Maine was rife with labor strife a century ago, much as the rest of the nation was. Strikes were a common occurrence as workers demanded a shorter workday and more pay. Socialism seemed to many to be a viable alternative to capitalism.

To complicate matters, Maine was already failing to keep up with the rest of the nation in population and in industrial output. There weren’t enough natives to do all the work, and many weren’t willing to do what was necessary under the often poor work conditions and low wages.

Onto this stage marched thousands of Italian immigrants over a period of approximately 35 years after 1880. In Maine, they played an especially important role in building the railroads and the paper mills, and in mining the granite and other stone that would go into buildings and monuments around the nation.

In April 1905, a thousand or more of them had gathered in tent cities between LaGrange and Stockton Springs to build the Northern Maine Seaport Railroad, a branch of the Bangor and Aroostook. Even though this was not the first time large groups of Italians had worked in eastern Maine, their arrival set off a wave of curiosity, and not a little apprehension.

“They are on the whole law abiding, and few, if any, complaints have been made against any one of them,” reported a writer for the Waldo County Commercial. “They seem to be as happy and contented as our American workmen and feel entirely at home so long as they have their chunk of bread and their bottle of beer.”

The Italians caused suspicion in some quarters, however.

Their arrival set off tough talk, for instance, at the Bangor police station where a new chief was being feted one April afternoon. One of the gifts Chief T. Herbert White received was a new revolver.

“The revolver is of gun metal, highly burnished, and is about the handsomest weapon that has ever decorated the hip of a chief,” wrote a Bangor Daily News reporter. Then he added, “It will be handy when the ‘Dagos’ out on the new railroad commence to get busy with the peace of the community.”

My dictionary defines “Dago” as offensive slang, an alteration of the Spanish name Diego, used as a disparaging term for Italians, Spaniards or Portuguese. It would have no place in news stories in a paper today. But it must have been common parlance a century ago, just as ethnic slurs such as “Paddy” and “Mick” had been a few decades previously when referring to the much-reviled Irish, who by 1905 were an accepted part of the community.

References to the labor tensions that contributed to this enmity can easily be found by reading a few weeks’ worth of old newspapers from back then. Italian laborers were striking in Calais at a paper plant construction project, and a short time later some arrived to fill the jobs of striking lime kiln workers in Rockland. They were not only unafraid to speak up for their rights, but on occasion, they were willing to take the jobs of other workers, making them the object of suspicion by both employers and unions.

These were the sorts of events that elevated tensions, helping to account for the ugly incident that occurred in Bangor between Italians and police in May 1905 after a falling-out over working conditions on the Northern Maine Seaport Railroad.

“Dago Invasion Tuesday Noon,” declared a headline in the BDN on May 3. The steamer City of Rockland had brought 175 more Italian laborers to the Queen City to help build the new railroad. At the dock, “the atmosphere was brilliant with red handkerchiefs and caps and had a wonderful flavor of garlic and onions … There were extension cases and wooden boxes and shiny black trunks with tin bands about them. There were musical instruments galore and a cartload of bric-a-brac,” the story reported.

Three days later, another headline – “Stranded Dagos Look for Help” – announced that many of the workers were back in Bangor. They had been sent to Hermon, where, instead of the “grading” they thought they had been hired to do, they were ordered to work in ditches in water up to their waists. They had come to City Hall asking for food and transportation back to New York City.

The rumpus that occurred involved the police, the overseers of the poor, a labor contractor and some construction bosses. After an unsuccessful search for the labor contractor’s local representative who had brought them to the area, the hungry workers were given a barrel of crackers and “half a cheese” and allowed to sleep in the attic of City Hall overnight.

That evening, the police interviewed bosses from the Hermon camp and Mr. Clement, the local representative for Marco, the New York labor contractor. A BDN reporter summed up what the trio had to say: “The dagos are a bad lot … They growled the minute they came into camp … and they are now simply trying to ‘work’ the city for their fares back to New York.”

Clement reportedly said, “All this talk about working in water is pure bosh … Two days before they came, it rained, and one of the ditches filled. When they began to work, they began to jabber like a lot of boobies, and finally a delegation reported that they couldn’t stand it. I set eight men to work bailing out. Then they wanted rubber boots and more pay … They kicked at this and they kicked at that and the other. We couldn’t suit them.”

He added that 27 more disgruntled workers were on the road from Hermon to Bangor.

As for the Italians’ side of the story, it is largely lost. Their words about the water in the ditches are reported briefly and in broken English, as if to entertain rather than to inform the reader. Indeed, their appearance and habits are more often than not reported with amusement and contempt in the local newspapers.

The last story in this trilogy was brief. The BDN headline said, “Dagos Hiked: Police Said ‘Scat!’ Yesterday Morning and They Scattered.”

“Now you get out of here and don’t you stop, even if you have to walk back to New York,” commanded Deputy Chief O’Donohue, pointing to the door. Some of the workers returned to work, others, having found some money, took the train back to New York, while still others boarded the Boston boat.

“Chief White says that he isn’t going to fool with the Italians a minute this summer. They must toe the mark or take the consequences,” a BDN reporter wrote.

The chief may have been referring to previous incidents such as the one in 1887 in Bangor in which 58 laborers were housed and fed in the Bangor almshouse after “terrorizing” inhabitants along a 100-mile route they walked from somewhere on the Canadian-Pacific Railroad after a job fell through. At one point, it had appeared to locals that they were going to try to board a steamboat by force in order to get passage back to New York.

This would not be the end of labor woes for the Northern Maine Seaport Railroad. Two more walkouts on sections of the road near Hudson and Stockton Springs were reported in the BDN on May 19. Construction was reportedly behind schedule, and rumor had it that the head contractor had gone after his subordinates “with a sharp stick.”

In the end, however, the Italians would finish the railroad as they had several others in Maine, and then most of them would head back to Boston or New York City. Their work was judged to be of high quality. The friction between the new immigrants and the old was forgotten, and today parts of the railroads and some of the paper mills, what remains of them, are a monument to their efforts.

Alfred T. Banfield Jr.’s University of Maine master’s thesis is a excellent source of information about the history of Italians in Maine. Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at

wreilly@bangordailynews.net.