In 1910 the same city had 85,000
inhabitants, of whom only about 14 per cent were Americans, and the
rest foreigners, two-thirds of the old and one-third of the new
immigration.
A like transformation has taken place in the manufacturing towns of
New York, New Jersey, and Delaware and in the iron and steel towns of
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the Middle West. For forty years
after the establishment of the first iron furnace in Johnstown,
Pennsylvania, in 1842, the mills were manned exclusively by Americans,
English, Welsh, Irish, and Germans. In 1880 Slavic names began to
appear on the pay rolls. Soon thereafter Italians and Syrians were
brought into the town, and today sixty per cent of the population is
of foreign birth, largely from southeastern Europe. The native
Americans and Welsh live in two wards, and clustered around them are
settlements of Italians, Slovaks, and Croatians.
The new manufacturing towns which are dependent upon some single
industry are almost wholly composed of recent immigrants. Gary,
Indiana, built by the United States Steel Corporation, and Whiting,
Indiana, established by the Standard Oil Company for its refining
industry, are examples of new American towns of exotic populations. At
a glass factory built in 1890 in the village of Charleroi,
Pennsylvania, over ten thousand Belgians, French, Slavs, and Italians
now labor.
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