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the construction industry (73.5%) where they worked under the direction of some
of the most elite white craft workers in Baltimore. From the early part of the
eighteenth century, African Americans frequently worked both as skilled and
unskilled construction workers; in 1930 they were still hanging on to unskilled
construction jobs. In fact, there is evidence that many of the Black construction
laborers were themselves building craftsmen, who, because of discrimination by the

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white craft unions and the employers, could not find employment in their trade.

There were some differences between the distribution of U.S.- and foreign-
born whites in manufacturing that are worth mentioning. At the laboring level, the
foreign-born were somewhat underrepresented and the U.S.-born are sharply
underrepresented; at the operative level, the foreign born are somewhat
overrepresented and the U.S.-born are significantly overrepresented. These
divergences are consistent with a process of gradual upward mobility from the
immigrant generation to the first U.S-born generation and beyond. However, on
the skilled level white immigrants are far more overrepresented (at over twice their
proportion of the class as a whole) than white U.S. natives (less than 1.1 times their
overall proportion). The proportional overreprcsentation of the foreign born is
highlighted by the fact that 14.5% of the skilled, aristocratic building trades workers
were white immigrants, again a significant overrepresentation. Whatever the
explanation for this - and it probably had to do with the specific needs for skilled
labor by particular expanding industries and with the escape of upper stratum U.S.-
born workers into the petty bourgeoisie — it illustrates that there was little barrier
to foreign whites as a whole starting at the top of the working-class ladder.

The pattern of ethnic distribution in working-class manufacturing jobs is
reproduced in mirror image in the second largest sector of the working class,
domestic and personal service. In this sector as a whole, there were virtually no
skilled-level and few operative-level jobs. Predictably, foreign- and native-born