Book Review October 1981

BOOK REVIEW By RICHARD J. SHEREIKIS (with excerpts)

When Chicago was young

Jones, Peter d'A. and Holli, Melvin G., eds.
Ethnic Chicago. Grand Rapids, Michigan:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981. 380 pp. $12.95

AN APOCRYPHAL anecdote tells of a immigrant to the city who moves into a neighborhood and somehow manages to assemble the money to rent a store front and open a little restaurant. He works hard, learns the language and prospers as word spreads through his neighborhood.

Soon he needs to enlarge and remodel, and needs money to do so. He journeys downtown — an alien country to him — to a recommended bank, and waits nervously to speak to someone about a loan. Finally an official motions him over, and the restauranteur begins to tell of his business and his need. The banker gapes at him, astonished at the unintelligible and exotic dialect the man is speaking. The banker can't understand a word, but it sounds like somethings he's heard an echo of before. It takes an hour and a half for the staff of the bank to figure out the problem, but finally a blonde-haired teller named Johnson comes to the rescue: the restaurant man has learned to speak Swedish, the language of the neighborhood he settled in.

That could never happen again, of course, what with radio and television blaring standard English at you day and night, and the gradual disappearance of neighborhoods where languages other than English are the lingua franca. But that Chinese businessman was experiencing simultaneously the effects of both assimilation and cultural pluralism, the divergent routes traveled by all ethnic groups that have come to Chicago. And those two routes comprise the major organizing principle for a new book on ethnics assembled and edited by two history professors at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.

In Ethnic Chicago, Peter d'A. Jones and Melvin G. Holli have produced a worthy sequel to their earlier work, The Ethnic Frontier (1977), which contained essays on disparate ethnic groups with some emphasis on their historical roots. This new book, tighter and more coherent as a volume, is composed of eight essays organized under the two major headings of "Cultural Pluralism" and "The Melting Pot." The first group contains essays on the Irish from 1870-1900, on Jews in Chicago and their migration through various neighborhoods and to the suburbs, on how Greeks have used both formal and informal education to maintain their ethnic identity, on Ukrainian nationalism in the city, and on the growth and development of a close-knit Italian community in Chicago Heights.

As the heading suggests, these are accounts of ethnic groups which, more or less, managed to maintain their separateness despite the inevitable dilutions of national identity which result from living in an amorphous country like ours.

In most cases, especially among the Irish in the latter part of the 19th century and, more recently, among the Jews and Greeks, it was the religious and nationalistic prejudice of the host culture that served, paradoxically, to weld the minorities into coherent community forces. As Michael Funchion writes about the effects of anti-Irish sentiment in Chicago: ". . . it constantly forced them (the Irish) to defend their own traditions, as well as their loyalty to the United States, and, in the process reinforce their ethnic identity."

Funchion's essay, like the others in this section, is rich in lore and detail about the various civic, religious and social organizations that gave support to groups which sought to keep alive their native traditions. And Irving Cutler's essay, "The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb," is outstanding for its vivid description of the Jewish dispersion from the Maxwell Street area to various parts of the South Side, to Greater Lawndale on the West Side, on to the North Side and more recently to suburbs like Lincolnwood and Skokie.

The "Melting Pot" section of the book is shorter, yet equally disparate, touching on the Irish again (from a political perspective), on the downfall of German Kultur during World War I, and on the remarkable story of Chicago's Japanese-Americans, most of whom came to the city in the aftermath of their internment in the notorious camps during World War II.

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ETHNIC CHICAGO

Irish Chicago
Chapter I by Michael F. Funchion
Excerpted with permission of the publisher, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

As an infant city, where all groups — native and foreign — were relative newcomers facing the common problems of a semifrontier environment, Chicago did not experience the more rampant anti-Catholic nativism that plagued several eastern cities during the two or three decades before the Civil War. Nonetheless, anti-Irish and, to a lesser extent, anti-German sentiment did exist. Some Americans resented the Irish for their political power, for their support of liberal drinking laws, for their sometimes squalid living conditions, and most of all for their Catholicism, which they felt posed a threat to the very fabric of American life. They often viewed Irish attempts to get public monies for their schools or to ban the King James Bible in the common schools as part of a concerted Roman attack on free American institutions. Only once during the decades before the Civil War, however, did nativism score a major triumph in Chicago. This occurred in 1855, when, after capturing the city council and the mayor's office, the nativist and xenophobic Know-Nothing party passed legislation requiring all applicants for municipal jobs to be native-born Americans. They also increased the cost of beer licenses, which led to the Lager Beer Riots, in which the Germans and Irish teamed up together to battle the nativist authorities. But the Know-Nothing victory, caused as much by a disruption in the two-party system over the slavery issue as by anti-Catholicism, proved to be shortlived. The following year the Know-Nothings were defeated, and their legislation was promptly repealed.

