Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2018
Drawing on Chicago immigrant communities’ archives, memoirs, and native-language newspapers, this article advances our understanding of Progressive Era environmental politics by delving into cross-class immigrant communities’ views on and activism concerning health. Everyday ethnic Chicagoans—medical and journalistic professionals alongside working-class immigrants—displayed a sophisticated understanding of health. Well versed in medical and scientific germ theories, they embraced a mixture of germ and environmental theories that made them, in effect, “disease ecologists,” revealing a widespread health ecology orientation not limited to the educated white professionals and reformers about whom scholarship has revealed much more. Such perspectives contribute to reinterpretations of earlier scholarly assumptions that germ theory largely displaced environmental analyses. Moreover, ethnic communities’ interpretations of health as ecological underpinned some of their political activism in pursuit of greater environmental parity. Many ethnic activists from across Chicago's class spectrum fought alongside white reformers to rectify environmental health inequities. They sometimes even initiated efforts, displaying an early version of environmental justice activism. At the same time, other cross-class ethnics at least partly blamed individual or ethnic communities’ habits and failures, mirroring to a degree the condescension visible among many Anglo reformers and professionals.
1 Hilda Satt Polachek, “The Ghetto Market,” July 16, 1905, folder 89, box 8, Polachek Papers, University of Illinois-Chicago. The author would like to thank Charlotte Brooks, Suellen Hoy, Matt Klingle, Nancy Langston, Erik Loomis, Martin Melosi, Gregg Mitman, Susan Pearson, Harold Platt, Tamara Venit-Shelton, and the anonymous reviewers who all helped improve various incarnations of this paper. I would particularly like to thank Colin Fisher, who told me about the Foreign Language Press Survey that provided many of the newspaper sources in this paper.
2 In this article, “environment” refers to the built environment, rather than to the Victorian view that natural environmental factors like temperature, altitude, humidity, and miasma shaped human health. Cities have become an integral part of environmental history, thanks significantly to pioneering scholarship by Martin Melosi and Joel Tarr, who helped shift scholars’ views to see “environment” in urban, human-made settings. For prominent recent examples of studies that join environmental and urban/social history, see McNeur, Catherine, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; and Rawson, Michael, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
3 Polachek, “Housing and the Typhoid Fever Epidemic,” undated (likely late 1930s), “Works Project (sic) Administration Writings” folder 90, box 8, Polachek, 3. Investigators including Alice Hamilton at first believed the typhoid outbreak resulted from germ-carrying flies, feeding on infected waste pooling in gutters and streets due to outdoor privies and bad sewage systems and depositing the germs on food and milk. Hamilton, Alice, Exploring the Dangerous Trades: The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton (Boston: Little and Company, 1943), 98–100Google Scholar. Outhouses, though forbidden by law, were common throughout Chicago, especially in poor neighborhoods where the city did not provide adequate sewage. But Hamilton led an investigation that later determined the underlying cause was a pumping station break that allowed sewage to escape into water pipes for three days and that officials had covered up the leak, preventing residents from protecting themselves. Hull House residents, “An Inquiry into the Causes of the Recent Epidemic of Typhoid Fever in Chicago,” Commons 81:8 (Apr. 1903): 3–7, http://hullhouse.uic.edu/hull/urbanexflpsp/main.cgi?file=viewer.ptt&mime=blank&doc=679&type=print (accessed Aug. 10, 2016). See, too, “Civil War and Civil Service,” Mar. 12, 1904, Chicago Tribune, folder 512, series XI, Hull House Collection, University of Illinois-Chicago (hereafter Hull House). Joel Tarr has argued that outhouses actually provided better sanitation than the early sewers. See Tarr, Joel, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1998)Google Scholar.”
4 Polachek, , I Came a Stranger: the Story of a Hull-House Girl (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 72–73Google Scholar. Polachek drafted the memoir in the 1960s, and her daughter published it later.
