Quantifying French-Canadian Participation in the New England Cotton Textile Industry in the Early Twentieth Century

Historians agree that hundreds of thousands of French Canadians came to the U.S. in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where they became the largest element among New England cotton textile industry employees. Some scholars claim that there was a “recomposition” of the cotton industry’s labor force in favor of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe sometime after 1890. This article explores the extent of this recomposition by quantifying the labor participation of French Canadians and southern/eastern Europeans in the cotton manufacturing industry in the 1920s in a sample of New England towns. Through an analysis of mill records and the 1920 U.S. federal census, this study presents evidence that the French Canadians remained the largest cohort among New England cotton manufacturing employees until the end of the region’s dominance of the textile industry and the relocation of its center of gravity to the U.S. South.