The Corn Latitudes

Nothing in common but being uncommon

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The forces at work pushing emigrants toward Chicagoland are seldom simple. Political upheavals often beget poverty, which excites political unrest; ethnic persecution often has economic competition as a complicating cause. A few immigrant groups have suffered from all three. Poverty, political injustice, and ethnic persecution, for instance, were all factors in the exodus of African Americans from the U.S. South.

 

It was a story that was already familiar to many of the city’s Poles. In the latter 1700s, Poland was gradually dismembered by its neighbors Prussia, Austria, and Russia, each of which proved a bad master in its way. The Protestant Prussians repressed the Catholic Church in their part of Poland and took its wealth and its young men to fight Prussia’ wars. Austria was then ruled by the Catholic Habsburg dynasty, but while the spirits of the Poles were sustained, their bodies often were not, as the region was wracked with poverty. The Russian tsar proved the most brutal master of all, confiscating the Poles’ lands, suppressing their language, barring them from jobs, and attempting to break the Catholic church. Rebellions in 1795 and in 1830 and 1863 were put down, forcing many to flee to the U.S.

 

If Chicago’s immigrants shared motives for leaving, many also shared a method.  As noted, the Irish and the Chinese and the early Mexicans came as laborers, and seldom brought their families. But in general, immigration was undertaken by whole families, if not parishes, even villages. James Grossman, in his study of the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, noted that Southern pastors would organize the move of their flocks; neighbors helped each other too, often through “migration clubs” that enabled them to obtain lower-cost charter rates from the Illinois Central.

 

Asians Indians came alone, and spoke English when they arrived (thanks to British-schooling). Those are the only similarities to the Irish experience that predated theirs by a century and a quarter. Many of the vanguard of Asian Indian immigrants were highly skilled males in the sciences and medicine, computer programmers, and business managers admitted under the 1965 immigration law. Once established, these pioneers sent for their kin to join them under the provision of the law that allows an immigrant who becomes a U.S. citizen to sponsor family members wanting immigrant visas. By the end of the twentieth century, Chicago had the third-largest concentration of Indians in the United States. Less adept at English and often untrained, many of these late-comers found careers in the only field in which these were not only not handicaps but boons—running restaurants and clothing shops for their countrymen in Chicagoland. Many of the merchants along Devon Avenue as an Asian Indian shopping center is directly linked to the arrival of the sponsored relatives of the vanguard professionals. Many of them lacked the skills they needed for corporate jobs like those held by their kin so they used their knowledge of language and customs to cater to their countrymen’s retail needs by opening shops on Devon Avenue.

 

Most immigrants also found themselves—whatever their status back home—on the lower rungs of the social ladder in their new home. Swedish women often worked as seamstresses in sweatshops, while their men toiled away as underpaid laborers; the Polish cleaning lady is a staple of folklore. When a Chicago kid these days hears a clatter from the top of her house she thinks not of reindeer but of Mexican roofers. Even some skilled artisans had to settle for low-level jobs because they were unable to communicate with their American customers; the Vietnamese professional men who had to take up janitoring because they could not speak English well enough to practice law or engineering represent a resource sadly lost to the city.

 

Once arrived, kinsmen cleaved to each other, forming the nucleus of a parish or a neighborhood in their shared new home. And each group looked on later arrivals with fear lest they be dislodged from perilous toehold in the city. The recently arrived accused the just-arrived of working for unfair wages, of being unclean, of being politically corrupt. In Chicago, class conflict has always had an accent.

 

The difficulty all immigrants faced in adjusting to a bewildering city is a staple of the Chicago novel. Church and kin did what they could to ease the adjustment. What they could not was left largely to the settlement house (as it still is), such as the Northwestern University Settlement House at 1400 West Augusta Boulevard, which began serving Polish immigrants in Polonia on the Northwest Side in 1901. (Its name did not reflect its location but the sponsor, Northwestern University.) The clientele of Jane Addams’ famous Hull House consisted largely of immigrant families from (mostly) central, southern, and eastern Europe. It was unusual in its size and scope of its facilities, but also in being ecumenical in national terms.

 

The Wabash Avenue YMCA functioned as a settlement house, providing housing and job training for new arrivals from the African American South during the first eave of the "Great Migration," before World War I. The black newcomers had no established churches that might succor them, and to ordinary anti-immigrant bias was added racism. James Grossman, in his history of the Great Migration, credits the orts to assist and the Chicago Urban League—founded in 1916, of necessity funded (as were many settlement houses) by white philanthropists and social reformers—with providing most of the settlement-style services that reached the Southern migrants. By 1919, more than 20,000 original visits to the League were being made in a year.

 

Once established, most immigrant groups left to found their own settlement house or similar service agency; the Bohemian Settlement House that served the (mainly) Czechs of Pilsen in the late nineteenth century is only one of these. The Chicago Resettlers' Committee, later the Japanese American Service Committee, was set up in 1946 as a social service agency to assist in the resettlement of the 20,000 newly-arrived Japanese Americans who had been interned during World War II and then grew (as most do) into a general-purpose social service agency serving that community. Victims of ethnic cleansing efforts in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, many Bosnian refugees found help at the Bosnian Refugee Center set up by the Illinois Department of Human Services; that organization in 1997 became the independent nonprofit Bosnian & Herzegovinian American Community Center.

 

Asian Indians turn to the Indo-American Center on Devon Avenue; Koreans support the Korean American Community Services operation on North California Avenue. In Chinatown, the Chinese American Service League, founded in 1979, serves as both a cultural center for established Chinese Chicagoans and a social agency that offers newcomers service from day care to English lessons and job training.