5 On the role of folk practices such as beliefs about sorcery and the “evil eye,” see Kraut, Alan M., “Healers and Strangers: Immigrant Attitudes Toward the Physician in America—a Relationship in Historical Perspective,” Journal of the American Medical Association 263:13 (Apr. 4, 1990): 1807–11CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Kraut, Alan M., “Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Pandemic,” Public Health Reports, 125 (2010, Suppl. 3): 123–33Google ScholarPubMed; and Kraut, Silent Travelers.
6 Relatively few studies explore the environmental perspectives of working-class immigrant/ethnic groups and African Americans, in general, let alone in terms of their views of health. For a few important exceptions, see Chiang, Connie Y., Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Fisher, Colin, Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurley, Andrew, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Klingle, Matthew, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; McNeur, Taming Manhattan; Perales, Monica, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Washington, Sylvia Hood, Packing them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–1954 (Idaho Falls, ID: Lexington Books, 2004)Google Scholar.
7 This article answers Connie Chiang's 2014 call to “delve further into the flow of power between and within racial and ethnic groups, paying closer attention to class differences and intellectual traditions” in environmental history to further understand “power relations involving racial and ethnic groups across the globe.” Chiang, Connie Y., “Race and Ethnicity in Environmental History” in Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, ed. Isenberg, Andrew C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 575Google Scholar.
8 This article uses as a model Flanagan, Maureen, Seeing with their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, which advances our understanding of the Progressive Era by contrasting elite men's and women's groups reform agendas.
9 A note on terminology: this article uses the term Anglo to denote the native-born, Northern and Western European-descent populations. Ethnic refers to the more marginalized Southern and Western European-descent populations, American and foreign born.
10 Although immigrants did not use the term per se, their statements nonetheless articulated ideas that the medical profession later officially termed “disease ecology,” despite the immigrants’ incorporation of microbiological and behavioral interpretations as well. On disease ecology, a subfield of medical research in the early twentieth century that insisted germs must be situated in a more complex frame recognizing both genetic and environmental factors; see Linda Nash, “Beyond Virgin Soils: Disease as Environmental History” in Andrew C. Isenberg, ed., Oxford Handbook of Environmental History.
11 On how social workers and settlement house reformers embraced a “broader ecological notion” of health, in which there was “no clear demarcation between occupational safety and health and other social and environmental problems,” see Rosner, David and Markowitz, Gerald, “The Early Movement for Occupational Safety and Health, 1900–1917” in Leavitt, Judith Walzer and Numbers, Ronald L., eds., Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, 3rd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 476Google Scholar. On germ and environmental theories’ blending in this era, see Tomes, Nancy, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Worboys, Michael, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. See, too, various essays in Leavitt and Numbers, Sickness and Health in America; on how epidemiologists applied germ theory as it confirmed environmental understandings, transforming from environmental dirt into filth-carrying germs, see Naomi Rogers, “Dirt, Flies, and Immigrants,” 551; on how public health efforts targeting typhoid blended bacteriology with the social (or environmental) context, see Leavitt, “‘Typhoid Mary’ Strikes Back: Bacteriological Theory and Practice in Early 20th-Century Public Health.” On sanitary engineers, entomologists, tropical medicine doctors, and allergists blending environmental with bacteriological interpretations, see various studies by Melosi, Martin including Garbage in the Cities: Refuse Reform and the Environment (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Mitman, Gregg, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Nash, Linda, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 6–7Google Scholar. In other words, rather than changing the emphasis on environment, germ theory gave some reformers and professionals a new reason to focus on it, as Hoy, Suellen shows in Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Some scholarship on Progressive Era reformers like Alice Hamilton and Jane Addams explicitly frames them as environmental health—sometimes even using the term environmental justice—activists. See Flanagan, Maureen, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivism, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Gottlieb, Robert, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993)Google Scholar, 83; and Platt, Harold L., “Jane Addams and the Ward Boss Revisited: Class, Politics, and Public Health in Chicago, 1890–1930,” Environmental History 5:2 (Apr. 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
12 Thanks especially to scholarship on workers and industrial disease, we do know that workers’ critique of unequal environmental conditions’ deleterious health effects helped prompt their labor activism, a critique that became the basis of the emerging field of industrial health and hygiene. See Clark, Claudia, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Rosner, David and Markowitz, Gerald, Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006Google Scholar, rev. ed. from Princeton University Press, 1991), and Dying for Work: Workers’ Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Sellers, Christopher, Hazards of the Job: from Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar. On Chicago workers’ health-related activism, see Pacyga, Dominic, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. On workers and environmental activism in general, see Montrie, Chad, A People's History of Environmentalism in the United States (New York: Continuum, 2011)Google Scholar.
