Sunday, December 01, 2013

Part of Why Pennsylvania Has So Many Churches?

I was reading David Brody's Steelworkers in America: the Non-Union Years. The book is about the period between the collapse of the steel industry craft union the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers until the onset of the Great Depression. The Depression would lead to the organizing drive that would eventually result in the formation of the United Steelworkers, organizing the steel industry on an industrial unionism basis. The book covers this intermediate period, the time of great Eastern Catholic immigration to Pennsylvania. Men came to work in the mines and the steel mills. The book provides an interesting insight into life in Pennsylvania during that period. Including this bit about how Churches were sometimes funded (pg. 116):
The Bethlehem Company deducted for their churches one dollar a month from the pay envelopes of its Catholic workmen.
That was a huge amount of money in those days. Many of these men made only about $15 per week.