When capital plays lord of the manor, the Old World furnishes the serfs. In some coal districts of West Virginia the land, streets, paths, roads, the miners' cabins, the store, the school, and the church are all owned and controlled by the coal company. The company pays the teacher, and no priest or clergyman objectionable to it may remain on its domain. One may not step off the railroad's right of way, pass through the streets, visit mine or cabin, without permission. There is no place where miners meeting to discuss their grievances may not be dispersed as trespassers. Any miner who talks against his boss or complains of conditions is promptly dismissed, and ejected from the 35,000 acres of company land. Hired sluggers, known as the "wrecking-gang," beat up or even murder the organizer who tries to reach the miners. No saloon, gambling-hall, or bawdy-house is tolerated on company land. Even the beer wagon may not deliver beer at houses to which the superintendent objects.
It is needless to add that the miners are all negroes or foreigners.
IS THE FOREIGNER INDISPENSABLE?
After an industry has been foreignized, the notion becomes fixed in the minds of the bosses that without the immigrants the industry would come to a standstill.
"If is wasn't for the Slavs," say the superintendents of the Mesaba Mines, "we couldn't get out this ore at all, and Pittsburgh would be smokeless. You can't get an American to work here unless he runs a locomotive or a steam-shovel. We've tried it; brought 'em in, carloads at a time, and they left."
"Wouldn't they stay for three dollars a day?" I suggested, "even if two dollars and ten cents isn't enough?"
"No, it's not a matter of pay. Somehow Americans nowadays aren't any good for hard or dirty work."
Hard work! And I think of Americans I have seen in that last asylum of the native born, the Far West, slaving with ax and hook, hewing logs for a cabin, ripping out boulders for a road, digging irrigation-ditches, drilling the granite, or timbering the drift—Americans shying at open-pit, steam-shovel mining!
The secret is that with the insweep of the unintelligible bunk-house foreigner there grows up a driving and cursing of labor which no self-respecting American will endure. Nor can he bear to be despised as the foreigner is. It is not the work or the pay that he minds, but the stigma. This is why, when a labor force has come to be mostly Slav, it will soon be all Slav. But if the supply of raw Slavs were cut off, the standards and status of the laborers would rise, and the Americans would come into the industry.
Some bosses argue for a continuous supply of green foreigners because the sons of the immigrants are "above their fathers' jobs." A strange industry this! Britain's iron industry is manned by Britons, Germany's by Germans, but we are to believe that America's iron industry is an exotic which can attract neither native Americans nor the sons of immigrants. The truth is that the school and other civilizing agencies have turned Michael's boy not against hard work, but against the contempt with which his father's kind of work is tainted. But for the endless stream of transients with their pigsty mode of life, their brawls and their animal pleasures, the stigma on the work would vanish, and the son of the immigrant would be willing to inherit his father's job.