Chicago History | Spring and Summer 1988

____

CHICAGO HrsTORY -

T_h _ e_M _ agazine of the Chicago Historical Sociery___

EDITOR

Spring and Summer 1988

R USSEi.i . L EWIS

Volume XVII, Number 1 and 2

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Mr.c Moss ASSISTANT EDITOR ALF.TA ZAK

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

CONTENTS

MAR GARET W EI.SH

DESIGNER

4

PHOTOGRAPHY

jAY CRAWFORD

24

N K.RZYSKOWSKI

Copy right 1988 by th e Ch icago Hi stori ca l Society C lar k Street at I ort h Avenue Chicago , IL 606 14

46 62

Cover : Photograph of.j ohn F Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic .\'ational Convention , Los Angeles, CA, by Gany IVfnogmnd. Copyright © The F:stateof Gany Winogrand.

Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Staging the Avant-Garde

J. H ECHT

"Welcome to Chicago" D AVID FARBER

78

Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appear ing in this issu e a rc available in th e Ch icago I listo rica l Society's Publi ca tions Office.

J. GARROW

STUART

ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal a re abstracted and indexed in H istorical Abstracts and America: H istory and Lift.

"I March Because I Must" DAVID

EDfTORIAL INTERN jOII

Big Table GERALD BRE NNAN

B11.1. VA N N!MWEGE N

August 1968 STEF LEINWOHL

DEPARTMENTS 3

From the Editor

106

Yesterday's City

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Ch icago Historica l Society OFFICERS Philip D. Block III , Chairman Bryan S. Reid,Jc, Treasurer Ph ilip W. Hummer, Vice-Chairman Mrs. Newton N. Minow, Secretary Richard H. Need ham, Vice-Chairman Stewart S. Dixon , Immediate Past Chairman Ellsworth H. Brown , Presidentand Director

TRUSTEES Phi lip D. Block III Laurence Booth Mrs. Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon Phil ip W. Hummer Edgar D.Jannotta Ph ilip E. Kelley W. Pau l Krauss Mrs. Broo ks McCormick

William J. McDonough Robert Meers Mrs. ewton . Minow Richard J--1.Needham Potter Palmer Brya n S. Re id , Jr. Edward Byron Sm ith,Jr. Dempsey J. Travis Mrs. Abra Prentice Wi lkin

LIFE TRUSTEES Bowen Blair Cyrus Colter John T. McCutcheon ,Jr. Andrew McNally III Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Gardner J--1.Stern Theodore Tieken

HONORARY TRUSTEES Eugene Sawyer, Acting Mayor, City of Chicago Wil liam C . Bartholomay , President, ChicagoPark District

The Chicago H istorica l Society is a privately endowed institution devoted to collecting, preserving , and interpreting the history of the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, and selected areas of American history.

It must look to its members and friends for continuing financia l support. Contributions to the Soc iety are tax-deductible, and approp1;ate recognition is accorded major gifts.

Membership Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's goals and activities. Classes of annual membership and dues are as follows: Individual, S30; Family, 35; tudent/Senior Citizen, $25. Members receive the Society's quarterly magazine, Chicago History; a quarterly newsleuer, Past-Times; a quarterly Ca/.endarlisting Society programs; invitations to special events; free admission to the building al all times; reserved seats at films and concerts in our auditor ium; and a 10 percent d iscount on books and other merchandise purchased in the Museum Store.

Hour s The Museum is open daily from 9:30 1U!. to 4:30 P.~!.; Sunday from 12:00 :-IOON Lo 5:00 P.M. The Library and Man uscripts Co llection are open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. All other research collections are open by appointment The Soc iety is closed on Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving days.

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Chicago Historical Society

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FROM THE EDITOR

?

Nineteen sixty-eight was a volatile year in America. The nation was divided; as the chasm widened between youth and the establishment, between hawk and dove, between black and white, confrontation was inevitable. The country teetered on the brink of chaos when oncerevered values and traditional authority were challenged. Revolution was in the air; called for in song and celebrated in dance , it became the rallying cry of campus dissidents and street demonstrators. At the Chicago Democratic National Convention, opposing forces clashed head on. The convention marked a turning point in our history and has become symbolic of those troubled times.

Some Chicagoans would rather forget the battles between protesters and police in August of 1968, but images of defiant demonstrators being Maced and tear gassed on Mayor Daley's orders are fixed in the nation's memory. The world saw Chicago not as "the city that works," but as a city out of control. For the youthful generation of the 1960s, Chicago and 1968 are inextricably linked to the violent suppression of political ideals.

Twenty years have passed since the convention and its demonstrations. Nineteen eightyeight has seen reunions, symposia , books, and articles, all interpreting and assessing the impact of these events. Clearly , the week of August 25, 1968, is critical to our understanding of the sixties and contemporary American history. But historians and commentators have focused on these events at the expense of a more comprehensive view of that decade in Chicago-from Camelot to counterculture. The spirit of 1968 was ignited by the sparks of revolutions in the arts, politics, and social thought in Chicago long before that pivotal year.

This issue of ChicagoHistory explores these other, larger dimensions of the city in the sixties.

Early in the decade, Chicago bristled with controversy over issues that surrounded the blossoming culture of the avant-garde. Gerald Brennan's article on Big Tablemagazine sets the tone for the decade, telling the story of the attempted suppression of experimental "beat" literature in Chicago in 1959. Stuart Hecht traces the rise of avant-garde drama in his account of the revitalization of Hull House theater and its failed attempt to fuse artistic innovation with a program for social change. Chicago was also the scene for some of the earliest civil rights demonstrations in the North. David Garrow's article, "I March Because I Must," chronicles Martin Luther King's confrontation with Mayor Richard Daley and the city's real estate board over the Chicago Freedom Movement's marches for fair and open housing. David Farber's insightful study of convention week 1968 offers a new perspective on the conflict between demonstrators, who used Chicago as a symbol, and the mayor, who struggled to keep his city working. Stef Leinwohl's photographic essay is a poignant record of one man's attempt to capture the spirit of that week in the faces of the anonymous as well as the famous. His work reminds us of the commitment to ideals of political and social change that brought people together. Perry Duis discusses the construction of McCormick Place, symbol of commerce and industry, and its portentous burning in 1967.

The 1960s was not a nostalgic or wistful decade. Americans looked hopefully forward to better times based on a revolutionized agenda for social, political, and cultural change. Now, twenty years later , as we struggle to implement that agenda, we must examine the sixties to see how fur we have really come .

RL

No.14 $1.QO U.K.: 5/•

Canada:

$1.20

+ EVERGREEN REVIEW

Big Table

by Gerald Brennan

ž'hen beat writers were censoredfrom the Chicago Review, its student editors struggled to publish the suppressedworks on their own. Their senseof mission, and their effort toforce the art, literature,and culture of the 1950s avant-garde into the mainstream,foreshadowedthe controversiesof the 1960s.

Why can't they ever grow up and dig that Burroughs is talking about us & them & the truth of wot they really go thru but are so spooked & full of the habit of lying that the)' can't see with their O\\'n nm eyes; Paul Carroll to Irving Rosenthal in a leucr dated April 13, 1959 In November 1958 adm ini strators at the Un iversity of Ch icago told the staff of the Chicago Review, the student literary magazine, that it could not publish the Winter 1959 issue as planned. Four months later the first issue of Big Table, which contained the complete contents of the suppressed Chicago Revi ew, was released. Within days of its publ ication the U.S. Post Office Department seized hundreds of copies for al leged obscenity. Eventually the magazine was fully exonerated, but Big Table's story is a case history of how radical new literature was fought at every tum by an establishment that included not only the federal government and local police departments , but also universities and the media, groups one would expect to jump to the defens e of intellectual expression.

By full 1958 Irving Rosenthal and the rest of his student staff had made the Chicago Review one of the most respected literary quarterlies in America, largely on the strength of two thematic issues released earlier that year. The Spring 1958 issue, a collection entitled "The San Franc isco Poets, " included works by Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen G in sberg, Philip Whalen , Philip Lamantia,John Wieners, Robert Duncan , and Michael McClure. Except for Evergreen Review 2, the is ue had given the so-called "Beat Generation" its first public exposure, and the Chicago Rroiew's connection with the prestigious

University of Chicago lent the new literature a patina it had not enjoyed before. Rosentha l then devoted the Summer issue a lm ost exclusively to writings on Zen Buddhism, a virtually unknown discipline in the Un ited States. Within four months , the Spring and Summer issues had tr ipled the R eview's circu lat ion. (Sales of the two issu es continued stead ily int o the 1960s.)

The Review 's future looked rosy in September when it released its Autumn issue, an eclect ic number that included pieces by Whalen, John Logan, Brother Antoninus, David Riesman, Hugh Kenner, and, as the cover adverti ed prominently, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. Burroughs had become the primary literary enthus iasm of most of the Review taff. They had discovered him alm ost acc id enta lly through poet Allen Ginsberg .

Ginsberg was writing long letters to Rosenthal and Paul Ca1Toll, poet , Review poetry ed itor, and the on ly nonstudent on the staff, suggesting authors and promoting the new writing. One of these letters included a section from Naked Lunch with the instruction "Write to Burroughs." Although n o one on the staff had ever heard of him, they wrote; soon afterward a box conta ining an incr ed ibl e manuscript anived at the Review office . The onionskin pages were in no particular order, a nd the suJTea l episodes had little narrative connect ion to one anothei: The sheets had been erased repeated ly and retyped, and the margins were crowded with addenda . BuJToughs's language was full of criminal and drug argot that the co llege students had never seen before. The difficulties that the manuscript presented in its unedited state-a lo ng with its graph ic violence and sexuality-had already caused it to be rejected twice, by Maurice

7711rty year5ago. , \1rwrict111ma1;az.i1ll' and book/mblishen c/a;hedwith t11gvro1~< a11ti.mwtcampaign. po1tal authoritie., ov1â&#x20AC;˘r the l'o;/ Ojfic!".1

Gerald Brennan is a freelance writer living in Berlin .

5

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988

Allen Ginsberg (background) encouraged Chicago Review rditors to publish Naked Lunch , a raw and difficult work by William IJ111Tough; (foreground). Photograph by Fred W 1\l cDam1h.

Girodias's Olympia Press in Paris and by Barney Rosset's Grove Press in New York. Nonetheless, Rosenthal and Carroll recognized an essential brilliance in Burroughs's nightmarish satire.

Rosenthal began editing the manuscript into readable form, and the first installment of Naked Lunch appeared in the Chicago Review 's Spring issue.

The entire Review staff was aware that Naked Lunch could create problems with the Post Office Department and the police. It was full of voracious homosexuals, homicidal physicians , vicious racists, and cannibalistic sex. Ginsberg wrote to the Review that the book was probably "too raw" to be published in the United States al the time.

Irving Rosenthal was completely captivated by the writing. He thought Burroughs might be the most important American writer of the century, and he detennined to publish Naked Lunch. He conceived a strategy to "sneak" it into the mainstream of American literature bit by bit by publishing excerpts in the Revi,ew, each progressively stronger in tone and substance. By the Lime anyone noticed that Burroughs's writing was objectionable, 6

the novel would be in print , the nation would acknowledge its genius, and censorship would have been forestalled.

The Winter 1959 issue was lo be the capstone of the plan. It would contain eight excerpts from Naked Lunch, the most to be published thus far.

1'vo pieces by Edward Dahlberg, "The Garment of Ra" and "The Further Sorrows of Priapus, " and Jack Kerouac's long prose experiment Old Angel Midnight, a stream-of-consciousness meditation reminiscent of Joyce's Finn egan's Wake, would accompany them. Like Burroughs's writing, Old Angel Midnight was liberally sprinkled with fourletter word , and both seemed likely lo offend puritanical censors. Rosenthal felt it was his job to publish Burroughs and Kerouac , regardless of the consequences . He realized that he might be forced to resign the editorship of the Review, but he had been thinking of leaving Chicago anyway lo pursue his own writing. onetheless, Rosenthal felt sure that , in spite of any misgivings it might have, the University recognized the seriousness of the writing and would come to the Review 's defense if censorship problems arose.

NovelistJ ack KProuacpersonifiedthe beat generation; he also coined the name. His work Old An gel Midni ght was among llwse banned fr om the Chi cago Review. Photograph by Fred W McDarrah.

For a whil e it seem ed that th e strat egy mi ght work. Th e Sprin g issu e cam e and we nt without co mm e nt, th e Autumn issu e was re leased to mut ed pr a ise in ea rly O cto be r, a nd th e staff th e n began wo rk o n th e Wint e r issu e. On Saturda y, O cto be r 25, a co lumn byJ ac k Mabley e ntitl ed "Filthy Writing o n th e Midw ay" a pp ea red o n th e fro nt page o f th e Chicago Daily News: A magaz in e p ubli sh ed by th e Univers ity of C hi cago is di strib u ting o ne o f th e fo ul est co llec tions o f print ed filth I've seen p u b licly circul ated .... Th e o bsce ni ty is put into the ir writing to a ttr act atte nti o n . It is a n asse rtio n of th e ir se nse o f br avad o, 'Oh boy, loo k what I'm do ing'j u t like th e little kids cha lkin g a fo u1~le tter verb on th e Oa k Street und e rp ass . ... I d o n't put th e blame o n th e j uvenil es wh o wr o te and edit ed this stu ff, beca use th ey're imm atur e a nd i1Tespo nsible. But th e U nivers ity o f Chi cago p u b lish es th e magaz ine. Th e tru stees sho ul d ta ke a lo ng h ard loo k a t wh at is be ing circul a te d und e r th is spo nso rship .

