Soulard playground, with Soulard Market shed visible in the background. Municipal Institutions of St. Louis: Where to Go, What to See (St. Louis: City Plan Commission, 1914), 45.
In 1909, the City of St. Louis razed two blocks of buildings in Soulard to make way for Soulard Place, also known as the Soulard Park and Soulard Playground. Located immediately south of the Soulard Market, near Soulard’s most densely populated blocks, the new 1.9-acre park provided much-needed recreation for working-class residents. Among the most important visitors were immigrants, many of whom hailed from rural regions in southeastern Europe and presumably missed the open air. The park would become part of the built environment—along with the nearby library. bathhouse, and police station—that would help instill in immigrants an American civic consciousness.
Opened in the fall of 1910, the park was an immediate success. In just two years, it was used by 152,469 children. They played on swing sets and teeter totters, competed in baseball and net handball tournaments, and (after 1918) soaked their feet in the park’s wading pool. At night, under the electric arc lights, they could attend neighborhood dances, film screenings, and band concerts.
But like later acts of urban renewal, the establishment of the park came at a cost. As I write in The Names of John Gergen,
“Some fifty-seven buildings were razed, among them tenements, stores, a saloon, and two restaurants. Dozens of residents were displaced, as were a butcher, a tailor, a physician, a dressmaker, a poultry vendor, two fruit vendors, a dry-goods dealer, a barber, and a female grocer. Typical was the case of the Prelutskys, a Jewish family of eight who migrated from Russia in 1897 and lived in a building at the corner of Ninth and Julia Streets, where they sold notions and candy. Evicted from their shop-cum-residence, they moved to an apartment above a saloon at 1712 South Broadway, where the traffic was heavier, the air pollution thicker, and the noises louder. Without their store, they became wage earners” (The Names of John Gergen, 51).
Fortunately, in February of 1909, the St. Louis Parks Department thought to photograph the buildings that stood condemned. Two of these photographs survive, having been published in the department’s annual report. One shows a row of houses that had been subdivided into apartments: Soulard’s tenements, many inhabited by recent immigrants. The other shows Louis Prelutsky’s vacated store, still draped with a banner advertising the final clearance sale. In both photographs, the ruts in the macadam streets are clearly visible.
Buildings at the southeast corner of Ninth Street and Julia Street, slated for demolition. Annual Report of the Park Department (St. Louis: 1909).Tenements at the northwest corner of Eighth Street and Soulard Street, slated for demolition. Annual Report of the Park Department (St. Louis: 1909).
The buildings that were razed, together with the land beneath them, cost the city $170,680 –about $5,292,400 in 2020 dollars. The cost to the people who lived and worked there is unknown.
Detail from 1908 Sanborn fire insurance map depicting buildings razed to make room for Soulard Place. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
“From 124 brittle pages of schoolboy scrawl found in a dumpster in south St. Louis, Benjamin Moore has painstakingly reconstructed a world that can seem to be as alive today as it was more than 100 years ago.” Read more . . .
“A compelling new book from the University of Missouri Press is shedding light on the immigrant experience in St. Louis. The Names of John Gergen, written by Professor Emeritus Benjamin Moore of Fontbonne University, explores the universe around just one immigrant to the Gateway City over the course of the 20th century, and how the development of the built, social, economic, and religious environments of Soulard and other neighborhoods influenced the life of a man named John Gergen and countless others. At the same time, Moore’s book shatters some of our romanticism about the past in St. Louis, and just what the immigrant experience was like in what are now considered to be highly prized and historic neighborhoods.” Read more . . .
Exterior of the restored Soulard market hall, looking west, 1910. “Municipal Markets of St. Louis,” Municipal Journal and Engineer 28, no. 17 (April, 1910): 614.
Among St. Louis’s historians and preservationists, the story is well-known. Late in the afternoon of May 27, 1896, the skies above St. Louis darkened dramatically. At around 6:00 p.m., one of the deadliest tornadoes in history touched down just west of Grand Avenue. As it swept eastward towards the river, hundreds of people died and thousands of buildings collapsed or partially collapsed, including the redbrick Soulard market hall. At least five bodies were found in the market hall’s rubble—some say as many as nine.
