- In between 1880 and 1920 other immigrants made Chicago their home.
- By 1900, Chicago had more Poles, Swedes, Czechs, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Croatians, Slovaks, Lithuanians, and Greeks than any other city in the United States.
- Chicago proclaimed itself at one time or another the largest Lithuanian city in the world, the second largest Czech city in the world,l and the third largest Irish, Swedish, Polish, and Jewish city in the world.
- They worked together in the workplace and also did business with one another, via either the ubiquitous peddler or the multi ethnic open-air market.
- Jane Addams Hull-House paid little attention to ethnic boundaries.
- The legal system and local politics threw immigrants together into a world in which ethnicity meant little.
- Chicago immigrants shared common experiences such as insights into immigration, assimilation, and Chicago itself.
- Immigrants succeeded only because they worked hard.
- They worked longer long hours and at low wages.
- They still found a way to save up part of their income
- Immigrants sacrificed immediate gratification for long-term success.
- they bequeathed inheritance to their children
- most new immigrants did not want to lose their ethnic distinctiveness.
- Sustained ethnic churches
- almost every immigrant group established schools which served as transmitters and preservers of their heritage.
- Immigrant parents labored long hours for a low and poor wages
- Most saw themselves as a citizen of two nations.
- Immigrants of all ethnic backgrounds assimilated rapidly despite the desires of foreign-born immigrants to preserve their ethnic heritage.
- It is evident how Chicago's public schools helped to assimilate European immigrants.
- Immigrants loved their foreign-born relatives but found that they had less and less in common with them.
- They received virtually no government assistance
- There was no such thing as food stamps, unemployment insurance,etc.
- When needed they turned to the hundreds of mutual aid societies that the ethnic communities had created themselves.
- Churches usually established upon ethnic and not a multi ethnic.
- The saloon was also important to the immigrants.
- Saloons functioned as community centers for new immigrants.
- Saloon's owner frequently served as an ethnic bank, and they lend money to new immigrants
- Saloon provided a big room for parties
- On hot nights immigrants payed the saloon's owners a nickle to sleep on their cold floor
- "The streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools inadequate,
- sanitary legislation unenforced, the street lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking in alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul beyond description. Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street sewer...Many houses have no water supply save for a faucet in the backyard, there are no fire escapes."This is how conditions were in their homes.
- people agreed to not see immigrants as passive subjects who did not shape their own experiences.
- life is more difficult back in their homeland
- they viewed Chicago as a place where hope is abounded
- they knew they had reasonable chance of improving their lot.
http://hungarianmuseum.com
http://www.uic.edu/depts/uichistory/hullhouse.html
