Madison Area History Article

[AJE]

This article reposted from the Madison Area Library Website.
The Changing Faces of Innocence: Wisconsin's Immigrant Children

The Changing Faces of Innocence: Wisconsin's Immigrant Children

Before Wisconsin attained statehood in 1848, the frontier territory was already a natural home for American Indian children as well as early English, Irish, French, German, Scandinavian and Swiss settlers. Immigration decreased during the Civil War, and after it was concluded, Polish and other Eastern European children came over with their families in increasing numbers, well into the next century.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Italian children joined the wave of emigration to Wisconsin rural towns and cities. After the Second World War, immigrant children increasingly came from Latin America and Asia.

The period from 1975 has witnessed an intensification of this trend, particularly with the thousands of Hmong refugee children who escaped the communist regime in Laos and refugee camps in Thailand to immigrate to Wisconsin and other areas in the United States. Communities in Wisconsin formed in Milwaukee, Green Bay, Wausau, Eau Claire, Madison and Appleton. Wisconsin now has the second largest Hmong population in the United States after California.

Today, on the streets of Madison and Milwaukee and on the playground, children can be heard speaking Russian. The arrival of succeeding ethnic groups has meant that the appearance, language and cultural heritage of immigrants has changed over the course of time, just as definition of who is native has been transformed throughout the state's history.

Immigrant youth have settled in Wisconsin as young entrepreneurs, refugees and adopted children. The driving force behind emigration has differed by ethnic group and historical circumstance. In the early years, Amish farmers, English Dissenters and Free-thinkers embarked on a journey which led to Wisconsin in order to practice their religion freely and to enjoy civil liberties.

Immigrant families have also sought a better life for their children based on economic difficulties in their homeland which included high taxation and land mortgage foreclosures as well as poor working and living conditions. Crop failures in Switzerland in 1845 prompted the Swiss, for example, to emigrate and settle in New Glarus and surrounding townships. Faced with a similar situation in the late 1840s, the Irish came to Wisconsin and settled in Erin Prairie and in Washington, Ozaukee, Lafayette, Brown and Sheboygan counties. Eastern European Jews sought refuge from pogroms in Eastern Europe around the turn of the century, only later to be joined by European Jews escaping or surviving Nazi campaigns of racial persecution.


This picture depicts three shy Ukrainian sisters on route to the United States from a displaced persons camp in Poland, where the children were born after the Second World War. Through the Church World Services, a Wisconsin resident sponsored this family uprooted by war, and the family was given a farmhouse in Woodruff, WI.



In addition to factory jobs, many families chose to settle in Wisconsin because of the state's farmlands, which were reported to be vast and inexpensive.


Many immigrant families depended on their children, relying on the speed with which children learned English, but also on their children's earning capabilities. Rural and urban children were employed in various sectors of the economy, from side jobs like peddling gum and newspapers or shining shoes to working in textile millls, factories and farms. In cities throughout Wisconsin, immigrant children could be found working in the brewing and textile industries, as well as in workshops, bakeries and butcher shops which were often family owned. In mid nineteenth century Milwaukee, young girls often went into domestic service at the age of eleven or twelve. From 1870-1900, the number of children between the ages of ten and fifteen who were employed more than doubled from 750,000 to 1,750,000, and many of these children were of course immigrants. In rural Wisconsin, immigrant children and succeeding generations of children assisted their parents on the family farm.

Madison Public Library