Workers believed foreigners were captive serfs though few actually were

Evidence

Apparently, relatively few of the new arrivals—who were now pre-empting most branches of common labor throughout industrial Pennsylvania—were actually imported from Europe under contractual arrangements with their prospective employers. But corporate power seemed so great and so menacing to American workers that they uniformly attributed a captive status to the new nationalities. Every time that employers brought a carload of eastern Europeans under armed guard from Pittsburgh or New York to work a struck mine (great numbers arrived this way during the bloody Hocking Valley strike of 1884), the impression seemed confirmed. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 279

Categorization

• XREF: Strong evidence for the reader’s thesis that a belief about an enemy can be threat-hardened and false yet persist because it is periodically re-impressed by rare confirming events — bears on rational correction backfiring. — connects to: Even literate ancient peoples suspected strangers might not be fully human

Broader Connections

• Even literate ancient peoples suspected strangers might not be fully human #exemplifies (0.80)