Manufacturing and Ethnic Diversity

Manufacturing in the United States has a long history of ethnic diversity. The boom of the Industrial Revolution depended on the influx of labor brought by waves of 19th-century immigration. The Industrial Revolution in the United States began with the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, which dominated the textile industry for generations.

Early in the era, textile mill labor was provided by young Anglo-American women. Lowell's factories offered better working conditions and higher wages than those of Europe, but a need to increase production as the Industrial Revolution took off led to the need to hire cheaper labor, usually for longer hours than these young women— often still living with their parents—could work.

Irish immigrants filled these jobs in the 1840s, followed by a series of immigrants from other countries in successive waves: French Canadians in the 1860s and 1870s, and Greeks, Poles, Portuguese, and Jews in the 1890s through the turn of the century. In Lowell, as in much of the country, newly arrived immigrants in need of jobs and connections were often used as strikebreakers. Over and over again, one generation of strikebreakers became integrated into the manufacturing community, aged, unionized, went on strike, and had their strike broken by a new generation of strikebreakers.

Each wave of immigrants faced resistance, both from “native” Americans and from earlier generations of immigrants. Each group worried that further immigration would drag down the high standard of living in the United States and the relatively high wages paid for factory work. In many cases, they were forced to establish ethnic neighborhoods. The Irish who came to Lowell to work in its first canal lived in tents and hastily erected shacks in “paddy camps,” which became the neighborhood known as the Acre, a gateway neighborhood that took in later groups of immigrants working in Lowell's manufacturing sector.

Employers encouraged friction between immigrant groups and played them against each other during times of labor unrest in order to transform employer-employee hostilities into employee-employee hostilities. While French Canadians were arriving in Lowell and taking manufacturing and construction work, Chinese were arriving in California to work in mines and on the railroads, and the way that employers used the cheap wages that immigrants would accept as leverage against established employees’ demands for pay increases played a large role in inspiring the birth of the labor unions and the brief-lived wave of workingmen's political parties. These unions and parties, in turn, were responsible for a century of anti-immigration legislation.

In the late 19th and 20th centuries, immigrant groups played a major role in the development of the manufacturing sector in the United States, especially in the major manufacturing centers of the midwest such as Detroit and Flint, Michigan; Chicago, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; and Gary, Indiana. The industrializing economy attracted new waves of immigration, particularly Czechs, Poles, Russians, and Italians, who settled in large numbers in these cities from the 1890s to the 1930s, and eastern Europeans of various nationalities who arrived in the early 20th century. More eastern Europeans arrived in the middle of the century as they fled the ravages of World War II and the spread of Soviet communism.

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