13 Washington, Packing Them In.
14 On Europeans and African Americans, see Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17, 34–35Google Scholar. See, too, Grossman, James R., Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar. In 1920 Mexicans comprised only 1,141 of the 808,558 foreign-born residents in Chicago. Innes-Jimenez, Michael, Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 21Google Scholar. See, too, Arredondo, Gabriela F., Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008)Google Scholar. There were only 172 Chinese descent people in 1880, 1,179 in 1900, and 2,353 in 1920; Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/285.html (accessed Feb. 16, 2017). In its early years this population largely resided in the downtown Loop area, on South Clark between Van Buren and Harrison, but by 1911 moved to the southern stockyards/meatpacking district where they lived alongside Italian immigrants and, by the late 1910s, African Americans (near Cermak Rd. and Wentworth Ave., present-day Chinatown). Racialization in the labor market meant that Chinese, unlike other immigrant groups who worked in the stockyards and in factories, tended to work in ethnic economic niches like groceries, restaurants, and laundries. Chuimei Ho and Soo Lon Moy, eds., Images of Chinese in America, 9, 57. See, too, Ling, Huping, Chinese Chicago: Race, Transnational Migration, and Community since 1870 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar, 32, 49, 54–57, 59.
Much of the evidence from Chicago ethnic-language newspapers in this article comes from the Foreign Language Press Survey, a project funded by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s to hire unemployed reporters to translate historical articles from Chicago's foreign language press. From 1890 to 1924 the Survey consulted 217 different newspapers from 23 ethnic groups. This article focuses on the groups whose papers were most active covering the related topics of health, environment, and germs. Between 1890 and 1924 the Survey contained only 20 articles about the Chinese population (and none written by the community) and only 4 from or about the Mexican population, in part reflecting the very small presence of each community in Chicago during the period. For more information see http://flps.newberry.org/info/3-organization/ (accessed Feb. 15, 2017).
15 Bachin, Robin F., Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 112Google Scholar. For more on the Stockyards, see Barrett, James, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Halpern, Rick, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904–1954 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
16 Phillips's ethnicity is unclear. Phillips, Herbert E., D.D.S, “Mary McDowell as We Knew Her in the Yards, Part II” in Mary McDowell and Municipal Housekeeping, ed. Hill, Caroline Miles (Chicago: Millar, 1938), 120–2Google Scholar. On Phillips's participation in the Dental Advisory Committee of the Committee on Economic Security, see https://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/ces/ces6.html (accessed Aug. 9, 2016).
17 Handbook of Settlements (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), 54Google Scholar, folder 666, series IX, Hull House. See, too, Cohen, Making a New Deal, 32–33. On the west side Greek population's history, including its involvement with Hull House, see Demas, Lane, “Immigrant Entrepreneurs and the Formation of Chicago's ‘Greektown’, 1890–1921,” Journal of Modern Hellenism 21–22 (2004–5)Google Scholar: 105–55.
18 Hull-House Maps and Papers, a Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing out of the Social Conditions, by Residents of Hull-House, a Social Settlement at 235 South Halsted Street, Chicago, Ill. (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1895), 17.
