Education by Compulsion: Solving the "Immigrant Problem" in Nineteenth-Century Chicago

For most of the nineteenth century, the urban elite believed that immigration was the city’s
great misfortune. Immigrants were blamed for introducing disease, illiteracy, criminality and
radical politics into the urban environment, and Progressives argued that the state and its organ
in the public schools had the responsibility to teach immigrants how to fit into America. This
paper argues that the movement for compulsory schooling legislation was perceived as a solution to the ‘immigrant problem.’ With evidence from Chicago and the Illinois legislature, I suggest that by the late- 1880s the movement for compulsory schooling was guided by elites’ desire to control and Americanize immigrants through the assimilatory power of public schooling.
Drawing on articles in the foreign language press, this article shows how immigrants seems
to have perceived compulsory schooling as a state project to Americanize their children,
and how they negotiated the tension of both wanting to see their children educated and to
protect them from an assimilationist state. Many immigrants turned to Catholic schools,
which they believed more carefully preserved students’ ethnic culture, but for those
parents who kept their children in public schools compulsory schooling was a policy
perceived not as promoting the teacher profession or as child care for the working class, as
other historians have suggested, but as an assimilationist project directed at immigrants.