Chicago – obviously – played an important role in my Mother’s family. Here the Hennessys and O’Garas got together, and here the Hennessys and Berens got together before spreading to so many other cities.
But what brought those families to Chicago in the first place? And how did Chicago shape their lives as Chicago itself kept evolving? It is easy to repeat all the PR about the early bustling, growing metropolis. Was that the only reason that so many immigrants came to Chicago?
Germans in Chicago:
For many decades, Chicago had more Germans than any other nationalities. The Encyclopedia of Chicago has a very insightful entry for the German immigrants to Chicago. The timing of the different waves of German immigration reflected their different origins in Germany, beginning with Germans from the southwestern areas in the 1830s. The economy, the politics, and the industrialization in Germany were often the driving forces behind German emigration.
Johann Behrens, Joseph Behrens and his Voss relatives arrived in Chicago in the early 1870s. It’s difficult to define their exact reasons for emigrating, but they did arrive to find many German institutions already in place to welcome them. Did the 1870 unification of Germany and its requirement of military service for all males prompt their coming to America? Our Dinse forebears arrived nearly ten years later with the early part of the 1880s immigrations from the agrarian, northeast regions of Prussia and Pomerania. These areas contained large estates and the tenant farmers who fled to America were probably much like the evicted Irish landholders. Many Germans came to Chicago, saved their money, and then moved to other states frequently buying their own farms.
Our Behrens and Dinse families, on the other hand, stayed in Chicago along with the growing numbers of their countrymen. Their early years in Chicago were probably full of opportunity as the city was rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871. They worked hard, saved their money, and around 1890 moved out of the rented flats and bought into the new housing developments of Hyde Park, mostly on Escanaba Ave. They arrived in Chicago because of the opportunities the city presented and they probably stayed for the same reason. The German community was also very influential: Germans rallied against the Sunday Closing laws and temperance – think William Golsen and his whiskey ring – and German was taught in the city’s schools unless funding became tight.
Unfortunately, some of the same factors which prompted many to leave Germany, influenced German employment in Chicago.
There was a lot of turmoil in the US.
The Chicago Haymarket Labor Protest on Tuesday 04 MAY 1886, which began as a peaceful rally for an eight-hour workday, turned into a Riot after someone through a bomb at the police. Tensions were already heightened due to the killing of several working men that Monday by the police. Several of the men arrested were either born in Germany or of German descent. The labor community – especially Germans and Bohemians – fell under police suspicion and then raids and what we today call harassment.
Feelings about this event were so widespread and pervasive, that when Alva Hennessy Berens related to her daughter Carol Berens Dalton many years later about her aunt Kate O’Gara’s husband William Ward, she described him as “a disturbed person as well as an anarchist. He wanted to blow up the government.” Kate and William were married on 12 JUN 1887, about a year after the Riots.
Then, the modernization and automation at the turn of the century caused the unemployment of many skilled German immigrants and their children. I’ve often wondered how this affected John Behrens and his family, especially if he was the sawyer and carpenter working for furniture manufacturers before he became a teamster.
Almost immediately following that upheaval came that little war in Europe which grew to consume the United States. Once again Germans were distrusted. Now even those German Americans whose ancestors had arrived in Colonial times were suspect in America. Germans were required to register; newspapers as distant as Dallas and Salt Lake City criticized the continued teaching of German in Chicago’s elementary schools. Hotel owners in Chicago Americanized the names of German dishes on their menus; and many German Americans anglicized their names. Alva convinced Lou to drop the “h” to sound less Germanic: Behrens to Berens.
~ April 2017
Next: Irish in Chicago: Hennessys and O’Garas