The Corn Latitudes

How intensely the newcomers came to feel their ethnicity often varied according to how threatened was their national identity in a foreign land. Christiane Harzig writes about Chicago's Germans,  “They not only varied by religion and origin but also by generation, class, gender, and political leanings. Sometimes they were able to unite across class, religious, and political lines to defend “Germanism”—the concept that they considered to be at the core of their ethnic identity.” The WASPs never failed to give them reasons to unite; whatever their other differences, for example, working-class German Americans stood as Germans against temperance and English-only laws.

 

This kind of re-labeling happened to Americans too. New Yorkers or Pennsylvanians were usually lumped together by Southerners as “Yankees” by the locals when they moved to the Midwest. In the 20th century, immigrant Sioux or Chippewa began to think of themselves as "Indians" after being treated that way, and ethnic politics became pan-Indian in personality.

 

Re-labeling was done on the basis of skin color too. On arrival, most of Chicago’s ethnic citizens were and are considered people of color by light-skinned members of the Northern European peoples, who  contrived derogatory stereotypes based on darker skin color that were used both to describe and justify the discrimination with which people of color were treated. On that basis many a newcomer to Chicago found herself redefined in racial terms.

 

Before World War II, Chicago counted only some 400 Japanese American residents. That people’s presence had been largely symbolic. The government of Japan had paid to build a replica of one of their famous temples for the World Columbia Exposition in 1893; the Pavilion  was augmented in 1935 by a ceremonial gate and tea house built for the 1933 version of the fair.

 

The attack on Pearl harbor excited some of the same kind of hysteria that had made targets of German businesses and newspapers during World War I. There being no Japanese American neighborhood in Chicago and precious few businesses, vandals were reduced to attacking the Japanese structures in Jackson Park, which they succeeded, after several attempts, in destroying by 1944.

 

All the more remarkable then that by the end of that war, Chicago had replaced the West Coast as the center of Japanese American life in the United States. Of the 60,000 internees who left the odious internment camps in the western states camps by war's end, some twenty to thirty thousand of them settled in Chicago. The resettlement of a people so recently reviled, and so markedly different in appearance and culture from the city’s white peoples, was remarkably free of animus. However, it would be an error, in the judgment of historian Charlotte Brooks, to infer from that a tolerance on part of non-Jap Chicagoans. She has argued that most Chicagoans had never even heard that Japanese Americans had been detained on the West Coast; thus the new arrivers in Chicago bore no taint of the spy and subversive. Nor did the locals seem to bear much anti-Japanese (as distinct from anti-Anti-American) prejudice. Most whites in the Midwest did not recognize their new neighbors as Japanese, seeing them only as “Oriental.” Where the resettlers faced discrimination in hiring and renting, it was not because they were Japanese but because they were not white.

 

This category of derogation was only tangentially related to actual color. Hispanics come in all colors, making “Hispanic” or “Latino” more useful as an ethnic rather than a racial category. That has not stopped many whites from treating Puerto Ricans as if they were African Americans. In short, “white” is a club to which membership is not determined by genes but by behavior. By adopting or at least mimicking the values of the Yankee—British and Protestant—people of all colors could become white. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass alluded to that past, tongue not entirely in cheek, when he wrote, “Just for the record, completely unreliable legend suggests that Americans of Greek descent didn't become white in Chicago until Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis in 1968, and then the first Mayor Daley had to make us white.”

 

Whites, in short, are whoever other whites say they are. As the term was used in the 19th century, Mediterranean and East European peoples were “races” distinct from British, Scandinavians or Germans. (In 1929, sociologist Harvey Warren Zorbaugh wrote that “while the Irish and Swedish had gotten on well as neighbors, neither . . . would live peaceably with the Sicilian. There was considerable friction, especially among the children of the two races.”) Chicago School sociologists defined African Americans, Mexicans, Italians, Slavs, and others as distinct races. The popular sociologists who held tenure in the city’s posher neighborhoods in the 19th century even included Chicago’s Irish as not “white.” (The Irish themselves had their own rather stricter criteria. James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan would observe, “The Polacks and Dagoes, and niggers are the same, only the niggers are the lowest.”) That would change. In a city that barred nonwhites from so much, of course, ethnics had good reasons to identify themselves as “white.” Poles and Irish for example not only became white but were the staunchest defenders of whiteness as a social category during the civil rights era.

 

Whatever their background, many Chicago ethnics were alike too in being either uninterested in or unable to read the mainstream newspapers and magazines. Instead, they turned to newspapers written in their own tongues. Every ethnic community had at least one. If the meat and drink of the mainstream popular press in Chicago was sensation, that of the ethnic press was disputation. African American readers of the Broadax for example were warned against the example of  Booker T. Washington by publisher Julius F. Taylor, while the Chicago Defender of  Robert Abbott was just as ardently pro-Washington.

 

Sociologist Marco D’Eramo’s summary of the process is worth quoting at length.

 

It was obvious that the first immigrants to arrive of a particular group should immediately start up a newspaper in their own language. That newspaper would then become two papers when the ethnic group split into opposing factions. The Germans had four newspapers, whereas both the Swedes and the Czechs had three, and so on. In an uninterrupted outpouring of fiery editorials, in a dozen or more languages, a babel of angry, indignant voices patriotically cursed the chau­vinism of others, intolerant themselves yet demanding tolerance from others. It was a case of who could shout loudest to spread their own message, and also an at­tempt to remember and keep alive the mother tongue, a form of self-defense against the surrounding contempt, a chain of spite from one ethnic group to another, more or less reflecting their order of arrival on the American continent, with the first to land feeling themselves superior to the second, who in turn felt themselves above the third, and so on.

 

Nor will it do to exempt the mainstream press as not being ethnic. The Chicago Tribune was a strident voice for the city’s establishment WASPs. Under Joseph Medill in the Civil War era waged editorial war against the Irish—more properly the Catholics. (The distinguished journalism school that bears his name has redeemed the Medill name in the minds of newer generations who do not remember the man’s vile social views.) His successor and kin Robert McCormick railed against foreigners in print, but in private insisted on taking tea each afternoon and affected the accent of a British clubman.

