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Review
| Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1920, by Dominic A. Pacyga. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 322 pages. $17.00, paper.
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| Dominic A. Pacyga first published Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1920 in 1991 through the Ohio State University Press. This paperback edition by the University of Chicago Press includes a new preface updating the historiography on Polish immigrant workers in Chicago and strengthening the significance of Pacyga's work in the field. The author acknowledges the groundbreaking study The Polish Peasant in Europe and America by his Chicago school of sociology mentors William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. However, Pacyga challenges Thomas and Znanieki's (and Oscar Handlin's consensus tradition history) conclusion that Old World communities broke down in the American industrial city. He insists, to the contrary, that "Polish Chicagoans brought much cultural, social, and ethical baggage with them from Europe" and through institutions such as "the Roman Catholic church, various labor unions, fraternal organizations, as well as saloons, gangs, and other less structured organizations...created an intense social web." (p. 5) Pacyga further argues "the building of community (the intramural response) made possible the eventual extramural responses such as active participation in the labor movement." (p. xv) Poles joined with other ethnic and racial groups and with Progressive reformers to form unions and, to a lesser degree, to participate in politics, thereby reaching beyond their own neighborhoods to address the problems posed by urban industrial life on a much larger scale. |
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Pacyga's work contains many strengths, which underscore its usefulness for undergraduate or graduate courses. While concentrating on Polish immigrants on Chicago's South Side, the study illuminates experiences common to poor, unskilled, immigrant workers whose numbers grew considerably in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Pacyga recounts the difficulties and dangers of not only work in packinghouses and steel mills but also of life in the neighborhoods surrounding them. With descriptions reminiscent of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Pacyga's account summarizes workers' experiences in the Union Stock Yards from their initial struggle to gain employment, through the various killing, skinning, butchering, and processing jobs in the packinghouse. Polish immigrants dominated the low-wage, unskilled tasks, including washing and wiping up after carcasses, trucking, and general manual labor, until they were able to move up to better paying and more skilled positions. Women's work and child labor were also common to Poles' labor history. Progressive reform in the form of child labor laws and compulsory education eventually challenged but did not erase child labor. Poles often suffered injury and illness in the workplace and in their crowded and unsafe living quarters near the job site. Tenements dominated the neighborhoods as did dangerous railroad traffic, wretched industrial pollution, and lack of clean water, all of which contributed to health problems among residents. Immigrants in the steel mills and its surrounding neighborhood faced analogous trials. Poles shared experiences similar to those of other ethnic immigrant groups and, often, of African American workers; however, Pacyga resists "any attempt to reduce the American urban working class experience to a uniform one." (p. 9) He insists that ethnicity remains a "vital variable" in understanding Polish American history. |
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Amidst their hardships, Polish immigrants built strong ethnic communities that both preserved elements of tradition and forged new values in America. Family, community, and church—the "interconnected social systems" of Poland—remained the center of Chicago's Polonia. Polish families quickly grouped together in local housing and established Catholic churches and schools in which they hoped to maintain their traditions. Church ceremonies conducted in Latin remained soothingly familiar. Parish clubs, libraries, and fraternal organizations also preserved old world language and culture. Those who had resisted sending their children to Russian or German dominated schools in the old world countryside brought their independent attitudes with them to Chicago. There, the majority of their children attended Polish parochial schools where they would be protected from the influences of the Protestant dominated public schools or the Irish dominated Catholic ones. "English was taught in the Stock Yard District as an 'ornamental language'" (p. 146) and pupils learned Polish history and culture along with other curricula until the state forced instruction in English. Pacyga argues, nonetheless, that while parochial schools initially preserved old ideals of Polish culture, the institution was different for Poles in the United States. In the old world, few of the lower class were educated, while in America Poles began to pursue higher levels of education as a means for their children to advance in society. This new attitude was more American than traditional. Similar blending of old and new values in areas beyond education eventually forged a new, more American, Polish community in Chicago. |
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Pacyga demonstrates that the hardships wrought by immigration, industrialization, and urbanization brought Poles and other ethnic communities together to seek solutions to their common plight. Extra-communal cooperation proved most successful in Progressive reform organizations and labor unions. Poles joined with other ethnic neighbors and white middle class reformers through the University of Chicago Settlement House. Progressive women's clubs raised awareness of educational, civic, economic, and cultural issues; and members strove to combat neighborhood problems, instituting needed improvements in such areas as garbage collection and the establishment of parks and day care for children. Polish workingmen and women also united across ethnic lines in unions seeking to improve working conditions. They resisted packers and steelworks owners' attempts to divide them by skill level and ethnic conflict. Unions saw advancement during the World War I period, but suffered setbacks after 1920 when the federal government dismantled the War Labor Board and "fragmentation and powerlessness" returned. Pacyga points to a postwar period of crisis, which in addition to union busting, brought the influenza epidemic and race riot of 1919. Poles generally resisted participation in violence against African Americans. Pacyga asserts, "class, not race, seems to have been a greater concern for immigrant communities." (p. 227) Poles realized that no single group could deal with all the problems posed by industrial city life; therefore, they bonded with others in the working class to find solutions. On some occasions they were successful, in others, less so. In either case, they drew from their traditions, engaged with their American surroundings and counterparts, and acted as agents on their own behalf. |
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Pacyga's work is a classic social history of one immigrant community. Yet it also links the experiences of Poles on the South Side of Chicago to broader elements of social, class, and labor history. His work offers important insight into American history during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. It is suitable for use in undergraduate surveys as well as more specialized upper-division or graduate courses. |
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| California State University, Long Beach |
Donna M. Binkiewicz |
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