Ethnic Segmentation in the Early Chicago Labor Movement

The setting for the rise of the Chicago labor movement was a rapidly growing industrial city. Although Chicago was founded in the mid nineteenth century as a commercial city, much of its economic growth in the post–Civil War period came in manufacturing. As the United States grew to the west, Chicago became the largest, most accessible city capable of transforming raw materials into finished manufactured goods and distributing them to consumers. The number of manufacturing establishments increased from 129 in 1860 to 730 in 1873 (Schoff 1873, 198). Those 730 establishments employed over fifty thousand workers, had over $50