 

Social dislocation is a function of cultural distance, not miles, and immigrants from North America have also found need of help in settling in Chicago. In 1954, members of the various Native American tribes with members in Chicago formed two support organizations: the All-Tribes American Indian Center and St. Augustine's Center for American Indians, to help them cope, functioning much as did the settlement houses of the turn of the 20th century in helping euro immigrants.  (both of which are still going strong today.) The Casa Aztlan Community Center on South Racine Avenue is the former Bohemian Settlement House property and since 1970 again serves immigrants, this time from Mexi­co.

 

Because of discrimination in rentals or because that’s where the costs are lowest or both, immigrants to both city and suburb tend to settle in what the social scientists call contiguous census tracts, and what everyone else calls the bad part of town. Until well into the 1900s that meant that most new foreign-born crowded along the downtown stretches of the Chicago River. Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians lived Goose Island, the Irish in Bridgeport and adjacent neighborhoods, the Bo­hemians along the South Branch, and the Near West Side were largely German and Irish and supplied work­ers to the iron and wood manufacturers.

 

The locations of these “ports of entry” shifted as the location of factories shifted—first to the far south side around Lake Calumet, later in new industrial suburbs. The south suburbs of Chicago Ridge, Hickory Hills, and Oak Lawn are the newest ports-of-entry for young Irish immigrants, many of whom are attracted by the prospect of construction jobs. By the time Russian Jews were allowed to emigrate from the old Soviet Union beginning in the 1980s—following a path to Chicago worn by the thousands of their compatriots who fled to Chicagoland 100 years earlier to escape Czarist pogroms—the port of entry for the Russian Jews was not Chicago’s West Side but Rogers Park, adjacent Skokie, and parts of Des Plaines, Palatine, Wheeling, and Buffalo Grove.

 

The larger suburban Latino concentrations in Chicagoland are often expansions of clusters established around World Wars I and II, when workers imported by local railroads and factories. Many of the jobs that originally beckoned are gone, but the descendants have become important source of low-wage labor for the suburban service economy. Mexican laborers constitute the new servant class in the suburbs, where they wait on in the stores, tend the babies, and mow the grass; the suburban lawns are to them what the steel mills were to their grandparents. Some estimates put as many as 24,000 Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, living in Lake County. The South or “real” Chinatown remains a port of entry for immigrants from Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan According to the Chinese American Service League (CASL), 70 percent of the Chinatown residents are new immigrants.

 

People seek housing where kin or fellow villagers have already established a beachhead, and can provide advice contacts and help. The result that immigrants in a given neighborhood or church often hail from the same place. Italians speak of the concept of quintadina in which newcomers followed the path—invisible to others—laid down by kinsmen or neighborhood from home and settled into their new home near neighbors familiar from the old one. The first major wave of Mexican migration to Chicago carried people from the Central Mexican states of Guanajuato, Michoacán, and Jalisco; the North Side German neighborhood was populated initially by immigrants from Bavaria and Württemberg, with East Elbians gathered along both sides of the North Branch of the Chicago River on the near Northwest Side.

 

James Grossman has recounted how in the 1920s African American transplants from at least nine Southern states gathered in clubs whose purpose was to steer newcomers to businesses or professionals with similar roots, thus easing the transition to a new life in the North while sustaining an identity as a Southerner. Other ethnic groups opted for slightly different mechanisms—churches, fraternal societies—but all served the same ultimate function.

 

Chicago thus has never been not quite the perfectly strange place to the immigrant that it might have been. Orthodox syn­agogues in the Lawndale in the 1940s bore the names of the communities in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, or Romania from which their founders had come. In 1900 most of the thousand or so Chinese living in Chicago hailed from the Sai-Ya dis­trict near Canton. Dominc Pacryga, who has charted many of these human tides, has noted that a great many of the Poles who came to the Back of the Yards were probably from the re­gion of Galicia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; more specifically, many of the stockyard Poles came from the High Tatra Mountains.

 

Remembering her youth in Italian Chicago, Anne Marie DiBuono writes: 

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Different regions of Italy settled in different sections of Chicago, and most of the people from my father and mother’s town settled in this section. It was called Accerra, and it is a province of Naples. They all settled in this section from Ryland to Loomis Street, from Harrison to Taylor Street. I think that it was the biggest or second biggest Italian section in the city. The Sicilians settled around Oak Street in the Cabrini area. The Tuscany and Venice regions settled around 24th and Oakley. The Neapolitans all settled around [Little Italy] where I am located.

 

Grossman notes how on the black South Side, businesses such as Robert Horton’s Hat­tiesburg Shaving Parlor, the Florida East Coast Shine Parlor or the Carolina Sea Island Candy Store advertised the origins of their proprietors to attract compatriots who had followed them to the big city. On one five-block stretch along Rhodes Avenue in the Black Belt were the Mississippi Coal and Wood Company and other small businesses owned by Mis­ssippians.

 

In the suburbs the dynamic was much the same. Dominic Candeloro’s study of the Italians of Chicago Heights reported that nearly half of Chicago Heights Italians came from just six towns in that country and four of five of those ap­plying for citizenship came from five regions in southern Italy. (Most were Marchegiana, from the San Benedetto area, with an admixture of Si­cilians, Abruzzese, and Lazioni.) Dozens of Puerto Ricans living in Elgin in the 1980s hailed from the village of Aguada on the island's west coast. Nearly 80 percent of all Mexican migrants to Chicagoland came from the states of Guerrero, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and Michoacán.

 

Immigrants share their new neighborhoods with other immigrants; the first “Chicagoans” they meet often are not. A famous survey of residents in the Hull House neighborhood in 1893 found eighteen nations represented in a third of a square mile. New residents of the “Hispanic” areas in near-southwest and near-northwest parts of the city may speak the same language but are strangers in terms of history and culture, comprising as they do peoples from a dozen nations.

