ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to analyze the urban environment in order to understand how community functioned to maintain militancy and how working class institutions, both formal and informal, have acted to maintain strong class solidarity and contribute to collective action. It looks at the effect and nature of immigration patterns and the modes of integrating immigrants into existing working class organizations. The workers in both neighboring cities lived in working class ghettos. In the late nineteenth century the ghettos of Fall River took on ethnic characteristics. Immigrants first settled in areas around the mills which had brought them to the city. The centrality or dispersion of the urban setting, the demands of the work place, and the nature of immigration acted, depending upon a whole configuration of elements, to strengthen or weaken community institutions. The needs of the members of the working class community created by the structure of work reinforced community institutions.
