header by Emerson Taymor, 2005
1. The Colonial Era: 1607-1763
2. The Revolutionary Era: 1763-1789
3. The Early National Period: 1789-1824
4. Jacksonian America: 1824-1848
5. Antebellum America: 1848-1860
6. The Civil War Era: 1861-1877
9. The Twenties
10. Depression and New Deal: 1929-1939
14. The Sixties
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), excerpt
CHAPTER 11:
IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN
From our very first months at Hull-House we found it much easier to deal
with the first generation of crowded city life than with the second or
third, because it is more natural and cast in a simpler mold. The Italian
and Bohemian peasants who live in Chicago still put on their bright holiday
clothes on a Sunday and go to visit their cousins. They tramp along with
at least a suggestion of having once walked over plowed fields and breathed
country air. The second generation of city poor too often have no holiday
clothes and consider their relations a "bad lot." I have heard
a drunken man in a maudlin stage babble of his good country mother and
imagine he was driving the cows home, and I knew that his little son
who laughed loud at him would be drunk earlier in life and would have
no pastoral
interlude to his ravings. Hospitality still survives among foreigners,
although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.
One thing seemed clear in regard to entertaining immigrants; to preserve
and
keep whatever of value their past life contained and to bring them in
contact with a better type of Americans. For several years, every Saturday
evening
the entire families of our Italian neighbors were our guests. These evenings
were very popular during our first winters at Hull-House. Many educated
Italians helped us, and the house became known as a place where Italians
were welcome and where national holidays were observed. They come to
us with their petty lawsuits, sad relics of the vendetta, with their
incorrigible
boys, with their hospital cases, with their aspirations for American
clothes, and with their needs for an interpreter.
An editor of an Italian paper made a genuine connection between us and
the Italian colony, not only with the Neapolitans and the Sicilians of
the immediate neighborhood, but with the educated connazionali throughout
the city, until he went south to start an agricultural colony in Alabama,
in the establishment of which Hull-House heartily cooperated.
Possibly the South Italians more than any other immigrants represent
the pathetic stupidity of agricultural people crowded into city tenements,
and we were much gratified when thirty peasant families were induced
to
move upon the land which they knew so well how to cultivate. The starting
of this colony, however, was a very expensive affair in spite of the
fact that the colonists purchased the land at two dollars an acre; they
needed
much more than raw land, and although it was possible to collect the
small sums necessary to sustain them during the hard time of the first
two years,
we were fully convinced that undertakings of this sort could be conducted
properly only by colonization societies such as England has established,
or, better still, by enlarging the functions of the Federal Department
of Immigration.
An evening similar in purpose to the one devoted to the Italians was
organized for the Germans, in our first year. Owing to the superior education
of
our Teutonic guests and the clever leading of a cultivated German woman,
these evenings reflected something of that cozy social intercourse which
is found in its perfection in the fatherland.