T ho ug h Mabl ey neve r m e nti o ne d th e na me o f the publi ca tio n , peo pl e o n ca mpu s knew wh at h e was ta lkin g a bout. Th e Univer sity's sllld e nt newspa p e r, th e Chicago Maroon, print ed a fro nt p age

articl e about th e column a week later . The Review staff was at first amus ed by Mabl ey's remarks , which re fle cte d a compl e te misunderstanding of the writin g . But within thre e weeks , Chancellor Lawren ce Kimpton had m e t with trustees. He sent word to Rosenth al: th ere wo uld be no Burroughs , Dahlb e rg , o r Kerou ac in the Winter issue. In fact, Kimpt o n want ed th e next issue to be "completel y inn ocu o us" in chara cter. Faced with this ultimatum , Rose nthal a nd five R eview editors , Paul Ca rr o ll, Eila Kokkinen, Doris Nieder , Barbara Pit sch e l, and Charles H o rwitz, resigned. A sixth, H yung Woo ng Pak, re fuse d to leave and be came th e new edit o r.

Wh e n the y left, th e editors took th e banned m anu scripts and se t o ut to find a way to publish th e m. Fo r reaso ns of time and economy Rosenthal h o ped to int e res t a n established mag azine in publishin g th e Win te r issu e, but h e was unable to find a nyo n e wh o wo uld publish it in its entiret y.

Lawre nce Fe rlin gh e tti, for example , wanted Old Angel Mi dnight, but not th e oth er piec es, for his j ournal fo r the Protection of All Beings. Rosenthal, howeve r, was d e termin ed to see all the pi eces 7

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988

Paul Carroll, 1961, al the Big Table office, his apartment on North DearbornStreet. Photographby A 1thur Siegel.

published together as they would have appeared in the Review. ILwas apparent that the staff would have to launch a new publication.

By mid-December, when that decision was reached, publicity about the events at the University of Chicago was mounting. The Maroon had covered the story from the beginning and made the affair a minor causecelÂŁbreon campus. In early December the Student Government appointed a committee to investigate the suppression.

8

By mid-month the news had burst the campus bounds and was written up in the Chicago dailies. Little magazines across the country followed the developments. Both Albert Podell, the Review's business manager, and Paul Carroll were asked Lo write accounts of the suppression. The reams of publicity seemed to guarantee that the new magazine would be an instant success, and iL seemed likely that the notoriety of the first issue might provide a solid foundation for subsequent ones. Thus it was decided that after Rosenthal had edited the first issue, he would resign to devote full time Lohis writing. Carroll would then become the magazine's editor and see it through the censorship fight that seemed inevitable.

Finding a name for the magazine proved Lobe a problem. Carroll and Rosenthal rejected countless ideas before Rosenthal finally decided on the name 331 around Christmas for reasons no one remembers today. Advertising contracts were drawn up, and Podell sent out all of his initial letters of olicitation under the name 331 during the last week ofDecembec But on New Year's Eve Rosenthal abruptly changed his mind and wrote to Podell that the name of the magazine was Lobe Review instead, probably in response to advice that the new magazine capitalize on its connection to the ChicagoReview by Laking a name like The New Chicago Review or The Chicago ReviRw Uncensored.But with the magazine planned as an ongoing project, the name had to outlive the first issue. Even Review did not sit well with Rosenthal or Carroll , who wanted a title that would separate their magazine from the Partisan Review, the Paris Review, the Evergreen Review, and all the other Reviews, as well as a Litle that would express the nonderivative, unacademic naLUre of the writing.

In desperation Rosenthal finally wrote Lo Jack Kerouac, who had coined the title for Naked Lunch.

Kerouac sent a post card in response with a !isl of suggestions. One was Big Tab/,e.It occurred to him, Paul Carroll recalls, when he found a note he had written himself: "Get a bigger table:' Rosenthal was struck immediately by the name. The magazine was christened Big 1ab/,earound the second week of January. A few days later Paul Carroll filed the papers that established the publishing company, Big Table, Inc. By late December 1958, with the manuscripts completely edited, the staff ÂŁaced the relatively unfamiliar task ofraising enough money to print

Big Table

Before the suppression, the Ch icago Rede ,v staff included /m ing Rosenthal (foreground), Doris Nieder (clockwise), Hyung Woong Pak, Barbara Pitschel, and Eila Kokkinen. Photograph by Carl Turk.

th e magazine. Although Podell remain ed business manager for the ChicagoReview, he had offered his services to the new venture in November and threw himself Lealously into olicitingads. CaIToll talked the magazine up among his society friends and the adult study groups he taught and began collecting pieces for the second is ue. Barbara Pitsch el was in New York City asking publishers to take ads, gelling printing estim ates , and giving int erviews on the suppression. Irving Rosenthal

was preparing to leave Chicago altogether. He had been so taken with New York's fervid liter ary scene during a trip to scout printers that he sudden ly decided to move there. By early January 1959, with Ginsberg's help, he had settled into a small cold-water flat on the Lower East Side where he set to work dummying the magazine.

The theme of everyone's pitch for money was the same: the ChicagoReview had been unjustly, if not illegally, censored by the University of Chicago.

9

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 To potential advertisers, Podell wrote letters that opened emphatically: "THIS IS QUITE URGE T. PLEASE GIVE THIS YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION. THE Chicago Review HAS BEE I SUPPRESSED by its owne1~the University of Chicago."

Podell repeated this plea again and again. Suddenly, the ban that had been so frustrating just a month and a half before became a badge of distinction. It set Big Tabl,eapart from all the other little magazines in the country and highlighted the fact that it was not simply a literary magazine but a moral crusade that advertisers were invited to join. That strategy was successful, according to Podell , who estimates that publicity about the suppression helped Big Tabl,esell twice as many ads as it might have othenvise.

Paul Carroll used the same approach, although in a less self-conscious way. At a Christmas party at the Old Town home of photographer Arthur Siegel, he described the suppression to Congressman and Mrs. Sidney Yates. William Hartmann, an architect and senior partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, overheard the story. Hartmann later approached Carroll, told him that he believed in Big Tabl,e'scause, and asked Carroll to come to his office the next Monday. When Carroll arrived, Hartmann presented him with a check for $250.

Carroll elicited donations from other Chicagoans as well, most notably art collector Muriel Newman, who donated $100 to Big Tabl,eand lent $1,000 more . (She later threw a party for other potential donors the night before Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso ' reading at the Shem1an Hotel on January 29, 1959.)

By January 20 everything seemed to be fulling into place. Rosenthal had settled in New York and found a printer willing to take on Big Tabl,edespite its precarious finances. Podell had raised hundreds of dollars in advertising revenues. Carroll had Newman's check for $1,000 in hand, and on January 24 he sent Rosenthal $500 for the printer.

Despite the University of Chicago's order that Burroughs , Kerouac , and Dahlberg be cut from the Winter issue of the Chicago Review, indeed despite the fact that the university did little to dispel the pall ofobscenity that it had helped cast over the magazine, it clung to the manuscripts with surprising tenacity. From the time the resignations had become public, the university had insisted that eventually all the suppressed works, as well as every manuscript that Rosenthal had

accepted for publication, would appear in the Review. None of the former editors took the claim seriously. They knew that Pak, the new editor , had never shared their enthusiasm for or commitment to the new writing . They did not expect him to fight for the manuscripts, or even to care if they were ever published. The university's attitude was typified by Richard Stern's remarks in the Maroon.

Stern, an English professor and faculty advisor to the Review, begrudgingly acknowledged Burroughs's originality, but maintained that the Review had become a mouthpiece for a small, insignificant group of writers. That was the reason the administration had felt a different Winter issue should appear . It was time , said Stern , for the Review to return to its true audience: the intellectuals. This could be interp1 ¡eted as a demand that the Review publish more academic writers like himsel[ In light of these facts, Rosenthal and the other Big Tcibl,estaff members felt that the university imply meant to hold the manuscripts until the furor had died clown. Then the pieces would be quietly returned to their authors.

In November Pak made a token effort to recover two of the manuscripts. Ten clays after the resignations, perhaps at Stern's urging, he sent his assistant Willard Colston to get Dah Iberg's pieces from Rosenthal, or, failing that, to obtain a letter from Dahlberg absolving the Review from the responsibility of publishing him. Curiou ly, neither Pak nor Colston believed that the other manuscripts belonged to the Review. In a letter regarding his visit to Rosenthal, Colston described the manu scripts "as part of a larger amount of material he Id

by Mr. Rosenthal more, it seems, in the capacity of agent, friend and disciple than as editor of the Review." Rosenthal flatly refused to hand over the Dahlberg pieces. He then produced letters from all three writers withdrawing their works from the Review and assigning publication rights to Rosenthal personally. Colston asked for Dahlberg's letter for the Review' files. Rosenthal refused lO give Colston tl1e letter or even to allow it to be photocopied. Pak and Colston decided that there was nothing they could do or cared to do. "We had no responsibility for the Kerouac and Burroughs Manuscript ," Colston concluded his report on the meeting, "and if Mc Dahlberg saw fit to grant Mr. Rosenthal the power of agent it was of little concern to us."

For the new Review editors the issue was dead,

10

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THURSDAY, JANUAlY 29, 1959

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Bi g Ta bl e

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SpyInSky FindsEarth Isn't Round Story. lllusttot ion On Pogt 2

Wh en Chicag o socialite M uriel Newman hosted a party for the sup-

pcn-ie,,of BigTab le, the Sun -Times gave it fr ont page coverage.

bu t no t for Ste rn . In mid-D ece m be r Rose nth a l and Can-o il pu b licly a nno un ced th e ir int e n t to p u blish th e mate ria l th e mse lves, a nd Ste rn re pli ed in the p ape rs th at if th ey d id th ey woul d be su ed by th e U ni vers ity of Chi cago. H e cla im ed a ll thr ee manusc ript s be lo nged to th e uni vers ity. In J anu ary 1959 h e began ma kin g e ffort s to recove r th e m .

Al Pode ll fina lly re igne d as bu sin ess m an age r o f th e Review th e week of J anu ary ll , 1959. H e had begu n work th e re in October, be fo re th e Mab ley art icle had appeared . After th e storm on ca mp us b roke , th e uni vers ity ad mini strat io n fro m Ch ance llo r Kimp to n do wn to Stern had po rtraye d Ro ent h al and hi s staff as fanat ics interes ted in pub lishi ng on ly o ne kin d of litera tur e. By p ostpon ing hi s own res igna tio n Pode ll h o pe d to d istance it fro m th e res ignatio ns of th ose respo nsible for th e co nt rovers ia l issu es . Alth o ug h he fe lt no d ee p perso na l com mit me nt to th e new writin g, he be lie\'ed tha t wha te\'er o n e's fee lings abo u t

Bun o ughs, Kero uac, a nd the o th e rs, a nyone co mmitt ed to free d o m o f ex pr ess io n had to o pp ose the uni versity's ce nso rship . Pod e ll had an a nge d with th e ed ito r o f th e Maroon, wh e re h e a lso worked , to p rint an acco unt of hi s res ignatio n, ho pin g to e nco ur age m o re symp ath e tic und erstand ing of th e edit o rs' ac tio n as well as furth e r p ub licity for Big 7a.b/,e.Th e Maroon edi to r, p erh a ps cowe d by th e uni versity's stro ng h and with th e Review, refused in th e e nd to run th e pi ece .

After Pod e ll te nd e re d hi s res igna tio n , Ste rn imm edi ate ly bega n pumpin g him for info rmati o n abou t the new magaz in e. H e d e m a nd ed th at th e ed ito rs of Big Tab/,eprov id e a le tte r from eac h a uth o r askin g th at hi s wo rk be withdr awn fro m the Review.A day o r two later Ste rn a nd Pod e ll m et aga in , a nd Ste rn hint e d b roa dl y th at unl ess th e le tters were fort h co min g th e univ e rsi ty wo uld su e Big Table. Pod e ll sna pp e d bac k th a t Stern ou ght to chec k with sup e rior co urt to see if th e Review had JI

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 been e njoined from publishing an issue without th e banned manuscripts. The remark thr ew Stern into a rag e, and Podell hastened away.

Despite his cavalier att itude , the thr ea t of a lawsuit won-ied Podell as we ll as Paul Can-oil.

They both wrote to Rosenth al reco mm e ndin g th at the authors send the letters as requested, but th at th ey word th e m so that th e witJ1drawals co uld be construed only as the resu lt of th e univ e rsity 's refusal to publish U1eworks in th e Winter issu e as promised . Podell consulted some lawyers and learne d to hi s fur!J1er chagrin that all of !J1e man uscripts wer e the legal propert y of U1e university and had been from U1etim e U1at Ros e n!J1al, act ing in his capacity as Review editor (and thus as an agent of the university) , had accepted th e pieces for publication . His letters of acce ptance to U1e three authors constituted binding contracts that could not be broken simply by asking U1at !J1e pi eces be returned. The o nl y loo phol e for Big Table, it seemed, was that the universit y had reneged on its promise to publish !J1ework in the Review'sWinter issue. Th e matt er would probably have to be d ec ided in court.

