"An Extra Gang of Italians"

Ainsworth on Christmas Eve 1918 was illumined with the glow of a burning bunkhouse. Fortunately, it seems no one was hurt. The remarkable thing was how the Gazette described the event: "The quarters of an extra gang of Italians on the Grand Trunk railroad were destroyed by fire Tuesday evening at Ainsworth."

The "gang" was a work gang, of course (for example), but this is the first time I've ever seen a railroad work gang described by the ethnicity of its members.

In studying up on the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s, I've seen mention of an increasing prejudice against southern and eastern European, Catholic immigrants as their numbers swelled after 1890 (my own maternal grandparents among them), leading up to federal immigration-quota laws that would be passed in 1921 and 1924, designed to discriminate against such immigrants, among others.

As I've mentioned before, Hobart and its environs at the time of the first World War were well supplied with immigrants and their children. There were households and churches that still used the languages of their non-English ancestors. But their members were largely of northern and western European origin, and many of them Protestant.

So I'm wondering if that little detail in a one-line story in the Gazette gives us a glimpse of this selective hostility — if the Gazette's editor (perhaps unconsciously) thought of people from Italy, now living and working in the U.S., as still somehow more alien, more defined by their ethnicity, than his German, Irish and Scandinavian friends and neighbors.


Source: "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 27 Dec. 1918.