoning fear. The children<br />
were passing through the schools and into business and<br />
higher jobs in the mills. Each year the number of<br />
homeowners increased, the business prospered, and the<br />
churches and societies became more substantial. The immigrants<br />
were assuming a middling social and economic<br />
position in the steel towns." (49)<br />
The U.S. Empire could afford gradually expanding<br />
the privileged strata because it had emerged as the big<br />
winner in the First Imperialist World War. Scott Nearing<br />
pointed out how in 1870 the U.S. was the fourth ranked<br />
capitalist economy; by 1922 the U.S. had climbed to No. 1<br />
position: "...more than equal to the wealth of Britain,<br />
Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Belgium and Japan combined."<br />
(50) Successful imperialist war was the key to<br />
Americanization.<br />
Throughout the Empire this movement of the immigrant<br />
proletarians into the settler ranks was evident. A<br />
history of Mexican labor importation notes: "In the beet<br />
fields of Colorado, as elsewhere in the West, other immigrant<br />
groups, such as the Italians, Slavs, Russians, or<br />
Irish, found that they could move up from worker or tenant<br />
to owner and employer through the use of Mexican<br />
migrants." (5 1)<br />
This point marks a historic change. Never again<br />
would white labor be anti-Amerikan and anti-capitalist.<br />
Although it would organize itself millions strong into giant<br />
unions and wage militant economic campaigns, white<br />
labor from that time on would be branded by its servile<br />
patriotism to the U.S. Empire. As confused as the I.W.W.<br />
might have been about revolution, its contempt for U.S.<br />
national chauvinism was genuine and healthy. It was only<br />
natural for an organization so strongly based on immigrant<br />
labor - many of whose best organizers were not<br />
U.S. Citizens and who often spoke little or no English -<br />
to feel no sympathy for the U.S. Empire. It was a tragedy<br />
that this strength was overturned, that this socialist<br />
possibility faded into a reinforcement for settlerism. And<br />
yet the contradiction between the reality of exploitation in<br />
the factories and the privileges of settlerism still remained.<br />
The immigrant masses could not be both settler and proletarian.<br />
This was the historic challenge of the CIO and<br />
75 New Deal.