The news disma yed Pa ul Can-oil, who dreaded a long and costly lawsuit th at co uld kno ck the legs out from und e 1- Big Table before it co uld stand on its own. Ir-ving Ros e n!J1al, h owever, re lish ed th e prospect of a showdown with tJ1e univ ers ity. 'Just between you a nd m e," h e wrot e Pode ll, "th ere is no!J1ing I would we lcome mor e than a suit of any kind by the university . . .. IL would be a sca nd a l Ulal might ve 1)' we ll result in [Chancellor] Kimp ton's resignation ."To Ros e n!J1a l, a co urt ac tio n was U1e only way the tru!J1 behind th e uni\ ·ers ity's disgra cef ul action would eve r be expose d . ILh ad recanted its long-st an ding policy of student auto nomy at U1e Review;it had violat ed U1e basic ca non ofacademic freedom; it h ad prov ed itself as Philistine as J ac k Mabl ey, the newspap e r co lumni st; and, in U1e process, it had lied abo ut its int e nti o ns and motives. Ros e nthal looked for signs !J1at the American Civil Libertie Uni o n (ACLU) or Big Table'sattorney, Lewis Mani low, would support U1e writers in a suit for breach of co ntr act. H e eve n considered initiating a libel suit against Rich a rd Stern for remarks Stern had made in the Maroon.

Whether or not he had a chance of winning, Irving Rose nth a l felt a lawsuit would serve a valuable purpose.

Rosenthal believed U1at !J1e univ e rsity h ad no L2

case, despite what tJ1e lawyers had told Pod e ll.

First of a ll, the Review had no documents re leva nt to U1e case . Rose nthal h ad never written formal le tt ers of accepta n ce Lo e ith er Ke rou ac o r Bun-ou ghs, which may exp la in Colston's remarks abo ut th e owne rship of th e ir manuscripts . Second, if pu sh ca me to shov e, Ros e nth a l co uld claim h e had rejecte d the pieces when the university told him th ey co uld not be publish ecl. Stern was bluffin g, he wrote Pod e ll. "T h e Unive rsity lawyers would not be stupid e nou gh to bring any kind of lega l act ion , a nd if they've given Stern any lega l co un se l it's that th e U nive rsit y is subj ec t to suit." The reaso ns for th e blu(f seemed clear to Rose nth a l. H e wrot e to Pa ul Can-o il: There are on ly two exp la nation s why Stern wants these releases. I. (weak exp lanat ion): he wams to claim there was no suppression since the wr iter s withdr ew their mss. 2. (strong exp lanat ion) : The Un iv. is afraid of being sued b)' th e writers for failure of th eir mss. to appear in th e Wint e r C R. I have no wish to relieve this !cac

Stern, meanw hil e, was playing a two- id ed game.

P1-ivate ly endeavoring to ob ta in letters of with drawal, h e publicly co ntinu ed to claim that the Review fully int ended to publish th e manuscriptseven if Big Tabl,edid too. Though Stern had a lso promised to publish e\·e 11• piece accepted by the former ed itor, the Review h ad a lr eady begun returning s u ch manuscripts in mid-January.

Stern's action and his private indiITe rence to th e manuscripts supp ort Rosen th a l's int erpre tat io n of U1e events.

By the end of J anua11 Stern had abandoned both hi s pretense of wanting th e manuscripts and his efforts to secure letters of withdrawal. By then the university's act ions were undergoing re n ewed scrutiny, and nearly a ll the publicity was negative.

The benefit reading at the Sherman Hote l given

by Allen G in sberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky on J anuary 29 sparked wide coverage in Chi cago newspapers, and most mentioned Big Tableand the ChicagoReview in th e ir articles. The Shaw Society, which spo nsored the eve nt , made indir ect reference to !J1e university wh e n itju stified its invo lve men t wi!J1 U1e str ange new writers

Gregor)' Corso read several of his poems lo benefit Big Table at the Shmnan H otel in Janua,y 1959. Photograph by Ai1hur Siegel.

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FEIRUAU

THE ARTS BOOKS

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AMUSEMENTS 1, 1' 59

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In Beatnik Invas1on

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i.J

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988

Alll'n Gimbrrg'i reading of H ow l, which had bem the subject of an obscenity trial \ÂŁ'Vera/ years ,arlie,; was a high point of the Big Table bmefit. Plwtogra/Jhby Arthur Siegel.

seen Burroughs, Kerouac, and Dahlberg through to publication . In the flush of success there seemed only one relevant question . "So how many to reprint," Rosenthal wrote Ca1Toll and Podell on March 22, "considering that we are still in the first week of publication , that no reviews have appeared anywhere, no censorship trouble of any kind yet, no attacks by squares. 5M, lOM, or 15M?" No one at Big Tab/,ewas aware of it, but only clays before Rosenthal 's letter was written , the United States Post Office Department had seized more than four hundred copies of Big Table, labeling them obscene . Conviction of the publishers on mail obscenity charges could mean a sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $10,000.

16

Though Rosenthal had expected the University of Chicago to support him if the U.S. Post Office Department tried to ban the Winter issu e of the ChicagoReview from the mail, he had taken the manuscripts to attorney Melvin Wulf at the American Civil Liberties Union for an opinion.

Although Wulf could not offer a formal opinion on behalfofthe ACLU, he told Rosenthal that he was positive about their chances should the Post Office Department or local police departments interfere. Beginning in January 1959 Big Tab/,e's staff remained in contact with the ACLU in Chicago and New York. Concern over an obscenity charge was, if anything, greater without the protection of the university. Podell also hoped to coax a written

Big Table statement from the ACLU with which he could confront a postmaster who objected lo the word "suppressed" on the front cover. There was concern, too, that bookstores might resist stocking the magazine for fear of police interference, and Podell thoughtsuch a letter would reassure them thatBig Table was not likely to cause trouble. Podell and Can-oil were apprehensive. Can-oil wo1Tied in letters to Rosenthal that Stern might tip off the Post Office Depanment or the Chicago police to Big -fable's objectionable nature in order to block its circulation. Podell heard rumors in February that Jack Mabley was working to have the Department deny Big Tablesecond-class mailing privileges. And, of course, there was concern that all the publicity sun-ouncling the appearance of Big Tableand the action by the University of Chicago might make authorities suspicious.

The ACLU had said unofficially that an obscenity charge could be successfully fought. Nevertheless the threat of legal action against Big Tablewas potent. Staff members, except for Al Podell, asked Rosenthal to remove their names from the masthead of the first issue to distance themselves from possible repercussions. Doris Niede1~ for example , was trying to finish her doctorate in the University of Chicago's English department, which still harbored hostility toward the ne~ writing.

Paul Can-oil feared that his connection with Big Table 1, especially with Bunoughs 's blatant homosexuality, mightjeopardize his teaching position at Catholic Loyola University. He continued to be outspoken in Chicago on behalf of the magazine, however, and was invariably identified as Big Table's editor by the city's media, even before the first issue appeared. Shortly after his decision to omit his name from the issue in February 1959, Loyola notified him that his contract would not be renewed afterjune.

Irving Rosenthal was concerned about the printer, Profile Press . He had learned from Barne y Rosset, then preparing to publish an unexpurgated American edition of Lady Chatterley~ Lover, that if obscenity charges were pressed the printer was liable to criminal penalties. This convinced Rosenthal that he should leave Profile's name out of Big 1able 1 altogether. Podell argued that it must appear , on the grounds that much of Big Table's fight for legitimacy would be won if the maga1.ine put on a respectable front. That meant not wrapping it in brown paper , selling it openly

in established, reputable book tores , and avoiding tawdry, pandering advertisements. The courts had already recognized these measures as evidence of a publication 's obscenity. (Big Table's attorney raised them, albeit unsuccessfully, at the Post Office Department hearing.) Podell pressed the point home by saying that if Profile was ashamed or afraid it should not have taken the job-apparently forgetting that Profile had been the only printer willing to print Big Table when its finances were nonexistent. (Profile had never objected to having its name included in the magazine and may have even wanted it there to advertise.) "Printed by Profile Press " appeared in Big Table 1 with no untoward effects.

On Thursday, March 19, Al Podell wrote to Irving Rosenthal: "Leaving clay after tom on-ow for the Coast-don't want to be around when Kimpton reads Big Table l." He arrived in California on Monday morning and set out to publicize the magazine and place it in stores. But he had a surprise. "T he Big TablesI mailed to Calif. have not yet an-ived. Hope nothing wrong with postoffice," he wrote to Rosenthal and Can-oil, but added immediately, as if shying away from a ridiculous conclusion, "Paul-I hope you gave that extra $50 to cover mailing costs under temporary permit."

The Post Office Department had been creating minor hassles for Big Table all along, demanding, for example, that the editors provide an address that belonged to a real office, or threatening to deny second-class privileges simply because the first issue's covers had not been included in the pagination. Through it all Podell continued to believe that the Post Office Department would not really interfere with the magazine. When he arrived at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, though, he changed his mind.

Podell wrote to Rosenthal after he returned to Chicago in early April.

NOW the big news. I THI 1K THE POSTOFFICE HAS BANNED BIG TABLE .... I'll tell you everything that I know. On March 17, I took three boxes ofbooks plus 21 advertiser's copies to tJ1e main postoffice. Thi was tlie first they had seen Big Table. One of the men made some remark about ''I'll take a copy with me and read it during lunch." I left after giving them $150 deposit. The next clay I mailed some 400 individual copies to subscribers and anotlier box from the postoffice around here. When I got to San Francisco a week later , Ferlingheui had received only the box I sent from the local postoffice. He had not received his adveni er's copy 17

EDWARD

DAHLBERG

THE GARMENT

OF RA

FURTHER SORROWS OF PRIAPUS

Printed in red, while, and blue, thecoveroJ BigTable I a111wwiceslhe "complete contents of the suppres5ed \\ 'intn 1959 Chicago Reviell'. ¡¡ The editors wonied that postal authorities might object to the word "suppmsed."

which had been left at the main postoffice .. . . Everyone on whom I've been able to check to whom books were sent from the main postoffice, has not received their copies . I can't afford to check the others but perhaps you can check one or two since they are in New York. ... If ANY of them have received their copies, then I am falsely alarmed.'But if none of them has received their copies, then the postoffice is screwing around .

Conversations Podell had with an acquaintance at the main post office only deepened the mystery. At first the friend "assumed " that all the copies had been delivered. But a few days later he told Podell, "I can't say anything but I may have something in a week ." As if, Podell concluded, "some asshole in Washington were trying to decide if his twelve year old daughter would be COITupted by reading Big Table."

In essence, that was exactly what was happening. At the same time that Podell had taken the cop ies of the magazine to the main post office, he had submitted Big Table'sapplication for a secondclass permit. Joseph Kozielec-perhaps the same clerk who said he was going to look through the 18

magazine during his lunch break-noticed that a space on the form for the number of subscribers had been left blank. As Kozielec exp lained it at Big Table'sPost Office Department hearing in June, he decided, in fine bureaucratic form, that he cou ld not process the application without this information. But instead of notifying CaJToll or Podell that there was a problem, he set the form, a long with the magazines, aside for two weeks.

Finally on April 3, with the Big Table staff sti ll unaware of any problem, Kozielec sent a copy of the magazine with a letter of transmittal to the director of postal services in Washington for an opinion on its mailability. Exact ly when the Post Office Department 's perception of the problem switched from the unfinished app lication to Big Table'spotential obscenity was never brought out.

Perhaps the Post Office's confus ion is reflected in Kozielec's testimony that "[On Apri l 3) we thought it was sumcient time that had elapsed and Mc Podell is not willing to come in with the subscription indi\'idual 01-ders."

Why would a minor clerk at Chicago's main post office sudden ly publicly decide to examine a copy of a literary magazine ? Was the Post Office Department expecting, even waiting for Big 7hble?

Why would the Department, which clearly felt it was within its prescribed duties in policing the mail, u e the smokescreen ofan incomplete form to cover its uspicion tlrnt Big 7hble was obscene?

Definite answers are hard to come by, but there are some tantalizing hints in James C. Paul and Murray L. Schwartz's book Federal Censorship: Obscenityin the Mail. They write that in the 1950s the U.S. Post Omce Department had no set procedure for inspecting the mail fo1- obscene material. It was not inspected systematically, and when obscenity was discovered by a postal employee it was almost always a chance occuJTence, as when a carton of books bursts open inside a post office.

Otherwise, almost every action taken by the Department against mailers of alleged obscenity was the result of complaints by individuals whose names had gotten onto mailing lists used by smut peddlers. Such complaints were, for the most part, made aga inst sellers of hard-core pornography who depended on mail orders to sell their merchandise. Big 7able's staff, like all publishers of legitimate literature, never sent out unsolicited cop ies, except to book reviewers. However, with feelings running high at the University of Chicago

Big Tabl e it is p os. ibl e th a t so m eo ne th e re no tifie d th e Pos t Office De partm e nt abo ut th e o bjec tio nable natur e o f Big Tablf. It is equ ally like ly th a t j ac k Ma bl ey, as rum o red , h ad ca lled th e Pos t Ofli ce De partm e nt.