 

Those kinds of neighborhoods—real mixing pots if not melting pots—still exist, although they now are found in different parts of the city. Today it is Albany Park on the far Northwest Side that has the largest percentage of foreign-born residents of any community in Chicago. The mainly Jewish population of the 1960s had by the 1980s been augmented by Greek, Korean and Romanian immigrants, who have been joined more recently by Hispanics and Asians; visitors are bemused to find that the local elementary school walls bear clocks set to the time in the students’ cities of origin in Bosnia, Israel, Indian, and Vietnam, and that community meetings require as many translators as a UN session.

 

Not everything about the immigrant experience of the 21st century is the same as that of the 19th, however, mainly because the immigrants are not the same. Many new immigrants hardly constitute a huddled mass. Nearly two-thirds of Chicagoland’s Asian Indian immigrants over the age of 25 have college degrees, according to one university study. Newcomers with educations have always bypassed the traditional “portal” neighborhoods in the industrial city; immi­grants from mercantile and professional families in northern Italy, for example, dispersed throughout the city since they began arriving in the of the 19th century. But immigrants of such backgrounds have never been so numerous as they are today.

 

In one sense, however, the new immigrants were honoring an historical precedent:  As immigrants have always done, they sought homes near where the jobs are. The difference is that the jobs these days are no longer, or rather no longer only in, the city. In 1990 only three suburban neighborhoods in Cook County were “ports of entry” for more than 1,000 immigrants; in 2000, 14 census tracts were. In the 1990s northwest Cook County and in central and southwestern Du Page County drew immigrants to employment centers such as Mt. Prospect and Arlington Heights, Schaumburg, Westmont, and Wheaton.

 

Denied a place in the society in which they found themselves, most immigrants clung the more determinedly to their old one. Memories of home were never far away for most of Chicago immigrants, who were seldom willing exiles. They recreated it as means allowed in their churches, their restaurants, their holidays. It is hardly a surprise that memories of repression stayed sharp too, considering how many immigrants suffered under repressive state or religious regimes. Striking packing workers in 1921 engaged in running battled with police at Davis Square, a small park located near 43rd Street and Ashland Avenue; as they heaved bottles and bricks at the police, the rioters, most of them Lithuanians and Slavs, called them “Cossacks,” likening them to their hated oppressors from home.

 

The Poles were especially insistent on preserving and perpetuating the language, customs and religion of homeland. The Polish migration to Chicago could be said to have begun in the late 1700s when Poland was partitioned out of existence as a nation-state by her more powerful neighbors. The Poles rose in revolt four times against Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary over the next 70 years, but the failed uprisings left Poland a nation without a state. Polish immigrants in Chicago devoted much energy to realizing the dream of a free Poland, and to exacting revenge on those blamed for the failed revolutions. These preoccupations animated Polish politics in Chicago for decades, to the puzzlement of outsiders ignorant of or indifferent to their history.

 

The city’s Poles were an extreme instance of what has been called “long-distance nationalism” but they were hardly the only group who felt the perturbations in the faraway homeland as an amputee might feel a tingling in a long-vanished limb. In a metropolitan area in which so many people have foreign roots, every “foreign war” becomes as local an issue as schools or parks. Conspicuous among these romantics are the Irish of Chicago, who long demonstrated a kind of hypernationalism. St. Patrick’s Day, the celebration of which become identified with Chicago—“oh yeah, the city where they dye the river green”—may be all about beer and leprechauns to the non-Irish, but the day was first celebrated by Irish paramilitarists known as the Montgomery Guards, in the 1840s. And many a dollar that supported Irish independence came from Chicago for the next more than a century.

 

In the same way that old-country history soured relations with co-believers suddenly thrown together in Chicago, so city politics was shaped by issues that often bore only distant relation to Chicago. The Germans for example were not economic but political refugees whose sensitivity to injustice or servitude made them eager backers of the antislavery republic party of Lincoln. Later, they backed Democrat John Peter Altgeld, not only because he was a countryman, but because he was a stalwart defender of immigrants. A generation later, the Chicago Germans voted for a mayor who could not have differed more from Altgeld—Big Bill Thompson, who endeared himself to German American voters by his vigorous detestation of Britain, Germany’s foe in the Great War then underway. Meanwhile, Jewish émigrés in Chicago organized relief committees to aid war victims in the towns in Russia, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Galicia from which they had come.

 

German agitation on behalf of the fatherland stirred reaction among nativist and pro-British Chicagoans that led to a crackdown, the sort of wholesale violation of American traditions of political liberties that politicians often indulge in when they are feeling especially patriotic. It was a fascinating episode that some historians regard as among the turning point in the city’s history, insofar as it changed Chicago from being a very German city into, well, some other kind of city by forcing what was in many ways its most intelligent, accomplished minority into a social and political quiescence.

 

Sometimes foreign wars come back to haunt Chicago. During 1977 and 1978, a small group of neo-Nazis from Chicago announced plans to rally in Skokie. Perhaps one half of Skokie’s then-population of 66,000 was Jewish, many of them survivors or relatives of survivors of the Nazi-led holocaust. village officials, responding to what many in and outside the town saw a deliberate provocation, tried to stop the march by passing ordinances banning lit distribution of “hate materials,” parading in military kit or without an insurance bond. The ordinances were challenged in state and federal courts and overturned, and the neo-Nazis were eventually issued a permit to demonstrate in Skokie. by then a massive counter-demonstration had been organized; cowed, the splinter group opted instead to hold rallies in downtown Chicago and in Marquette Park in south Chicago. inconsequential as political persuasion, the Nazi march touched off a national debate about the limits of civil discourse that generated some light in spite of the heat with which the issues were debated.

