The foreign-born peak, counted: 1910 and 1920

1910 · 1920

The pull: The population record prints the foreign-born of 1900 in detail — 8,601 foreign-born in a city of 35,999, 3,053 of them born in Poland and 2,402 in Germany — and of 2000, and says plainly what it could not print: the peak decades. "The 1910 and 1920 country-of-birth tables, in which the Hungarian-born would be counted," it names as the settling pull, estimating from the parish record that the Hungarian-born must number in the low thousands. Both tables are read first-hand, and the estimate holds: the Hungarian-born were the city's second immigrant people in 1910 and again in 1920, and the foreign-born crested at a quarter of the city in 1910.

1920: The Fourteenth Census, Volume III, prints the count in Table 12, "Country of Birth of the Foreign-Born White, for Counties and for Cities of 10,000 or More," in the Indiana chapter (pp. 303–304). South Bend's line: 13,391 foreign-born white in a city counted at 70,983 — 18.9 percent. By birthplace: Poland 4,229; Hungary 3,229; Germany 1,741; Belgium 667; Russia 642; Austria 585; Sweden 509; Canada 451; England 231; Italy 193; Ireland 155; Czechoslovakia 101; Greece 92; the Netherlands 74; Scotland 67; Jugo-Slavia 60; France 51; Switzerland 46; Roumania 26; Lithuania 25; Wales 3; all other countries 214. The line reconciles exactly — its parts sum to its printed total. The county line reads 17,174 foreign-born white: Poland 4,493, Hungary 3,641, Germany 2,492, and Belgium 1,606 — the Belgian figure the county's own, since Mishawaka's line in the same table counts 2,303 foreign-born white with Belgium its largest birthplace at 691. What the count says at a glance: in 1920 nearly one South Bend resident in five had been born abroad, and the two largest peoples — Poles and Hungarians together, 7,458 of the 13,391 — were more than half of the foreign-born whole.

1910: The Thirteenth Census prints the city in Table 38 of its first volume, "Foreign-Born Population by Country of Birth, in Cities Having from 25,000 to 100,000 Inhabitants: 1910" (Chapter VII, pp. 860–861). South Bend's line: total population 53,684; total foreign-born 13,443 — one resident in four. By birthplace, as the Bureau tabulated them: Germany 5,347; Hungary 3,829; Russia 1,125; Austria 576; Sweden 528; Canada 500; Belgium and Luxemburg 481; England 239; Ireland 188; Italy 121; and the remainder in small numbers. The line's great peoples reconcile to its printed total. One discipline of the table must travel with its figures: the Thirteenth Census offers no column for Poland. By the Bureau's stated rule, persons born in Poland were distributed under the three empires that held Polish land — Austria, Germany and Russia — so the Germany, Russia and Austria lines of 1910 each carry Polish-born residents whom the table cannot separate, and no Poland-born figure for 1910 exists on this basis. That is the whole reason the 1900 line can name 3,053 Poland-born (the Twelfth Census's different presentation, as the population record prints it) while 1910 cannot, and why 1920 — the first census taken after Poland's restoration — is the first that counts the city's largest people under their own country's name. The series now reads whole: 8,601 foreign-born in 1900 (23.9 percent of the city), 13,443 in 1910 (25.0 percent), 13,391 foreign-born white in 1920 (18.9 percent of a city grown by a third) — the immigrant city at its crest spans exactly the two decades the wagon and plow works were at theirs.

Sources:

1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, Vol. III, Population of States by Places (1922), Indiana chapter, Table 12, pp. 303–304 — South Bend city and St. Joseph County lines, read first-hand from the Bureau's own chapter PDF; the city line's components sum to its printed total.
2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, Vol. I (1913), Chapter VII, "Country of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population," Table 38, pp. 860–861, with the chapter's stated rule on the distribution of the Poland-born — the South Bend line read first-hand.