Furth e rm o re, it was n o sec re t th at C hi cago's Ca th o lic hi era rchy too k a dim view o fBurr o ughs. Ca th oli c newspa pe rs too k up Ma bl ey's d e nun ciatio n o f th e Rf,vinu a lm os t imm e di a te ly, and p a ri sh pri ests put pr ess ur e o n Ca th o lic tru tees to d o so m e thin g a bo ut th e app a llin g lite ratur e be in g publi sh ed . Pe rh a ps th e co mpl a int came from thi s qu arte r. T h e m os t prob a bl e ex p la natio n m ay be th at th e e no rm o us loca l publi city Big Table had rece ived h ad a le rted p os ta l o flicia ls in C hi cago.

As ad vertise r a fte r ad vertise r re port ed th at th ey h ad no t rece ived th e ir co pi es, Pod e ll clun g to th e hop e th at it mi ght be a false a larm . H e stayed in d a ily co nt act with hi co nn ec tio n at th e pos t o ffice, wh o was becom in g in creas in gly ne rvo us a t Po d e I l's p e rsiste n ce. Th e m a n begge d Pod e ll to bac k o ff. whil e te llin g him no thin g abo ut th e imp o und ed m agaz in es . It was a "d e lica te situ atio n ," h e to ld Pod e ll, whi ch was puttin g him "be twee n th e Dev il a nd th e d ee p blu e sea." Th e cle rk , howe ve r, was equ a lly pe rsiste nt in d e m a ndin g th e na m es of Big Thble's di stributor s. Po dell re fused e very tim e, first o ut o f lazin ess, later fro m con ce rn for th e ir we lfare.

He lost no Lime in no tify ing o ne o f th e m aga zin e's di tributor s- Pa p e r Edition s, th e¡o n e Po d e ll th o ught wo uld no t be sca re d o ff by th e thr ea t o f posta l sa nctio ns - th at tro ubl e was br ewin g. H e e mph as ized th at th e AC LU had ass ur ed Big Table it co uld win su ch a case, but ur ge d th e di stribut o r to ge t its co pi es into boo ksto res as soo n as poss ibl e.

On Frid ay, April 17, still in th e d a rk a nd d es pe rate for a reso luti o n of th e diffi cult y, Po d e ll wir ed th e U.S. Pos t O ffice De partm e nt in Washin gto n , D.C., reques tin g Big Table's sta tu s a nd th e wh ereabo ut s of th e imp o und ed issu es . Ge nera l Co un sel Her be rt Warb urt o n re pli ed th e sa me clay, saying a d ec isio n h ad no t bee n reac he d but th at o n e co uld be ex pec ted b)' th e followin g l\lon clay. B)' Thu rs d a)', A pril 23, th e r ulin g h ad n o t bee n rece i\'e d , a n d Po d e ll se nt a n o th e r te leg r a m .

"Urge nt!} requ es t th e d ec isio n o n m a ilab ility. Yo u promi se d Mo nd ay but n o ne has arri ved . If you rul e Big Table no n m a ilabl e we re qu es t h ea rin g o n th e m a tte 1~ pr e fe ra bl y la te Ma)' o r ea rl y Jun e."

Warb urt o n re pli ed th e followin g clay th a t th e m agazin e was "o f q u es tio n abl e m a ilabilit }'¡" Ho we\'er, he was still no t p re pa red to state fo rm a l ch arges;

h e promi se d th ey wo uld be se n t, a lo ng \\'ith a h ea rin g elate , b)' ea rly th e nex t wee k.

Evid e nce th at th e Post Offi ce De pa rtm e nt might act ua lly ba n Big 1ablf filled Irvin g Rose nth al with re n ewe d e ne rgy. H e co nfe rr e d with lawyers a t th e AC LU to lea rn h o w se rio us th e p os ta l a uth o ritie s mi ght be and to pl an a co ur se o f ac tio n. H e ta lked to Barn ey Rosse l, wh o was pl a nnin g a d e fe nse of Lady Chalterley'sLover. H e m ad e a list o f "e min e nt sq ua res" wh o mi ght tes tify o n be h a lf of Big Table.

H e wro te to Ca rr o ll and Po d e ll lo ng "strat egy le tter s" full o f ad vice, e xh o rt atio n , po int ed qu estio ns, a nd pl a ns o f attac k dr awn m os tly from hi s o wn ex p e rie nce durin g th e suppr ess io n at th e Univers ity o f C hi cago . H e re lish ed th e pro spec t of battlin g th e Po t Offi ce De partm e nt not onl y beca use it wo uld m ea n a vindi ca tion of Burrou ghs a nd th e wo rk o f Big 'fable a nd th e Chicago Review, but a lso fro m a childlik e m alice towa rd th e blind powe rs th at h ad bl oc ked hi s e ffo rt . "I've a lway want ed to ge t bac k at th e Pos t OCTice for m a kin g m e stud y th ose e ndl ess d oc um e nt s to try to figur e o ut how mu ch pos tage goes o n a pac kage, a nd thi s is a goo d tim e to d o it." H e in stru cted Pa ul CaITo ll to save a ll rev iews, es p ec ia lly th e re m arks Richard St e rn h a d m a d e in th e Mar oon d e fe ndin g Bu1To ug hs wh e n Ma bl ey's a ttac k first app ear ed. ("I do , h oweve r, think th at th e wo rk o f Burrou ghs whi ch th e ChicagoReview print ed in its last issu e is lively a nd quit e brilli a nt ," Ste rn to ld th e newspa pe r, "and I myself wo uld have acce pt ed it fo r pu b licatio n in a se ri o us m aga zin e (no t, o f co ur se, in a famil y n ewspa pe r).")"Th e ironi c ju stice o f this cl ippin g," Rose nth a l wro te Ca rroll , "is th a t it wo uld not surpri se m e to lea rn th a t Ste rn had had a ha nd , a sec re t o r an o nym o us h a nd in a lerting th e Pos t Offi ce."

T h e firs t o f May ca m e, a nd th e Pos t Offi ce De pa rtm e nt had no t yet issue d form a l charges . To Rose nth a l th at indi ca ted th at th e po sta l a uth o rities we re u ns ur e o f th e mse lves. T ha t was ha rdl y th e case. Th e De partm e nt , und e r Pos tm as te r Ge nera l Arthur Summ e rfie ld , was o n th e \'e rge o f la u nc hin g a fie rce a ntismut camp a ig n , whi ch wo uld e nli st th e he lp o f th e e ntir e natio n to sta mp o ut po rn og r aph y o n ce a nd for a ll. Loca l postm aste rs we re to give lec tur es ale rtin g citize ns to th e thr ea t; citize ns we re to turn in smut p eddl e rs.

N ewspape rs in vestiga ted th e m e nace and re port ed o n it. Lite ra ry p ro du ct io ns like Big Table, Lady Chalterley's Lover, o r Tropic of Cancer, co nt a inin g 19

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 vulgar language or graphic portrayals of sex, were every bit as repugnant to the Post Office Department as hard-core pornography. When the Department gave evidence of the burgeoning trade in pornography to Congresswoman Kathryn Granahan's House Subcommittee on Postal Operations in summer 1959, one of the publications presented in evidence was Big Table.

The Post Office Department was fervent in its pursuit of smut, despite its defeat in every major court case and the reluctance of the just.ice Department LOexpend Lime, money, and manpowe1- on cases it had little chance of winning. Postal authorities continued to grab anything they considered obscene with a ferocious zeal, but they were unable and unwilling to follow through when it came to formulating charges in a timely manner. For one thing, the enormous bureaucracy ofan organization the size of the U.S. Post Office Department made expedient action virtually impossible. Once a piece of ma il had been targeted, it had to work its way through the department as officials at various local and federal levels inspected it. Typically when a clerk at a local branch received a copy of a publication along with a complaint from the addressee, he looked at it and gave it to his postmaster. lf the local postmaster thought the material might be obscene, he sent it to the general counsel in Washington, who gave it to a team of lawyers to evaluate for pornographic content.

Once the general counsel's office had judged that the publication was obscene, the decision was relayed back to the local post office where other copies had presumably been impounded. The local postmaster notified the mailer, who was then entitled to an administrative review of the judgment. Usually matters never got that fuc Vendors of hard-core pornography generally just pulled up stakes, abandoned their books, and Look the loss.

The process took time; too much time, Congress thought. In 1958 it passed legislation requiring the Post Office Department to notify mailers of a seizure within twenty days. To hold mail longer required a court order. Postal authmities fought the law, calling it unrealistic, and made no effort to comply. In fact, they consistently ignored the law, which, together with more than ten years of court rulings, would have severely limited the Post Office Department's power to hold up the mail. This attitude indicates another reason behind 20

the Department 's delay in notifying the editors of Big Tctbl.e: a deep-seated contempt for individual rights and the rule oflaw, at least where they affected postal power to censor the nation's mail.

In May the staff was still discussing how many copies of Big Tctble1 to reprint. Irving Rosenthal had ordered a first printing of 10,000, an unprecedented run for the first issue of a small literary magazine. Publishers like Barney Rosset had urged him to start wit11 only 2,000 or less, and Paul CaIToll, though confident of Big Table'spotential, begged Rosenthal time and again to print only 5,000 at Grst. The large print run-and the expense it involved-became the source of bitter disagreement between Rosenthal and Ca1Toll. Eventually it led to a rupture in their friendship that lasted nearly a year.

A week after publication it seemed as if all of tl1e 10,000 magazines would be in bookstores, and a Post Office Department ban was expected to increase demand dramatically. But demand was difficult to judge from the actual sales. Kroch 's had sold more than 150. The University of Chicago bookstore sold more than 50 copies within two day of the magazine's relea e . But many stores had trouble selling more than 5 copies. Rosenthal wanted to reprint at least 5,000. Al Podell, uncharacteristically cautious , recommended holding off until after the Post Office Department's case had been settled. By itself, he thought, a postal ban would support a reprint. But if local police also banned it, Big Table, Inc., would be stuck with thousands of copies and nowhere to sell them.

By mid-May some Chicago booksellers were hesitating to stock the magazine, although none of them had actually been harassed about it. The police did interfere in other cities, however. ln Toronto, Ontario, a bookseller who sold Big Table was aITested on an obscenity charge. The day after Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso gave a reading in Cambridge, Massachusetts, police aITived at a bookstore that had stocked the magazine. The poets removed Big Table from the store rat11er than endanger t11ebookseller wit11fines or aITest.

A group of Harvard law students notified a local civil liberties group, who intimidated the police into backing off. Sales resumed undisturbed.

On May 8 newspapennen called Al Podell and asked him to comment on the announcement by t11eU.S. Post Office Department that Big Tabl.ewas nonmailable. Podell knew nothing about such a

Big Table decision and immediately called the ma111 post office in Chicago to inquire. It took the better part of the day to get any information, but eventually he was told that indeed a ruling had been made and a letter sent on April 30. Podell protested that he had received no such letter. The post office was aware of that. There had been "errors in the letter of transmission, " he was told , which had he ld up the delivery of the decision. The editors had apparently listed two addresses on their application for Big Table's second-class p e rmit: Pau 1 Carroll's apartment on North Dearborn Street (where they were actually working) and Al Podell 's in Hyde Park. The letter had been sent to Podell 's apartment. But he had given up that residence when he left on his trip to the West Coast. The letter had to be returned to the main post office via the Hyde Park branch before it could be delivered to Carroll. Postal officials assured Podell that he would eventually receive the letter. He asked that the letter be read to him and learned that the Post Office Department had determined that Big Tablewas probably statutorily non mailable "because of its obscenity and filthy contents with particular reference to the articles entitled 'Old Angel Midnight' and '10 Episodes from Naked Lunch. "' Some 441 copies were being held at the main post office. A hearing had been sch~clulecl for June 2 in Wa hington , D.C. Podell went to work immediately. He wrote a letter to General Counsel Warburton with five demands: release the twenty-one advertisers' copies since they were sent only to prove that ads had appeared, or allow him to remove the invoices from these copies; allow them to mail "seve ral hundred copies" of Big Tableto recognized critics, authors, physicians, and sociologi ts to solicit testimony on the magazine 's behalf; allow them to send about fifty copie to publishers to solicit ads for Big Table 2; send the foregoing mailings "airmail special delivery on a postage free basis " to compensate for the financial loss the Post Office Department had already caused Big Table; and fina lly, in respect to the magazine 's right to clue process , move the hearing to Chicago, where Big Table was published and mailed , and where its editors lived. Not surprisingly the Post Office Department refused every demand, except for the advertisers' paperwork . Podell was told he must petition the hearing examiner for a change of venue.

The obscenity charge was just another grim burden for Paul Carroll. Despite his precautions and the protests of his Loyola students, he was going to lose his job at the encl of the month.

Besides searching in vain for a new one, he had been putting together Big Table 2 (without any practical editing experience), trying to find manuscripts for Big Table3, a special issue entitled "The Literature of Crime" (which never came off), worrying over the magazine 's finances , as well as finding time to write his own poetry. The reality of the Post Office Department's action hit Carroll hard at first. When he heard the news he sent Rosenthal a terse, rather uptight wire, with no trace of his usual poet's whimsy: "PO says obscene.

Call Saturday morning. Paul." But although his mood swunge1Tatically between despondency over money to frustration at "the puerile shit over obscenity and dirty words," Big Table's cause sustained a quiet elation in Carroll that lasted through the hearing. "Having to fight for Big Table is good," he wrote to Rosenthal , "-concrete things like tJ1is seem to ram home to me that certain things like this are valuable worth a fight & not just fancy talk in a classroom: ' In the weeks after Al Podell received official word of the ban, the staff set to work lining up testimonials, publicizing the ban, calming booksellers and distributors, negotiating a change of venue to Chicago, and preparing for the hearing with tJ1e American Civil Liberties Union . They had always implicitJy counted on the ACLU' help.

