In the late 1800s, George Kracha settles in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to work in the steel mills at ten cents an hour. A half century later, Dobie Dobrejcak, a third generation Kracha, is heavily involved in the successful unionization of the steel industry. The powerful Robber Barons of the Gilded Age were a handful of extremely wealthy capitalists who ran the steel, oil and banking industries with an iron fist. The successful unionization of the steel industry represented a leveling of the playing field between the steel workers and powerful tycoons like Andrew Carnegie. Before this time the mill workers sacrificed their lives in a dangerous industry where low wages, long hours, boss brutality and layoffs were the norm. Thomas Bell tells us this story is one of the “maimed and destroyed, the sickly who died young, the women worn out before their time with work and child-bearing, all the thousands of lives the mills had consumed” (394).
The families who came to settle in the mill towns grew more sophisticated over the half century before unionization. As they became familiar with the heavy-handed and one-sided tactics of steel mill owners they evolved into people like Dobrejcak, people determined not to become sacrifices in the mill production line. The experiences of the Slovak people who settled in the mill towns were similar to many waves of immigrants who experienced great poverty despite their tireless labors. As Bell tells us, “In American they were foreigners in a strange land, ignorant of its language and customs, fearful of authority in whatever guise” (123). Yet it would be such immigrants on whose backs America’s great industrial revolution would be built, immigrants who would slowly but surely become a politically active group fighting for worker’s rights.
Odds are that without the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, immigrant work
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