 

No place is so far away from Chicago that the city’s recent immigrants do not involve themselves in remedying the conditions that caused them to leave. Many of the Punjabi supporters of an independent Kahlistan live in Chicago. Chicago’s Croatian community did not skimp on the funds, arms and men they sent to support their compatriots’ cause in Eu­rope; Chicago’s Serbs also sent volunteers to fight in what was then still Yugoslavia. Palestinians from the Chicago area have been arrested in Israel for helping fund the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist outfit Hamas, and have demonstrated in Chicago in support of the Palestinian intifada uprising against Israel.

 

Immigration, which branded one an outsider to the natives, carried a cachet in many an ethnic community. Veteran newspaper editor Bernie Judge grew up in Our Lady of Peace Parish in South Chicago.

 

The marvelous thing about the neighborhood was that it was the complete reverse of a class system. My father was born in Ireland—the old country — so I had more status. It was a point of pride to have immigrant parents, because that really tied you to Ireland and its ways. It meant you really knew more about your history and were more inside the real Irish culture.

 

Usually, Chicago immigrants influence affairs in their homelands only indirectly, but not always. Chicagoan Valdas Adamkus had emigrated to the U.S. in 1949 to escape the Soviet occupation of his native Lithuania and made a career as a top administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; in 1998 he was elected president of his homeland. Mexican nationals living in Chicago have run for at-large seats in that nation’s federal congress. Mexicans in Chicago also vote with their money; hometown associations based on the social networks of people hailing from the same places raise money for public works and other projects back home.

 

Those back in the home nation have been solicitous toward the people many regard as exiles in America. Construction in 1903 of the Louis Sullivan-designed Russian Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral and Rectory on North Leavitt was partially paid for by Russian Czar Nicholas II. The governor of the Mexican state of Zacatecas raised about half the funds needed to purchase and renovate a cultural center in Chicago for Zacatecans here. The Puerto Rican government helped Chicagoans with ties to that island buy a building near Paseo Boricua on the Northwest Side that houses the Institute of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture.

 

The one thing that immigrants of all backgrounds have in common is the experience of gradually ceasing to be an immigrant. But Americanization happened in Chicago at different rates for different groups. Many immigrants resisted assimilation both as a concept and as a process. Chicago’s Poles for example sought to become Polish and American rather than Polish American; the children of Greek immigrants, for example, through after-school programs and church schools, often ended up speaking more fluent in Greek than did their parents. The Poles were not alone in fostering separate institutions, even physical isolation within enclaves; so, to varying degrees, have Jews, Ukrainians, and Mexicans. Jon Hahn, a reporter at the Chicago Daily News, grew up in Chicago’s Northwest Side in the 1940s “in a red brick two-flat with our grandparents, great-aunt and uncle and great-grandparents. Downstairs we spoke Chicago; upstairs they spoke German.”

 

Ethnic identity tended to be protected less aggressively among immigrant Italians, Irish, Germans, and Japanese, with the result that members of those groups became for the most part classic hyphenated Americans. Some cultures went beyond assimilation to something annihilation and vanished almost without a trace, as was the case with the French-Indian métis and the biracial Ben Ishmael tribe.

 

If becoming an American was a debatable question among Chicago immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries, being in America was not. Whatever their commitment to the culture of their new home, permanent residence as forced on most immigrants by the cost and distance of a return. But going home is much easier to do these days. Transportation is better, and in real terms cheaper. Travel to and from the homeland is especially easy for immigrants from this hemisphere. Mexicans maintain intimate ties with home states through travel and telephone, and vice versa that their European predecessors could only dream of. These days Hispanic immigrants, especially Mexicans, make was once a once-in-a- lifetime journey to America once a year. They practice "shuttle migration," in which farmers come north to work during the summer, then going home to plant a crop during the Chicago winter. Others make temporary moves north when jobs were available; faced with layoffs, the new immigrants simply go home rather than suffer workless in Chicago.

 

Because ties to home are never quite severed, today’s immigrants see themselves less as, say, Palestinian American or Armenian American as Palestinians or Armenians in America. The result is what some academics have dubbed transnational communities, the sociological equivalent of the “Spanglish” that is spoken along the southern U.S. border.

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” They did not understand....”

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A town that is a center of immigrants is doomed to be a center of anti-immigrant prejudice too. The middle class and rich were dependent on immigrants, whose labor they exploited; at the same time they were fearful of their numbers, and of the alien ideas they brought with them packed in their trunks. Immigrants have been blamed variously for cholera, for crime, for political unrest, for unemployment, for unsettled workers.

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Fear led to a system of barriers, social stigma, and discrimination intended to keep immigrants in their place—a place, of course, assigned them by the ruling elites. By keeping the supply of willing labor high, for instance, immigration helped keep wages low, which is why the Knights of Labor had backed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which closed U.S. borders to immigrants from the country.

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Mrs. O’Leary—Roman Catholic, immigrant, poor, Irish and female—was a perfect patsy for the Great Fire of 1871. The authors of probably the best all-around portrait of Richard J. Daley, American Pharaoh, recall how the future mayor learned at his mothers knee the Irish tales of woes at the hands of the English, the landlords, the Protestants, and, of late, Chicago’s WASP establishment. They recall a scene when Daley, at that time one of most power politicians in America, spoke to an Irish American dinner at Chicago's venerable Conrad Hilton Hotel. "I can't help thinking of your mothers and fathers and grandparents who would never have been allowed in this hotel," Daley declared. The lace-curtain Irish crowd laughed, but Daley did not. Instead, he offered a prayer “for those departed souls who could never get into the Conrad Hilton."

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“Labor” and “immigrant” had come to mean the same thing in Chicago beginning roughly in 1870. The fact that immigrants were exploited is not accident of their history; they were imported precisely because they could be exploited. A worker rebellion against wage slavery was inevitable. The one thing that was different from the homeland was political freedom. Labor unions or workers political parties were tools to fight the owners that workers could only dream of at home. If the bourgeois saw the labor left as threats to American freedom, the workers saw them as the ultimate expression, and guarantor of it.

