I'm pretty sure it's been at least ten years since anybody here has tried that kind of thing.
I frankly think it's inaccurate.
You're just upset you can't be a pipe fitter's helper.
I wonder why the guy who wrote the chart was so big on Lithuanians? As far as I know, there isn't a very big population of them around. Apparently, they're the same as Scots, except because they dig better, it's worth spelling their nationality properly.
This has got to be as much about machine politics as racism, right?
Wow. I love how weirdly specific it is. Ukrainians can be rigger's helpers, but not Russians. Who knew?
I was thinking it was all based on twelve guys he knows. "That Harry hate oily, confined spaces!"
Germans, Chinese, Syrians and Belgians can't handle dirt, but the Germans and Chinese are okay with oil. Belgians and Syrians, no.
I picture the Belgians and Syrians sitting together in the cafeteria, being grossed out by everyone else.
Belgians can't handle dirt
Guy's never watched cyclocross, obviously.
Their mastery of frites suggests that Belgians also cope with oil just fine.
I must admit I am surprised at the ordering. The Irish are very high up. And the Degenerate Dutch are actually below "Americans, Black" - they're not as good at tank cleaning, which makes sense given that tanks are quite cramped and the Dutch tend to be tall. The English are about halfway down, below the Italians. And the Belgians are just terrible at everything.
This is an odd sort of racism.
(The Welsh are bad with pick and shovel? The Welsh?)
The contrast in skills between Jews and Armenians is also delightful. "At least the Armenians can operate a wheelbarrow."
The contrast in skills between Jews and Armenians is also delightful. "At least the Armenians can operate a wheelbarrow."
But only in warm, dry weather! The Armenians can't handle cold and wet, but apparently the Jews are all over it.
6: That was my thought, but I can't see how Lithuanian would be such a big deal then.
Interesting Hispanophone effect. While Spaniards, Mexicans, and Filipinos differ in many regards, they are all suited neither to the day nor the night shift.
What's the sourcing on this? I'm kind of thinking it has to be a modern joke.
16: Maybe it started from ethnic arrangements and unfolded from there in an epileptic tree of someone's devising. A Lithuanian's, even.
17.2: Seems to have been reproduced in a book _Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960_, where it is is cited to Urban League paper archives.
For some reason I'm not getting the option to display the chart, only to link it for download. Sorry.
You would need to take the image out of being embedded in the doc. Right click on the image and save it as its own jpg file?
It's the holy grail of prejudice! At last!
You know, during our recent renovation, I discovered that particular trades in Chicago belong to particular nationalities. So, for example, you want a flooring guy, odds are he's going to be Romanian. Obviously the degree of specificity and racializing in this chart is nuts, but I wonder if it's rooted in something similar: the folks in Pittsburgh had particular jobs in the old country, and that gives them experience with certain systems.
Pittsburgh of the mid-90s was the only place I've ever lived in the United States where the various "white" ethnics still took distinguishing themselves from one another super seriously. "Oh, he's a Serb? Oh ho." Also there's that awesome Disneyland-esque "Hall of the Nationalities" university building. If you were going to have fine-grained beliefs about inborn qualities of the various ethnic groups contained within the European Union, Pittsburgh is a pretty good place in America to do it, just saying.
20: I also tried saving it as a pdf, which usually just uploads and gives me options of displaying in the post or as a pop-up. But the pdf did the same thing as the .doc, so I left it as is. Would a jpg be different than a pdf for some reason?
Perhaps a young future executive of the pipe company sat in these rooms and wondered about which ethnicity would be best at wheelbarrow. Someday, he would prepare a chart.
Chicago is the same way. I expect it's not uncommon in the Northern industrial cities. Hell, even high school friends have kept marrying intra-ethnically; Greeks marry Greeks, etc. The absence of this was one of the things I really liked about California.
Because I could finally get my swarthy hands on your white women, I should have added.
23: not sure what the issue is, maybe the spaces in the filename.
With a jpg, you'd just need to embed an image in your post, which is pretty easy with most blogging software.
I'm kind of thinking it has to be a modern joke.
Nope. Looks legit.
I must admit I am surprised at the ordering. The Irish are very high up.
Very high as far as labor. That doesn't surprise me at all for Pittsburgh of that time. It would have been extremely politically difficult to have done much else.
Also there's that awesome Disneyland-esque "Hall of the Nationalities" university building.
"I was told there would be rides but this is just an ornate classroom."
Man, turn of the century racists were weird. I really do find this kind of thing fascinating, because at least some of it seems to have come from people who really weren't malicious, but honestly believed they were reporting true, observable facts about the world, like that the only useful work you can get out of an Armenian is pushing a wheelbarrow.
I think some of the calculation was based on there not being enough Armenians to club the Pinkertons if you tried to kick them out of the plant for wanting more money.
