Today Mary is surprised when her teacher told her there might be a job for her to use her newly acquired comptometer skills. And the same day she presents herself to Widener Building 8th floor office of Cambria Steel Company. The parent company was Midvale Steel and Ordnance, the same company for which Mary had worked for only four days in June at their Eddystone rifle plant inspecting triggers. The Widener Building, located in the central business district of Philadelphia, is an 18 story structure completed in 1916. According to advertisements at the time, amongst other businesses it housed several brokerage firms.
While Mary was interviewing for her new job, the newspapers carried headlines of the gains and losses in the war in Europe, also the death in battle of former President Roosevelt's son, Quentin. And on page 3 of The Philadelphia Inquirer the following:
The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law in 1882 by President Chester A. Arthur. It excluded immigration of all Chinese "laborers". It was the first law excluding a specific ethnic group from entering the United States and was largely a reaction to increasing immigration of Chinese as cheap labor in the U.S. West Coast states. Following the signing of the act, there were isolated atrocities against Chinese living in the U.S., massacres and mass exclusions from some major cities and towns. The law was not repealed until 1943. A very thorough presentation of the Chinese Exclusion Act aired in May 2018 on PBS American Experience.
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