19 Hull-House Bulletin, Jan. 1, 1897, folder 433, series X, Hull House.
20 “Chicago Is Overcrowded and Dirty by P. Novik,” Daily Jewish Courier, Apr. 8, 1924, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_4_1_1090 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
21 On Chicago and the environment in this era, see Pellow, David, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Gottlieb, Forcing, 97; Platt, Shock Cities.
22 “Council Leases Dump for Garbage Piling Up in City,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 7, 1913, 1; and Oscar E. Hewitt, “City Dump Price Double the Value,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 4, 1913, 3, both from ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune (1849–1987).
23 Hewitt, Oscar E., “Talk Injunction against Garbage Dump Near Homes: Residents Say Disinfecting Will Not Avert Nuisance at North Side Site,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 3, 1913, 1Google Scholar, Proquest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune (1849–1987). On Elias on the Board of Commissioners, see The Chicago Daily News Almanac and Year-Book for 1909, Vol. 25 (Chicago: Chicago Daily News Company, 1908), 447Google Scholar.
24 “To the Citizens of Hawthorne and Vicinity Businessmen's Association Protests against Dumping Refuse in Abandoned Quarries,” Dziennik Chicagoski, Jan. 12, 1928, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_4_1316 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
25 “Report of the Meeting Held by the Taxpayers Improvement Club of the Eleventh Ward,” Denni Hlasatel, Sept. 24, 1911, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5418478_1_1597 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
26 “Northwest Side Jews Want to Keep Their Neighborhood Clean,” Daily Jewish Courier, Oct. 5, 1921, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_4_1_1110 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
27 “The University of Chicago Settlement,” reprint from University Record, Aug. 13, 1897, folder 2274, box 48, Graham Taylor Papers, Newberry Library.
28 McDowell, “Civic Experiences,” 2.
29 “The University of Chicago” pamphlet, 11, n.d, folder 2274, box 48, Taylor.
30 McDowell, “Standard of Living,” Civic Frontiersman, 1914 (?), folder 13, box 2, McDowell. See, too, McDowell, “Civic Experiences,”1914, 9–11, folder 19, box 3, McDowell. See, too, Mary E. McDowell, “From Day to Day” (speech?), 79–83, folder 2135, box 44, Taylor.
31 Reports of Sanitary Survey,” 1902 or 1903, folder 519, series XI, Hull House.
32 Addams, , Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 102Google Scholar, from Flanagan, America Reformed, 37. See, too, Jane Addams, “Jane Addams's Own Story of Her Work: The First Five Years at Hull-House,” Apr. 1906, 11–12, The Ladies Home Journal, folder 1883, box 33, Taylor.
33 Mrs. Janovsky, Notes (between former Stockyards residents and planners for McDowell's memorial), Nov. 27, 1936, folder 2, box 1, McDowell, On Janovsky's role on the literature committee, see “News from the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Bohemian Club,” Oct. 4, 1922, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5418478_4_0794 (accessed Aug. 9, 2016).
34 Herbert E. Phillips, D.D.S, “Mary McDowell as We Knew Her in the Yards, Part II,” in Mary McDowell and Municipal Housekeeping, 120–2.
35 Polachek, I Came a Stranger, 72.
36 “The Greek Quarter,” Saloniki-Greek Press, Apr. 24, 1915, http://flps.newberry.org/artcle/5422062_4_1019 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
37 See, for instance, “A Struggle for Bread (Editorial),” Dziennik Zwiqzkowy, June 11, 1912, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_4_0948 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016); “Poles Pledge Support,” Chicago Chronicle, Oct. 1, 1906, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_3_1189 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016); “Children in Factories,” Znanje, Dec. 31, 1921, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5420779_2_0154 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016); “A Stroll in the Chicago Sweat Shops,” Jewish Labor World, Sept. 4, 1908, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_3_0770 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
38 “A Society in Chicago to Help the Sufferers from Tuberculosis,” Forward, Nov. 12, 1921, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_4_1_0764 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
39 Examples of newspapers sympathetic to unionization and labor struggles included many Chicago Jewish newspapers, including Daily Jewish Courier and Jewish Labor World/Forward (the Labor World became Forward in 1919), cited here. The Courier catered in particular to Orthodox Jews. On Daily Jewish Courier, see American Jewish Year Book, Vol. 25, “Jewish Periodicals Appearing in the United States,” 317; and Bekken, Jon, “Negotiating Class and Ethnicity: The Polish-Language Press in Chicago,” Polish American Studies 57:2 (Autumn 2000): 5–29Google Scholar, 22. On Jewish Labor World and Forward, see Bekken, “Negotiating Class and Ethnicity,” 24–26.
