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.
The story of John Gergen and his fellow immigrants from a region and empire that no longer exists was almost never told. Moore was walking around the streets of his South City neighborhood and came across a dumpster filled with the detritus of another gut rehab. His expert eye found on top of the pile what was probably the oldest stratum of habitation from the house: the schoolwork of a young boy named John Gergen. The precious scraps of deteriorating line paper held some of the usual repetitive handwriting exercises that American students are familiar with today. Other pages held fascinating essays that gave a window into the life of the young immigrant. And still other pages showed math equations that betrayed the strong possibility of serious learning disabilities. A young John Gergen produced nonsensical answers to long multiplication and addition questions.
As Moore dived into the life of this mysterious man who is buried in a St. Louis cemetery, he soon discovered that Gergen emigrated from a region of Europe that few Americans have ever heard of: the Banat. Now split up between Romania, Hungary, and Serbia, the Banat once held a sizable ethnic German population. Drawn by large amounts of unsettled land left behind by conquests of former Ottoman Empire territory, German immigrants created a community far from their homeland in northern Europe. With first the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, and then the forced movement of ethnic Germans from southeastern Europe after World War II, the memory of any Germans ever having lived in the Banat is rapidly fading.
“It’s hugely important, and it’s a chapter that really hasn’t gotten much attention,” Moore says. “There are many people in St. Louis descended from Southeastern Europe. They formed the core of the South City working class up until 1914. They came from southern Hungary, Serbia, Croatia. Many came with the intention of returning and buying farmland in their home country. They were very much working class. They were very much interested in bettering their life and not leaving a cultural mark.”
Many of these immigrants came from a German-dominated empire into a city that was likewise dominated economically and culturally by German industrialists and landlords. Even the churches they initially worshipped at in Soulard were German-language national churches of the Roman Catholic archdiocese. Only much later did Croat, Hungarian, or Slovak national churches open.
But to turn to our figure of John Gergen, perhaps what is so perfect about our subject is the sheer randomness of his story. Literally plucked from a dumpster in 2004, he is an Everyman in many ways. Moore’s journey of discovery of this immigrant lost to history was long and arduous.
“John Gergen remained a mystery for a very long time,” Moore says. “There were years where I didn’t work on him at all.”
Moore continues: “This guy was a nobody. He’s the kind of person who’s completely erased from history. I wanted to see his world as much as possible from his point of view. I tried to understand neighborhoods, families, and just the general working class.”
Gergen’s father came first, and died after an accident led to septicemia. His wife and three of his children migrated a month later. Moore is still unsure whether they knew he was dead.
“It’s inconceivable to me that she didn’t know he was dead,” Moore says. “She immediately gave her children away. She gave [John] away and started a new family in Chicago, becoming pregnant soon after arriving.”
Gergen took the name of his adopted family in his newly adopted country, thus giving us the title of the book.
But life was still difficult with Gergen’s new family. He lived in what was oftentimes dirty and unsanitary conditions, in cramped tenements crowding the streets close to the river.
“Soulard was such a substandard place at the time,” Moore says. “There was plenty of incentive to leave Soulard.”
Hence the story then turns to how immigrants in Soulard left the crowded “inner city” to new suburbs such as Gravois Park, and then after that, Bevo. Before long, the natural tendency to move further west took them to St. Louis County. Gergen never married due the prejudice against his tuberculosis diagnosis, and soon even descendants of his own family began to forget he even existed.
Ultimately, perhaps what is most valuable and insightful about the book is its window into a St. Louis that has been forgotten. It’s one that many of us—both city boosters and detractors—have wanted to forget. Today, the formerly crowded, filthy, and dangerous neighborhood of Soulard, which immigrants worked for generations to escape, is now an expensive, charming community that features prominently in tourist brochures and publicity campaigns for St. Louis. One could only imagine the reaction of city leaders of the late 19th century if they could see the cramped immigrant slum they tried so hard to “reform”—and then their successors in the mid-20th century attempted to destroy—now so highly prized. With the story of just one man, Moore shows us that the journey of our city is so much more complicated than we can imagine.