 

According to the conventional wisdom, the Chicago version of the immigrant’s story consists of the trauma of arrival, the settlement in a neighborhood of like, crushing work for the parents, dislocation and alienation for their American-raised kids, a gradual climb up the economic ladder and successive moves to nicer, larger dwellings in nicer neighborhoods. Nothing better illustrates the dynamic of ethnic rise than the fact that Richard M. Daley, born and raised in Bridgeport, moved out to Central Station, to a townhouse in a redeveloped rail yard of upscale ”townhomes” invariably described in the old neighborhood (often with a sneer) as “fancy.”

 

Of course, moving up often means moving out in many senses, including marriage outside the tribe and  the abandonment of the city for the suburbs. The result for many a de-racinated American is ambivalence toward both her past and her present identity. The crisis of identity is a staple of Chicago’s literature and lore; if the first generation faced a struggle again poverty or prejudice, the second faced a struggle against themselves. They replayed the experience of their own parents and grandparents who struggled to keep alive in strange world of America, just as their struggle to keep alive their cultural identity in strange world of suburbia. The ethnic vestiges that once embarrassed them become precious in retrospect, as all rare things become precious simply by being rare. Thus the ethnic festival, organized by second- or third-generation immigrants in which they celebrate the food, the dress, the habits that they used to sneer at in their grandparents.

 

The lore of such journeys burdens the history of every ethnic group in Chicagoland. The waystations on their hegiras varied by zip code but were otherwise much alike. Generally, West Siders kept moving west, North Siders north, and so on. Germans went from between Chicago and North avenues, Old Town, then Lake View, then Lincoln Square—last stop on the way out of town to the 'burbs. The Bridgeport Irish moved to Washington Park, then Hyde Park and South Shore, Mount Green, or Beverly. Swedes congregated at first near Wells and LaSalle, resettled around Division and Chicago, and sojourned for a time in Andersonville on their way north of town. The Norse from May and Erie migrated to Logan Square, then Wicker Park, and on to the northwest suburbs. From the Near South Side, Croats ended up in Hegewisch on the Far Far South Side.

 

Czechs first settled along De Koven Street in an area that came to be known, inevitably, as “Little Prague.” As so many have, they then moved out—first to the neighborhood around Eighteenth Street and Racine Avenue named after a local restaurant and saloon owned by a nostalgic native of Plzen who named his joint the Pilsen Café). Beginning in the 1880s, the destination was “Ceska California,” the second most influential Czech neighborhood in Chicago, on the west edge of the city between 14th and 33rd streets. The Czech residents abandoned these West Side neighborhoods by the 1950s, leaving the city altogether, many moving to the near suburbs like Berwyn and Cicero; 22d Street (later Cermak Road) between Cicero and Harlem was long known as the Bohemian Wall Street.

 

In 1867, St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish was formed by Poles who had settled near the Rolling Mill district along the North Branch of the Chicago River. This mother of all Polish parishes in Chicago built its church in 1876. At the turn of the 20th century, St. Stanislaus Kostka boasted 40,000 members—most counties in Illinois have no city that large—which is thought to have made it the largest parish in the nation; services conducted in Polish filled it a dozen times every Sunday. The neighborhood around St. Stanislaus Kostka is still an immigrant haven, but these days immigrants are Hispanic, not Polish. The church building still stands, but the institution it once housed is crumbling as its members who moved to the suburbs worship in towns such as Wheeling and Mount Prospect.

 

Jews were especially itinerant. The Roman Catholics may have been bound to the old neighborhood by the sanctity of the physical parish, African Americans by the hostility of their white neighbors, but Jews simply left. The German Jews who made up the congregation of K.A.M. Isaiah Israel—the Midwest’s oldest Jewish congregation—moved no fewer than seven times before ending up (for the moment) at their present home at 1100 East Hyde Park Boulevard. However, the virtues of the old neighborhood—mainly social comfort and reinforcement—were deemed too valuable to surrender, so they simply rebuilt the old neighborhoods wherever they went. Jewish Lawndale was recreated in West Rogers Park, which was served by synagogues first founded around on the near West Side of downtown near Maxwell Street; Irving Cutler has observed that California Avenue, between Peterson and Touhy avenues, with its rows of mostly Orthodox synagogues, is reminiscent of Douglas Boulevard in Lawndale. (In the North Shore suburbs, where the “old country” is Garfield Park, Reform temples are the norm.) Shoppers on Devon Avenue, the Main Street of West Rogers Park, were served by merchants who relocated from Roosevelt Road or Lawrence Avenue.

 

By some calculations, four of five Chicagoland Jews now live north of Lawrence Avenue. In his memoir, author Rich Cohen wrote this about growing up in the 1970s:

 

[The South Side] had once been the home of our grandfathers, a haven for immi­grants from Poland, Russia, and Greece. On weekend nights, the air had filled with fumes from their grills— souvlaki, bratwurst, sausage—and the streets had soaked up the warm midwestern rain. But drib by drab the sons of those immigrants had moved to the manicured pastures of Rogers Park or Bucktown, or even farther north to Winnetka, Evanston, Glencoe.

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For families like the Cohens, the city has become the Old Country.

 

Self-help was a tradition and not just a slogan among many of Chicagoland’s ethnic groups. Every one had its fraternal societies and benevolent associations that together composed a parallel social system for the millions who were barred from or did not trust Chicago’s mainstream versions.

 

Sicilian immigrants around Taylor Street and their North Side compatriots around Sedgwick Street obtained life insurance (and not a little help with extortionists in both City Hall and the Black Hand) from the benevolent association Unione Siciliana, which was founded in  1895. Other such organizations provided banking services, funerals. Within a few years of their arrival in numbers during the World War I era, local Mexicans had founded chapters of mutual benefit societies known as mutualistas, which dispensed aid from a dues-supported fund to members who were hurt or out of work or needed to bury a loved one. The German version were the landsmanshaften or vereins; in the German Jewish community they functioned as social clubs, loan associations, sick-benefit and cemetery agencies all in one, according to Irving Cutler.