The two cited Croatian papers, Radnicka Straza and Znanje, also tended to sympathize with the working classes—the first morphed into the second in 1923. Radnicka was the first socialist Croatian paper in the United States, and was edited by Mirlan Glumac and Todor Cvetkov, who became a lawyer and activist in the socialist antiwar movement during World War I. The later Znanje was formed when Cvetkov seceded with a socialist group from the South Slavic section of the Communist Party USA in 1923 and made it the official paper of the Yugoslave Educational League. See George J. Prpic and C. Michael McAdams, “The Croatian Press,” 45–58, 47 in Miller, The Ethnic Press in the United States.
Lithuanian and Polish papers came more from a range of perspectives. The Lithuanian Lietuva's publisher A. Olsauskas (Olszewsi) was a prominent Chicago banker, book publisher, and in 1910 became the first president of the Lithuanian American Press Association. The liberal paper had a circulation of around 6000. The other cited Lithuanian paper Naujienos, begun by the Chicago chapter of the Lithuanian American Socialist Alliance, was edited by Dr. Pijus Grigaitis, whose politics were democratic socialist. See Edgar Anderson and M. G. Slavenas, “The Latvian and Lithuanian Press,” 229–45, in Miller, The Ethnic Press in the United States; and Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., “Lithuanian and Polish Immigrant Adult Literacy Programs in Chicago, 1890–1930,” Polish American Studies 57:2 (Autumn 2000): 31–44, 36. Of the Polish publications, two of the three cited displayed some level of sympathy to workers and strikes, and especially (in the case of Dziennik Zwiqkowy, founded by Polish nationalists) or only (in the case of Narod Polski, founded by the Polish Roman Catholic Union) Polish workers rather than workers across the ethnic spectrum. Dziennik Chicagoski was founded by a congregation of Catholic priests to present its readers with a pro-Clerical line and was reluctant to support strikes, except when it believed workers had no other choice. See Jon Bekken, “Negotiating Class and Ethnicity: The Polish-Language Press in Chicago,” Polish American Studies 57:2 (Autumn 2000): 5–29 (though George S. Pabis, “The Polish Press in Chicago and American Labor Strikes: 1892-1912,” Polish American Studies 48:1 (Spring 1991): 7–21 argues that neither the Narod Polski nor Dziennik Chicagoski supported strikes or strikers at all. Pabis explains that all three of these papers were instruments of the Polish immigrant elite, particularly in terms of their views on labor activism/strikes.).
The political orientation of the Greek and Italian presses cited are unclear. Saloniki-Greek Press was begun by Constantine Damaskos and the Salopoulos brothers, Constantine a pharmacist and Nicholas a physician who was also Greek Consul General in Chicago. See Andrew T. Kopan, “The Greek Press,” 167 in 161–76; Miller, The Ethnic Press in the United States. L'Italia was the most widely read Chicago newspaper of at least thirteen, and was published by the Neapolitan immigrant Oscar Durante. See Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1045 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 31.
