Americanization in the States: Immigrant Social Welfare Policy, Citizenship, and National Identity in the United States, 1908–1929

6. Cosmopolitanism Cut Short: The Illinois Immigrants Commission, 1919–1921

6   • Cosmopolitanism Cut Short The Illinois Immigrants Commission, 1919–1921 As the state with the largest immigrant population in the West and some of the nation’s most famous progressive activists and institutions, Illinois was where one would expect to find an active public Americanization program. However, despite the presence of Jane Addams and Hull-House, Grace Abbott , Sophonisba Breckinridge, and the Immigrants’ Protective League (IPL) and several other well-organized immigrant organizations, Illinois did not develop a public immigrant social welfare policy until after World War I. As the Americanization movement peaked in 1919, Illinois finally established the Illinois Immigrants Commission (IIC). Like the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration and the Massachusetts Bureau of Immigration, the Illinois Immigrants Commission had limited powers and a small appropriation, which limited most of its work to Chicago. Only in existence for two years, the IIC was created in the midst of the Red Scare and ceased operation just as the United States was implementing its first immigration restriction measure. For the short time that the commission was alive, it advocated a more cosmopolitan and pluralistic vision of American citizenship and national identity than most Americans were willing to accept in the early 1920s. The death of the IIC at the hands of machine politicians reflected the weakness of progressivism in Illinois and the strength of an alternative means of providing immigrant social welfare through patronage. Since the establishment of Hull-House in 1889 and the founding of the University of Chicago in 1890, most progressive activity in Illinois was concentrated in Chicago, where most of Illinois’ foreign-born residents lived. But progressives were politically weak in the Windy City. Kenneth Finegold notes that unlike in New York or Cleveland, Chicago politicians rejected progressives ’ approach to politics, which sought to build “an electoral coalition 105 106 Americanization in the States between elite ‘traditional reformers’ and ‘municipal populists’ supported by portions of the working class” and the city’s “New Immigrants.”1 Central to those coalitions was a heavy reliance upon social science expertise and the new progressive middle-class values of professionalism, anti-individualism, and “scientific” objectivity. Chicago leaders instead practiced machine politics that traded individual socioeconomic benefits for working-class support. Unlike progressive social welfare, which sought to change recipients’ behavior by modifying social systems and structures, machine social welfare was personal, tangible, and tied to specific instances of need, such as death or unemployment.2 Outside of Chicago, Illinois progressives were also unable to build an alternative political system that could transcend class, religion, national origins, and locality to pass new social welfare legislation at the state level.3 So, despite creating and leading a national network of political activists and intellectuals, Illinois progressives were largely shut out of state politics. It took all of the nationalistic pressures of World War I to convince Governor Frank O. Lowden and the state legislature to create the Illinois Immigrants Commission in the summer of 1919. The year 1919 was the high point of the Americanization movement, which coincided with mass national hysteria about alien radicals during the Red Scare.4 In this politically and ideologically charged environment, the Illinois Immigrants Commission found few interested in a cosmopolitan approach to Americanization that gave immigrants the lead role in rejuvenating American democracy. The IIC represented the transfer of personnel and ideas about immigrants, assimilation, and class interactions from private progressive groups affiliated with Jane Addams’ Hull-House settlement to the public sector of state government . The direct link between these two sectors was the Immigrants’ Protective League (IPL), a pro-immigrant organization directed by Hull-House residents Grace Abbott and Sophonisba Breckenridge. The IPL had been established in 1908 by the Council of Jewish Women, the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League, and several Hull-House residents and patrons to provide a wide range of social services to immigrants: meeting young women at Chicago’s train stations to ensure that they went home with family or friends, not seducers or brothel procurers; providing new arrivals with information about housing, jobs, and social welfare services; and promoting immigrant education and citizenship. After the league began receiving complaints from immigrants about exploitive labor contractors, it lobbied successfully for state regulation of private employment agencies and better promotion of public employment offices.5 Progressives affiliated with Hull-House had long been scrutinized for their class-based paternalism and their promotion of Anglo-Saxon Protestant...