But despite the many months Rosenthal and Carroll had consulted the ACLU, and its repeated-if unofficial-assurance mat Big Tablewas not ob cene, it was not until mid-May, two months after me Post Office Department first seized the magazine, that me ACLU made a commitment to the fight.

After he returned from California in the first week of April and had spoken to his acquaintance at the main post office, Al Podell relayed his suspicions to the ACLU.Joel Sprayregen , a young staff attorney, wanted to confront me post office as soon as he had heard the vague yet ominous report Podell had received from the anonymous source. Podell , perhaps to protect his informant, asked Sprayregen to wait until he had wired the Post Office Department in Washington me following Friday . Podell and Sprayregen stayed in close touch as the situation unfolded over tJ1e next week. Then , around April 15, Podell wrote to 21

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988

Jt-3[0 OJllA~ JY FORBIGTABLE FOR HAVING THE

courage

~

of the Post Office Department 's delay in pressing charges. But Rosenthal's assumption was that the ACLU did not have to wait for charges lo be sent to Big Table.The magazine's rights under the law had already been violated by the failure of the Post Office Department to notify its publishers promptl y. Podell explained that the Chicago branch of the ACLU was not sure the legal principle at stake-the failure to notify within twenty days-was wonh the expense that the fight would entail.

The news that the ACLU would not take the case put Big Table, Inc. , in limbo. Its own lawyer, who had volunteered his services during the heady days of the previous January, had refused to get involved in a confrontation with the Post Office Department. Now, with an action of some kind or another inevitable , a feeling of desperation must have arisen among the staff members. Advertisers were not paying their bills because they had not received their advertisers' copies or their invoices.

There was not enough money in the bank to pa y for the next issue. How would they hire a lawyer for a court fight that could drag on for years?

When Rosenthal heard that the Chicago office was hedging he tried to interest the New York ACLU in defending Big Table. Rowland Watts of the New York office was favorably impressed by Rosenthal's story and refer-red the case to Herbert Levy, a senior civil rights attorney there. Watts was particularly interested in the Post Office Department's failure to notify Big Table, Inc. , as well as its failure to specify exactly what was obscene in th e magazine. Rosenthal told Podell he thought that ew York would jump in immediately if the Post Office Departm e nt did not make its obscenity charge more precise. Despite not getting the commitment of support he had hoped for, Rosenthal offered to wage the battle from New York if neces sary, the very role he had hoped to avoid by giving up the editorship of the magazine. At the same time he urged Podell to persuade the Chicago ACLU to get involved immediately , to save everyone time and expense later.

A meeting scheduled by the Chicago ACLU board to decide the issue of support for Big Table came and went without a resolution. Podell then wrote to Rosentl1al about rumors that the Chicago ACLU planned to wait until the case reached the Federal Court of Appeals "two or three or four years from now when we are both old and tired

Ji@ {P)~~OOli~[EOOrE\vM

AMERICAN J ~LITERATUR Eâ&#x20AC;˘

the

gate

of

dearborn street and chicago avenue

horn superior 7 2833

Big Tables cause becameafocusfor the avant-gardein Chicago.This culfor the CatPof Horn nightclub appeared in Big Table 3.

Rosenthal with the news that the ACLU would not be able to take their case.

Until that point Carroll and Rosenthal could rationalize the ACLU's ambivalence as the result

22

Big Table

and washed out." At the same Lime he told Rosenthal thatjoel Sprayregen had offered to take the case himself, regard less of the ACLU's decision.

This sho uld have been welcome news, but Rosenthal, Carro ll, a nd Podell were a ll hesitant to put the fute of Burroughs and the new litera ture in the h ands of an attorney less than a year out of Yale Law Schoo l. Podell mused, "I personally wou ld feel more confident with me defending the magazine than with him, " and reco mmended approachingjake Ehrl ich, who had won the Howl obscen ity tria l in San Francisco a few years earlier .

But time was short; a hearing cou ld be set as ear ly as the encl of the month, and Podell reasoned , "perhaps we can let J oe l handl e the hearing (I don 't [th ink we sho uld ] if he wants pay) then see what is what when the hearing is over." Rosenthal agreed, ca llin g Ehrlich "an o ld hero of mine, " but adv ised care lest they e trange Sprayregen. Even after the ACLU agreed to defend Big Table and assigned Sprayregen to the case, Paul Carroll felt concern al Sprayregen's inexperience and con sulted ot h er lawyers as well as Rep. Sidney Yates.

"He [Sprayrege n] is our lawyer, of course: But I suspec t the more adv ice the better /as long as we let the ACLU lawyer make the final counce l [sic]."

Much of this attitude may have been the result of nerves tautening as the postal vise closed around the magazine. Sprayregen handled the case from start to finish, and the staff of Big Tablehad nothing but praise for him. ln May 1959 Ch icago postmaster Carl Schroeder unveiled the Post Office Department 's war on smut in the city, urging "citizens to join the Post Office's crackdown on ... the half-billion-dollar-a-year traffic in obscenity." At the same time , Al Podell , as business manager , was concerned with co llecting a few hundred dollars from Big Table'sadvertisers who could not be billed without a copy of the magazin e . Because of the growing wave of publicity, more and more subscribers wanted Big Table 1 delivered to them. Podell , concerned about the magazine 's reputation as well as it s finances, searched for a way to get the copies out. He discussed clandestine mailings with Paul Carro ll, who was opposed to the idea without exception. He believ ed that the legal repercuss ions would be much greater for the magazine and its ed itors if th ey were disco\'e1¡ed to be sending co pie through the ma il after the Post Office Department ban.

Without te lling Carrol l, Rosentha l, or later Joel

Sprayregen, Podell began sending out indi vidu al copies by first-class mail in plain brown paper wrappers through "a little hick postoffice which hasn't gotten the word yet." Later that summer, Podell loaded his car with cartons of Big Tablesand drove clown to New Orleans. He stopped at every little post office a long the way, there and back, a nd mailed two or three cop ies from each one .

On Friday, May 8, 1959, the clay after Podell's ca ll to Chicago's main post office, the C hi cago ACLU agreed to represent Big Table, In c., and to pick up virtually a ll costs of the defense. The hearing was held in Chicago and, as expected, the U.S. Post Office Department upheld its judgment that Big Table 1 was obscene. But in September 1960Judgejulius Hoffman , in a literate and wellcons id ered op ini on, declared that no part of Big 'fable 1 was obscene and ordered the Post Office Department to release a ll the copies it held. During the hearing and appea l Big Tablecont inu ed to publish and was mailed openly, without interference from postal authorit ies . A few weeks after Jud ge H offma n's decision, Big Table 5 was published. It was to be the final issue of the magazine.

For Further Reading The works of the beat writers are published worldwide in a variety of languages. The Twenty-Fif1h Anniversary Edition of William Bun-oughs 's Naked Lunch was published by Grove Press (New York) in 1984. Allen Ginsberg's Howl appears in severa l co llect ions, including Collected Poems: Nineteen Forty-Seven to Nineteen Eighty (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).J. W. Ehrlic h, H owl of the Censor (San Carlos, CA: Nourse Publishing Com pany, 1961), recounts the u-ial in which the poem was judged "not obscene." Introductory readings on the beats themselves include Ann Charters, ed., The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, volume 16 of Dictiona1y of Litera,y Biography , (Detroit: Gale, 1984); Arthur and Kit Knight, The Beat Vision (New York: Paragon House Publishers , 1987) and Kerouac and the Beats (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1988). To hear a complete reading of Howl, listen to Allen Ginsberg Reads Howl and Other Poems (Berke ley, CA: Fantasy Records , 1959).

Illu stra tio ns 4, from EvergreenReview,September /October 1960, courtesy of Barney Rosset; 6- 7, Fred W. McDarrah; 8, courtesy of Paul Can-o il; 9, from The Un iversity of Chicago Arch ives, copyrighted 1958, Ch icago Tribune Company, all rights reserved, used with permission; 11,Š with permission of the Chic ago Sun-Times, In c., 1988, and the Associated Press; 13, CHS, ICHi-20753; 14, Chicago SunTimes, In c.; 15, CHS, ICHi-20758; 16, CHS, ICHi-20754 ; 18, CHS Library; 22, from Big Tabl.e3 (1959), CHS Library.

23

"I March Because I Must"

by David

J. Garrow

In the summer of 1966 Chicago tensed as Martin Luther King, Jr.and black citizens marched for the right to fair and open housing. The marchesforced the city to confront the housing issue at an extraordinary summit meeting.

Editor's note: 1965 was a turning point in Martin Luther King,J r.'slife. Foralmosta decade,he had led the Southern ChristianLeadershipConference(SCLC) in a full-scale, nonviolentassaulton racialsegregationin the South. Through marches, sit-ins, boycotts, and civil disobedience,King had reclaimedsome of the Constitutional rights black Americans had been denied, and he had drawn worldwideattention to the civil rightsstruggle in the South. By 1964 King was acknowledgedas the nation'sforemost black leader,and in Decemberof that year he receivedthe Nobel PeacePrize. The Nobel Prize and growing supportfrom whitesinspiredKing in 1965 lo move out of theSouth and confrontwhat he considered the mostcriticalissuein America:the wiclespreadoppression of blacks in the urban North.

Civil rightsactivistsin Chicagowereeagerto have the SCLC launch its northerncampaignin theircity.Beginning in the early 1960s, birarial groups had protested against Chicago'ssegregatedcity schoolsand Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis's discriminatorypolicies.

The CoordinatingCouncilof CommunityOrganizations (CCCO),themostactivecivil rightsgroup in the city,was attempting to mobilizethe black community against the schools.CCCOleaderAl Raby wasanxious to coordinate his group's effortswith the SCLC 's attempt to establish a northernfoothold.

King had always believed that blacks in the North benefitedfrom the southern civil rightsstruggles,but his visits to Chicagoand other northern citiesin 1965 convinced him otherwise. Realizing that the prima,y issues for northern blacks were class and economicproblems, not the blatant racial discriminationhe had experienced in the South, King changed his strategyand made the abolishmentof poverty the central issue of his northern campaign. ForKing, the eradicationof slums wasthe key lo this struggle. Chicago- home lo some of the country's

DavidJ. GaiTowisprofessorof politicalscienceat City University of New lvr/1.

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worst slums-was the ideal place for him to begin his crusade.

The ChicagoFre<'dom Movement,as the CCCO-SCLC coalition came lo bf' called, emergedin j anumy 1966.

King, Ralph Abernathy,James Bevel, and Andrew Young of the SCLC worked closelywith Raby, ChicagoUrban Leagu<'executivedirectorEdwin C. "Bill" Brny, and other local activists over the next six months to define the movement'sgoalsand begin organizingtenementresidents. But the work was slow, and the movement was plagued by poorly defined goals. Not until spring did leadersidentify th<'creationof an open-housingmarket as the single most important step toward ending slums.

Then they beganpressuringcity officialsfor change.

When Mayor Daleyrebuffedthe movement'smid-July demand that the city take immediate action to md the discriminatmy practicesof realtorsand bank loan officersand provide morelow-costhousing,the movement 01ganizedmarchesto draw attention to this injllstice.On Friday,j uly 29, civil rights activistsheld a vigil outside a realty office in Gage Park; two days later, marchers in i'vlarquelle Park were violently assaulted by white residents as the police looked on. The following week protestersmarchedin the Belmont-Craginneighborhood and again in Marquette Park, where they confronted morehostility.Movementmemberspicketedthe downtown offices of the Chicago Real Estate Board on Tuesday, August 9, while Mayor Daley'sChicagoCommissionon Human Relations met in City Hall. Fearinggreater violenceif the marchescontinued, the Commissionasked the mayor to call a meeting to resolvethe city's volatile racialsituation. Sponsoredby the ChicagoConferenceon Religion and Race (CCRR) and chairedby industrialist Ben W Heineman, the August 17 meeting brought togetherthe leadersof the ChicagoFreedomMovement and the ChicagoReal Estate Board, Mayor Daley and cityofficials,and otherprominentcitizensand clergymen.

In this excerptfrom DavidJ. Garrow'sbook Bearing the Cross, the author recounts the tense moments and dramatic turns of events of this important meeting.

,\/ artm f.11thnKing.j,: marchesdown State Streetto City Hall protesting Chicagossegregatedsclwols,july 26, 1965. After difficult but ruccessful struggle1to reaffinn the righlSof blarks i11till' South, King came 1101thto desegregateChicago. Photographbyj ohn Tweedle.

Convincedthat slum conditionspe,petuated theirpowerlessne.~~in American society, blacksmarchedthrough white neighborlwodsdemanding an end to homing discrimination. Feelingang,y and thm1tmed, white residentsjinmd an ally in Mayor Richard Daley.

King arrived in Chicago Wednesday morning, just a few hours before tJ1e "summit meeting" convened at the Episcopa l diocese offices. The severa l dozen participants sat around a long conference table, and Chairman Heineman asked Richard Da ley if he had any opening remarks.

"We have to do something to resolve the problems of the past few weeks," the mayor declared.

