The purpose of this study was to examine the apparent contrast between community expectations concerning Slavic immigrants in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century and the actual behavior of the immigrants. While established groups in the anthracite fields, and American society at large, expected that the immigrants would threatenwage scales in the anthracite industry, primary evidence indicates that the Slavs did not do so. However, the community expectations proved to be so strong that almost all accounts of the immigration of Slavic labor assert that the many union failures, and the traditionally depressed wages in the anthracite region, were the result of the eastern European influx.The contrast between the community expectations and the actual behavior of the Slavic immigrants is illustrated in the presentation of three case studies. The first is a study of the content of a Scranton, Pennsylvania newspaper, the Scranton Republican, which concentrates on latent and overt anti-immigrant biases in editorial and reportorial copy. This study also reviews the content of the publications of contemporary observers and scholars which are shown to contain anti-Slavic biases as well. A second study examines the emergence of the Polish National Catholic Church, which demonstrates the ability of the immigrants to manipulate complex American insititutions such as the court system, and to create for themselves a complicated formal structure to meet their spiritual needs. This was done in the face of vigorous opposition by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Scranton. Lastly, this thesis contains a study of the organization .of the United Mine Workers union in the anthracite region, which shows that it was the Slavic immigrant workers who made the unionization of the anthracite industry possible, after fifty years of failure by the established American, Welsh, and Irish miners.This contrast between historical fact and social perception is explained by using the hypothesis proposed by social psychologist Erving Goffman, and modified by sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. That thesis asserts that social reality is based on perceptions of events, rather than the events themselves. Since those perceptions are based on social expectations, it can be said that, in the case of the Slavic anthracite workers the negative expectations of American society concerning the eastern Europeans produced negative conclusions concerning their behavior, despite much evidence to the contrary. Those negative conclusions remained in the literature of the anthracite industry until the publication of a study by historian Victor Greene, The Slavic Community on Strike, in 1968, which finally revised the record concerning the Slavic mine workers.While the conclusions reached in this study remain tentative, pending comparative studies in other geographic locations and industries would seem to support the position that intergroup friction is sometimes the result of faulty perceptions on the part of a dominant group rather than any real threat posed by a minority. The possibility that prejudice has primarily cultural rather than economic roots may offer an alternative to the present emphasis on economic opportunity in the efforts to eradicate discrimination within American society.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/174938 |
| Date | January 1976 |
| Creators | Barendse, Michael A. |
| Contributors | Vander Hill, C. Warren |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | iv, 153 leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
| Coverage | n-us-pa |
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