For three decades thereafter, vendors at the Soulard market were purportedly left to improvise in an empty field, supplied only with a few “temporary buildings,”[1] until the current Soulard market hall opened in 1929. As one historian writes,
“The original Soulard Market building blew down in the Great Cyclone of 1896, the costliest tornado in US history. But even a tornado couldn’t stop the farmer’s market. Rough-and-ready sheds and stalls went up everywhere, and sellers hawked goods from the backs of trucks and wagons. The noisy, bustling market thrived this way for the next 30 years.”[2]
It is a wonderful story of hardscrabble determination in the face of disaster and deprivation. But the larger events surrounding the demise of the old Soulard market hall are considerably more complicated.
True, the Soulard market hall was heavily damaged—nearly destroyed—by the 1896 tornado. However, the front of the market hall—the oldest part—largely survived, and within a year, it had been restored. The redbrick market hall then stood for another three decades, a familiar landmark for the immigrants and other residents who lived in the surrounding tenements and worked in Soulard’s factories and shops. Like much of Soulard, it became increasingly dilapidated, but it never fell into disuse. Well into the 1920s, it was the scene of political gatherings that drew hundreds of people, even as the market trade itself moved outside, under the wagon shed or into the open yard just west of the market hall. Not until 1928 was the old market hall deliberately dismantled to make way for the new market hall that today is a celebrated feature of the Soulard cityscape.
Drawing depicting the reconstructed Soulard market hall. “Tornado Anniversary,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 27, 1897.
The original Soulard market hall was built in stages, beginning in the 1840s. From the beginning, it was a joint public-private enterprise. In 1843, an ordinance specified that the market building was to “be built under the direction of the City Engineer” and that the City would retain “the right to take possession and control, as city property, the said market house and square.”[3] The ordinance further required that the market hall be built within ten years. This first building faced Seventh Street. Its facade—with steps, a porch, brick columns, and a Roman pediment—signaled its public purpose, and it would survive as a Soulard landmark until 1928.
In 1855, a two-story addition was added to the first building’s rear. That April, several newspaper advertisements solicited in the local papers “sealed proposals for the building of an addition to the Soulard Market House. For the inspection of plans and specifications, apply at the City Engineer’s Office, Town Hall.”[4] Regrettably, the architectural plans for the second building have long since been lost or destroyed. However, we do know that the new building was completed by 1856: on January 8 of that year, the St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat advertised “a supper . . . at Soulard’s New Market Hall, for the benefit of the Bohemian Church and School” (the St. Louis Leader called the occasion a “festival and tea party”).[5]
In 1867, the City of St. Louis acquired the Soulard Market for $25,000, paid for by a special bond issue. A third building, added to the rear of the second, was erected sometime after 1868. In December of 1868, the City Council passed “an ordinance for the extension of the Soulard market building from its present western end ninety-eight feet towards Eighth street.”[6] A decade later, Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis depicted an extended market hall that ran the entire city block—from Seventh Street to Eighth Street. A lean-to covering abutted the north side of the market hall. This was the market hall that Soulard residents would know for some twenty-nine years.
Soulard market hall, circa 1874. Camille N. Dry, Pictorial St. Louis: The Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley, ed. Richard J. Compton (St. Louis: Compton, 1876).
In 1890, a 291-foot-long steel-framed free-standing shed, also called the “open market hall,” was added just south of the brick market hall. Observed one news writer,
“Soulard Market will look like a new building when the improvements now in progress are completed. A new roof is to be put on and the building touched up generally, and an addition in the way of ‘sheds’ is to be built alongside that will cost nearly $10,000. These ‘sheds,’ as they are inappropriately called, will consist of a handsome building with an iron roof resting on iron pillars and being open at the sides.”[7]
Footprint of the Soulard market hall, 1892. Whipple’s Fire Insurance Map of St. Louis, Missouri, Vol. 1 (St. Louis: A. Whipple & Co., 1892).
When the 1896 tornado struck, the sheds were largely unscathed, protected from the full force of the twister by the brick market hall that was just a few feet to the north. Moving eastward, the tornado nearly leveled the western two thirds of the market hall. The lean-to covering, where several bystanders had taken shelter, was likewise destroyed. However, the eastern third of the building—the oldest part of it—remained largely intact, its four brick pillars in the front somehow withstanding the force of winds that reached speeds in excess of 160 miles per hour.
Drawing depicting the wrecked Soulard market hall shortly after the 1896 tornado. “Tornado Anniversary,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 27, 1897.
