At Home: 1890: Side by Side

Side by Side--Newcomers 34

Yugoslavian immigrants in Chicago, ca. 1910 [48k]

Newcomers

Foreign-born immigrants (1,205,314 in Illinois in 1910) and blacks migrating from the South (about 72,000 in Illinois in 1910) were considered newcomers.
Many recent foreign immigrants were German, Austrian, or Swedish and were guided into an easy adjustment to American life by established "old" immigrant communities.
"New" immigrant populations were mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe. Most were males who came without families. They were largely unskilled workers, not accustomed to urban life. They chose to live and work with their countrymen, who shared the same language, customs, and values. Once they were established, many men sent for their families. Others chose to return home.
In 1910, over 70% of the newcomers were living in Chicago and Cook County, where unskilled industrial jobs could be found. Smaller cities with industries, including Rockford, Joliet, Aurora, and Elgin, had large immigrant populations. Large groups of Slavs and Italians moved into mining communities, replacing Irish and German miners escaping the dangerous conditions.
Newcomers worked long hours (sometimes 60-80 hours per week before 1903) for low wages (an average of 22 cents per hour in a large packinghouse), with no guarantee of work the next day. Often the women and children in the family had to work to make ends meet. Almost 32,000 foreign-born and black women worked as domestics in Illinois in 1900.
Many newcomers suffered bigotry and inequality of opportunities. Some employers refused to hire them; others, such as the Pullman Car Co., required language tests to weed out foreign-speaking immigrants. State and municipal laws were written to segregate the races. Sometimes this bigotry led to violence.
Newcomers were often crowded into tenement buildings in neighborhoods that were filthy and foul-smelling. In one three-block Polish neighborhood in Chicago there lived 7,306 children. In Chicago, 90% of blacks were confined to a densely populated region on the south side, known as the "Black Belt." The population of these narrowly defined black neighborhoods doubled between 1910 and 1920, yet the boundaries hardly changed.