40 “Labors Dangers (Editorial),” Dziennik Chicagoski, Mar. 10, 1893, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_4_1383 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
41 “To the Inter-Ocean. The Italians Have Done Their Duty,” L'Italia, July 21, 1894, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5425702_1_0810 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
42 “Law Enforcement (Editorial),” Skandinaven, Aug. 19, 1900. While this article did not directly discuss health per se, fire code violations causing death implicitly concerned health issues, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423969_2_0224 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
43 “The Judge Lends a Hand (Editorial),” Svenska Nyheter ,Aug. 30, 1904, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423404_1_0630 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
44 “An Appeal to Stock Yard Workers by P. Vipartas,” Naujienos, May 11, 1916, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423970_1_0402 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
45 Harry Rosenberg, “Harry Rosenberg on Packing Industry and the Stockyards,” date unknown, folder 15, box 3, Mary McDowell Collection, Chicago History Museum.
46 Many of the cited articles discuss the inequitable environmental context of health, some discuss only germs or bacilli and not necessarily their environmental context, and still others discuss both.
47 Kuzniewski, A. J. “The Polish-American Press,” 275 in Miller, The Ethnic Press in the United States, 275–90Google Scholar and Cutler, Irving, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 285Google Scholar.
48 See Hoerder, Dirk, The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s–1970s, An Annotated Bibliography: Volume 2: Migrants from Eastern and Southeastern Europe (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 698–703Google Scholar.
A note on methodology: to find newspaper sources from the online database of the Foreign Language Press Survey, I searched related keywords during the period from 1890 to 1924, which included 35,515 articles, and included here those that were the most relevant. To be sure, the information is imperfect, as Works Progress Administration (WPA) translators had discretion in terms of which articles they translated from the various ethnic newspapers, and the choice of what to translate likely reflected the translating reporter's own bias. It could also be that the unemployed WPA translators may have been more likely to come from the Jewish or Polish communities, given those communities’ large size, and thus be biased toward articles from those communities’ publications. Moreover, I may have missed relevant articles, or omitted some that were less relevant or repetitive from others located. Nonetheless, overall it is clear that certain communities were more preoccupied with health, and particularly devoted more coverage to environmental links to poor health, than others.
49 Hoerder, Dirk, The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s–1970s, An Annotated Bibliography: Volume 2: Migrants from Eastern and Southeastern Europe (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 96–97Google Scholar.
50 For population sizes and publication numbers, see Demas, Lane, “Immigrant Entrepreneurs and the Formation of Chicago's ‘Greektown’, 1890–1921,” Journal of Modern Hellenism 21–22 (2004–5): 105–55Google Scholar, 107; Fourteenth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1920, Vol. III, Population 1920, Composition and Characteristics of the Populations by States, 40, 51–52; Guglielmo, White on Arrival, 14; and Hoerder, Dirk, The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s-1970s, An Annotated Bibliography, Volume 3: Migrants from Southern and Western Europe (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 144–48Google Scholar.
51 Handbook of Settlements, 54, 1911, Russell Sage Foundation, Folder 666, Series IX, Hull House. See, for instance, Platt, “Jane Addams and the Ward Boss Revisited.”
52 Kraut, Silent Travelers, 140, 150, 218–19. On immigrant Italians and Jews both consulting doctors from their own ethnic group—which was one way they tried to reconcile their folk customs vis a vis medicine, which they brought with them from their often rural peasant backgrounds, see Kraut, Alan M., “Healers and Strangers: Immigrant Attitudes Toward the Physician in America—a Relationship in Historical Perspective,” Journal of the American Medical Association 263:13 (Apr. 4, 1990): 1807–11CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, 1808.
53 Hoerder, The Immigrant Labor Press in North America: Volume 2, 96–97 and 698–703; and Dirk Hoerder, ed., The Immigrant and Labor Press in North America, 1840s–1970s, An Annotated Bibliography, Volume 3, 144–48.
54 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 47–48 and chap. 1 in general.