Photographs of the destruction caused by the tornado abound, including two photographs of the collapsed western, or rear, part of the market hall. But no one bothered to photograph the market hall’s front, facing seventh street, probably because it was still standing. Within weeks after the tornado hit, vendors in the western part of the market had relocated to the market’s surviving front. One of the two extant photographs of the collapsed rear of the market hall in fact shows a banner with the words “F. Schrader removed to east end of market.” Declared one widely published contemporaneous account, “tradesmen whose shops are demolished have contrived temporary quarters under the sheds and in that portion of the old building still standing.”[8]
The partially destroyed Soulard market hall, looking east, with still-standing sheds to the right, 1896. Photograph by Julius Gross. Courtesy of the St. Louis Public Library.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 1896, as south St. Louis recovered from the disaster, residents in Soulard advocated for the market hall’s resuscitation. On August 24, a “delegation of South Side citizens called on [the city Comptroller] to plead for the rebuilding of Soulard Market.”[9] On September 19, several city officials determined to “work toward cleaning up the wreck of the Soulard Market and making the building tenable. They paid a visit to the spot and after a careful inspection, decided to have the work-house gang clear away the debris at the west end and partially restore the building.”[10] On December 23, 1896, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen passed ordinance no. 18,725. Its wording speaks to a building that was ravaged yet redeemable, with the estimated cost of repair coming to $5000. (It proved to be an overestimate; the winning bid for the repairs was $3900.) The ordinance authorized the Board of Public Improvements to reduce the size of the building by a third, thereby restoring it to the size it had been prior to 1869. “The site of the western [the rear and newest] building [was] to be leveled off and paved with brick, the eastern [the oldest and front] building to be repaired, the central building to be rebuilt.” A granitoid floor was to be added to the eastern building.[11]
Rebuilding and repairs went quickly. Less than a year after the tornado, the market hall was up and running again. It now consisted of not three but “two buildings, each 32 by 60 feet, placed end to end and separated by a brick-paved passage which permits traffic to cross the lot to the wagon shed south of the buildings. Both buildings are of brick with metal roofs. The one facing seventh street, which is the main entrance, contains a middle passage with stalls on each side, the division between which is indicating by a number of wooden box posts extending from the floor to the ceiling.”[12] The rebuilt building behind it –which before had been the middle building–was now only one story, and the roof of both buildings was the same height.
Footprint of the restored Soulard market hall, 1908. Insurance Maps of Saint Louis, Missouri, Vol. 1 (New York: Sanborn Map, 1908).
Ten years later, in May 1907, $550 was spent on “repairing brick work, tuckpointing, and staining Old Market House; new sash cords for windows; repairing wooden ceiling; painting inside walls and ceiling; new galvanized downspout for south side, and new locks for office and closet doors.”[13] The investment indicates that civic authorities regarded the rebuilt structure as something a good deal more than temporary. As one historical-minded civic booster wrote, “Soulard Market is to-day the same as it was many years back: the same as regards the haggling over viands and the gesticulating which invariably accompanies the business transactions of the Teuton. The market-hall shows distinctive signs of age, but despite the mutations wrought by time, its clumsy architecture is with us still.”[14]
Even so, the market hall’s long-term viability was threatened by vendors’ preference for the cheaper spaces outdoors and by an increasing number of grocery stores in the neighborhood. In 1902 and 1903, municipal officials proposed using the hall as a public bathhouse, but nothing came of it, because contractors never submitted an acceptable bid; the bathhouse instead opened in 1909 on the other side of Seventh Street, across from the market hall. In 1910, one national periodical lamented the dismal state of the market hall, foreshadowing the criticism of the aging structure that would eventually lead to its replacement. “It is the least sanitary of the city markets and the least remunerative. But four stalls are now rented, and these do not have an attractive appearance.”[15]
I have found nine photographs of the market hall (or parts of it) that were taken between 1897, when the market was rebuilt, and 1928, when it was torn down. Two date from 1910. One of these photographs depicts the original market hall building’s interior, photographed looking east, towards the entrance. Though the emptiness is apparent, the windows and inflowing light are impressive. An accompanying photograph (reproduced at the top of this blog post) depicts the facade and north wall of the market hall, with a horse and wagon parked on the macadam street out front.
