Wednesday,
January 17, 2007
Italian Immigrants Suffered Contempt and
More in
The
ANNOTICO Report
Mormons
fled persecution, yet were not very tolerant of
Immigrants in
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
January14, 2007
Unlike the Mormon pioneers,
who had purposefully gathered to
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
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
Of course, the racism and
hatred found its most abhorrent expression in the activities of the Ku Klux
Klan, which was active in
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
Friendships grew when people
saw each other as individuals, not as strange "aliens." ...
* KRISTEN ROGERS-IVERSEN lives in
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_5011990
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