 

As ethnic groups became established economically, many were able to provide themselves full-fledged community institutions.  Jewish Lawndale in the 1920s was served by a rehabilitation hospital, a con­valescent home, a day-and-night nursery, a large orphanage, a home for the Orthodox Jewish aged, and Mount Sinai Hospital, which served kosher meals. On the Polish Northwest Side one found a hospital too, plus and old folks homes and the Polish Welfare Association to help Polish communities deal with juvenile delinquency and other social problems.

 

As for business capital, that too was largely community-generated for decades. Building and loan associations ranks not far behind the local church as a crucial neighborhood organization; such organizations offered not only helped build loans but ethnic solidarity.

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Where their numbers made such things commercially viable, ethnics frequented their own taverns, shops, private schools, and social clubs. Where their numbers made such things desirable, ethnics attended their own churches; by 1915 there were at least 202 well-defined national parishes for 16 different groups in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Many also had their own politicians; most of the great latter chiefs of the Democratic machine owed their start to their fellow ethnics; Anton Cermak was the boss of his Czech community in Lawndale.

 

The tendency to ethnics of like origins to congregate in the same parts of the city is well known. To a Pole on Milwaukee Avenue in some eras, the Northwest Side was a Polish neighborhood no matter how many people of other backgrounds shared it, because the only people she interacted with, worshipped with, shopped with, and gossiped with were Poles. The Poles were not the only group that (melting pot clichés to the contrary) did not want to be American, at least during the years soon after arrival. They only wanted to be in America, and the ethnic enclave made it possible.

 

Unease in sharing public spaces with the dominant “whites”—mainly Protestant, mainly middle class, mainly assimilated if not native born—was general. White ethnics seldom ventured downtown, for example, a habit that presented opportunities, and not only for the pushcart and corner grocery- scale businessman. The German American W. A. Wieboldt built a storefront shop on North Avenue into a chain of department stores beginning in 1884; one of the secrets of his success was putting his stores in the neighborhoods rather than downtown, and staffing them with multilingual clerks who made ethnic shoppers feel comfortable.

 

Writer Lee Sandlin, in a family memoir, recalled the days his grandfather Clarence spent as a cab driver in the 1920s in the then-German Lincoln Square area. Clarence had been raised among the Germans of Downstate Edwardsville.

 

He quickly felt at home among the countless coffee shops and meat markets and corner bakeries, the pharmacies with their herbal remedies and the newsstands with their arrays of Teutonic eccentricity (magazines devoted to naturism, and magnetic healing, and National Socialism), the endless elm-pillared streets, the receding rows of brownstones, the turrets and spiky church steeples and water towers; it was like a dream of the old Germany he'd sometimes heard described in his childhood.

 

There is a major difference between the ghetto and the ethnic enclave. The former is imposed on a weaker group by a stronger one. None of the ethnic ghettos of Chicago was a true ghetto. The Jews of Maxwell Street were not confined there by law, for example, as their kin had been in Europe. The exception was the African American neighborhoods whose purity was enforced by whites as a kind of apartheid. 

 

In contrast, the segregation that results in the voluntary enclave was self-protective, its purpose to preserve and, in some cases perpetuate traditions that under assault in the new land. The enclave was adopted by Chicago’s Poles, for example, as a strategy for cultural survival. the boundaries of these enclaves were always precisely, if seldom officially observed, usually because patrolled by young toughs or by insurance red-liners and realtors.

 

It must be owed that enclaves are not in every way bad things. The presence of people of shared tastes gives ethnic merchants a market, ethnic professionals clients, and ethnic politicians a constituency. In Chinatown, in Little Village, and the other lesser ethnic enclaves, segregation allowed flourishing businesses owned by and catering to the locals and to tourists eager for a taste of the exotic in food and entertainment.

 

The concentration of ethnic-minded voters also secured majorities in at least aldermanic and some state legislative races. Indeed, a succession of black pols connived in maintaining the black ghettos in spite of the social cost to their own constituents because they gave the aldermen a ready-made power base. Recent court decisions sanctioning same-race majority districts in the name of voting rights have confirmed these pols’ opinion that, when comes to politics, a ghetto is a good thing. 

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Bronzeville is a good example. There seems to be an almost palpable longing among some middle class African Americans for the Bronzeville of old. The area offered displaced Southern blacks social comfort, a fount of identity. That Bronzeville is mostly vanished, but the trend among African Americans who can afford to live the old neighborhoods is to gather in new same-race communities in Chicago’s southern suburbs. While racial steering and other kinds of discrimination still exist in the suburbs, segregation in the region's new Bronzevilles is mainly voluntary, driven by a desire for social comfort and cultural solidarity—less aggravated versions of the impulse to social self-sufficiency and economic nationalism that Chicago’s earlier ethnics would have sympathized with.

 

Few of the mythic Chicago ethnic neighborhoods retained a specific ethnic character for much longer than a generation or two. Maxwell Street is a good example. On Sunday morning, Graham Hutton wrote in the 1940s, Maxwell street market was “London’s Caledonian market, Berwick Street, and Petticoat Lane fused into one, with the color and noise and bargaining of all the world’s peoples.” Phil Holdman recalls growing up there in those days—the “nickel show” known as the Irving Theater “Kingfish” Levinsky’s fish store, Shloimes Clothing Store, a live chicken store and the shochet next door that slaughtered your fowl for a dime and an old man who “robbed your chrane” (pulverized your horseradish) for your Friday night gefilite fish. “I don’t think that English was spoken on this block,” Holdman told an interviewer, “only Yiddish.” Holdman’s mother was “a live chicken maven” who always picked out the one with the most schmaltz; she shopped on Maxwell because she “didn’t trust those fancy new stores on Roosevelt Road, with their cash registers.” By 1910 the Jews started moving out; by the l930s only a small remnant of Jewish businessmen and older Jews remained in the Maxwell Street area.

