Newberry Library spotlights 'invisible labor' of Chicago immigrants

Immigrants are often hidden. Living in neighborhoods you don't visit, doing unheralded jobs. A pint of strawberries lists the origin of the fruit but not of who picked it. Your hospital bill lists every procedure but ignores where the medical staff tending to you came from. We will never really know how vital immigrants are to our country until the incoming administration starts plucking them off the street and deporting them. Assuming Donald Trump does what he promises, always an iffy proposition.

This is nothing new. If you look at old postcards in a thrift store, nothing says, "Made by German immigrants in Chicago." Beautifully bound books don't credit, "Sewn by Bohemians."

Which was a big problem for Jill Gage, custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing at the Newberry Library — her title, in the vernacular, means the person who wrangles the library's extensive collection of posters, handbills, catalogs, books, typefaces and other printed material, which includes bus tickets and sheet music.

When she set out to curate the latest exhibition at the Newberry, “Making an Impression: Immigrant Printing in Chicago,” she started by looking at what the Newberry doesn't have.

"I wanted to think about what we don't see in the collection so much," she told me, when we met to walk through the small but significant show at the library's Hanson Gallery. "I wanted to poke at the collection and think about printing from a different angle."

Some people might know Chicago is the former printing capital of the nation, between R.R. Donnelley churning out Yellow Pages and Rand McNally making maps. But there was also Curt Teich, who came from Germany for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and noticed a need for postcards.

"If you had to think about the most important printer in the history of Chicago, I would say Curt Teich," Gage said. "He really brought the postcard industry to the U.S. It really opened up this huge part of American culture."

The Newberry has 3 million postcards, and the Teich collection includes fascinating production material, plus the family archive, including their all-important citizenship papers. Finding Teich was easy; other contributors to Chicago printing, not so much.

"They're hidden," she said. "I wanted to think about what you can't see. I'm obsessed by what I call 'invisible labor.'"

Some immigrants were found hiding in plain sight. Chicago is where catalog sales began, with Montgomery Ward, building a highway of commerce that leads directly to the Amazon packages piled on your doorstep. All Gage had to do was to look closely at catalogs.

"I was astounded when I looked at the early Sears catalogs and realized they had instructions for ordering in three languages — English, German and Swedish — because it was for immigrants," she said. "They were dealing with a population of readership that didn't necessarily speak English."

Nor trusted enterprises that involved telling Sears their address.

"They had to explain mail order to people who didn't know what mail order was and were new to the United States," she said. "They had the most amazing instructions — like, 'Don't be afraid of the mailman.'"

A reminder that when immigrants are being given the bum's rush out of the country, we are ejecting not just workers but consumers, too.

Finding hard-working Germans and Slovaks and Hungarians did not mean Gage's job was finished.

"I wanted to press on that history, in general of printing, but also why we collected," she said, addressing what she called "archival silences." "What does it mean when you're researching cultural history in Chicago and you literally can't find anything? When I looked at the collection, this was a hard exhibition to curate."

Take Chicago's Spanish-speaking community. They're the center of national attention right now. But few institutions like the Newberry felt the need to retain Hispanic newspapers for posterity. Gage ended up turning to artists to fill the void. She found a 2018 print of the mastheads of the city's Latino papers, created by Nicole Marroquin, "Latinx Newspapers of Chicago" which the artist considered "a call to arms for cultural institutions to widen their collecting scope and to make Latinx history more accessible."

A historical exhibition should connect to life today, and not just be some random aspect of the past dredged up and presented for no particular purpose. The presidential election occurring five weeks before her show opened, Gage couldn't have known the environment it would open into. Almost a twisted sort of lucky break, I suggested, making the exhibition even more relevant than she could have imagined when she began working on it.

"Unfortunately well-timed," she agreed.