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Among the cargoes that came to Chicago on the boats and trains from Europe was political ideas. Most of the “agitators,” from trade unionists to socialists to bolshevists to anarchists, were immigrants. Marco D’Eramo reminds us that the word “Italian,” which today evokes mainly images of the gangster Al Capone, in the 1920s brought to mind Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the immigrant anarchists who were condemned to death in 1921 after a sensational trial, and executed in 1927. 

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Socialism, communism, and anarchism were all movements with a strong German accent in 19th century Chicago. Many unions ere made up of Germans who dominated many skilled trades; many already had experience of worker politics in Europe, and had emigrated to the U.S. after the government there clamped down on socialist activism. Many Germans came from radical political backgrounds, and thus had a sophisticated vocabulary with which they defined issues like unemployment in terms of class; they were among the leaders on the pulpit and in the streets, and made up a big part of the militants.

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“Foreign” and “left” melded in a fearful public mind; foreign-born people and foreign-born ideas became one enemy. At least one Chicago newspaper blamed the violence at the Haymarket in 1886 on “Polish rioters,” and suggested that authorities here might borrow a page from the czar’s manual of repression, since the Poles were unfit to enjoy liberty. Examples of such rants from the 1880s through World War I could fill volumes; they were as common in the newspapers of the day as, say ritual denunciations of communism were in the Tribune in the 1950s.

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In the 1880s, Marshall Field hired only American farm girls to be sales clerks because they didn’t speak with “foreign” accents. Settlement houses and churches that catered to immigrants—Hull House, the Catholic Youth Organization, Chicago Hebrew Institute, and the Japanese American Sports League, among others—had to set up sports programs because ethnic youths were so often barred from varsity sports at public schools. In the 1920s, nativists decried the presence of Mexicans—“slave types” is one of the kinder terms used to describe them. Such resentment has led to periodic U.S. government expulsion campaigns, which were only slightly dignified by such terms as repatriation and deportation. It happened in the 1930s—when the Mexican population in Chicagoland was nearly halved, to 16,000—and again in the 1950s.

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As noted, class friction was an ingredient in anti-immigrant feeling. So too was racism—the immigrants who have been most opposed have been without exception the darkest of skin—and anti-Catholicism. An aging Edgar Lee Masters gave vent to the prejudices of his Downstate youth in The Sangamon:

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The Illinois and Michigan Canal work brought hordes of Irish Illinois. It took time to assimilate these foreign stocks with their race-hatred and religious bigotries. They did not understand the faiths of New Salem, they did not understand the institutions of the country. They spoke their own language, celebrated the feast days of their own saints, and took America as a place where liberty meant the right to do as they pleased.

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That complaint can be heard today, with few details changed, although one might have to listen a little harder than in Masters’ day. Accommodation in suburban Chicago has been complicated by the usual cultural misunderstandings. There are the usual flashpoints in parks over noise and parties, zoning for mosques and temples, language and dress.

 

As happened in the city, much of the anti-immigrant agitation comes from people whose not-very-distant ancestors were immigrants. Elgin in the late 1800s and early 1900s was more than 25 percent foreign-born. That heritage was largely forgotten within two generations; thanks to 50 years of assimilation. In the 1980s, Elgin saw another wave of immigrations—mainly Mexicans and other Hispanics and Laotians—that has again made it substantially foreign-born, with all the social and political stresses that attend accommodation.

 

The southwest suburbs burgeoned in the 1960s and ‘70s when whites fleeing the arrival in their old neighborhoods of African Americans sought new havens. Of late, the area has put up resistance (less virulent, it must be said) to new generation of dark-skinned newcomers, from Hispanics to Arab Americans. Arab Americans, mainly Palestinians, migrated to the south suburbs in such numbers in the 1980s and 1990s that the area accounts for almost a third of metropolitan Chicago's approximately 150,000-strong Arab community, which is the nation's third largest.) The attacks in New York City on the World Trade Center brought a latent prejudice into the open; a noisy march on a mosque in Bridgeview had to be stopped by local police, and an Arab American community center was the target of a Molotov cocktail that damaged only the area’s reputation for tolerance.

 

Inevitably, anti-immigrant prejudice in every era found political expression (as did resistance to it; see Politics for more.) Immigrants competed with early poor arrivals for jobs and housing of course, and stirred resentments that politicians were happy to indulge. In the 1830s, allowing unnaturalized Irish canal workers to vote was rejected for fear the Irish a would muster a majority in local races. Later, prohibition and “law and order” platforms often had a strong anti-immigrant aspect.

 

In the 1850s, the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party elected a mayor, Levi Boone, who in 1855 undertook a selective enforcement of the city’s Sunday closing law and stiffened licensing requirements, both measures aimed mainly at Irish and Germans. Germans saloon keepers resisted, the police arrested, and tension exploded in the famous Lager Riots, sometimes called Chicago’s first civil disturbance, when an armed group of North Side Germans marched on City Hall to rescue imprisoned compatriots resulted in militia being called into the streets. The casualties of that incidents were, officially, one dead and approximately sixty rioters arrested; unofficially, the hopes of the Know Nothings also were hurt. Rather than squelch the immigrants, their outrage mobilized them politically, and thereafter immigrant voters would be precisely the force in city politics that the Know Nothings feared they might be.

 

Of course, there were tensions not only between groups but within them. To the Americans, an Irishman was an Irishman. To the Chicago Irish, one was a Ulster man or a Cork man. Fights among Irish recently arrived from rival counties in an early Irish settlement along the Chicago River near Erie Street were so in earnest that Chicago Police disdained to enter the area.