In sort-of fairness, I believe that these factories would often buy labor from agents who specialized in providing particular ethnic immigrant groups. So, "I need 30 guys for wheelbarrow, do I call the guy who sends me Romanians or the guy who sends me Hungarians" was likely a real decision that had to be made at some point by the hiring manager for a plant. At which point why not make a chart.
I mean, a modern MBA would have used a four-quadrant chart and powerpoint, but you have to understand that those were different times.
AIMHMBH, even into the 80s there were so few Jews in the plants that people would refer to them as "X the Jew" where "X" is their first name. Or maybe that was only the ones who made book.
Then some of the Hungarians left Hazelwood and Wiz Khalifa moved in.
Is it possible that, through some combination of inter-war border shifting and good old American not giving a fuckedness, "Lithuanian" was how they referred to a German from Prussia and other northern, industrial areas?
I understand not wanting to keep your slave name but the Exodus was a long time ago.
If you were going to have fine-grained beliefs about inborn qualities of the various ethnic groups contained within the European Union
My high school was a hotbed of fine-grained beliefs about inborn qualities of the various ethnic groups contained within east and southeast Asia. But distinguishing between white people? That's preposterous.
Is it possible that, through some combination of inter-war border shifting and good old American not giving a fuckedness, "Lithuanian" was how they referred to a German from Prussia and other northern, industrial areas?
Wouldn't it be more likely to refer to Polish people? Poland and Llithuania were one country/kingdom for a while.
That was my first thought also, but Polish is on the list and German is lower than I could have expected.
I had to look up "Letts". But yeah, absurdly detailed.
The building-trade-to-nationality thing exists here, but with a different mapping. All the flooring guys in Boston seem to be Vietnamese.
31: I remember something comparable from an old webcomic, now offline, set in modern Glendale with a focus on both the large Korean-American and Armenian-American communities there. It had something to the effect of "now there's the lowland Armenians, who are bookish and good accountants/bureaucrats, and then there's the highland Armenians, who are brutes." Written by a Korean-American.
That was before the Jackie Robinson of the Armenians, Kim Kardashian, broke through people's stereotypes.
47: Were they talking about the highlands of Armenia or California?
The highland Armenians hang out here.
By 1925 for sure, Lithuanian meant Lithuanian. For one thing, it was its own country, which we'd helped to set up. For another, it had just fought a war with Poland. For a third and way more important from the plant manager's perspective thing, the Lithuanians spoke a different language which (I think) is not mutually comprehensible with Polish (or, obviously, German).
I definitely feel my slight French Canadian heritage when forced into a tightly confined space.
I'm pretty sure the plant managers knew as much Lithuanian as they did Polish or German. But I know there was a large population of "Baltic Germans" and I know that many of them fled the Russian Revolution.
I used to go drinking with guys who lived near the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia Museum in Lincoln.
Not that they knew anything about the contents of the museum. I just remembered the sign and years later typed "Germans from Russia" into Wikipedia. Those were usually called "Volga Germans," but I bounced around a bit until I hit on the Baltic ones.
I think the Baltic Germans were generally the rich/dominant class in the Baltics and thus less likely to be fodder for Pittsburgh pipe manufacturing. Also I think to the extent they were fleeing Lenin they would have mostly ended up in Germany or the independent Baltics.
Their story is well told in the excellent film Balto, also Balto II: Wolf Quest and Balto III: Wings of Change.
Königsberg was the big Baltic German city that is now a weird enclave of Russia with no Germans in it.
58: Although that didn't happen until World War II. Horrible ethic cleansing, but it did get us Steppenwolf.
ethic->ethnic. I think the Soviets still tried playing up the Kantness.
(The Welsh are bad with pick and shovel? The Welsh?)
I'm thinking Thatcher wrote it.
This has got to be as much about machine politics as racism, right?
Further to 31, this was the heyday of "race science" and charts like this, made for internal use, were based on "scientific" observation and analysis.
i made a JPG of it, here:
http://ok-cleek.com/blogs/?p=23446
Minivet and MAE, thanks for ferreting that out. The copy I have was passed down to me and it honestly hadn't occured to me to look for the original. This gives me a cleaner version to use (in a workshop on economic justice).
I'm picturing a class where you give them some markers and white-out to let them mark their own chart.
Exactly right. Then we make them shovel bulk materials.
seems to have come from people who really weren't malicious, but honestly believed they were reporting true, observable facts about the worldI think all the racists I know honestly believe this still. The acrimony comes from having that belief shunned by society and/or not being able to treat POC/whoever the way they would like to.
13
I showed this chart to an Armenian-American friend, and he said almost verbatim your comment on wheel barrows.
Somebody just told them that the instructions for emptying a wheel barrow were written on the bottom.