Interior of the restored Soulard market hall, looking east, 1910. “Municipal Markets of St. Louis,” Municipal Journal and Engineer 28, no. 17 (April, 1910): 614.
Two photographs by Richard W. Lemen, both made in May of 1919, document the outdoor festivities that accompanied the reopening of the market following the Great War and the influenza pandemic. The first photograph shows but a glimpse of the market hall’s western gable. The second, badly faded, shows the market hall’s rear building, decorated with bunting and a flag. It appears massive above the pedestrians below.
Soulard Market, 1919. Photograph by Richard W. Lemen. Courtesy of the St. Louis Public Library. Soulard Market, 1919. Photograph by Richard W. Lemen. Courtesy of the St. Louis Public Library.
Another photograph, published in 1923, depicts the market hall’s antebellum front. Once again, the size of the market hall relative to the bystanders is impressive. It is a reminder that the redbrick hall was a fixture for tens of thousands of people who visited the market between 1897 and 1928.
Perhaps the best representation of the old Soulard market hall is a World War I-era ink drawing by Archibald B. Chapin, published in the St. Louis Republic. In the foreground, the fishmonger’s stand figures prominently; the market shed peeks out from behind the market hall. The spire of Ss. Peter and Paul Church is visible in the background.
Drawing by Archibald B. Chapin. St. Louis Republic, 1917-1919. Courtesy of the St. Louis Public Library.
But the market hall’s days were numbered, largely due to a growing recognition that it was obsolete. Progressive thought and activism in the early 1900s emphasized sanitation and cleanliness. In the 1920s, a love of modernity reinvigorated these values. As the oldest of St. Louis’s four public markets, Soulard Market would not evade censure. In February 1923, the Consumers League of St. Louis took out a full-page ad in the Post-Dispatch calling for support of a bond issue to redevelop St. Louis’s markets. “Sanitary markets mean clean foods,” averred the advertisement. “Our present public markets are worn out and out of date. . . . Think of it! All old buildings where sanitation and drainage is [sic] very poor. Are we asleep? Let’s build new sanitary markets.”[16] The campaign succeeded. Later that year, the Board of Aldermen approved a $1,125,000 bond issue to fund the rebuilding of St. Louis’s markets. In 1927, $170,000 of the money was appropriated for rebuilding Soulard market; an additional $97,000 was drawn from a bond issue for parks and playgrounds.
To make way for the new market hall, the old Soulard market was dismantled. How the razing was carried out—whether by bulldozer, wrecking ball, or sledgehammer—is lost to history. The exact date of the market’s demise is also unknown. In the local press, there was not so much as an announcement, only a passing observation, in May of 1929, that the original “building was wrecked last year to make way for the new architecture.”[17]
Today, it is hard to imagine a preservation-oriented community standing for the market hall’s demolition. After all, the front building of the market hall, which by 1928 was nearly eighty years old, had seen more than its share of history. In 1852, newspapers across the country had reported that German immigrants had fired upon nativists casting ballots at the market; “the Soulard Market House was entirely riddled.”[18] By 1855, it had housed a mission Sunday School that distributed “tracts and other missionary propaganda,” sometimes aimed at converting the neighborhood’s Jews.[19] In 1861, it had been the command center for a regiment of Home Guards stationed on the market grounds. 1862, it had been the Second Ward’s headquarters for enrollment in the Union Army. In 1865, the market hall had become the command center for Union troops billeted on the market grounds. In 1877, to serve Soulard’s poor, the Soulard Market Mission had moved into the market hall and had remained there until the 1896 tornado struck. “For a long time attendance at Sabbath-school averaged from 800 to 900, and frequently more than 1300 were present.”[20] Even after the tornado and nearly until the moment of its demise, the market hall was the scene of political gatherings. In early March of 1921, for example, Grace Semple, chair of the Republican Women’s Club of St. Louis, addressed some 350 Republicans in the hall; later that month, Mayor Kiel addressed a crowd of a thousand.
And so the question remains: why has the restored market building—the one that stood between 1897 and 1928—been largely omitted in contemporary accounts of Soulard, especially when so many photographs and drawings testify to its existence? And why have historians and civic authorities repeatedly asserted that the original market hall was destroyed by the tornado in 1896 instead of by the builders of the new market hall? Is the oversight only accidental, or might it represent a more significant lapse in St. Louis’s collective memory?
Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the opening of the new market hall was a bright spot in an otherwise dim period in the history of the surrounding neighborhood. Throughout the 1920s, the neighborhood steadily lost residents to newer housing developments south of Arsenal Street, including such neighborhoods as Bevo Mill and Princeton Heights. Then, in the 1950s, the building of the Third Street Interregional Highway (later Interstate 55) and the razing of most of the historic buildings east of Seventh Street, including the Soulard Bath House, resulted in the destruction of a considerable part of the neighborhood. The market itself was now hemmed in by the highway to the west and the Seventh Street artery to the South. By the late 1960s, the neighborhood would be termed by at least two sociologists as a “white slum.”[21]
As the Soulard neighborhood’s decline gave way to decay, the new Soulard Market Hall stood out because of its beauty and vibrance. Early efforts by preservationists understandably centered on the new market’s vitality. The successful application to list the Soulard Market on the National register of Historical Places, which was submitted in 1972, celebrated the new market building while obscuring the fate of the old one:
“The Soulard Market is the most significant business in the neighborhood. An earlier Soulard Market building was destroyed in the tornado of May, 1896, and for several years thereafter the market operated in a variety of temporary quarters at the present location between Seventh, Ninth, Carroll, and Lafayette avenues. The current Soulard Market building was constructed by the City of St. Louis in 1928-29 and is a large structure of Italianate design. The central portion contains a gymnasium and a community center, and market activities are conducted primarily in the long flanking wings.”[22]
Early preservationists’ celebration of the new Soulard market building was aided by the fact that it had an antique appearance. The architecture of its south entrance echoed the Florentine foundling hospital designed by Filippo Brunelleschi in the early 1400s. Perhaps it was easier to forget the erasure of the old market hall when its replacement also evoked a sense of history. In any case, the new market hall was (and is) one of the jewels of Soulard. And why dim the luster of a civic jewel by pointing out that its existence was predicated on the destruction of another?
Furthermore, contemporary historians and preservationists may simply find it too painful to recognize that the old market hall was dismantled deliberately. Granted, more beautiful buildings in St. Louis have been deliberately destroyed, and with far less reason. And the new market hall has been a success story on many levels, helping to stabilize the surrounding neighborhood by drawing attention to its history and character. But when the old market hall was dismantled in 1928, an important connection to the past was severed. For all eight decades of its existence, it was a place where commerce, politics, and religion intersected visibly and sometimes violently. In light of its history, we are poorer without it, and its absence should serve as a reminder that much of what we choose to preserve or otherwise celebrate often stands upon the grave of something that came before.
East end of Soulard Market, with side view of the market hall entrance. St. Louis Public Library Annual Report, May 1, 1922 to April 30, 1923 (St. Louis: 1923), 93.
Notes
[1] U.S. Department of the Interior, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form,” Soulard Neighborhood Historic District, submitted by Stephen J. Raiche, June 20, 1972.
[2]History Happens Here (blog of the Missouri Historical Society), “Soulard Market’s Unlikely Survival Story,” by Andrew Wanko, posted May 9, 2019.
[3] Ordinance No. 1300, approved November 15, 1843, The Revised Ordinances of the City of Saint Louis (St. Louis: Chamber & Knapp, 1850), 276.
[4] Advertisement, Daily Missouri Democrat, April 25, 1855.
[5] Advertisement, Daily Missouri Democrat, January 8, 1856; advertisement, The Leader, January 5, 1856.
[6] “City Council Proceedings,” Missouri Daily Republican, December 19, 1868.
[7] “New Soulard Market,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 10, 1890.
[8] “Estimates of the Losses Inflicted upon the City of St. Louis by the Cyclone,” Los Angeles Herald, May 31, 1896.
[9] “Municipal Matters,” St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, August 25, 1896.
[10] “To Restore Soulard Market,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 19, 1896.
[11] Ordinance No. 18,725, approved December 23, 1896. I am grateful to Stuart Baker for retrieving a copy of this ordinance from the archives of the City of St. Louis.
[12] Charles Claude Casey, “Municipal Markets of St. Louis,” Municipal Journal and Engineer 28, no. 17 (April 1910): 614.
[13] “Journal of the Board of Public Improvements,” St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, May 11, 1907.