55 “Our Sweat Shops,” Daily Jewish Courier, Nov. 15, 1907, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_4_1_0933 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016). The argument against sweatshops on the basis of their breeding contagious diseases was common. See, for instance, “The Sweat Shop Must Go (Editorial),” Skandinaven, Mar. 29, 1896, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423969_2_0718 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016). Newspapers also frequently argued that the authorities should step in and regulate sweatshops—see, for example, the article in the German newspaper urging the Chicago Health Department to clean the sweatshops for “humanitarian and sanitary reasons.” “Our Clothing Industry,” Abendpost, Apr. 6, 1892, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5418474_6_0171 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
56 “Workmen's Ghetto,” Daily Jewish Courier, Oct. 7, 1913, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_3_0414 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
57 “The Housing Question,” Daily Jewish Courier, Feb. 26, 1914, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_4_1_0854 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
58 “Child Labor a Letter from Mr. Prasinos,” Saloniki-Greek Press, Dec. 25, 1915, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5422062_2_1043 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
59 “In the Scrapbook, 126, of Mr. P. S. Lambros, 130 N. Wells St., Chicago, Illinois’. Association to Hold Banquet Sunday,” Chicago Evening Post, Mar. 8, 1933, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5422062_1_1397 (accessed Aug. 9, 2016).
60 In the context of the influenza epidemic of 1918–19, see Kraut, Alan M., “Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Pandemic,” Public Health Reports 12 (2010, Suppl. 3): 123–33Google Scholar.
61 Kraut, Alan M., Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994)Google Scholar, esp. chaps. 5 and 6. See, for instance, 107–8, 133, 135, 147.
62 See Greene, Daniel, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
63 Polachek, “Ghetto Market,” 3–4.
64 “Chicago Is Overcrowded and Dirty by P. Novik,” Daily Jewish Courier, Apr. 8, 1924, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_4_1_1090 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
65 ”The Sweat Shop Must Go (Editorial),” Skandinaven, Mar. 29, 1896, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423969_2_0718 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
66 “The Deterioration of Youth (Editorial),” Naujienos, Feb. 3, 1916, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423970_1_1346 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
67 Editorial, “Playground Needed,” Dziennik Zwiqzkowy Zgoda, Feb. 26, 1910, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_4_1357 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
68 “Russians in America (Correspondence and letters) from the Life of Russians in Chicago (Sketch by R.S. Special Correspondent, Serghey Heiman), Russkoye Slovo, Dec. 9, 1918, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423967_1_0390 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).”
69 “The Non-Americanization of Immigrants an Answer to Elizabeth Fracer's [sic] Article in the Saturday Evening Post,” La Fiamma, Nov. 1, 1923, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5425702_2_0210 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
70 “Our Fair City (Editorial),” Skandinaven, Feb. 20, 1892, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423969_2_0970 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016); for a similar argument in a different publication, see The Greek Quarter,” Soliniki-Greek Press, Apr. 24, 1915, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5422062_4_1019 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
71 One Swedish paper lamented the high death rate among poor American babies, arguing that “if such a death rate existed among cattle, for instance, the government would certainly be expected to spend millions of dollars” to help, and the farmer would certainly have public sympathy. “A Grave Situation,” Svenska Tribunen-Nyheter, Mar. 15, 1910, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423404_2_0371 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
72 “Child Labor,” Radnicka Straza, May 10, 1916, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5420779_2_0163 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
73 “A Girl as Mother's Helper (Woman's Section),” Dziennik Zwiqzkowy, Jan. 6, 1911, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_2_0666 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016). See, too, “A Few Words about Keeping Order in the Home,” Narod Polski, Jan. 13, 1904, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_2_0611 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
74 “Czech Women in the Stockyards,” Denni Hlasatel, Dec. 24, 1917, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5418478_2_1621 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
75 “Health and Diet (Editorial),” Jewish Standard, Sept. 5, 1908, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_2_0317 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