Heineman offered King a similar opportunit}', and King expressed tl1an ks to tl1e Conference for this chance to begin a dialogue. In Chicago, he exp la ined, "we have a dual school system, a dual economy, a dual housing market," and otl1er segregated conditions, and the movement's goal wa "to transform this duality into a oneness. We cannot solve tJ1is alone; we need the help of the peop le with real powe1~"Then he turned to Al Raby, who sounded a distinct!}' different note, "I am very pessimistic about tl1e negotiations today," he declared bluntly, "because my experience with negotiating has indicated that our success has always been very limi~ed." Fifteen years ago. when a black family tried to mo\'e into Cicero, serious violence erupted, just as would happen today if the movement marched there: So there has nol been any significant change ... The Movement has exposed b)' its marches how we all ha, ¡e failed. We must admit that this dialogue that's beginning today would not have occuJTed without the marches.

But there will be no resolution of this situation umil we have a factual change in the circumstances of Negroes.

We will not end our marches with a verbal commitment.

Heineman tJ1en asked the cha irman of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, Ely M. Aaron, to present his group's proposals.

26

Aaron read eleven recommendations , which included calls forthe Real Estate Board to instruct its members to abide by the city's pro-forma anti-discrimination ordinance and for the movement to institute "an immediate moratorium on marches." A black businessman , A. L. Foster, representing the Cosmopolitan Chamber of Commerce, broke in to say that the key point was for the Real Estate Board to declare its support for open occupancy without regard to race. Board President Ross Beatty responded immediately. "The most important thing for us to understand is what the situation really is as it exists , not what we'd like it to be or want it Lobe, but what it really is.... We are not here 10 negotiate because the problem can't be solved between us and the civil rights people ." Realtors were nothing more than agems for 01hers , and "we cannot persuade property owners to change their attitudes aboul whom tl1ey wan I to sell their property Lo ....

We are the ones that are easr to blame, ... but the problem is not ours. The realtor is an agent; we must represent our clients. And tJ1erefore, because our clients are opposed to tJ1e open occupancy law, we must oppose the law ifwe are Lohonestly represent our cliems." Change could take place on Ir if public attitudes hifted, and "realtors cannot take tJ1e lead in tJ1is."

Then Raby read the Chicago Freedom Movement 's nine demands. They called for the city Lo begin vigorous enforcement of the existing fairhousing ordinance , for tJ1e maror to consider a tougher provision that would apply to owners as well as brokers, for the realtors ' assoc iation to witl1draw its ongoing court challenge to tl1e existing ordinance and to encl its opposition to a state

fair-hous ing bill pending in the Illinois legislature. They also specified that the Chicago Housing Authority end the practice of concentrating high-rise public-housing projects in the ghettos, and that the Public Aid Department stop refe1Ting its recipients to avai lable housing on the basis of race. They further demanded that lending authorities, business and labor leaders, and urban-renewal planners a ll pledge to encl cliscriminatOJ)' practices .

A representative of city mortgage bankers volumeered that his group could accept that demand in full, and Mayor Daley broke in to ask if demonstrations would halt ifall the movement's demands were met. King responded, "Yes, the demonstrations in the neighborhoods might stop, but we have demands also in the areas of education and employment and you are hearing here only our demands in the area of housing:' Somewhat miffed, Daley replied, "If we do all we can as a city, then why can't the marches stop?" Heineman tried to clarify the situation, and King asked Daley directly if he was ready to grant each of the movement's demands. The mayor took the sheet, read each of the points out loud, and agreed that he and the city would meet each one. A clearly suspicious Al Raby questioned Daley in detail about some of the items, and then Heineman asked King what be meant with regard to halting the neighborhood marches. King sa id that open-occupancy protests aimed at realty firms would end, but that neighborhood marches a im ed at educationa l or employment issues would not be ruled out.John Baird , an influential businessman, inte1jectecl a more basic concern. "The Mayor can't really do a ll of the things that he has said here immediately, with all clue respect. Will the marches stop before

the Mayor has been able to accomp lish th e specifics?" Al Raby, worried that things were moving too fast, pointed out that a number of the movement's demands had not yet been addressed. Housing Authority chief Char les Swibel co nceded he could not promise an immediate halt in the construc tion of high-rise ghetto projects, and a lengthy exchange about high-ris e public housing ensued.

The discussion was brought back into focus by Arthur Mohl, a Rea l Estate Board member, who declared that the board would ab ide by the city ordinance, but that discrimination was not a realtors' problem because "we are not the creators, we are the mirror:' King responded immediatel y: All over the South I heard the same thing we've just heard from Mr. Mohl-from restaurant owners and hotel owners . They said that they were just the agents, that they were just responding to the people's unwillingness to eat with Negroes in the same restaurant or stay with Negroes in the same hotel. But we got a comprehensive civil rights bill and the so-called agents then provided serv ice to everybody and nothing happened and the same thing can happen here.

After a pause, Heineman declared that "I don't intend to recess this day until we have resolved these issues." Thomas G. Ayers, president of Conso lid ated Electric and Chicago's most powerful business leader, voiced ag reem e nt with King 's remarks. "I think we support all the points in the proposals of the Chicago Freedom Movement," he added significantly. A labor representative expressed a simil ar comm itment , and th e n Jim Bevel returned to the question of the Real Estate Board. "The core problem is that real tors refuse to serve Negroes in their offices, and that must change.

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askin g Dr. Kin g to d o if you to ld him he h ad to co me o ut aga inst th e fair h o using o rdin a nce.

King resp o nd ed imm ediat e ly: I m ust app ea l to th e d ece ncy o f th e peo pl e on th e Chi cago Rea l Esta te Boa rd . Yo u 're no t nego tiating thi s qu estio n with us. Yo u a re me n co nfr o nt ed with a mora l issue . I d ec id e o n th e basis o f co nscie nce. A ge nuin e lea d er d oes n't re flect co nse nsus, h e m o lds co nse nsus.

Loo k at myself. Th e re are lo ts of Neg ro es tJ1ese clays wh o are for vio le n ce, but I know th a t I am d ea lin gw itJ1 a mo ra l issu e, and I am go ing to o pp ose vio le nce ifl a m th e last Negro in thi s co untr y spea kin g for no nvio le nce. low th e rea l estat e peo ple mu st act o n prin cip le in th a t sam e man ner, or th ey're no t lea d e rs. Th e rea l esta te indu stry has no t o nl y re flec ted di scrimin atm-y auitud es, it has pl ayed a sign ifica nt pa rt in crea tin g th em. ln fact, in Ca lifo rni a th e rea l esta te peo pl e sp e nt five milli o n d o llars to kill th e o p e n occ u pa ncy law th ere. Now d o n't te ll me th at you 're ne utr a l.

Mayor l?ichard Daley and attorney Ely ,\I . Aaron (top, cmter left), chainnan of thRChicagoC01mniisionon Human Relations, ,verejoined al the August 17 summit on Chicago'sracialproblem; by (be/nw,from lefl),\l 01ti11Luther K ing.J r., Edwin C. 'Bill" Bm)', and Al Raby.

That is insultin g a nd it is humili atin g. And th e burd e n is to cha nge se rvice to Negroes ."

Board Presid e nt Bea tty resp ond ed th at he, Mohl , a nd a third re pr ese nt a tive, Go rd on Gro ebe, did no t h ave th e a uthorit y to acce pt a ny sp ec ific d e mands. H e add ed th e re wo uld have to be furth e r dis cussi o n after a reg ul a rly sch edul ed m ee ting of th e Rea l Est a te Boa rd th a t a fte rn oo n .

H e in e m an reco gni zed tJ1e o pe nin g Bea tty h ad pro vid ed. "We re you saying IJ1a t th ere sh o uld be a sub committ ee of th e Conf e re n ce o n Re ligio n a nd Rac e, th e Free d o m Move m e nt a nd th e C hi cago Real Est a te Boa rd to ta lk abo ut tJ1is furth e r?" he asked. "We ca n't sit across th e tabl e a nd bar ga in with th e civil right e rs for something th at we d o n't ha ve th e powe r to give," Bea tty parri ed. Go rd o n Gro e be, se nsin g th e tra p, o bjec ted : If King would co me o ut aga inst th e fair ho using o rdi nan ce, th e n h e wo uld lose hi s supp o rte rs a nd h e wo uld lose hi s positio n a nd h e wo uld no t be a lea d e r. And you 've go t to rea lize th at you 're askin g us to d o th e same thin g. Wh e n we ask o ur rea lto rs to abrogate th e ir pos itio n as age nt s, th e n you '1¡e askin g u s to d o wh at you'd be

28

ju st th e pr evio us d ay, King we nt o n, Atto rn ey Ge ne ra l Katze nb ac h had re m arked to him on th e ph o ne tJ1a t if th e fed e ra l gove rnm e nt had a ll th e fund s th at the rea l estate inclu stt)' had e mpl oyed in o pp os ing th e lair-ho using prov isio ns in th e admini stra tio n's civil right s bill , it co uld e limin ate a ll the slum s in o ne maj or city. "I a pp ea l to th e rightn ess o f o ur pos itio n a nd to your d ece ncy," King d e clared .

I see no thin g in thi s wo rld m ore d a ngero us th a n Negro cities rin ged with whit e su b ur bs. Loo k at it in ter ms of gr a pplin g with right eo usn ess. Peop le will adju st to cha nges , but th e lea d e rship has go t to say th at th e tim e for cha nge has co me. T h e p ro ble m is no t tlie p eo pl e in Gage Par k, th e p ro ble m is th at th e ir lea d e rs a nd institu tio ns h ave ta ught them to be wh at th e) are.

In th e lace of th at a pp ea l, Ross Bea tty re trea ted a bit. "We ll, we will reco mm e nd to o ur boa rd th at we sit clown with you a nd dis cuss thi s furth e r. But we h ave go t to be clea r o n wha~ th e Chi cago o p e n occ up ancy o rdin a nce rea lly requir es ." A Pr es byteria n chur chm an, b e traying so m e exas p eration , po inted out that the Free do m Moveme nt's d e mands were strai ghtfon vard a nd th a t "I think th e Chi cago Rea l Estate Boa rd ca n ac t on th ese ." Ra bbi Marx add ed his voice eve n mor e bluntJ y. "We have hea rd thi s sam e thin g fro m th e Rea l Estate Boa rd ove r a nd ove r. Th ey mu st und erstand th at we mu st have a ch ange n ow." Unit ed Aut o Wo rke rs re pr e sent a tive Ro bert J ohn so n expr esse d th e sam e fee ling: "I agr ee we mu st have cha nge. This is an

"I March Because I Must" urg ent situation. The Real Estate Board must realize that there must be change now." Bishop Montgomery voiced his agreement, and then Al Rab y suggested that they adjourn. Mayor Daley imm ediate ly disagreed. "No, let's not adjo urn the meeting. The Chicago Real Estate Board shou ld get on the phone to their members and do something about these demands now." Daley 's blunt declaration surprised many. By indicating his support for the stance taken by the religious leaders and by businessmen such as Ayers, Daley "p laced a terrific burden" on the realtors, C ivil Rights Commission observer John McKnight noted. All eyes turned toward Beatty, and he again tried to duck responsibility . "We cannot possibly deal on the phone; we cannot possibly work out a resolution to these things today." Cha irm an Heineman added his voice to the consensus: Gentlemen, the big stumbling block here is I.he Chicago Real Estate Board and what it's going to do about the demands on it. And tl1e representatives of tl1e Real Estate Board must realize tliat I.hey are the key to this thing. The monke y, gentlemen, is right on your back, and whelher you deem it as fair or not, everyone sees I.hat the monkey is I.here. And Lhe question is how are you going to deal with the demands p laced on you?

Then Heineman and Eugene Callahan whispered to each other about breaking for lun ch and recessing until Beatty and his col leagues had an opportunity to meet with their board. Heineman announced that suggestion and everyone agreed to break until 4:00 P.M. to a llow the realtors to reassess their position.

During the three-hour recess, King spoke privately with Heineman and Archbishop Cody while also caucus ing with the other Freedom Movement representatives to discuss under what terms they would be willing to grant a moratorium on neighborhood marches. With urging from Bevel and Raby, the movement delegation agreed that it would be a mist a ke to halt protests simply in exchange for promises, and not actua l, concrete results. Meanwhile , Mayor Daley was pressuring the Real Estate Board to adopt a more flexible position. Daley put it bluntl y to Beatty in a midafternoon phone cal l: "In the int erest of the city of Chicago, you ca nnot come back here this afternoon with a negative answec" Beatt y briefed his board on Daley 's sentiments and those of the other influential Chicagoans who had spoken up at the morning meeting , and with great reluctance

and some anger, the realtors approved a new statement for Beatty to take back to the afternoon session.

Heineman reconvened the gather in g by asking Beatty to report on the Rea l Estate Board's discussions. Text in hand , Beatty read the new statement to the hushed room. It declared that 'â&#x20AC;˘freedom of choice in housing is the right of every cit izen," but warned that "street demonstrations will harden bigotry and slow down the progress." It added that "if demonstrations do not terminate promptly, we may lose control of our membership and be unable to fulfill the comm itm ents we have here undertaken. " Those commitments, the statement went on, were two: first, a pledge to "withdraw a ll opposition to the philosophy of open occupancy legislation at the tale leve l-provided it is applicab le to owners as well as to brokers"; and second , a promise to remind all members to obey the city's fair-housing ordinance. When Beatty concluded by denouncing the movement's testing of brokers ' racial practices as "unwarranted harassment," King whispered, "This is nothing." Then King asked Beatty to clarify his remarks. Beatty reread his text, and an exasperated Raby declared that "we've heard your statement; we're not sure what you're saying." Raby said he wanted precise responses to each of the movement's demands, and Jim Bevel added that the crucia l question was whether blacks would actua lly be served at wh ite realty company offices. Human Relations Commission attorney William Robert Ming, who had h e lp ed defend l{jng again t the Alabama tax charges six years ear lier, pointed out that the ordinance required that, but Andrew Young reiterated Bevel's point: "We need a plan to do right and not a law to stop wrong." Beatty chimed in, "I cou ldn 't agree with you more. We shou ld take the monkey off our back and put it on the back of a ll the people."

