![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/01\/POLYGLOT-I-LOVE-YOU-CROP-823x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nEvidence that Chicago was a cosmpolitan city with many different races, nationalities and spoken languages proliferated in words and images. In 1911 a Chicago Daily Tribune article listed the languages in which one can say \u201cI Love You.\u201d \u201cFourteen Languages Beside English Spoken Here by Permanent Colonies of More than 10,000″ wrote another.\u00a0Elias Tobenkin, a Chicago Daily Tribune feature reporter whose beat was Chicago\u2019s West side, wrote that in Chicago an immigrant\u2019s ignorance of English was no obstacle to success. \u00a0It did not demote a skilled engineer to ditch-digging or a physician to street cleaning. Chicago built up large foreign colonies so rapidly \u201cthat a man from almost any civilized country can live here for years … and have no need of the English language or seldom hear a word of English spoken.\u201d \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
- \n
- Proof That Chicago Is Cosmopolitan (1898)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Marketing In The Chicago Ghetto (1901)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Representatives of Many Races (1903)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Polyglot City Of Toil (1906)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Five Nationalities In This Picture Taken In Chicago’s Babel (1908)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Chicago The Polyglot City (1909)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Chicago In First Place As Cosmopolitan City (1910)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- ‘I Love You’ (1911)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
CHICAGO A MODERN BABEL (1894-1911)<\/h3>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/05\/PROOF-CHICAGO-COSMOPOLITAN-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe literary elite in Chicago including Jane Addams, Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, and the Anglo-Jewish Israel Zangwell preferred to characterize Chicago\u2019s ethnic and racial diversity as a \u201cmelting pot\u201d or perhaps a \u201cmixing bowl\u201d deferring to the \u00a0assimilation, absorption, \u00a0and amalgamation of peoples unlike themselves. In contrast, down the streets of immigrant colonies, in the trenches on the West side, the piercing sounds of noisy and shouting voices evoked the Biblical image of confusion and the din of Babel. \u00a0As a local linguist said Chicago was \u201can unparalleled Babel of foreign tongues\u201d\u2013unparalleled compared to the claims of Constantinople, Cairo, and cities of the Orient. The multitude of diverse and unintelligible voices in the village square clashed with with the Anglo-American social vision of a harmonious “community” embodied in a mono-lingual Settlement House represented by Jane Addams. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
- \n
- Like a Big Sponge (1894)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Clans Have a Gala Day (1896)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Right Here in Chicago (1897)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Warm Debates in Streets: Public Forum Rough and Ready (1900)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Chicago The New Babel (1903)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Holiday Hailed by Babel of Joy (1907)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Swarming Square a Babel (1908)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- 30 Different Languages on Halsted Street (1911)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
LINGUISTIC CONDITION OF CHICAGO by CARL DARLING BUCK (1903)<\/h3>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/05\/REPRESENTATIVES-OF-MANY-RACES.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nCarl Darling Buck (1866-1955) became professor of Sanskrit and Indo-European comparative philology at the University of Chicago in 1892. A graduate student at Yale,\u00a0he studied classical languages abroad at Athens and Leipzig. A specialist in Italic languages and Greek dialects, he was uniquely qualified to evaluate the polyglot linguistic environment in Chicago in 1903.<\/p>\n
Linguistic conditions, he wrote, correspond to \u201cpresent racial divisions … like the Irish language is the best available test of nationality.\u201d Enumerators in the Census Reports made significant errors. 50,000 Jews, for instance, almost exclusively speaking Yiddish, a bastard form of German and Hebrew, were incorrectly listed either as Polish or Russian speakers.<\/p>\n
Chicago was the fourth largest Polish city in the world. \u00a0It had twice as many Poles as any other U.S. city, and it had the largest Greek population. Chicago was the second largest Bohemian city in the world, with three times as many Bohemians as elsewhere in the nation. There were fifteen Bohemian newspapers in the city including four dailies. Also, Chicago was home to the greatest number of speakers of Croatian, Slovakian, Lithuanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Danish populations in the country.<\/p>\n
In Chicago, Buck observed, there were some fourteen languages \u201ceach of which is spoken by 10,000 or more persons. Newspapers appear regularly in ten languages and churches services may be heard in about twenty languages.\u201d \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
- \n
- Linguistic Condition Of Chicago<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
IN BABEL: STORIES OF CHICAGO by GEORGE ADE (1906)<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2015\/12\/1263-vehicles1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nGeorge Ade (1866-1944) was born and raised in Indiana in a family of seven children. \u00a0He joined the Chicago Morning News in 1890. \u00a0It later became the Chicago Record for which he wrote the column, Stories of the Street and of the Town,\u00a0<\/em>on America\u2019s burgeoning Midwestern city.\u00a0<\/em>His work was\u00a0<\/em>richly illustrated by his lifelong friend John T. McCutcheon.<\/p>\n
Ade\u2019s subject was the everyday life and common worries of the \u201clittle\u201d man and woman\u2013average, ordinary, lower middling, colloquial-vernacular-slang speaking, arriving in the city from anywhere to make a go of it. The Stories \u201care supposed to deal, more or less truthfully, with everyday life in Chicago.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0The \u201cbig bugs,\u201d for instance, \u00a0lived behind picketed fences of private ownership and purchased propriety.<\/p>\n
The Mark Twain of strong city currents, Ade satirized, mocked, and punctured pretension and grandiosity in brief concrete dramatic episodes–three and four page column-size stories.<\/p>\n
In Ade\u2019s world, the diversity of peoples and social types glanced, careened, and bounced off each other. Urban life was \u201cincongruous,\u201d lived sideways, driven by partial understandings, missed meanings, punctuated phrases, superficial appearances, diversionary slogans, depths upon depths of intentions\u2013 the Babel of modern life.<\/p>\n
Ade’s version of the urban world was not “surreal,” with\u00a0every nationality, race, and class living inside a funnel speaking only to itself. \u00a0Always partial, never fully revealed, the imperfections of linguistic contact in vernacular slang was the urban game of\u00a0Babel. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/08\/886-PUCKS-PATENT-BIG-PROFIT-STREETCAR-Puck-Illus-1024x968.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n- \n
- In Babel: Stories of Chicago<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
TOWER OF BABEL:\u00a0POPULAR CARTOONS<\/h3>\n
![](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2017\/05\/IRISH-DIALECT.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n- \n
- Babylon<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Irish Dialect<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CHICAGO A POLYGLOT CITY (1898-1911) Evidence that Chicago was a cosmpolitan city with many different races, nationalities and spoken languages proliferated in words and images. In 1911 a Chicago Daily Tribune article listed the languages in which one can say \u201cI Love You.\u201d \u201cFourteen Languages Beside English Spoken Here by Permanent Colonies of More than<\/p>\n
- Irish Dialect<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
- Babylon<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- In Babel: Stories of Chicago<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
- Clans Have a Gala Day (1896)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
- Marketing In The Chicago Ghetto (1901)<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n