Interview: Helen Papanikolas Helen Papanikolas has spent years researching the experiences of immigrants in the western United States. The author of several books based on hundreds of interviews with immigrants, she contibuted her knowledge of the immigration experience to the production of Joe Hill. Continued from previous page... Q: Once again, let me just reintroduce the topic of the immigrants' view of America. And if we could make it so simple, the Ellis Island experiences we see so many in the early films of people arriving, taking their first steps on American soil. They were looking for opportunity. Is it as simple as that, that they were looking for the opportunity that did not exist at home? A: They were looking for the opportunity, but the Southern Europeans looked on the experience in America as temporary. They fully intended to go back to their countries with a little sum of money to set themselves up in a shop and not have to work with their hands. When they came to America, they had no great ideas that they were coming to a land of liberty. And they soon found out that they didn't have much liberty. They were chased from place to place, they were arrested for vagrancy in those very early years. They found very little help anywhere. And usually, they traveled by freights. They would jump off in some unknown place and hoped they could find a countryman. And if they found a few of their countrymen, it was wonderful for them, to eat their own foods, to have a place to sleep. But they kept going on, always looking for work. And their experience was not all the same. There were some better-educated people who immediately learned how to take a push cart, for instance, and within a few months have their own small business of sorts. The immigrants were extremely frugal. That's another thing which Americans criticized them for. I remember a quote in which it said "American workers would not live that way. They want to dress well and eat well, whereas the Europeans save all their money and live poorly." But some of the Europeans were industrious in an entrepreneurial way. They would take a pushcart, learn how to go to wholesale produce markets-- and there are chains in -- grocery chains in Chicago, New York, even San Francisco that began that way. There were foreign language schools here in Salt Lake, in Carbon County, in Bingham, Murray there were Greek Schools. Salt Lake City, of course, had Hebrew schools, Chinese schools. The culture was so important to the immigrants, and that is something that the Americans, again, could not understand. They wanted the immigrants to leave their culture at Ellis Island. And that doesn't happen. Language is lost first and culture last. The culture we see today is much watered down from what it was the beginning of the century. The people of my generation, children of immigrants, lived almost an immigrant life. For example, I go into this in quite a bit of detail on my parents' biography. We lived a completely Greek life in our home. We went to Greek school after public school. All our friends were friends we met in church or in Greek lodges. The lodges were specifically established first -- the first lodges to help the immigrants if they were sick, if they were killed, to help with the burial expenses. And then as we children grew older, the parents began to be afraid that we might intermarry. And so they immediately began establishing boys and girls lodges. The lodges were specifically to get the young people together so that they wouldn't marry outside the culture. But that does not work. The second generation, the children of the immigrants, almost always married within their culture. But the third generation just as frequently did not. And they usually keep their roots in the church or their Buddhist temple, the synagogue, but all of these other -- all of this ethnicity that was so important to the first generation becomes diluted and almost is gone by the third generation. Q: We've talked about the romantic notion of the immigrant coming to the new land. It's very romantic and it's almost like we don't want to talk about the rough times. A: And I've noticed that with so many immigrant people. They were so used to a difficult life, they were used to enduring. And I'm surprised. For over 45 years I interviewed -- interviewed immigrant men and women, and, for example, one man, Jim Galanis, told me some very interesting things and how he was cheated by labor agents and so many wonderful -- I quote him all the time in my work. Then I interviewed another man and he said -- mentioned the burning of South Omaha's Greek Town. I said, "Well, how did you know about it?" He said, "Well, Jim Galanis told us." Jim Galanis, whom I had been corresponding with and a good friend of my father's all those years, had never told me he had been in South Omaha when Greek Town was burned down. So our immigrants were used to enduring. And so many of them wouldn't think to talk at length about the indignities and the hardships, going without food, going from place to place searching for work. To them, it was just part of life. You know, they came from countries where, if they eat -- ate meat once a year, that was wonderful. Sometimes on Easter, for example, they could only -- they would have two kinds of cheese instead of one kind. That kind of poverty is unknown in America -- unknown. But, still, the governments from where these immigrants came realized that the immigrants were having a very hard time here and the governments sometimes sent their representatives to check on conditions. The one I like best of all was a Greek woman, a journalist, who -- it's amazing to me because Greek women were always chaperoned wherever they went. And here was this woman who came all the way on trains, all over the United States. She went to Cuba, as far as Alaska by herself. And her account of the difficulties and the horrors of immigrant life can't be equaled. She accosted the manager of Utah Copper, now Kennecott, because there were no boarding houses. At the time, the men were living in shacks they built themselves out of blasting powder boxes or in tents. And she told the Company it was a disgrace and it was horrible. There were