 

Relations between the major factions of the Jewish community—Germans Jews and Eastern European Jews—were expressed less violently than among the Irish, but were just as keenly felt. By the 1880s the city’s German Jews had become middle-class and largely Americanized. The arrival, beginning in that decade, of Eastern European Jews unsettled not only relations between Jew and non-Jew in Chicago, but between Jew and Jew. Both immigrant groups shared a religion—a fact that was enough to make them brothers in the eyes to many non-Jews—but the manners, the speech, the politics, the poverty, the primitive religious practices of the newcomers who piled into the West Side ghetto were alien to the settled, genteel Jews in affluent enclaves such as Hyde Park.

 

The Ashkenazic newcomers have been described by Irving as “Yiddish-speaking, synagogue-building, religiously conservative, and sometimes politi­cally radical.” But these “Orientals” —from Lithuania, Poland, the Ukraine, Bessarabia, Gali­cia, Latvia—were also Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Bessarabians, Gali­cians, Latvians, and thus were divided by all differences that makes each of those nationalities distinct from—and antagonistic to—the others. Ideas were at issue too; among the Jews who moved to West Town in the late 1800s were socialists, secularists, and Zionists as well as Orthodox Jews. The solution, concluded many German Jews, was to turn the newcomers as quickly as possible into Americanized Jews like themselves—a project to which the German Jews devoted much money and apparently not a little bit of condescension.

 

The term Ostjuden would have to have been explained to them, but everything else about that tension would have been familiar to the “Old Settlers” of Chicago’s black belt. The Old Settlers were either from the Upper South or had been born in the North, while the migrants were coming from a part of the South that not only was rural but was deeply poor. Their arrival threatened the image of middle-class respectability that the Old Settlers had worked hard to build. (This and kindred tensions had a parallel in the Yankee-Southerner tension in so many Downstate counties.)

 

The city’s established blacks, many of whose families had been in Chicago for decades, had acquired a sophistication that was for the moment beyond most of the rather ragged newcomers. Timuel Black recalled that the influx of mostly rural Southerners into the Black Belt altered the cultural mix there by creating a market for new kinds of musical entertainment. The Regal Theater went from a showcase of advanced jazz to one offering more down-home fare such as rhythm-and-blues.

 

Socially conservative, jealous of their small victories over white prejudice, earned by scrupulous code of conduct that demanded that they be whiter than the whites. They found the sharecroppers from the Delta dirty and uncouth, an embarrassment to the race. Through such mouthpieces as the Urban League and the Defender, they issued rules of behavior for the newcomers that would prevent their becoming an embarrassment to the race.

 

The Defender never wavered in its conviction that it knew what was good for “the race.” In 1917 the paper published a famous exhortation titled "Things That Should Be Considered," that offered improving dos and don’ts for the benefit of migrants from the South, including these:

 

Don’t use vile language in public places.

Don’t act discourteously to other people in public places.

Don’t allow yourself to be drawn into street brawls.

Don’t use liberty as a license to do as you please.

Don’t take the part of law breakers, be they men, women, or children.

Don’t make yourself a public nuisance.

Don’t encourage gamblers, disreputable women or men to ply their business  anytime or place.

Don’t congregate in crowds on the streets to the disadvantage of others passing along.

Don’t live in unsanitary houses, or sleep in rooms without proper ventilation.

Don’t violate city ordinances, relative to health conditions.

Don’t allow children to beg on the streets.

Don’t allow boys to steal from or assault peddlers.

Don’t be a beer can rusher or permit children to do such service.

Don’t abuse or violate the confidence of those who give you employment.

Don’t leave your job when you have a few dollars in your pocket...

 

Of course, any immigrant group brings its history with it. They import, with their family Bibles and heirlooms ancient animosities that color their reactions to events in new land. The arrogance of the Poles toward their Eastern European neighbors in Chicago owed in part to history; in old Poland, a Polish minority ruled over a vast non-Polish majority made up of Lithuanians, Latvians, Germans, Ruthenians, Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Gypsies, as well as one of the world's largest Jewish settlements. Thus, observed Marco D’Eramo, “when a Pole got into an argument with an Italian on a Chicago street, if you wished to unravel the chain of causes leading to the event, you would soon be­come enmeshed in a morass of political vicissitudes, from the decrees of a German chancellor to the desperate act of a Russian nihilist.”

 

The Chinese had their version of this conflict, in their case between the descendants of the Chinese coolies who had founded the Chicago colony and the political refugees from Maoism who joined them in Chinatown in the 1950s. So do Asian Indians; as noted by Vinay Lal, the UCLA historian, in the Encyclopedia of Chicago, “The ethnic, linguistic, and cultural divisions that prevail in India have been carried over with organizations such as the Bengali Association, the Bihar Cultural Association, the Tamilnadu Foundation, the Telugu Association, the Punjabi Cultural Society, the Maharashtra Mandal, and at least three Gujarati associations.” Bosnians who came to the city often chose to associate with peoples of other nationalities (albeit with a shared ethnicity) than associate with other Bosnians of different faiths; Bosnian Christians in Chicago identified with coreligionists from Croatia and Serbia, while Bosnian Muslims identified themselves exclusively as Bosnians.

 

Nothing separated immigrant communities like politics. Not American politics, toward which many ethnics took a utilitarian, what’s-in-it-for-us attitude, but the politics of the homeland. The local factions in the fight for Irish independence led to killings in Chicago streets as long ago as the 1880s. (As time went on, supporters of the IRA’s campaigns against British rule in Ulster confined themselves to raising the money so that others could do the killing back home.) Chicago Poles were split into those who envisioned a future in which Poles would return to a free Poland, and those who accepted that the future of Chicago Poles was in the U.S.; rather than free Poland from the Soviets, the job was to protect Polish language, customs, and churches against the Americans. The dispute generated rival organizations, political movements, scandals, even street fights.