 

Most ethnic enclaves survive only as local lore.A very few enclaves were the subjects of formal academic studies of the sort that fixed the life of Depression-era Bronzeville as prehistoric pollen is fixed upon a microscope slide. Many more enclaves were the subjects of memoirs, or novels. Painter Anthony Angarola, a first-generation Italian immigrant,  made the local immigrant experience a theme of his work in the early 1920s through a series of canvases with titles such as Swede Hollow, Little Italy St. Paul, Bohemian Flats, and German Picnic.

 

There are exceptions. Like so many big city ethnic hoods, Ukrainian Village was more Ukrainian than Ukraine, in the sense that in the old country many of the old ways that were abandoned undere Soviet domination ended are here nostalgically preserved. St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church, which was modeled after the Basilica of St. Sophia in Kiev. the Ukrainian National Museum Features trademark crafts—intricately painted easter eggs, wood carvings and colorful embroidery. Each March, readings, art exhibitions and other events honor Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's greatest poet and a champion of national indepoendence. 

 

Ukrainian Village has seen its share of gen­trification, but in this case many of the affluent young buyers are Ukrainians who had left for the ‘burbs and who opted to return to the old neighborhood to raise their kids. That Ukrainian Village kept its character for nearly a century in a city in which neighborhoods change ethnic composition every generation or two confirms the Ukrainians’ fierce conservatism. Richard Lindberg, in his useful 1997 book, Passport's Guide to Ethnic Chicago, reports that as late as 1969 a decision by the local Catholic parishes to switch from the traditional Julian calendar to the Gregorian—adopted by the rest of the world in 1582—so upset some parishioners that they started their own church a few blocks away that marks time the old way.

 

The Ukrainian National Museum in Ukrainian Village museum is surprisingly modest, given the size of the Ukrainian community. In any event the real history of these people in Chicago is better gleaned from the neighborhood itself; next door to the museum is Sts. Volodymyr and Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church, whose Ukrainianness attests to the church’s role in cultural anchor to immigrants adrift in the wild seas of America; also nearby are Ukrainian restaurants and bakeries, where Ukrainian life in Chicago can be digested literally.

 

According to the Chinese American Service League, 70 percent of the Chinatown residents of today’s Chinatown are new immigrants. Long fixed in area at eight square blocks,  road projects in the 1930s, ‘50s, and ‘60s pared away at Chinatown’s edges. The most recent surge in  immigration forced the long-delayed cause expansion of the district, into Bridgeport and Brighton Park just south and south west of Chinatown. (Many Americanized Chinese are going farther, to western suburbs as Westmont and Naperville.) Local businesspeople also realized the need to upgrade housing and commercial infrastructure to hold on to their established residents. Need met opportunity when the Santa Fe Railroad abandoned its yards north of Archer Avenue that had long been a barrier to expansion. The 1990s saw the construction of retail strips, town houses, condos and apartments, and subsidized se­nior housing, and a new park.

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New buildings in Chinatown have been built in the Chinese style, with wide eaves and elaborate painted roof brackets, and many of the old 19th century buildings have been remod­eled to look more Chinese. The On Leong Merchants Association Building at 2216 S. Wentworth Avenue, built in the mid-1920s in a style reminiscent of the architecture of the Kwangtung district of China, whence many of Chinatown's early residents came. It was the headquarters of the founders of today’s Chinatown. It was the local version of the familiar community center, housing at various times a meeting hall, a school, a shrine, and the association's offices. It is now an official City of Chicago landmark.

 

The accents and the menus change, but the social dynamic that produces ethnic enclaves hasn’t changed much. Chicago still has many such refuges from American-ness in the city. Settled from about 1870 to the early 1950s by immigrant Czechs (the city of Plzen, or Pilsen, is the capital of west Bohemia, from which many Chicago came). it evolved into a Mexican neighborhood, and its main drag, Eighteenth Street, is lined with Mexican tacquerias, family-owned grocery stores, and bakeries. The music on the street, the fare on the food carts, the outdoor murals give the district an unmistakably Mexican feel, a match for Maxwell street in its heyday as a simulacrum of the old country.

 

Today’s Pilsen does not merely resemble a Mexican barrio, it is one, one that is, as Marco D’Eramo points out,  closer to any other Mexican town than it is to an Evanston or a Park Forest, both towns that are, in cultural terms, a thousand miles away from Pilsen. Resident have lived here for 20 years never having to learn English. Those that move up do not necessarily move out; many Mexicans are investing and making homes in the area rather than in the city’s outlying neighborhoods or the suburbs. Those that do leave have been replaced by the heavy influx of newcomers who maintain the Spanish accent.

 

A bit to the west of Pilsen is la Villita or Little Village, a little bit—actually, a pretty large bit—of Mexico transplanted to South Lawndale. A major port of entry for immigrants, the area bounded by Western, Ogden, and Kostner avenues and I-55, was largely middle European until 1970 or so. Today it is home to well over 100,000 people, most of whom are  Latinos and most of the Latinos are Mexican. The dozens of shops crammed with goods from Mexico reminders that cowboy is not solely a creature of the U.S. West. Pushcarts that sell popsicles in the suburbs in the summer here sell mango and papaya. Sales volume in the businesses along the two and a half-mile stretch of 26th Street between California and Cicero Avenue are thought to be second only to Michigan Avenue among the city’s most prosperous retail centers. Chicago ethnic communities tend to measure the vibrancy of their communities in terms of parades; the big one in Little Village each September is thought to be the largest annual Hispanic parade in Chicago.

 

As in Pilsen, residents here are spared the awkwardness over language that makes social exchanges with non-Spanish speakers anxious. There is little that is American, much less specifically Illinoisan or Chicagoan about the place—except perhaps that it has its own Chamber of Commerce—but it is nonetheless closer to the “real” Chicago than the usual tourist haunts because it is here that one can witness anew the old dramas of arrival, struggle, and assimilation that make up the stories of uncounted thousands of Chicagoans for more than 150 years.   