Discussion bogged clown on the question of whether a Real Estate Board commitment to instruct its members to obey the ordinance would result in blacks being served. "We're still not clear on some points of the ord inance," Beatty asserted while avoiding any direct answer. Al Rab y asked the mayor whether brokers cou ld be forced to post a non-discrimination statement in their windows. Daley was flustered. "I said already this morning that I would do that, and I keep my word."

After several other exchanges, Jesse Jacks o n interrupted to assert that the basic questions were

29

lAllcago H 1.Story, :::, prmg and Summer 1988 110 1 lega l bu1 1he ol og ica l. Ra by so ug h1 to ge t th e di sc uss io n bac k o n 1rac k, a nd Bill Be rr y d ec lare d t h a 1 th e rea lt ors' n e \\' state m e nt \\'as "to 1a ll y unaccep ta bl e." lf'th e boa rd co uld do n o thin g a bo ut th e m o ve m e nl 's d e m a nd s, th e n what a bo ut th e m ayo r; h e as ke d . Da ley res p o n de d fo rce full y: l thin k th ey\ ·c do n e a 10 1. It sh oll's a rea l c han ge 1ha 1 th cy'"e co m e in h e re in d ica tin g th a t 1hc1· \\' ill n o lo n ger oppose o p e n orcupann. \\' e h ;n·e ag reed to 1·irt u a ll) a ll the poi n ts h ere and eHT)onc says th at th ey arc goi n g to m o,·c a h ead. Nol\' let's n o l quib b le m ·cr \\'o rd s: th e int e n t is th e importa nt 1hi ng. \\' c' rc h ere in goo d fa ith a n d th e c it, is as k in g for rnur h e lp.

H e in e m a nj o in ecl in a nd pr esse d lk tT)' lo admi1 th a t 1he rea lio rs' promise 10 e ncl 1he ir oppos i1ion to ;1 s1a 1e o p en- h o u sin g l,11,·11·as a sign ifican l concess io n . Be tT) co n ceclc cl 1he po int , and th en King sp o ke up : I hope 1ha 1 peop le here don't feel that 11c .1rc jusl being recaki 1rant. b u t 11c do ha1C a little hisl<ir1 of disappo in11nc n 1 a n d broken prom ise,. . \\' c sec a gulf bct11·ec11 the prom ise and the fu lfi llmcnl. \\' e do11·11,,1111 to fr>ol people am longer: the, feel the1 ha1c been fooled: so 11·c arc S,l\ ing tocl;n that :\cgrocs. so 11c ;ire as ki ng1ocla1 · t h at :\cgrncscan IH11·,1m11hcrc. \\ ' hen 11ill that be :. 'li:_ · 11u,. ,o that 11c 1rnn·1 fool 1hc people. \\'c need a timc1;1ble. ,omcthing 1en con( rcte. \\ 'e 11,1111 to kno11 11·ha1 1ou1 implemc111a1ion is.

H e ineman responclccl immeclia1eh. "\\' e don·, sec 1·ou as recalci1ran1. .\ m ·one here can unclcr stancl \\'h) you 11·an110 nail clo\\'n 1he l(Tm ., of'1his agreement. " Looking :tt 1hc Frecclont :\lmcmcnl repre5en1ati1 ·e,. the chairman ,ummari1ecl the situation: ·1he .\ Lnor h,1, .inepted 1ou1 dcm ,uHI, on him . I he Real l·.,tate l\o ;u cl ha, ,tatecl 1ha1 it 11ill 1,i1hcl1:n, ii', oppo,ition to a ,1,11e open o(cupanc1 1;111.. \ nd 1hi, i, a grca1 1 ic ton. a m:1jrn Ii< IC>I'\ . .tncl pt oh,tl>il c11,u1 ('' pa,,agc of th,11 lcgi,lation.

I he C>lht't demand, h,11c been mainil ;1nep tccl .

The11 I lcineman ,lated the ho1to111 line . " I he Chair feels th,tl 11c are \\'ell on out 1,,11 to reali1ation and 1ha1 the dcmon,tration, could nm1 c c·a,e until ll'e sec if 1hc,c agree111c·11tsan• 1,orking out."

Jim Be, ·cl 1,·as the first to re,pond. La\\'s alone ll'Cre not the heart of' the matter. ,\ctual . tangible change, 11erc. ··1can't sugges1 am thing to the :'\egro people of thi, to\\'n until I can ,a, lo them. ·11n1 can lrn, Janel from the people 11ho ,ell Janel.' '.\()

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'\01hing lc·,, ... f'hc11 Robert '-ipikc. ,1 lht ·o loh" prn almo<,1 fc..,-,01 ( lo,c· I<> the mo1t·111e111.,urpriscd C1tT1011c ill ,1g1eeing 11i1h I lcincm.111 ,md liaclh undcn u11ing Bc1(·l: I l "n,icl(·t IIfl' l hang,· In Ihe ( 111< .tgo Rea I I· ,1.11c 1\0.11d ,1, p1ofou11d. ,lltd I do11·1 1hink. <>11lit<· oth(·t lt,111el.tlt,11 11(' should 1.,k(' lkll'I ·, lnr,11,1tio11 lrghtil. But 11('\(' go1 lo n1.1kc <k,n ltt·t(' 1h,11 till· ( lt1«1go Ftecdom .\lrnc 111,·nt didri'I ,.11. 111it, 1l1tt'<' dt·1n,11HI, lo thl' Re ,tl bt,lll' I\C>;ircl. ,, lt,11 lll'lel i, s;11ing. and 1ha1 i, th,11 :\egroe, llf>uld he ,cned 111,tll lltt· ofli<n. I 1hi11k \\(' need ,0111(' l(·tm, ltet(' lrn ,I tll<ll,ll<lliu111.

\\'hi le,< >me liste1ll'l'' tried t<>c<>1Heal I heir a,tc ,11i,l I me111. Rah, 1r1ccl to put on the brake,. "I don·,

''! Ma/'Ch 13ecall\eI i\lmt" in Cage Park ma\ · seem like a ll'ITiblc 1hing. but l li1c in I .a\\'11~laleand it ·is safer for me in Cage Park 1han ii i, in Ln, ndalc. For the :\egro in 1hc ghc110. \ iolcncc is the rule. So \\'he11 1ou sm·. "cease these demonstrations," qn1'rc sa, ing to m. "g;, back to a place " ·h ere there is more\ iolencc than " ·here you ,cc I iolcncc taking place outside the g heuo." ln1 cn 1ion ,tl ly or 1101, Mayor Daley asked if h e had understood Young c01Tec 1ly. "Diel I hear you say that we arc go in g Lo haH· more \·iolence in this c it y:,•· Young responded: :\o. 1'111sa1 ing that :\cgrocs 1d10 arcjammcd into ghettos arc people 1d10 arc forced into I iolent \\'a1, of life.

1'111<,,11 ing that the Blackstone Ra11gcrs arc the product of \\'hat happcm 10 people " ·hen \OU li1c in a ghcuo .

I'm ,a, ing 1ha1 the ghcuo has to be d i,pcr,cd. that this cit: 11~11si' be open~-d up. and this high concentration c11dcd. or " ·c \\'ill ha1·c 1·iole11cc \\'hether th ere is a 111m·t·111t·n1or not.

Dale: insisted that "the c it y didn't create this frus1ra1io11 or 1hi~ si1ua1io11. \\' e \,·ant 10 try 10 do \1·ha1 \'Ou sa,." ) c>ung mm eel to exploit the opening: \\'ell. 1,c need a program. \\ 'c need to k1101, ho\\' much i, <roing to be accomplished in thirt\ dais, and h01,· ,ix11 da\,. \\'e 1\'ill find [blackj familic, 10 mmc m;7ch i1t10 t\,c1t1\ [\\'hitcj communities in the 11ex1 thin: d:I\,. . \\ 'c\ ·c got 10 ha1·e a plan fc>ran open cit\' to take 10 the peop le.

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d e 1;1ilcd colloqu\ 011 the ilcm, p c naining lo the lkp a nm c nl of l'uhli c .\id 1ha1 \,a, i111c1Tup1cd 0111\ \,hen .\ ndr e \, \'oun g hrnkc in 10 In lo redin·tl the di,cu,,ion 10 Lite la1gcr is,uc, imoh-ecl. "\\ 'Ito i, going 10 bear rc,po11,ihili1\ for clncgrega 1i11g 1ht· l ii\ :, The ,oc icl\ mu,1 change . \ \'c rnu,1 1.1ke n ·,,)(rn,ihiliL\ hell' fot implcrnenling a pl ,111fo r ,111open cil\. \\'e need .1 pl.111Lo .1ggll ,,in ·h dnt ·g 1c g.11t· 11ti, t ii\ ... Young then 1.iunt heel i1110 a l(llnllll ' lll.lr\ ()Jl the ('',1,tlJ!i,ltmc11L\ l' ,tgt-rncs, I<> h ,tl1 1hc OJH' 11- hm1,i11g pro1c,1, ,111cl1ltt· .111c1HLrn1 \\ lt 1it ' \ i()l(' IH e : 0

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Chairman Heineman returned 10 Rohen Spike\ point that the mo\ ·ement\ elem ands \,Cr(· nmd1cre near as far-reaching as Young\ and Bc,cl\ cli,qui~itiom. '·:\ o\, , I think \1·e\ ·e got Lo undcr,tancl \,hat \, ·e·rc talking about here. \Ve u nclcrsloocl 1ha1 \'OU r proposab \,·ere on these t\1·0 page,. and it ,ounch no\\' like you 're changing thing,." Young di,agrcccl. ":--:o. \\'hat I'm talking about is a pl,111 to implement \,·hat is on those t\\'O and H ousing page,." I le ga\C ,c\ ·eral examples. .\u1horil\ Chairman Charles S\\·ibel piped up to ,a1 1ha1 hi, unit and others \\·ere commi1ted to fc>llm, ing through . "I \\'an1 to ,cc 1hc,e marche, enclccl tocl ,n. If' \1·c are dealing 011 the top of' the 1;ible. 1he11 call off the marches for l\1·ehe months."

1'11e rnmc111cn1 repre,entati\e, groaned audibh ,11 S\1 ibel\ mention of' t\,chc month,. and Rab: · ,i',ked for .1 fiflecn-minute acljournmen1 so that 1IH' 111rncmcn1 rcpresc111,11in ·s could c1ucus pri\ ,lleh. lkfiire the meeting broke up. lto\1·e\'e1; black P:1cki11ghou,e \\'orkcrs executiH' Charles l lm ·es 1lllt-red .t pm1e1-f'ul \1arning. '.ll

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 We'vegot to see that we're in changing times and we can't go out after these negotiations and tell the guy on the street that what we got was an agreement from the Chicago Real Estate Board 1hat they philosophically agree with open occupancy. The people want to hear what we're going to do for them now. If I as a union negotiator ever came back r.omy men and said to them , "I got the company to agree that philosophicall y the y were in support ofseniorit(' I'd be laughed out of court.

Hayes 's sentiments were endorsed unanimously in the movement 's brief caucus. No one believed that the promises uttered so fur by the city and the Real Estate Board were meaningful enough to halt t.he neighborhood protests, and when the session reconvened , Raby reported the movement 's decision to a hushed room: We view this meeting as very important and significant.

For the first time there are verbali7ations at least that show that we have some opportunities for change. But I would remind you tJ1at the important thing. that we stressed at the beginning of the meeting , was the actualit)', the implementation. That 's the key. \Ve can see the need for further discussions. In your mind the question may be a moratorium, but we would have to say that we would have a mora1orium on demonstrations ifwe had a moratorium on housing segregation. \Ve would like to see a meeting one week from now to see what you're doing in terms of implementation. In the meantime we would meet in a subcommittee on specifics .... During this week we will ha, ·e to continue our present plans.

Heineman asked if that meant ongoing protests. Raby said yes. "Demonstrations ,,·iII continue for the next week." Then Daley spoke up in a tone of itTitation: I thought we were meeting to see if ... there couldn't be a halt to what is happening in our neighborhoods . . . . I repeat , as fur as the city is concerned, we are prepa1·ed to do what is asked foe I appeal to you as citizens to try to understand that we are trying. I asked "'hy you picked Chicago' l make no apologies for our city. In the name of all our citizens. I ask for a moratorium and that we set up a commi1tee. v\le're men of good faith and we can work out an agreement. ...

What's me difference between today and a week from today with men of good faitJ1' We're defending your rights, and also there 's no question about the law. Can't you do today what you would do in a week' Thomas Ayers, who had not spoken since the morning, asked that everyone persevere. "We started on this document, this two page document; I don't think we should leave it now. We've gotten substantial agreement; we ought to make sure at least that we know what the outstanding areas are."

