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although, because of its isolation and the iron rule of the company, the locals knew it by another name: Little Siberia.
    Gaetano Ciccone, however, viewing Aliquippa for the first time, could be forgiven for thinking he had arrived not in an Arctic prison camp but in an industrial version of Dante’s Inferno. Once described as ‘hell with the lid off,’ Aliquippa’s burning smokestacks belched out a steady stream of grey and black that shrouded the horizon as far as the eye could see, while the sky directly above the town glowed with fiery oranges, reds and murky yellows from the steel mills. The pervasive rotten-egg smell of sulfur was one Gaetano would soon get used to.
    This corruption of the landscape was mirrored by the rawness of daily life. Pittsburgh had the world’s highest mortality rate for typhoid, and tuberculosis was rampant; there was more space for cemeteries in the city than for recreation, while the destitute and immigrants like Gaetano were crowded in a squalor unsurpassed by the Old World.
    It is unclear whether Gaetano and others of his clan had been brought over by the notorious padroni, or bosses – Italians already in America who acted as employment brokers and operated a form of indentured servitude. It is more likely, though, that he had to bribe the mill foreman with some of his carefully saved dollars to secure a hot and dirty job on the floor of the blast-furnace shed. Certainly, it was not long before he joined the streams of fellow steelmen, metal lunch pail in hand, traveling to the J and L mill, where he was officially described as a ‘wire worker.’ For the first few months he doubtless shared a bed with another worker on an opposite shift in his boarding house in West Aliquippa, where the 4,200 Italian immigrants were clustered. After a while he settled into the mute industrial rhythm of the community, the hardships of the field exchanged for the iron rigors of the foundry.
    The local newspaper – controlled, needless to say, by the boss of J and L, Tom Girdler – regularly ran editorials denouncing union organizers as ‘bloodsuckers’ and ‘mad dogs,’ who should be met with violence. During the 1892 ‘battle’ of the Homestead Steel Works (part of the Carnegie Steel Company), near Aliquippa, sixteen people had been killed and hundreds injured when steel bosses sent in 300 Pinkerton detectives to break a strike organized by the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers. As a result of the strike non-union labor was brought in, and the steel industry was not unionized until the mid-1930s. During the national steel strike of 1919, a year before Gaetano arrived, union organizers had been turned away by police waiting at Aliquippa train station, and on one occasion a union organizer was spirited away by the police and committed to a state mental hospital.
    The company deliberately sought to recruit immigrants, knowing that they would have arrived with no notions of joining unions, and, partly for that reason, would be easy to control and willing to do the hard, dirty work in the mill. Newly arrived Slovaks, Greeks, Italians, Irish and Eastern Europeans all worked alongside one another, the lack of a common language in this polyglot community a convenient barrier to communication, and thus to fraternization and organization. Furthermore, every ethnic group was assigned to a different housing area and discouraged from straying into other neighborhoods.
    Within the cowed immigrant workforce there was a pecking order based on nationality and race. One Italian carpenter, for example, was told he could not have a more skilled job because ‘he had the map of Italy all over his face’. Indeed, the Italians were the bottom of the heap, and Italian peasants like Gaetano the lowest of the low. In the shadow of the Mafia, they faced discrimination not just from the authorities but from other ethnic groups, who referred to them as ‘dagos,’ a corruption of the common Spanish