[14] Philip Skrainka, St. Louis: its History and Ideals (St. Louis: [Lambert-Deacon-Hull printing co.,] 1910), 68.
[15] Casey, “Municipal Markets of St. Louis,” 614.
[16] Advertisement, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 4, 1923.
[17] “New Soulard Market, Which Cost 267,000, to Open Thursday,” St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, May 5, 1929.
[18] “St. Louis Riots!,” The Weekly Pentagraph (Bloomington, IL), April 21, 1852.
[19] Karl M. Vetsberg, “Reminiscences of a Former St. Louisan,” The Jewish Voice, November 6, 1914.
[20] “Presbyterianism in St. Louis, Missouri,” The Herald and Presbyter 78:11 (March, 1907): 10.
[21] William L Yancey and Lee Rainwater, “Problems of Ethnography in the Urban Underclass,” in Pathways to Data: Field Methods for Studying Ongoing Social Organizations, ed. Robert W. Habenstein, (Chicago: Aldine, 1970) 245–69.
[22] U.S. Department of the Interior, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form.”
In our own era, recent immigrants and refugees sometimes endure unfavorable comparisons to earlier immigrants, including those who migrated from southeastern Europe to Soulard in the early 1900s. Back then, it is sometimes claimed, immigrants embraced their new homes while eagerly seeking to become English-speaking Americans. Now, so the story goes, the melting pot no longer works, and immigrants’ retention of separate identities poses a threat to American culture.
But this purported contrast between then and now founders upon the evidence. Consider, for example, the experience of librarians at the Soulard branch library in south St. Louis, who regarded Americanization of the neighborhood’s immigrants a key part of their mission, especially through the teaching of English.
Romanian immigrants in a YMCA-sponsored English class at the Soulard branch library, circa 1918. Gateway Region Young Men’s Christian Association (S0473).1503. The State Historical Society of Missouri, Photograph Collection.
The Soulard branch library was opened in 1909 in large measure to serve and thereby Americanize the neighborhoods’ foreign population–a goal that met with limited success, especially among adult immigrants. Since about 1900, Soulard’s new arrivals from southeastern Europe, who numbered in the tens of thousands, had adapted the languages and customs of their homelands to their new industrial environment by forming new families and communities that rested upon shared ethnic identities. Their sheer numbers made it possible for them to retain their ways of speaking and relating, not only in their homes but also in their churches, workplaces, and saloons. After the U.S. entered the war, official and popular hostility to “enemy aliens,” including Germans and Hungarians from the Banat, deepened immigrants’ resistance to being changed. Official restrictions on “enemy aliens” legitimized xenophobia; immigrants, in turn, became increasingly suspicious of efforts to Americanize them.
A 1917 account by St. Louis librarian Margery Quigley sheds light on the frustration of Soulard’s patriotic librarians, especially Josephine Gratiaa, head of the Soulard branch library. It also offers tantalizing glimpses of the contempt for Americanization felt by Soulard’s immigrants, who remained strongly connected to their “old world” families and identities and who knew first-hand the value of their language and customs to their survival and self respect. Noted Quigley with apparent bemusement:
“Several classes have been opened at different branches to teach these women English, but they have evaporated in a few weeks. The women are sensitive, and suspicious as well, especially since the war began. They are afraid that they will be arrested as spies. Miss Gratiaa, of the Soulard Branch, reports that no foreign adult will consider having his picture taken in any position in the library, even by a friendly and plausible library assistant, for he is thoroughly convinced that it is some sort of war-trap. Even before the war, the women preferred the safety of home to the invasions of an unknown social world. One group of Hungarian women was dragooned by a social worker and a steamship agent’s wife into organizing to study English. The women came to the library once and stared for an evening at the charmeuse dress and fresh complexion of the debutante who was their teacher. The next week they went on strike without warning and allowed the instructor and her protector to twirl their thumbs until the library’s closing time.”
Gratiaa shared Quigley’s frustration. In 1918, she speculated that “there is certainly an insidious propaganda working among the foreign born, which is preventing, as far as possible, their participation in any of the means of Americanization.” She further noted that “many English classes among foreigners at near-by factories have had to be abandoned for non-attendance.”
