BOOK REVIEW By RICHARD SHEREIKIS
Ethnic waters still run deep in Chicago A historical look at the ethnic groups which form one of America's greatest cities THERE MAY not be another city in America where ethnic labels are more important than they are in Chicago. Talk to anyone in almost any neighborhood, and somewhere early on you'll get the message that where your ancestors came from is somehow still important. Third persons mentioned in conversations will probably be referred to with an ethnic prefix: "That Irishman, O'Hara," or "That Polack, Rudzinski." Your grandfather may have come here from Sicily in 1895, but you're still likely to be known as "that Eye-talian guy" or "that Dago." It can get ugly, of course, as Chicago's history of racial and ethnic strife testifies. But the labels aren't always resented, Archie Bunker's son-in-law to the contrary notwithstanding. In a numbing sea of urban anonymity, after all, your ethnic group — which often means your family, your neighborhood, your church — can be a source of strength, an island of identity, atleast. These islands, in fact, may be Chicago, a sum much greater than its separate parts, but owing something to each. That's finally what emerges from the essays that make up The Ethnic Frontier, a collection, which, despite its unevenness, makes an admirable effort to examine the contributions of various ethnic groups to the total impression that is Chicago. Yet the book is not a paean to "the melting pot," a concept which the editors tell us early on ''has been abandoned . . . [as] an inept metaphor, false in historical fact and misleading in social theory." Nor are the editors interested in an "adversary framework [which] would . .. reduce ethnic history to a mere local argument or dialectic." Instead, Holli and Jones tell us, they are seeking "an ethnic history for its own sake, a richly detailed and informing portrait, warts and all, of various ethnic communities, their values, social structures, inner dynamics, and everyday lifestyles." The four essays in the opening section, "Diverse Roots," suggest at the outset both the strengths of the book
RICHARD SHEREIKIS 16/May 1978/Illinois Issues and its organizational problems. A detailed say on "Wild" Chicago, the multiracial frontier town that took roots on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, covers the 1816-1837, a period which predates the major studies in the central portion of the book by 50 to 100 years. Even more gratituitous is the second essay on "French Detroit," which analyzes the early settlement of that major city. Both essays are interesting, both very thoroughly researched. But given the thrust of the central chapters, with their heavy emphasis on the roles and styles of various important ethinic groups in Chicago, the reader tends to worry how these early pieces are meant to function. The same question arises from the third essay, but here one is emphatically thankful that the editors allowed such latitude in subject matter. This, too, is a fugitive chappter, in more ways than one; but its subject is so fascinating, its implications so frightening, that only a perverse reader would call for its omission from this predominantly Chicago volume. It is entitled "The Ben Ishmael Tribe: A Fugitive 'Nation' of the old Northwest," and it tells the compelling story of the Ben Ishmaels, a nomadic, tri-racial (Native American-African-poor white) tribe of around 10,000 people who moved about the Midwest on a regular migratory pattern through most of the 19th century. Based in Indianapolis, they travelled each year north to near Kankakee, then southwest toward Champaign, and from there back to Indianapolis. Despite their tenacity, the tribe was hounded, persecuted and finally sterilized out of existence. Hugo P. Learning, the writer of the essay, presents an impressive circumstantial case to argue that the Ben Ishmaels were the real targets of the first compulsary sterilization law in the world, which was enacted in Indiana in 1907. Along the way. Learning draws some startling but credible inferences from evidence like the names of towns along the tribe's migratory path (Mecca and Morocco, Ind.; Mahomet, Ill.); and he sees some interesting implications in the literary works of James Fenimore Cooper and James Whitcomb Riley. More relevant to the book as a whole, Leaming also suggests, albeit tentatively, that the Ben Ishmaels may have been the forbears of Black Muslims or other "secular nationalists" in Chicago. In any case, this is a fascinating essay, convincing and provocative. The central section of the book, "The Urban Frontier: Chicago," consists of four essays on, in order, Polish, Black, Jewish and Mexican Chicagoans. In each, the writers attempt to realize the editors' goals of examining these ethnic groups, not so much as adversaries or competitors for power and riches in Chicago, but in terms of the dynamics within each group. Edward Kantowicz's study of the Poles, for example, stresses the tension between assimilation and separation that simultaneously gave Poles solidarity and strength while preventing them from making major contributions to the overall political and cultural life of the city. The final section of the book, "The Struggle Continues," consists of a single essay by Arnold Hirsch: "Race and Housing: Violence and Communal Power in Chicago, 1940-1960." What Hirsch brings to light is the sordid and generally unpublicized racial strife that scarred Chicago in those "quiescent" 20 years before the turbulent sixties and seventies. Violent and bloody racial outbreaks in the Airport Homes housing project (1946), the Fernwood Park housing project (1947), Park Manor (1949), Englewood (1949), Cicero (1951), Trumbull Park (1953) and Calumet Park (1957) are used to illustrate a pattern of racism that became much more visible in the sixties and seventies. Hirsch identifies the almost conspiratorial silence of both local and national media (except in the case of the Cicero riots) as the major deterrent to public consciousness of these early but no less ugly outbreaks by white citizens against blacks. Hirsch carefully documents the sociological makeup of the rioting white crowds in these early incidents, suggesting that these outbreaks had a "communal" quality that somehow makes them doubly frightening. Not all the essays in The Ethnic Frontier achieve the noble goals which the editors announce in their introduction. A few seem downright out of place in both subject matter and emphasis, in fact. But the book, like the city it examines, is finally more than the sum of its many parts. What it lacks in coherence and consistency it makes up in some bright flashes of insight, some intriguing scholarly findings and some refreshingly clear and unpretentious writing. May 1978/ Illinois Issues /17
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