 

Sag paneer on white bread

 

“Ethnic” means “the city” to a lot of Chicagoland residents. The suburbs are widely assumed to be the very symbol of white-bread America—the place to which the WASPish whites fled to escape the dark-skinned newcomers of each new generation of immigrants. Enough Chicago suburbs confirm that stereotype that it persists in the face of demographic evidence to the contrary.

 

However, Chicagoland’s hinterland population always had a substantial (and in some places, an overwhelmingly) ethnic flavor. The farms around South Holland were first worked by Netherlanders, as the name suggests; in 1900 Hollanders were growing "Glencoe horse-radish" in the valley of the Skokie River in far north Cook County. Joliet was the center of the Austrian population in the U.S. in the 19th century and had a significant population of Catholic Slovenes. There are at least a half dozen Hindu temples in the suburbs. Mitsuwa Marketplace, the giant Japanese supermarket in Arlington Heights, is a far cry from the ethnic grocery of legend. Cosmetic dentists in places like Buffalo Grove have names like Patel these days, and you can get sag paneer for lunch in Schaumburg. In the southwest suburbs, lunchers bored with hamburgers can dine on hummus on pita bread or lamb kabobs.

 

Things are different for the suburban ethnic in the ways that life for all is different in the suburbs. The familiar social dynamic from the city enclave is altered by that environment. In the former, enough families of like background lived within a streetcar ride to sustain the ethnic church, the store, the social club. Suburban ethnics, with rare exceptions, adopted the dispersed living patterns typical of all but inner-ring suburbs. A church or a shop must draw from much larger area to sustain itself. Many of the suburbs temples and mosques have not been built in Hindu or Muslim neighborhoods—they aren’t any—but stand at easy-to-reach spots along the expressways, in response to the same logic that sites shopping malls in such spots.

 

For years, immigrant Poles of the Divine Mercy Polish Mission had to drive to the cafeteria of Montini Catholic High School in Lombard to celebrate Catholic mass in Polish, and be able to observe the rituals peculiar to their national church, such as bringing baskets of sausages, eggs and other items to church on Holy Saturday to be blessed as part of the Easter traditions. Re-enacting the  ancient tradition to the immigrant, they plan to build a church of their own; the difference is, this new church going up on Swift Road near North Avenue in unincorporated Du Page County on the edge of Lombard and Glen Ellyn.

 

Nonetheless, the experience of suburban ethnics is remarkably similar to their counterparts in the city. For one thing, the tendency to settle in enclaves was nearly as marked as in the city. These settlements accreted around factories at first; this was the case with the Mexican settlements in Aurora, Joliet, and Blue Island; Waukegan is some four percent Mexican and Mexican American. These days the factories are in towns such Arlington Heights and Bensenville, and they too have attracted Mexican workers and their families.

 

At the same time, their story is alike that of their un-hyphenated neighbors as well. As ethnic families acquired means, they moved to the suburbs in search of better homes and schools, more greenery and space, less crime. The settlement along the North Shore around World War I of German Jews for example was a phenomenon of the affluent, but after World War II a mass migration from Rogers Parks and other city neighborhoods began, until today probably three-fourths of the region’s Jewish residents are suburbanites, most of them in the more affluent northern suburbs.

 

If the leitmotif of Chicago suburbs in the first three quarters of the 20th century was growth, for example, the significant demographic story of the last quarter of the 20th century has been change. One can note a hundred examples. As early as the 1840s, the French Canadians who settled the future Wilmette had left, and that old trading settlement was transformed into a German farming center, thanks to the arrival of immigrants from the latter nation’s Trier region. (The area was known as New Trier, a name that survives in New Trier Township and the high school and the school district that supports it.) The south suburb of Posen was named Bremen when it was founded by Germans, but was re-named by Polish immigrants who moved to the area to work in the steel mills in adjacent Harvey. Even in Skokie, the quintessentially Jewish suburb, public schools by the 1990s ended their long-standing policy of declaring a school holiday on major Jewish holidays, because there were too few Jewish students any more to justify it.

 

Chicagoland’s ethnic citizens are among those who have joined in the post-war suburban exodus. As a result, probably not one Chicago suburb is not more ethnically diverse than it was 20 years ago, and in many cases the difference is dramatic. To cite just two examples of dozens: Country Club Hills, once heavily German, is today a mostly black suburb. South Holland long resisted the in­flux of Poles and Italians who populated the later industrial towns that adjoin it; of late the population has shifted a third time, so that a town that was 0.2 percent black in 1990 was by 2000 51 percent African American. Waukegan is today some 45 percent Hispanic; three west suburban towns (Cicero, Hodgkins, and Stone Park) were majority Hispanic by 2002.

 

Joliet Slovenians had a falling-out with the Germans of St. John the Baptist at 404 N. Hickory Street, where the Slovenians worshiped for a time. The Slovenians thus determined to build a new church and built it with limestone and two steeples. The church still draws now-aging Slovenians, whose masses are accompanied by polka music, but its school is filled with children of Hispanic immigrants.

 

Such demographic shifts eventually are expressed politically. (The city of Chicago is not the only place where the phrase, “It’s our turn” has meaning.) In Chicago Heights, the Scots-Irish business establishment that dominated the commu­nity a century ago has long since surrendered power to descendants of the ethnic migrants whom they so bitterly opposed; as early as 1970, Italian Americans dominated the city council, the school board, and the park board. In the west suburbs, voters elected the first Latino to the Aurora City Council in 2001. Waukegan, a town that heretofore had tended to prefer mayors with Irish and Swedish surnames, in 1957 elected Robert Sabonjian, the son of local Armenian immigrants as mayor and kept electing him; Sabonjian served 24 years, during which time he helped friends with names such as Manion, Hoogasian, and Paravonian into politics. The social changes that have come at Cicero over that same span of years can be read in the surnames of its top elected officials; in a 2003 special election, the old town president Betty Loren-Maltese was replaced by one Ramiro Gonzalez.