streams running at the side, one of sewage and one of water. And the manager, whose name was Gemal, said, "Well, if we did build them boarding houses, they would prefer to stay where they are." That was the general view of immigrant laborers. And you may have heard that, time and again, industrialists said, "You cannot mine coal without a machine gun." And that's exactly what they would do. The guards, mines and railroad people, had machine guns trained and ready to turn on workers. That's why we may think unions went too far. But what they did was remarkable. And what is also remarkable to me --- the immigrant women were magnificent. Italian women marched through the muddy streets of Trinidad, Colorado; Helper and Castle Gate to uphold their men when they went on strikes in the 1900s. An Italian woman, Katarina Patino, hid the labor organizer Mother Jones between Castle Gate and Helper -- hid her from the authorities. What the authorities would do, they'd take Mother Jones, put her on a train, and as the train went around the curve of Helper, it had to slow down, and she'd jump off. And she did that several times. So, in desperation, they'd put her they quarantined her in what they called "the pest house." These women were wonderful. The Yugoslavian women, in the 1933 strike, became leaders. They defied the deputies. They caused such havoc. They detested the manager of the Consumer's Mine, whose name was Parmley. And six of them caught him one day -- he always carried a gun -- caught him one day, threw him to the ground and urinated on him. And he couldn't stand it. They took his gun away, too, which was a terrible thing to do to someone during labor wars. And he immediately told Rollo West, the head deputy and also mayor of Price. So Rollo West had these women -- it was blazing hot -- locked up in a shed, a construction -- railroad construction shed. But these women were just wonderful. I have the utmost admiration for these women. Q : You've alluded to an American backlash in those peak immigration years. We start seeing things like the immigration restriction league, and other so-called "protective" associations. As we look back, what was motivating these immigration restriction leagues, these American-first groups? A: They just felt -- well, they came into prominence, they had always resented to -- the immigrants coming in. When World War I erupted, and the United States got into the war, many immigrants, at first, balked at -- at enlisting in the army, and this caused a great deal of anger and hatred, and escalated those hostile feelings against the immigrants. Well, within a few months, they did begin enlisting. But it was never forgotten. And the American Legion established at the end of the war had a primary purpose in passing legislation to restrict the immigration flow from these countries. It was a turbulent period for the immigrant. Q: You mentioned something quite interesting earlier, that the people in this generation, in contemporary America, couldn't believe the level of control that a manager, that a mine owner could have over his work force. A: Yes. Q: Let's help people understand what that control was like, how the company could control a worker. A: Well, it -- I did mention that, at that time, that Protestant individualism was considered the highest good. And managers -- management was always in league with the government. And churches took, even in our state the LDS Church was always on the side of management. It was very difficult. The companies often had their own guards. In the Bingham strike of 1912, for example, what they did -- what the managers did was send out people to go on Second South, which was a very dismal street at that time. There were vagrants and loiterers, and they would just get them all together and give them a gun to act as guards. There were extreme excesses. These so-called guards were illiterate, they were poorly fed and very eager to show their might. The LDS Church, for example, -- I'm thinking of Carbon County strikes right now -- went into Emery County to get young Mormon boys to come, both in 1922 and in 1933, because they were told that the immigrants had intended to take over the county government. Just so much propaganda. The managers had tight control. A good example is the Colorado strike of 1913-14, the Ludlow Massacre. The Rockefuller family owned the mine and smelter facilities, and Rockefeller decided to have a "company union." And he thought that would take care of any problem. They established company unions and gave benefits, that kind of thing, but it could not last. True union members could not accept a company union because managers still had all the say. They have the government in their pocket, and the National Guard could be called out. It was called out in the 1922 strike in Carbon County, and that's when the United Mine Workers was completely demolished. And in 1933, they sent their riot squads down. It's hard to believe, but capitalism as we know it today, is much weakened compared to the capitalism that the robber barons, mine, mill, smelter managers, railroad magnates had in those days. Q: In practical experience we are a nation of immigrants. And yet there seems to be a tendency for earlier immigrants to discriminate against the later immigrant. Is that a fair characterization? A: It is fair. And I dislike it very much, and whenever I'm asked to speak, I always give examples of it. When people become secure, they are careless about other people. A good example is the Mexican immigration. The Mexican people -- of course, this was their land once. And we are connected; they're not overseas. It's easy for them to come back and forth. But we now have a very strong Hispanic middle class in this country. Nobody knows much about them. All the public gets exposure to are the gang killings. . .or immigration stories about young undocumented people desperately coming to this country. And it is unfair. It gives the totally wrong impression. They are poor, they are in the same position the early immigrants we've been speaking about. I hear children of immigrants voice derogatory terms about newer immigrants.                     About the Program || Joe Hill Home || PBS Home