Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Italian Immigrants Suffered Contempt and More in Utah

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Mormons fled persecution, yet  were not very tolerant of Immigrants in Utah, at the turn of the Century.

 

One newspaper then, commenting on [Italian] immigrants, made the doubly racist comment, "If God had dipped them in once more they'd be black." ...

 

 A woman from Sunnyside was raised "with a wholehearted contempt for Italians, and other southern Europeans...

 

Intermarriage with foreigners was considered almost as bad as death."

 

 

Immigrants' Influx Stirred Backlash

 

Salt Lake Tribune

January14, 2007

 

Utah experienced big changes around the turn of the 19th century. The economy was changing. As a result, the demographics were changing. Industrialists brought in thousands of workers who were willing to work for cheap: immigrants.


   Unlike the Mormon pioneers, who had purposefully gathered to Zion, these newcomers from places like Italy, Greece, Japan, Lebanon, Finland, Wales and China happened to end up in Utah. It became their personal "promised land" - a place where perhaps they could earn enough money to survive and, just possibly, thrive. "The fight for daily bread" is what the Yugoslavs called it.


   So they came to lay rails, dig out coal, work in smelters, harvest sugar beets and in general do the jobs that the descendants of the pioneer immigrants wouldn't do, at least not at such low wages.


   As they flooded into the state, the familiar status quo teetered toward a new balance. This was tough on some members of the Anglo American majority. As Helen Z. Papanikolas wrote, "The old inhabitants . . . were alarmed: after a half-century they had succeeded in 'making the desert blossom as a rose,' and suddenly foreigners who had neither fought nor suffered for Zion were invading it.


   Too often, this fear was expressed in animosity and racism. The new people were so - different. They looked different, spoke differently, had "weird" customs and ways. One newspaper, commenting on southern European immigrants, made the doubly racist comment, "If God had dipped them in once more they'd be black." ...


A woman from the coal camp of Sunnyside was raised "with a wholehearted contempt for Greeks, Italians, and other southern Europeans who lived there. . . . Intermarriage with foreigners was considered almost as bad as death."


   With their tendency to unionize and their growing numbers, the immigrants seemed to threaten the balance of power. A paper in Eureka wrote, "Eureka has always been a white man's camp . . . [the presence of non-American southern Europeans] in a mining town, or any other town for that matter, adds nothing to its dignity, its wealth or its importance. . . . For the first time in the history of Eureka, the 'bohunks' have got a foothold here. . . . What does it mean? Where is it going to end?


   Of course, the racism and hatred found its most abhorrent expression in the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which was active in Utah during the 1920s.


   Although the experience of being a stranger in a strange land was painful to most immigrants, there were places where groups lived in harmony and even friendship. Sophie Nielsen Critchlow came to live with her family in Spring Canyon, Carbon County, in 1922. There they became neighbors to Japanese, Koreans, Italians, Austrians, Mexicans, Greeks, Jews, Danes, Britons and Norwegians. She later recalled, "We soon learned that living in an ethnic community wasn't half bad. We learned to eat and enjoy their cooking. The pastries some of these ladies turned out were real melt-in-your-mouth delicacies. Their children were beautiful and clean, well mannered and polite. We ran in and out of their homes and were soon unaware of the difference in our skin color or nationalities."


   Friendships grew when people saw each other as individuals, not as strange "aliens." ...

 
   * KRISTEN ROGERS-IVERSEN lives in Salt Lake City. Kristenri@yahoo.com Sources: The Peoples of Utah, edited by Helen Z. Papanikolas; A History of Carbon County, by Ronald G. Watt; Utah Historical Quarterly; Beehive History 27.

 

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_5011990

 

 

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