 

These transitions seldom lead to violence, as happened so often in the city, but social relations were no less fractious along Chicago’s suburban frontier than they were in the city’s parishes; Chicagoland citizens were a long way from welcoming difference, as so many pretend to do today. These days, discrimination on grounds of faith or color may be proscribed, at least officially. Within the peaceable kingdom of the middle class, people are quite tolerant all manner of ethnic and religious differences. There has been a Japanese community in Chicago as far back as the 1890s. (Before she left for Japan in 1940, World II traitor, Tokyo Rose lived in Chicago with her father, who owned a restaurant on N. Clark Street.) The first sizable contingent of Japanese began arriving after World War II, between 1950 and 1960 and landlords shunned them; their descendants, and countrymen in the form of expatriate business  executives have created a Japanese American community in the northwest suburbs without problem. The discrimination faced by Jews in some North Shore towns has been largely dissipated. Segregation however remains real; the difference is that people realized that skin color and religious preference are meaningless in terms of what really makes them uneasy about neighbors. The same-race suburb thus is as rare as the same-sex school, but the same-class suburb remains the standard.

 

Up onto the pedestal

 

Each ethnic group underwent its own passage from outcast immigrant to honored citizen. For years, the proof that an ethnic group had achieved status in the larger community was the erection in public space of a statue of their national hero or the naming of a street or park streets after them. One would be hard put to count them all, much less to describe them.

 

Two examples of many: Auburn Avenue is now Lituanica Avenue in memory of the first Lithuanian Roman Catholic church in Chicago which was built there, at 33rd Street, in 1892, and Crawford Avenue became Pulaski Avenue in 1952, after nearly 20 years of political and legal wrangles. The statue of the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, who gave us our classifications of plants and animals, stands on the Midway between Ellis and Woodlawn avenues; at the eastern end of the Midway stands a large equestrian statue of a Bohemian knight, to honor Thomas Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia.

 

As new groups arrive, Chicago’s bronze citizens become as varied as living ones. Mahatma Gandhi has a statue, in Skokie's Heritage Park at the intersection of Dempster Street and McCormick Boulevard, commissioned by a trust formed by Skokie’s Indian American community; the park is designed to showcase a total of 13 sculptures celebrating Skokie’s cultural diversity and village unity.

 

The many log houses that have been preserved across the region—one finds them in Highland Park, Skokie, Deerfield, Naperville, and many more towns—are themselves ethnic artifacts, that form of shelter having been adapted by the region’s Brits from Scandinavian models.

 

Statues cost money. Many groups are finding it cheaper to persuade the city council to get a street made an honorary way. There are many of these signs appended to regulation street signs in Chicago; one such is the one at Clark and Montrose cryptically announcing the presence of “100th/442nd/MIS Way”—it honors the 100th Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and the Military Intelligence Service, which were three of the segregated Japanese American military units that served during World War II.

 

Multiculturalists of our day, frustrated in their attempts to create a diverse society here, sometimes create one in an imagined past by offering old Chicago as a model multi-ethnic community. Consider the career, living and dead, of Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable. Most accounts describe du Sable as a fur trader from Haiti of mixed blood, the son of French man (possibly a sailor) and a African-born slave woman. But the evidence about this, as about so many things about his life, is scant, and some scholars believe it more likely that du Sable was born in Canada of two free black parents.

 

Du Sable appears to have been the first permanent resident of what was then known as “Eschikagou.” (First permanent resident; in 1674 Father Jacques Marquette, on his way to set up a mission in downstate Illi­nois, was forced to winter on the site of Chicago.) Du Sable ran a trading post in 1779, possibly earlier. His commercial success demonstrated the importance of the site as a locus of travel, which in turn may have been important in convincing federal authorities to establish Fort Dearborn here. In his 20 years he built an impressive establishment on the north bank of the Chicago River. When he sold out in 1800, the property included a house, a horse mill, bakehouse, barn, dairy, a poultry house, workshop, and stable. The house measured 40 by 22 feet—quite commodious for the time—and was furnished with a glass-doored French cabinet, a large feather bed, a couch, mirrors, and paintings.

 

It is plausible, if generous, to examine the inventory of his belongings in 1800 and praise him (as does the Chicago Public Library Web site devoted to him) as “a man of good taste and refinement” but it is surely a stretch to argue from the same evidence, as one African American organization does, that “he collected fine art and owned several European rare art pieces.“

 

Doubts can be raised even about the near-universal description of du Sable as African American, at least in that term’s narrower sense. His language and education was that of a French New World colonial; it is perhaps significant that when he retired, he sought out for his last home not a black enclave but a French one, in St. Charles, Missouri, where Frenchness was still a part of the present and not the past, as it already was in Chicago by 1800.

 

For decades, credit for the founding of the city for decades was given to Brits John Kinzie and his clan. They were crucial players in the early history of the town, but they were not the first Euro-Americans on the scene. It is now accepted that du Sable had appeared in the region as many as fourteen years before the Kinzie family arrived from Detroit, and that the Kinzies based their prosperity on the trading establishment built up by du Sable.

 

Du Sable not only recognized the potential of Chicago as a trading center but was the first man to act on it, and for that alone deserves mention among the city’s notables. But  du Sable partisans tend to exaggerate his role in the city’s development. He is today widely credited as “the founder of Chicago,” but there is a difference between a resident and a founder. Du Sable built a trading post, not a town. (The French-Canadian/Indian community of which du Sable was a member was indifferent to formal town-building.) Ralph Pugh, a historian with the Chicago Historical Society specializing in the life of du Sable, has offered what may be the most sensible judgment, although surely not the final one. "Because he has become politically important, facts are often said about him without challenge,” Pugh told the Chicago Tribune in 2003, “which actually does a disservice to a great man who is quite historically important."

