Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country by Paul A. Shackel (review)

In 1897, hostilities toward Southern and Eastern European immigrants in the anthracite coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania erupted in racial violence. The event, known as the Lattimer Massacre, killed nearly twenty unarmed immigrants and injured dozens more. Today, more than 120 years later, anti-immigration hostilities continue to influence local politics as local whites try to expel Latino residents. Remembering Lattimer is about this legacy of anti-immigration sentiment in eastern Pennsylvania.

Anthropologist Paul Shackel uses a variety of techniques to tell the story of Lattimer and how the event has been remembered. Memory studies provide the foundation for his work, but Shackel also incorporates ethnography and archaeology to demonstrate how the memory of the Lattimer Massacre has shifted. It is, in part, an effort to understand how a community makes sense of its past. This book is also an effort to make Lattimer "part of the national memory," to help society understand that racism and xenophobia are not new (4).

The book details the background of eastern Pennsylvania and its relationship with immigration. Most of the residents were anthracite coal miners, who, in the early 1800s, hailed from Western Europe. This population shifted in the late 1800s when new immigrants, who were mostly Lithuanian, Polish, and Slovak, were recruited by coal barons in an effort to ethnically divide their workforces and prevent unionization.

As the numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans increased, many of these immigrants became the victims of racism. Social Darwinism, Shackel notes, became a powerful way to dehumanize these new immigrant groups and cast them as ignorant, immoral, and a danger to the local economy. In the eastern Pennsylvania mines, these sentiments allowed Anglo-Saxon miners to identify Eastern European immigrants as enemies. By the 1890s, predominantly white, English-speaking eastern Pennsylvania miners, with the endorsement of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), successfully pushed for the Campbell Act of 1897, which required companies to pay a tax for each nonnaturalized worker in the mines. Companies deducted this tax from the nonnaturalized immigrants' pay, so Eastern European immigrants earned less than other miners even though they performed the same jobs. Lithuanian, Slovak, and Polish miners struck against the discriminatory policy. When word spread that these strikers intended to march to nearby Lattimer, a local sheriff's posse surrounded the unarmed marchers and opened fire.

As Shackel notes, the memory of the massacre is less straightforward. In 1897, local newspapers celebrated the shooting and claimed that the posse had prevented violence that the marchers would have caused. In the following decades, different groups used the memory of Lattimer for their own ends. Although most of the victims of the massacre were nonunion, and the UMWA sought to expel them from the mines, the UMWA later co-opted the memory of the massacre, using it to emphasize the importance of unionism. These efforts to keep the memory of Lattimer focused on labor concerns often came at the exclusion of important factors such as ethnicity. Individuals who tried to rectify this oversight in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were shamed for, in the words of one local official, "littering up the true purpose of the Lattimer Massacre memorial with ethnic slurs" (73).

These findings help Shackel set up his analysis of the eastern Pennsylvania town of Hazleton in the present day. Just as public understandings of the massacre have changed over time, the community's image of itself has also changed. Although descendants of immigrant miners still live in the region and hold festivals that celebrate their Eastern European heritage, they seldom remember the discrimination their ancestors faced. In forgetting this discrimination, these groups create a new history in which they were always accepted by the local community.

This shift has made it possible for these individuals to see current immigrants as outsiders. The newest immigrant groups are largely Latino and have faced substantial...