'Dutchman': An On-the-Job Etymology

Abstract

AT MID-CENTURY, the chief arena for ethnic conflict in America is often a city schoolyard. In bygone years such conflict occurred in the mine, mill, workshop, and construction camp-the industrial front. Immigrants who came to build a new nation had first to face bigotry and hostility on the job. Ironically, as each group achieved status, it vented its spleen on newcomers surging up from below. Today, job conflict between national groups is submerged. Unions, employers, churches, schools, and government educate toward mature democratic behavior. However, a residue of ethnic hostility lives on in the language of the trades. An apprentice or new worker learns the argot and slang of his special calling. Along with a host of esoteric technical and trade terms, he picks up hidden reminders of the past in the form of pejorative language--the language that downgrades, demeans, destroys. No one who has rubbed shoulders where men work together has escaped the half-playful banter between national and even native regional groups. This vocabulary of slurs and slanders is applied directly to persons. However, a special type of depreciatory nomenclature has been applied to tools, mechanical devices, and work processes. Long after a minority group is integrated, or has completely vanished from the trade, the tool name lingers on as a faint reminder of early aggression or conflict. Phrases in this category that I have heard in actual usage in San Francisco building construction and waterfront employment are: German planer, Irish buggy, Irish confetti, Irish rosette, Jew nails, Mexican drag line, niggerhead, Norwegian steam, Polack screwdriver, Portugee lift, Portugee pump, Swede hand axe, and Swede rule. Any construction stiff or factory hand could extend this brief list from his personal vocabulary. A study of the origins of these terms would portray the grim story of the adjustment of immigrant to industry.' Very early in my own apprenticeship as a shipwright in San Francisco I was exposed to a single ethnic work-process term that, unlike the unpleasantries cited, was ameliorative and complimentary. The word was dutchman; perhaps it caught my ear because it was used in a pleasant, friendly manner. The setting was dramatic. We were high on the hull of a huge vessel under construction on the ways. I was helping two skilled Scottish shipwrights, Ben Carrwardine and James Allan, who were fitting the twin hawse pipes into