 

As long ago as 1912 the city of Chicago placed a marker in his memory at the corner of Kinzie and Pine (now Michigan Avenue), near the former site of his trading post; a marker that recalls du Sable's home at 411 N. Michigan Plaza was installed near that spot in 1977. Du Sable was officially recognized in 1968 by the State of Illinois for having been the “Founder of Chicago,” and in 1987 the U.S. Postal Service issued a du Sable stamp as part of its Black Heritage series. In 1999 city officials formally recognized du Sable as Chicago's founder.

 

The du Sable Museum of African American History in Washington Park was founded in 1961; a sculpture gardens on the grounds features five pieces installed in 1977 to represent “The Spirit of du Sable.” the lower lobby of the Harold Washington Library Center in the Loop is Du Sable's Journey, a “cosmogram” created by artist Houston Conwill, architect Joseph DePace, and poet Estella Conwill Majoza, which traces the water routes traveled by DuSable from Haiti to the Great Lakes.

 

There has been grumbling since the 1920s that du Sable has had only got a high school (in a black part of town) named after him. The lower lobby of the Harold Washington Library Center is adorned by an artwork titled DuSable's Journey, which traces the routes by which presumably got from Haiti to Illinois. But no major street bears his name, which led to proposals to rename Lake Shore Drive (in 1993) and even City Hall (in 2001) in du Sable's honor. His partisans have lobbied of late for a du Sable day, to be officially observed each June.

 

He at least has a park. In the 1980s Loop developers donated to the city a 3.5-acre plot of land at the present mouth of the river across from Navy Pier, which then-Mayor Harold Washington in 1987 proposed as a park to be named after du Sable. The steering committee has proposed creation of a DuSable Founders Trail along the river's north bank to link DuSable Park to the site of his trading post, south of Tribune Tower.

 

Progress in turning the vacant lot into a park over the following 20 years was slow—environmental problems and bureaucratic inefficiency, says the city; indifference due to race, say backers of the park. The real delays owe to political disputes between partisans, who are content to “celebrate” the mythic du Sable, and historians, who urge that the du Sable commemorated by the park be the real one, not the rather inflated hero of legend.

 

Another sore point is the statue that has long been planned for the site. The AIC, which has pledged several hundred thousand dollars to the project, picked Martin Puryear, the noted African American artist for the job; his proposed abstract work pleased not the local du Sable lobby. It was faceless, for one thing. This was historically appropriate—no one knows what du Sable looked like—but politically insufficient. One of the founding members of the du Sable League told the press she wanted du Sable depicted as “a huge statesman looking like Abraham Lincoln.'' Her colleagues stated their willingness to accept a ”realistic” du Sable statue that depicts him with a recognizable face—even if that face must necessarily an imagined one.

 

Ethnicity—and more recently race and sex—have always played a part in the selection of public art in Chicago. The ability to pay for a statue that trumpeted the achievements of one’s own was a mark of having arrived, and winning permission to do so was endorsement by the officials of worth. Thus, a review of the catalog of such pieces, with their dates, constitutes a quick study of the city’s ethnic history.

 

The subjects are almost without exception to be national heroes—soldiers, politicians, thinkers, artists. The Nicholas Copernicus was erected in part by the Polish American Congress, the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Lincoln Park sponsored by "The Germans of Chicago." The erection in 1891 of a statue of Carl Linnaeus in Lincoln Park commemorates the Scandinavian population of the North Side as much as it does the great 18th-century Swedish botanist. (Another statue of Linnaeus, by Robert Berk is in the form of an out-sized garden gnome at the Chicago Botanic Gardens in Glencoe.)

 

In more recent years new class of outsider has been sanctioned to tell their stories, which has resulted, among other effects, in the many murals of civil rights heroes in public libraries in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and many more works in many situations by women.

 

Having a statue or a mural is no longer enough. The count varies by the strictness of one’s definition, but a conservative tally puts the number of ethnic museums and cultural centers in Chicagoland at more than three dozen. (Many newer museums exist only on the Web.) Whatever their form, the “heritage museum” soothes the longings of a people for home, but its larger purpose is educational (or, often, polemic). They aim to persuade ethnic snobs that the organizers have a history worth noting. They also seek to teach their Americanized children and grandchildren of what was lost by immigration—although the effect as often as not, is just the opposite. Almost any custom, wrenched from context, seems absurd, especially when the customs highlighted because they are the most “colorful”—meaning the most distinct from American ways. Offering the children of Ukrainian immigrants the opportunity to learn egg painting, for example, risks making ancestors seem not just quaint but weird.

 

What such museums usually do not do is instruct the visitor about the specifically Chicagoland experience of an ethnic group. The result is that one usually learns (to pick a typical example) a lot of Poles at the Polish Museum of America near St. Stanislaus Kostka on the Northwest Side—you can see a chair Paderewski sat on at the piano or early 20th-century Expressionist Polish paintings—but little about Chicagoland’s Poles. A rare exception is the virtual tour of German American historical sites in Chicago posted on the web site of the local chapter of the Goethe Institute.

 

A museum must have a coherent record to display. Donations are the usual means of building a collection of interest to future historians, but of late ethnic groups have sought out the group’s history, not merely stored it. The Chicago Japanese American Historical Society is a grassroots organization founded in the early 1990s whose self-described mission is to preserve, promote, and present the history of Japanese Americans in Chicagoland. A similar mission animates the History Makers, a nonprofit based in the old Bronzeville neighborhood that is modeled on and seeks to expand the African American oral history work undertaken by the WPA in the 1930s.

 

We’re all Indians now

 

The career of the Chicago Ethnic of the post-settlement eras has undergone an apotheosis akin to that of the Native American. At first they were excoriated, exploited, sneered at as backward, barely civilized if they were fully human at all. Yugoslav-born poet Charles Simic—named in 2007 the new Poet Laureate of the U.S.—moved to Chicago from his native Belgrade as a youth. His new home town, he decided, reminded him of Dostoyevsky’s descriptions of the slums of St. Petersburg:

 

A Ukrainian, let’s say, would come to Chicago when he was a boy, get on a shift in some factory and then, because overtime was so well paid, stay for the next forty years . . . .