Although the xenophobic occurrences of 1855 were never repeated again, anti-Catholicism continued to survive in Chicago. In the years after the Civil War, certain Protestant ministers repeatedly warned their congregations that the "demon of Romanism" was prowling about, seeking to undermine the democratic institutions of America. Several Protestant newspaper editors and political reformers attacked the Irish for polluting municipal politics. Although most were sincere reformers and not really bigots in the true sense of the word, they often seemed to be more concerned about the number of Irish politicians than about the actual corruption they were responsible for.

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ETHNIC CHICAGO

The Jews of Chicago
Chapter II by Irving Cutler
Excerpted with permission of the publisher, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

The main commercial street bisecting Greater Lawndale was Roosevelt Road, to which Jews would come from all over the city to shop. In the mile stretch from about Kedzie Avenue to Crawford (Pulaski) Avenue were a half-dozen movie houses (where such performers as Sophie Tucker, the Marx Brothers and Benny Goodman appeared in vaudeville acts), Jewish bookstores, funeral chapels, restaurants, delicatessens, Best's and Lazar's kosher sausage establishments, groceries, fish stores (with elderly horseradish grinders and their machines on the sidewalk outside), meeting halls, and political organizations.

The 24th Ward was the top Democratic stronghold in Chicago. In the 1936 presidential election Roosevelt received 29,000 votes to Landon's 700, and FDR called that ward "the number one ward in the Democratic Party." In addition to politics, Roosevelt Road was also known for such well-remembered and homely in-situtions as Zukie the Bookie's and Davy Miller's pool hall-boxing gym-gambling-restaurant complex, which had originated on Maxwell Street. Jewish youths who hung around Davy Miller's establishment on Roosevelt near Kedzie served a community function of a special sort: they took on the Gentile youth gangs that harassed Yeshiva students and stuck gum in the beards of elderly Jews. In the 1920s the Miller boys also fought the young Gentiles of Uptown for the territorial right of Jews to make free use of the newly created Clarendon Beach, just as in earlier days they had fought for the right of Jews to use Humboldt Park and Douglas Park. In later years such Jewish youths battled members of the Nazi Bund.

The Greater Lawndale community was alive with outdoor activity, especially in the warmer months. Through the alleys came a constant procession of peddlers in horse-drawn wagons, hawking their fruits and vegetables in singsong fashion. Mingled among them were the milkmen and the icemen. Occasionally fiddlers would play Jewish melodies in the yards, and the housewives would throw them a few coins wrapped in paper. The area was also traversed by the "old rags and iron" collector, the knife sharpener, the umbrella man, and the organ grinder with his monkey. Soul-hunting Christian missionaries canvassed the area often, going from house to house, but they made very few converts.

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Paul Green traces the development of the predominantly Irish political machine that was set running, ironically, by Anton Cermak, a Bohemian. Green's account of the development of what was essentially a multi-ethnic machine is interesting for some of its political detail, but that very detail also makes "Irish Chicago" almost tedious, confining itself so narrowly to the political machinations of a seemingly endless list of local functionaries.

Melvin G. Holli's "The Great War Sinks German Kultur" is a fine and thorough piece on the rising and then falling fortunes of the sizable German community in Chicago prior to and during World War I. Using quotations from contemporary foreign language newspapers, Holli shows how the German community waxed hot and heavy-handed about the inferiority of Slavs and other eastern Europeans in the earliest years of the war before the U.S. involvement. But after a round of German atrocities and attacks on civilians (such as the sinking of the Lusitania in 1918), the Germans became the persecuted in Chicago and their language disappeared from the public schools.

Masako Osako's account of the assimilation of Japanese-Americans in Chicago reveals another facet of the results of prejudice, this time racial. Osako traces the early Japanese migration to the west coast of the U.S., and then reminds us of those shameful internment camps of World War II. The Japanese community in Chicago burgeoned in the aftermath of those camps, growing from only 390 in 1940 to 10,829 by 1950, and to about 15,732 now. Osaka's text is supplemented with pictures and graphs that tell a story of assimilation that is very different from the pattern in the Chinese-American community — a contrast that Osaka analyzes rather fully.

Ethnic Chicago, in short, is an uneven but generally helpful and interesting blend of essays. Most of the authors have roots in the ethnic groups they write about, and in most cases that gives their works a feel of substance and authenticity. Some essays could stand some infusions of anecdote or humor, the kinds of things that might render more fully and colorfully the values and traditions that Chicago's foreign-born citizens have brought to the city over the years. But every essay is full of information, and the whole, like the city, is really larger than the sum of its parts.

Richard J. Shereikis is associate editor of Illinois Issues and associate professor of literature at Sangamon State University. He grew up on the south side of Chicago.

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