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Exiles

Are we not all immigrants from our pasts?

Illinois Times

April 16, 1987

Written when I was beginning to spend time in Chicago and the prospect loomed of a move from my boyhood home in Springfield. I was preoccupied with questions about who I had been and who and where I wanted to be. Asking such questions is a big part of what being American is about, perhaps more than finding the answers. 

 

There are famines, and there are famines. With the official jobless rate at 18 percent and the unofficial one much higher, young people in Ireland are emigrating to the U.S., to “America,” as of old. Analysts deduce from applications for the few special visas offered to hopeful Irish emigres by the U.S. government each year that an astounding one-quarter of the island’s population wants to leave.

 

Many already have. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Irish are living in the U.S. illegally; whatever other bit of green they may show on their persons on St. Pat’s Day, it is not the official registration card of the resident alien. As so often in the past, the new arrivers are young and single. Unlike their predecessors, they are also very well educated. Hunger is not driving these Paddies west. They are lawyers and architects, not navvies and nursemaids; asked why they abandoned home, they mention money and income taxes and an Ireland that is mediocre and boring.

 

I have been fascinated for a long time by voluntary emigrants, people who (in the phrase of essayist Guy Davenport) came here “uncompeled, and had other choices.” Part of that fascination lies in my family’s history. My father’s ancestors nursed their share of political grievances against the Saxon duchy in the 1830s (then under the sway of militarist Prussia) the biggest being the natural resistance of parents to seeing sons blown up in other people’s wars. But it wasn’t principle which spurred them abroad, just the desire to be left alone, to grow old and fat on beer in the company of attentive grandchildren. Like today’s Irish, they were neither illiterate nor destitute when they left Germany for Cass County, neither oppressed nor persecuted. They were just unhappy, and vaguely uncertain about their futures where they were.

 

In a recent book review about a similar party of Swiss colo­nists in Illinois, I noted how such immigrants confound the rags-to-Rotary Club sagas which constitute our national mythology of improvement. They sought freedom, certainly, but what Davenport describes as “freedom from constraint and sanc­tions” of an ordinary sort. It is a point he makes in his consideration (first published in the Hudson Review, later in his new essay collection, Every Force Evolves a Form) of generations of English emigrants to the U.S. They came looking variously for “Utopia, themselves, the confirmation of their worst suspicions, Paradise, or the spearhead of technological advance,” even (as he surmises about the poet Auden) to be lonely.

 

Or to be respectable. Davenport’s reminder that “strange things happen to uprooted people"—a phrase that makes a more apt national motto than E pluribus Unum—is confirmed in an interesting new book from the University of Illinois Press. The authors of The Irish in Chicago (there are four of them, writing in separate essays) credit their relentless striving for middle-class respectability for blunting their creativity, which seems always to have sprung from whiskey, song, and revolution, in roughly equal parts. Respectability was the Chicago Irish’s retort to the anti-Irish stereotypes of the WASP establishment; basically, the Irish quieted anti-Irish feeling by ceasing to be Irish.

 

The process by which new­comers end up exiles from their own ethnicity is by now a familiar one. (Calvin Trillin, who is one, spoke in Chicago last week on the topic, “The Mid­western Jew, or How to Make Chopped Liver with Miracle Whip.”) One of the contribu­tors to Irish, Charles Fanning, says that the leitmotif of the Irish experience in Chicago has been silence, what he calls “the struggle for significant speech”—a struggle which makes their failure to produce a major writer after Farrell the more pointed. That silence should be the curse of a people for whom talk comes as natural­ly as breath, that the people who gave the world Yeats (or was it Yeats who gave the world the Irish?) should have no songs of their own is tragic. After sev­eral generations the Chicago Irish have shed much of their religion and their city neighbor­hoods, if not their prejudices. The younger ones still eat soda bread, which they buy at the su­permarket along with their tofu and pasta; they listen to tradi­tional Irish music as played by groups such as the Chieftains, which they probably heard for the first time on WXRT. If they persist in calling themselves Irish Americans, it’s because being just Americans means being nothing at all.

