3 Loaves?

In the booming economy of the early 20th century, American industries needed cheap labor. They looked to newly arrived immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe - Italy, Poland and other countries — to provide some of this labor. These immigrants had left behind depressed conditions in the "old country." They said they came to America "for bread" — pane to the Italians, chleb to the Poles.

But life in the United States was full of its own hardships. Some factory owners exploited the newcomers, paying them the lowest wages for the hardest jobs. They often used ethnic tensions to divide workers, paying some immigrant groups lower wages than others and threatening to replace workers of one nationality with workers of another. Executives hoped that creating such rivalries would prevent workers from fo

rming unions.

Since the 1800s, many textile cities had sprouted up in New England's green valleys. But Lawrence,

Massachusetts, reigned as queen of the milltowns. Almost a dozen textile factories lined its riverbanks, with more than 40,000 people laboring in the mills (Read More)