 

Destined To Remain Forever Foreign

 

Absorbing people from other cultures is generally judged to be a boon to the city. Classical musical culture would scarcely exist in Chicago without the Germans, for example, just as science and the arts would be poor indeed without the contributions of the Jews, to take just two of many examples. But immigrant populations in the 19th and early 20th centuries were factors in several of the unlovelier aspects of Chicago life. The fifty years of immigration from eastern and southern Europe between roughly 1870 and 1920 left the region in a state of almost constant social tension, even tumult. As voters they were loyal constituents of a succession of political machines. (See elsewhere this section.) It was a factor too in the balkanization of its residential districts—it could be called the “city of enclaves” rather than the city of neighborhoods—and of its Catholic churches.

 

Immigrant labor was a factor in Chicago’s rise as the first great industrial city. Employers preferred to hire ethnics—they worked harder at jobs that natives wouldn’t touch, and were moderate in their wage demands, being fearful of losing their jobs. The sheer diversity of the workforce also made it harder for workers to organize themselves to protect themselves against the predations of the bosses; they couldn’t easily communicate with each other, for example, which was an impediment to strike talk. (Unions later succeeded in no small part because the earlier immigrants had learned English and the newest—African Americans—already spoke it.) As D’Eramo notes, business leaders—political and social conservatives—urged “open door” policies not from any love of social diversity but because the constant inflow of immigrants made it easier for the bosses to frustrate agitation for improvements in wages and working conditions.

 

Since 1945, Chicago become one of the most ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse cities in the world. Its earlier migrations have long since been absorbed, its members having become, if not Americanized foreigners, at least hyphen-ized Americans. But of the 2000 Chicagoland population of roughly eight and a quarter million, foreign-born people numbered nearly one and a half million, or 17.2 percent of the total. That is not nearly as dramatically high as it was a century ago, but it remains higher than Illinois as whole, where a bit more than 12 percent of the population that year was foreign-born. Chicago and its hinterland continues to offer the visitor the spectacle of strange tongues and unfamiliar faces.

 

If immigration by 2005 had ceased to be a phenomenon, or even much of a social problem—it is more a fact of the city’s life, like the weather—it continues to shape Chicagoland’s future. Jeff Libman, who compiled 20 oral histories of recent immigrants for the book, An Immigrant Class, noted that the more than 110 languages spoken by students from 144 countries at Truman College were proof of what he calls “the cultural smorgasbord” that is the U.S. in the 2000s. Chicago seems destined to remain forever foreign.

 

Memorialization

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To say that immigrants left their marks on Chicago is a truism. Just as the Native Americans left behind trail-marker trees or mounds that hint at Chicagoland’s richer ethnic past, so did the region’s European peoples leave physical reminders of their occupation. The buildings, landscapes, and institutions shaped by immigrant hands are beyond counting. One can point to the Danes who designed Lincoln Park, Swain Nelson and Olaf Benson, and Jens Jensen. Musical life would have been moribund without Germans like Theodore Thomas, its architectural life likewise without Dankmar Adler or Mies or Helmut Jahn. The contributions of Italian and Swedish craftsmen to local architecture are massive.

 

In some ways the most eloquent of the memorials to Chicago’s immigrants are the churches they built. Most immigrants began to build churches almost as soon as they landed in Chicago, as Eskimo might hurry to build an igloo with a blizzard approaching. What is by some measures the oldest church building in Chicagoland owes to this impulse: St. James on the Sag Catholic Church, at 107th and Archer, was built by Irish immigrants in 1833 from local limestone dug out to make the Illinois & Michi­gan Canal. The Irish were the first but far from the last to rebuild a part of home in Chicago in brick and plaster. Bohemians of Pilsen established St. Procopius parish in 1875, and within eight years build the large church—in the Romanesque style that was by then passé in that part of Europe—that still stands at 18th and Allport.

 

These churches were built to serve immigrants, were paid for by their donations, and often were built at least in part by their hands. They were usually designed and decorated in the style of the old country. As a result, in many a Chicago neighborhood of the West, Near South, and Northwest sides, taking trip to old Krakow or Kiev required that one merely step from the sidewalk into a church such as St Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral 2238 W. Rice Street on the Northwest Side. Norwegians still gather in the Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church in Logan Square to hear services in their native tongue and perhaps to reflect on when that neighborhood was heavily Scandinavian. The Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral and Rectory 1121 N. Leavitt Street was designed by Louis Sullivan, but he borrowed from the design of the Russian provincial churches that were familiar to his clients; the Greek Orthodox Annunciation Cathedral at 1017 N. LaSalle Street was built by the first Greek Orthodox congregation in Chicago to resemble the Cathedral Church in Athens.

 

The Poles of Chicago sought not merely to recall the old country but to recreate it. The sanctuary wall of St. Adalbert Roman Catholic Church at 1656 W. 17th Street is painted with scenes from Polish history and its windows celebrate Polish saints. The Irish St. Stanislaus Kostka is Old St. Patrick's, built on the near West Side at Adams and Desplaines streets in 1856. The 15 church windows from the 1920s are a lesson in Celtic Revival Art, based on the Book of Kells. (The windows were restored in 1996.)

 

It is not only churches that immigrants built to recall the homeland. Thalia Hall was built by the Bohemians of Pilsen in 1892 as a meeting hall and theater. (Thalia was the Greek muse of comedy and pastoral poetry.) Its theater recalled the Old Opera House in Prague. The Bohemians are long gone, but the hall now serves a new generation of immigrants—students and faculty attracted to the burgeoning university neighborhood round the University of Illinois at Chicago.