Even as they encountered stiff resistance, St. Louis’s proponents of Americanization went to great lengths to document their efforts, of which they were clearly very proud. Dozens of surviving photographs from the early twentieth century–many of them carefully posed–depict immigrants studying English in classes sponsored by the YMCA, including classes taught at the Soulard branch library. In 1919, Gratiaa published an monograph titled Making Americans: How the Library Helps, in which she extolled “the importance of the Library in any scheme of Americanization.” Central was the library’s role in teaching English to immigrants–either indirectly, by providing books in English, or directly, by offering English classes. Wrote Gratiaa, “the war revealed the necessity of teaching English to all our alien population. This is imperative not only because of temporal advantages such as the increase of industrial efficiency and the prevention of accidents, but also because until the foreigners learn English, they can never completely understand us or become a real part of American life.” To her credit, Gratiaa cautioned that “no attempt must be made to prevent the use of other languages, because we believe that the native heritage of the foreigner must not be lost.” But her emphasis was clear: “English is the language of this country, and no immigrant is ever completely Americanized until he can use it.”
Immigrants in a YMCA-sponsored English class at the Soulard branch library, 1923. Gateway Region Young Men’s Christian Association (S0473).1577. The State Historical Society of Missouri, Photograph Collection.
English, of course, would become the preferred language of immigrants’ children, who grew up hearing it and speaking it on the playgrounds, the schools, and the libraries, including the Soulard branch library. (In February, 1917, the St. Louis Star aptly described the children’s reading room of the Soulard Branch library as “the real melting pot of St. Louis . . . where children of all nationalities mingle and read books of their common foster parent, America.”) But among the parents–that is, among adult immigrants themselves–English was never as highly valued as the proponents of Americanization fervently wished. After all, why would any self-respecting immigrant choose to speak and write badly in a new language when the old one worked perfectly well–especially in the homes, the dance-halls, and the saloons? It was a hard lesson in rejection for the staff at the Soulard branch library who desperately wanted their adult clients to use English.
Children watching a “movie show” in the auditorium of the Soulard branch library. Margery Quigley, Where Neighbors Meet: An Account of the Use of Assembly and Club Rooms in the St. Louis Public Library (St. Louis: 1917), 7.
In 2004, I stumbled upon the World War I-era schoolwork that would lead to writing The Names of John Gergen. The book focuses on the author of the schoolwork, an immigrant orphan who lived in the working-class neighborhoods of south St. Louis and who died young in 1935. Coincidentally, shortly after I found the schoolwork, I began work on the Bosnia Memory Project, which is dedicated to documenting St. Louis’ Bosnian community, the largest outside of Bosnia. Over the past fifteen years, my colleagues and I have recoded hundreds of oral histories of Bosnian refugees in an effort…
Very much looking forward to an online book discussion at Left Bank Books. Kasi Williamson, Associate Dean for Arts and Sciences at Fontbonne University, will be joining me. For more information, visit their webpage and Facebook page for the event.
John Gergen and his foster mother, Rose Gergen, probably in a St.Louis park, date unknown. Photographer unknown. Note the greenhouse in the background.
The Names of John Gergen is a social history and biography, not a work of genealogy. Still, family relationships were important to the formation of John’s identity and the cohesion of the Banat Swabian community that he was a part of. I have linked below a genealogical chart that shows the relationships constituting John Gergen’s extended family.
A caveat:
When researching and analyzing immigrant communities, genealogy has limited value–especially its traditional forms, which emphasize ancestry and lines of descent. After all, older generations of extended families seldom migrated, nor did immigrants often inherit property in the homeland. Futhermore, the second generation–that is, the generation born in the host country–typically developed identities rooted in the culture of the host country, so that they were culturally distinct from their forebears. Consequently, the most important relationships to develop among immigrants were within the cohort: brothers, sisters, siblings-in-law, cousins, and friends.
Later, I’ll post about a new model of family relationships that is more adept at explaining what I call familial communities–the extensive network of families that emerged among Banat Swabian immigrants in St. Louis and other industrial American cities. For now, the attached diagram may be helpful in navigating the familial reltionships that appear in the book.
A preview of The Names of John Gergen is now available here on Google Books. The official release date was delayed a little by the pandemic and by the bad weather in February. It will now ship on March 12.
Also, until August 30, the University of Missouri Press is offering a 25% discount. When ordering, enter code NJG21. That will bring the cost down to $37.50–a good price for a cloth-bound book of this size.
Immigrant Identities in St. Louis, 1903-1935 