76 “The Crisis,” Dziennik Zwiqzkowy, Mar. 15, 1915, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_8_1126 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016). For a discussion of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mainstream Americans’ understanding of the new scientific medicine/bacteriology/microbes, see, for instance, Bert Hansen, “Popular Optimism about the Promise of the New Scientific Medicine: The Case of Rabies Vaccine” and Tomes, Nancy, “Germ Theory, Public Health Education, and the Moralization of Behavior in the Antituberculosis Crusade,” both in Warner, John Harley and Tighe, Janet A., eds., Major Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 224–33Google Scholar and 257–64. For a discussion of native-born professional and lay Americans’ association of disease germs with certain immigrant populations, see Markel, Howard, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
77 “The Era of Licenses. Editorial,” Illinois Staats-Zeitung, Dec. 3, 1917, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5418474_4_1326 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
78 “In the Balkans and Here,” Znanje, Dec. 25, 1920, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5420779_2_0908/ (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
79 “Greek Parishes of Chicago (Editorial),” Saloniki-Greek Press, July 15, 1916, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5422062_5_0841 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
80 “Foreign and American Patriotism,” Daily Jewish Courier, Mar. 8, 1914, http://flps.newberry.org/article/ 5423972_8_1_0762 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
81 “A Bad System for Workers,” Illinois Staats-Zeitung, Apr. 7, 1892, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5418474_6_0168 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
82 “In the Matter of Filth (Editorial in English),” Skandinaven, Oct. 9, 1898. http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423969_2_0965 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
83 “Our Most Important Needs by Dr. A. L. Graicunas,” Lietuva, June 11, 1909, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423970_1_1370 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016). On Graicunas, see Genevieve Poyneer Hendricks, Handbook of Social Resources of the United States (Washington, DC: The American Red Cross, 1921), 244; https://books.google.com/books?id=IXEbAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA244&lpg=PA244&dq=Graicunas+Hendricks&source=bl&ots=pPn6pIwvkS&sig=opVfvF_54oaPf7_gmx8RCghoXdA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiwwqq727nOAhXM7CYKHcwFDwkQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=Graicunas%20Hendricks&f=false (accessed Aug. 10. 2016).
84 “The Italian Medical Society for the Health of Italian Babies,” L'Italia, July 13, 1919, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5425702_1_0800 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
85 “A Word to Mothers (Correspondence),” Dziennik Chicagoski, May 8, 1897, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_4_1363(accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
86 “Medical Lectures for Polish Mothers,” July 20, 1917, Dziennik Zwiqzkowy, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_4_1324 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
87 “Jewish Charities,” Illinois Staats-Zeitung, June 13, 1900, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_9_1_0295 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
88 There is no information identifying Dr. (J. F.) Hultgen's ethnic background, though he likely he came from the ethnic German community.
89 “Health and Sanitation,” Dziennik Zwiqzkowy, Nov. 7, 1911, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423968_4_1350 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016)
90 “Dr. Sachs Demands Sanitary Conditions,” Daily Jewish Courier, July 26, 1914, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_4_1_1121 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
91 “Dr. Sachs’ Unique Accomplishment for the People by Dr. George Halperin,” Daily Jewish Courier, Apr. 21, 1916, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_10_1_1147 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
92 “Health Promotion Week begins Tomorrow in the Jewish Neighborhoods,” Daily Jewish Courier, May 9, 1919, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423972_4_1_1118 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
93 “The Necessity for Sanitary-Hygienic Information,” Krasnow Scrapbooks, date unknown, but likely Dec. 1918 or Jan. 1919, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5423967_1_0387 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016).
94 “Backwardness in ‘Croatian Unity,’” Radnicka Straza, June 4, 1913, http://flps.newberry.org/article/5420779_2_0207 (accessed Aug. 8, 2016). It is not particularly surprising that this coverage would be in a paper like Radnicka Straza, the first socialist Croatian paper in the United States. George J. Prpic and C. Michael McAdams, “The Croatian Press” in Miller, The Ethnic Press in the United States, 45–58, 47.
95 See Washington, Packing Them In.
96 See Melosi, Martin V., “Environmental Justice, Political Agenda Setting, and the Myths of History,” Journal of Policy History 12:1 (2000): 43–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
97 Ibid. Melosi explains the difference in terms of equity versus justice/rights.