 

The West Side districts as Garfield Park and Douglas Park, is littered with monuments to the industry of the old Jewish community there. Built mostly in the 1920s  by first and second generation immigrants, mainly from Russian and eastern Europe, they include the Hebrew Theological College at 3450-3458 W. Douglas Blvd., the Jewish People’s Institute across the street at 3500 W. Douglas Blvd. (where Leo Rosten taught  English to immigrants in the classes that inspired his humor classic The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N), Congregation Anshe Roumonia at 3622 W. Douglas Blvd., Anshe Kenesseth Israel at 3411 W. Douglas Blvd., and the Anshe Sholom Synagogue at 3803 W. Polk Street.

 

A few of the settlement houses survived. The Arts & Crafts-style Northwestern University Settlement House at 1400 W. Augusta Boulevard is an official Chicago landmark. Hull House the institution changed as the world changed. So did the original building complex that housed it—barely. Hull House was a place of national significance, and when it was threatened with demolition, a protest was planned by such national luminaries of the left as Eleanor Roosevelt and Mrs. Sidney Hillman, widow of the leader of the powerful Amalgamated Clothing Work­ers of America. Of the 13 buildings that once filled its two-block campus, only the relocated 1905 Dining Hall survived the clearing of the area in 1967 by the University of Illinois at Chicago. The university did agree to reconstruct the original mansion at 800 S. Halsted as a monument and museum.

 

Just as Chicago’s immigrants passed from one neighborhood to another, so have many immigrant landmarks been passed from one immigrant group to another. On the West Side for instance buildings once central to the civic and religious life of that area’s Jews today serve the same role in the lives of the African Americans who replaced them. The Hebrew Theological College was for a time the Lawndale Community Academy, today’s Independence Boulevard Seventh-Day Adventist Church began life as the Anshe Sholom Synagogue, Shepherd’s Temple Missionary Baptist Church was the home of Anshe Kenesseth Israel, and the current Lawndale Community Academy was once the Jewish People’s Institute. Such conversions make for a tortured sociology; the façade of today’s Stone Temple Baptist Church includes a Star of David and depictions in stone of a menorah and the Torah.

 

Chicagoland’s Germans left mementoes of their occupation behind in the form of several windmills they built in Du Page County in the mid-1800s. The Old Holland Mill, built by Louis Backhaus in the 1850s York Center (later Elmhurst), worked for about half a century but by 1914 was falling into disrepair. Businessman “Colo­nel” George Fabyan had the 68-foot Old Holland Mill taken down, transported to his estate on the Fox River at St. Charles, there to produce his own flour during the Great War. The Graue Mill in the settlement of Brush Hill (now Oak Brook) dates from 1852; it survives as the only operating waterwheel gristmill in Illinois.

 

Structures are not the only reminders of what the region owes to its immigrants. Immigrants of every nation brought with them new ideas about God, politics, and food. (As a Cicero booster recently proclaimed to readers on the Web, the presence of immigrants in that town has done wonders for the local restaurant fare.)

 

Immigrants left enduring marks on the land of northeast Illinois. From the air, one can see occasional interruptions of the rigidly rectangular patterns of farm fields, laid out under the township and section land surveying system imposed by the Federal government. Among the earliest groups to settle Kane County for example were the Irish, who sought out the wooded areas in Rutland Township, in the north of the county; their farms consisted of small irregular fields, laid out in pre-grid days according to systems familiar from home. Scots and Welsh also settled in the area, and they laid out their fields in so-called long-lot patterns. Historian David Buisserett found that the old Scots fields in Elgin and Plato townships, and those worked by the Welsh in Big Rock Township along the Big Rock River were still visible from the air in the 1980s.

 

Statues of ethnic heroes abound in Chicago, but monuments to the unheralded heroes who trekked to America are rare. One exception is the bronze group known as "Pioneer Family Memorial" (also “Pioneer Memorial Monument” and "Pioneer Family") at Kimball Street Bridge over the Fox River in Elgin is a tribute to the pioneers settling the Fox River Valley; as sculpted by Elgin native Trygve Rovelstad, the work depicts a family and their scout. At King Drive and 26th Place in Bronzeville stands “Fly Away,” a monument to the Great Migration by Alison Saar. It depicts a man standing atop a mound of worn-out shoe soles, dressed in a suit made of shoe soles. The shoes, the artist has said, are symbolic, of the often difficult journey from the South—a point that would have more force if almost everyone who came to Chicago from the Delta had not ridden aboard the trains of the Illinois Central.

 

At the Art Institute, a painting touches on the experience of the African American immigrant. Walter Ellison in 1936 painted Train Station, depicts scenes at a central rail terminal—possibly Macon, Georgia—in which white travelers are shown heading south for vacation and blacks heading north, as Ellison himself did, when he came from Georgia to Chicago.

 

For all its importance to the history of the region, there is not a museum of immigration in Chicagoland. Most of the dozens of ethnic museums in the region are museums of national culture and so do not concentrate on the specific experience of the Chicago immigrant.

 

An exception is the Swedish American Museum Center in Andersonville, which  has the distinction of having been officially blessed by a sitting monarch—Sweden’s King Carl XIV Gustaf. It offers a permanent exhibit titled, “The Dream of America—The Swedes Who Built Chicago.” The SAMC’s new Children's Museum of Immigration also provides youngsters the chance “to experience the immigration phenomenon firsthand.” Alas, while the children can see a Swedish farmhouse, or stuga, and a Viking ship, the artifacts of that people’s journey to America, in the form of, say, steerage deck on an immigrant steamer or log house of the sort that once stood across metro, is missing.

 

More typical is the Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center houses the archival collection of Greek Immigrant Experience, a series of full-scale recreated scenes revealing the life and history of Greeks in America—not Greeks in Chicago—since the turn of the 20th century. That said, these museums can be considered artifacts of their founders’ common immigrant experience insofar as the impulse to build them had its roots in the rise of ethnic, national, and religious self-consciousness that so often was a result of the builders’ submersion in an alien culture. ●

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