 

It is said that we are a nation of immigrants, by which it is meant that we are a nation of ex-immigrants. I find that as­sumption false. Lawrence McCaffrey, another contributor to Irish, describes that experience as an Irish diaspora, a rest­less roaming, a succession of exoduses over generations either from something (WASP preju­dice, poor black newcomers) or toward some­thing (better housing in the suburbs) but always away from the settled and the familiar. In his reflections on the ca­reers in the U.S. of expatriate British writers Isherwood, Huxley, and Auden, Davenport notes that they had been outsid­ers in their country, stateless even before they left the docks of Liverpool or Southhampton. Change is just another kind of distance. Does not our rootless­ness, our dislocation, make most Americans outsiders in their own country?

 

I was raised in a lower middle-class household of the sort whose children, like Ireland’s, were raised to leave—not the country, but the streets, the towns, the classes, and the customs of our upbringing. It was assumed that I would not live like my parents, or where my parents lived. The language with which the new Irish emigrants describe their dissatisfaction—the lack of economic opportunity, the frail prospects of amusement—precisely matches that used by me and my age-mates to describe our reasons for leaving Springfield and the Midwest. I pass along the remark of an incredulous, grateful former town-mate who, after settling in the Boston area, exclaimed, “Intelligence has value here!”

 

For the outsider in his own country, emigration is not a matter of leaving home but of finding one. A few weeks ago, in Chicago, I walked past a board­ed window which had been ap­propriated as a community bulletin board. A crudely print­ed flyer tacked there caught my eye—mugged it, more like. It bore the name “Krohe,” and advertised a performance of Shaw’s St. Joan starring one Charly Krohe; the photo showed a bare-chested young man of ambiguous sexuality wearing ear­rings, a crucifix, and strips of duct tape across his nipples.

 

I do not know this young man. However, our last name is rare, and I have yet to hear of a Krohe living anywhere in the U.S. who is not related to me. My guess is that if Charly did not start his journey toward the avant-garde from a place like Jacksonville or Beardstown or Virginia, his parents did. In any event his roots are in a place where duct tape is not a part of one’s costume, even on Satur­day nights, and men do not pre­tend to be women, at least not in public. How much farther a journey was his odyssey to Chi­cago than the trans-Atlantic trek of our presumed common ancestors? They after all ended up living the same life they’d led in the old country, only in a new place. Which was the braver voyager? Who had the more difficult crossing? ●

SITES

OF

INTEREST

John Hallwas

Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.

Lee Sandlin Author

One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.

Chicago Architecture Center

See Home Page/Learn/

Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago

 

The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.

Illinois Great Places

The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our  shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.

McLean County Museum

of History

A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.

Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois

 

Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."

Illinois Digital Archives

 

Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards,  posters, and videos.

The Illinois State Museum

 

The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and  history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.

Chronicling Illinois

“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

Chicagology

I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered." 

Illinois Labor History Society

The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like. 

Illinois Migration History 1850-2017

The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories  (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly. 

History on the Fox

An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than

2,000 words.)

BOOKS

 OF INTEREST

SIUPromoCoverPic.jpg

Southern Illinois University Press 2017

A work of solid history, entertainingly told.

Michael Burlingame,

author of Abraham 

Lincoln: A Life 

One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.

Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018

A lively and engaging study . . .  an enthralling narrative.

James Edstrom

The Annals of Iowa

A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians

as well as local historians generally.

John Hoffman

Journal of Illinois HIstory

A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.

Harold Henderson 

Midwestern Microhistory

A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.

Greg Hall

Journal of the Illinois

State Historical Society

Click  here 

to read about

the book 

Click  here 

to buy the book 

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Southern Illinois University Press

SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.

University of

Illinois Press

The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog  (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more.  Of particular note are its Prairie State Books,  quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.

University of

Chicago Press

The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to

Vivian Maier.

Northern Illinois University Press

The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.

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Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order

by book title. 

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Illinois Center for the Book

Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.

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