            They became slaves. They liked the idea! They worked four extra hours every day, and they worked weekends. They just worked—all their lives. When you met them, you couldn’t tell what age they were. They were forty, fifty, sixty; they had a gray look.”

 

That characterization is general. Sinclair wrote about it admiringly in The Jungle, others less so. In Chatfleld-Taylor’s 1895 novel, Two Women and A Fool, the main character reflects on the city’s newest residents:

 

Those people who passed me, how brutal were their faces; how beast-like their little eyes. But they were the repulsive life of this great city The character of the people one meets here has changed since I was a boy There is less vigor and Yankee pluck in their faces, more of the degradation of the European serf.

 

The ethnic did not enhance his reputation in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. These new “white ethnics” by then were considered were hard-working, devout—not likable people perhaps but admirable. They could also be xenophobic and deeply racist. Their ethnic strongholds were redoubts of racism in the city, and what was seen as Richard J. Daley’s catering to that constituency was a blot on his reputation too.

 

That was 30 years ago. The same white ethnic that was damned as a racist boob in the 1970s is today romanticized as the salt of the earth. Writer Stuart Dybek has made a career out of recording their antics, as did Mike Royko with his comic Everyman from the Polish Northwest Side, Slats Grobnik. This view just as misleadingly narrow, if more flattering, than the old one. The shift probably owes much to the process by which the city’s baby boomers have come to terms with their own parents. Whatever the social dynamic at work, it threatens to transform the white ethnic Chicagoan into a “character” of the sort that used to populate the burlesque stages and the columns of George Ade.

 

If the ethnic Chicagoan has become a cartoon type, a caricature, so her old neighborhoods have become Disney’s Main Street with an accent. Many of the city’s ethnic neighborhoods offer an experience almost as ersatz as did the Midway during the 1894 world’s fair. Greek Town, on Halsted between Adams and Monroe streets, is little more than a marketing rubric for restaurant advertising. (A “new” Greektown has sprouted along Lawrence Avenue on the North Side.) What is left of Little Italy along Taylor Street (around 1500 west) serves mainly to provide decent eats—Mario's Lemonade and sandwiches from Conte DiSavoia—to the hungry yups who work and study at the nearby University of Illinois at Chicago. The ironies are rich; Little Italy, much of which was torn down in part because it was too European, is these days being gussied up because it isn’t quite European enough. 

 

The redevelopment of “Bronzeville,” as the African American ghetto south of downtown is sometimes known, is welcome from an economic point of view, but it poses the same kind of threat to the historic remnants of Bronzeville that gentrification poses to all of Chicago’s newly trendy ethnic neighborhoods. Interests marshaled by a longtime alderman hope to turn the area around 47th into a “modern African Village” to which conventioneers would repair via the Red Line to sample authentic "blues" culture in new clubs and dine in African/Caribbean restaurants.

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That part of east 47th Street has been redubbed Tobacco Road, the title of a minor 1964 hit song by local boy made good Lou Rawls, whose name graces the theater being/is built on the former site of the old Regal Theatre. This part of the black South Side in its heyday was hardly a place of tarpaper shacks. It was ineluctably urban and cosmopolitan. Residents and some preservationists have complained publicly about making a blues-oriented Tobacco Road the main street of a new African village in a place that was never a Tobacco Road, never an African Village, and where the music played was jazz rather than blues.

 

If residents of the ethnic neighborhood are sometimes nostalgic for a old country that they never experienced, so many of the visitors to those neighborhoods from the suburbs are nostalgic for a Chicago neighborhood that no longer exists—if it ever did. Indeed so rapid is the social change in Chicago that often by the time public institutions get around to paying their respects, the people have moved on. In the 1980s the architects of the new branch library for the once-German Lincoln Square neighborhood included custom-made furniture whose design was based on German mythology, but not many of the rear ends that will sit on it are German.

 

One of the legacies national church-building was a surplus of churches, as the original Catholic settlers of founders of working-class parishes died or fled to the suburbs. Since 1975 about 80 parishes have been shut in the archdiocese. In some parts of the city the process by which the parish was replenished by new residents from different nations but the same faith still goes on; Hispanics are keeping alive many a parish on the West Side. In neighborhoods in which working class Catholics were not replaced by coreligionists—which was the case in great swaths of the west and south sides now occupied by mainly Protestant African Americans—the old parishes have been starved of support. While black converts to Catholicism were not rare in Chicago, there were seldom enough members of the church to sustain the substantial infrastructure of church, school, rectory, and convent.

 

Some white ethnic parishes had been able to count on 60 percent of the residents to carry the weight of all that brick; when the parish neighborhood went all black the parish might be able to draw upon contribution from only five percent or less, and many of them were poor. The now-mostly black West Side can support perhaps three of the ten parishes that line the Eisenhower Expressway between Damen Avenue and the suburbs. (And one of those ten was itself forged from three parishes in the late 1980s.) On the South Side, ten Englewood parishes were reorganized in 1989 to sustain one church. Typical is what happened to St. Michael Catholic Church on 24th Place, a modest building in a modest neighborhood in the Lower West Side. The parish opened in 1903 and served mainly Italian immigrants; the parish's heyday was in the late 1940s. The local ethnic population was at  its peak, the baby boom was underway, and new affluence made possible the construction of an elementary school next to the church that in short order enrolled 233 children. Fifty years later, the church was ordered closed, there not being enough families to support it.

 

Meanwhile, each new Chicago ethnic continues to become ethnics of Americanized sort, in their way an inauthentic—indeed unrecognizable as such in the old country—as the caricatures. This kind of cultural emigration—a social and psychological abandonment of old country—was as wrenching in way as the not much less total that the physical abandonment that their grandparents and great-grandparents had experienced. There is also the painful irony that people who came to the U.S. to better themselves economically find, after they’ve achieved it, that their heritage is diluted, thanks to the effects of materialism, that universal solvent of values. Nothing is more poignant than the new schools that have been set up at which grandchildren of recent Greek, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian immigrants, among others, are taught the language, history, and customs of countries that most have never seen. ●

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