32

OrU? of tlU?movement'sdemands wasvigorousenforcementof tlw 1963 ChicagoPair Housing Ordinance, whichforbade racial, religious,or ethnic discriminationby realestate agents. ChicagoReal EstateBoard president Ross Beatty argued that tlw ordinance was urumforceabk since mostwhite Chicagoansopposedit. Photographbyjack Dykinga.

Raby quickly spoke up: "Well, let me give you an example. Is the Mayor going to ask for the legislation to require brokers to post the ordinance in their windows; will he ask [the City Council] for that legislation next Tuesday and will he get it? Will that actually be implemented?"

Daley 's response was immediate and blunt. "We've got to show the City Council that you'll do something. We'll pass

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what we said we'd pass if we get a moratorium."

That statement ofa quid pro quo infuriated Raby, "Ifl come before the Mayor of Chicago some day, I , hope I can come before the Mayor of Chicago with what is just and that he will implement it because it is right rather than trading it politically for a moratorium." Heineman tried to calm the situation . "In a cooler moment , I think you'll realize that the Mayor cannot help but want fewer demonstrations. He 's concerned about the safety of the people . And the 1ayor is accustomed to having his word taken." Rab y refused to back

clown, and in a "very angry and tense" voice told Heineman , "I won't reply to what you've said for the sake of harmony." He took the two-page statemem of demands in hand, and went down the points one by one, indicating that the verbal commitments offered so far fell short of what the movemelll wanted.

The air was tense when Raby stopped. It seemed possible that the entire clay's effort would co llapse.

Then, with what one on looker termed a "grand and quiet and careful and calm ing eloque nce ," King spoke up: 33

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 This has been a constructive and creative beginning.

This represents progress and a sign of change. I've gone through this whole problem in my mind a thousand times about demonstrations, and let me say tJ1at if you are tired of demonstrations, I am tired of demonstrating. I am tired of tJ1e tlireat of death. I want to live. I don't want to be a marty1: And there are moments when I doubt if I am going to make it tJ1rough. I am tired of getting hit, tired of being beaten, tired of going to jail.

But the important thing is not how tired I am; the important thing is to get rid oftJ1e conditions tliat lead us to march.

I hope we arc here to discuss how to make Chicago a great open city and not how to end marches. We've got to have massive changes. Now, gentlemen, you know we don't have much . We don 't have much money. We don't really have much education, and we don't have political power. We have only our bodies and you are asking us to give up tlic one thing that we have when you say, "Don't march."

We want to be visible. We are not trying to overthrow you; we're trying to get in. We're trying to make justice a reality. Now the basic thing isjustice. We want peace, but peace is tlie presence ofjustice. We haven't seen enough for tlie massive changes tliat are going to be needed. To tlie Chicago Real Estate Board, I want to say particularly tJ1at your second point about tlie demonstrations being tlie wrong approach botJ1ers me, because the problem is not created by the marches. A doctor doesn't cause cancer when he finds it. In fact, we thank him for finding it, and we are doing tlie same tliing.

Our humble marches have revealed a cancer. We have not used rocks. We ha,¡e not used bottles . And no one today, no one who has spoken has condemned tliose tliat have used violence. Maybe tliere should be a moratorium in Gage Park. Maybe we should begin condemning tlie robber and not the robbed. We haven't even practiced civil disobedience as a movement. We are being asked to stop one of our most precious rights, tlie right to assemble, the right to petition. We asked Chicago to bringjustice in housing, and we are starting on tJiat road today.

We are trying to keep the issue so alive that it will be acted on . Our marching feet have brought us a long way, and if we hadn't marched I don't think we'd be here today. No one here has talked about the beauty of our marches, tlie love of our marches, the hatred we're absorbing . Let's hear more about the people who perpetrate the violence. We appreciate tlie meeting. We don't want to end tJ1e dialogue . We don't see enough to stop the marches, but we are going with love and nonviolence. This is a great city and it can be a greater city.

When J{jng finished, his remarks had "changed the mood completelY:' After several brief comments, Andrew Young declared that "we need a working committee. The Real Estate Board did a good job, they moved along in tJ1e hour and a halftJiey had, and tomorrow by noon we could start working out a pro-

34

gram. As soon as concrete proposals are worked out we can get back together." Robert Johnson of tJie UAW seconded Young's suggestion and Heineman moved quickly: The Chair will appoint a commiuee, under the chairmanship of Bishop Montgomery, that will be composed of no mo1¡e than five representatives of the Freedom Movement, two representatives of the Real Estate Board, the president of tlie Association of Commerce and Industry [Thomas Ayers], an officer of the Commercial Club of Chicago , a representative of labor, and the fayor of Chicago or his representative. And they will meet at the call of Bishop Montgomery. We'll reconvene tliis group to have a report from them. I propose that we reconvene this group a week from this Friday.

Some we1¡e surprised at the nine-day time frame, and one person asked Heineman what the subcommittee's purpose would be. "The purpose of tJ1e subcommittee," he answered, "is to come back with proposals designed to provide an open city."

Montgomery stated tJiat the first subcommittee meeting would take place Friday, and discussion turned to what the different parties ought to say to the press. Heineman asked if he might issue a statement for all, including an explanation tJiat tJiere would be no morato1ium, but tJiat tJie movement would proceed with restraint. King voiced a dissent. "Can't you say that iftJiere are demonstrations, you want to call on the violent people to be restrained?"

Heineman tried a different formulation, still using the word "restraint." King objected. "I think we've been restrained.'' Bevel and Bob Ming offered suggestions, and then Raby inteITupted in a tone of disgust. "I can stand anytJiing you say about me; I really don't care. The important thing is what is the ubstance of what we're willing to do to open up tJiis city:' WitJi tempers starting to fray, Daley cut tJ1e discussion off. "I think everybody should be allowed to say anything they want to and tJ1at it be made clear that this is a continuing meeting, and that this has been a beginning." No one objected, and tJie lengthy session ended as tJie clock neared 9:00 r.~1. J{jng spoke briefly to waiting newsmen and then headed olfto a church rally.

Thursday afternoon King and a dozen otJier activists met at tJie Urban League office to review Wednesday's session, make plans for the Friday subcommittee meeting, and pick tJie five representatives who would attend. News reports said that the mayor was "disappointed and frustrated"

"I Mar ch Because 1 Must "

that Wedn esd ay's nego tia tion s had not produ ce d a mo ratorium . Key m ove me nt lea d e rs we re a lso unh app y. Th e two prin cipa l co nce rn s we re th a t th ey h ad started n ego tiatin g be fore th e ne ighb o rhood prot ests h ad reac h ed pea k int e nsity, and that th ey might be h e ld Loth e hurri edl y pr e pa red de mand s th at Wedn esday's di scussions had focused o n. Co n ce rn abo ut th e lauer p ro ble m was es pecia lly se rio u s. A numb e r o f CCC O lea d e rs had rea lized in ad vance th at th e list of ite ms was inco mplete and vague ly word ed , bu t no o ne had expec ted Daley to be so eage r to reac h a se ttle m e nt o r th at th e city wo uld foc u s so pr ec ise ly o n th e m ove.me nt 's d e ma nd s. Move me nL lea d e rs ho ped th e sub co mmitt ee's age nd a co uld be ex p a nd e d Lo incl ucle a br oa d di scussio n of all th e issues ra ised by th e initi a l d e m and s, a nd th ey se lec ted fo ur Chi cagoa ns- Raby, AFSC exec utive Ka le Williams , Ca th o lic Int e rr ac ia l Co un c il Dir ec to r J o hn McDem1o tt, and Be rry o f th e Urb an League- plu s o ne SC LC sta ffe r,Jim Beve l, as th e ir sub co mmit tee re prese nt atives. Th ey a lso ag ree d Lo a nn o un ce

Open-housingdemonstration,Belmont-Craginneighborhood. Outraged that realtors refu.sedto serve blacks in their offices. Chicago Frenlom ,\l ovement o[ficialr demanded that the city m1uir,, brokns to post nondiscriminatorystatnnenls in their windows. Photograph byJ ack Dyl,inga.

multipl e ne ighborh ood protests for Sunda y d espite su gges tio ns th a t th e city might mov e for a court injun ctio n if th e move me nt pe rsisted with its d e mo nstrations. King and his aid es mu se d th at an a tte mp t by Da ley to b loc k on going pro tests wo uld be a stra tegic e 1To r th at wo uld pla y int o th e mov em e nt 's ha nd s, a nd King ta lked abo ut th at poss ibility at a T hur clay night mass mee tin g: I wa nt to te ll you a sec re t a nd I ho pe th e pr ess won't hea r a nd I hop e th e mayor wo n't h ea r. We've had moveme nt s a ll ac ross th e nati o n a nd all across th e So uth and d o you kno w, o ur move m e nt won no t o nl)' beca use of o ur inge nuit y and beca use o f o ur abili ty to mobili zeth at was ju st o ne sid e o f it-but it wo n as mu ch beca use o f th e m ista kes of o ur o pp o ne nt s. Now we will we lco me a n)' mi sta ke o ur o pp o ne nt s are willin g to ma ke in Chi cago .

35

White power advocateslike the Ame,-ican,\ 'azi party rlmu an enthusiasticre1ponse in many white neighborhoods . Fearingth.I'worstif the movement marched as /1lanned into Ciceroon Simrlcl)',August 28, Covemor Kn¡11rrmade plans to mobili,;ethe National Guard.

Blocking e ith er the Sunday marches or a Friday house-hunting expedition into Gage Park that he would lead would be just such a mistake, King declared. Although those remarks seemed to indicate an almost playful eagerness to see the Chicago protests through, King was deeply drained by the events of the summer. The tensions of the Meredith March, the turmoil over "black power," and the Chicago demonstrations had all combined to make him weary. Now, at the conclusion of his Thursday night mass-meeting speech, he spoke to that theme, a theme that rarely emerged in his public comments. 'Tm tired of marching," he told the crowd, tired of marching for something that should have been mine al first ... I'm tired of the tensions surrounding our days . . . I'm tired of living every day under the threat of death. I have no martyr complex , I want to live as long as anybody in tJ1is building LOnight, and sometimes I begin to doubt whether I'm going LO make it through. I must confess I'm tired .... I don 't march because I like it, I march because I must

It was unusual for King to confess his deep .wea1iness to anyone other than his closest aides, but the words,just like his Wednesday comments to the negotiators, revealed his state of mind most clearly.

36

The pace of his life was brutal in its rclentlcs demands , and the events oftJ1e summer had offered little solace and much sorrow. Perhap tJ1eChicago Freedom Movement would soon reach a producti\'e climax .

Friday morning, as King rested, tJ1e movement's five representatives gathered for breakfast before the subcommittee's fir t meeting. When they joined the other members at the Episcopal parish house, they found both a surprisingly large number of de legates-nineteen people, a ll told-as well as a newly designated chainnan, Commonwealth Edison President Ayers, whom Montgomery had asked to take over his duties. The subcommittee began its discussions with a lengthy consideration of what the city's fair-housing ordinance required and how its enforcement might be improved. They had been assembled for several hours when Housing Authority Chairn1an Char les Swibel passed a note to Al Raby indicating that a court injunction had been handed clown against the movement just minutes earl ier. Raby stepped out to a phone, confinned the report, and returned to break the news to the full group. At the request of Mayor Daley, Police Superintendent Wilson, and city attor ney Raymond Simon, Cook County Circu it Court

"I March Because I Must" Judge Cornelius]. Hanington had issued an order drastically limiting tJ1eallowable scope oft11e neighborhood protests. Marches would be restricted to one area of the city per day, cou ld involve no more t11anfive hundred participants , and would have lo be held during daylight and not at rush hours.

Additionally , police would have lo be informed in writing , at least twenty-four hours in advance , of t11eroute , leaders, and size of any column.

The subcomm ittee members were slllnned by the news. Professor Spike was infuriated by the city's double-dealing, and Eugene Callahan of the Conference on Religion and Race lashed out angrily at city Human Relations attorney Bob Ming, who denied knowing anyt11ing about the injunction.

The movement representatives demanded an immediate recess in order to discuss whether negotiations should be broken off because of Daley 's bad-fuit11behavio1~ Although both Raby and Bevel had voiced strong emotions on Wednesday, at this crucial juncture bot11 men reacted calmly after the initial anger had passed. They and their fellow negotiators decided that a walkout would be counterproductive, and the subcommittee reconvened for an afternoon session that went surprisingly well. When the group adjourned after agreeing lo continue deliberations on Monday , representatives from both sides expresse _cl optimism to newsmen.

King learned of the injunction in a phone call from city attorney Simon, and reacted more strongly than the movement 's negotiators. He told reporters he might have to defy the order, and met with auorneys before watching Mayor Daley appear live on television to explain this new action.

Although the mayor coupled his defense of the legal initiative with calls for an encl to discrimination and harassment of the marchers, King denounced Daley in harsh terms. The injunction was "unjust, illegal, and unconstitutional," and the mayor was "more of a politician than a statesman and not good at either." Daley should have moved ~o control the white hecklers and provide greater protection for the marcher rather than restrict the movement's right to protest. "I deem it a very bad act offuith on the part of the city in view of the fact we're negotiating," King complained. 'This just Lands in the way of everything we're trying lo do:¡ Saturday morning King huddled with attorneys and other movement leaders lo discuss the injunc-

tion. The lawyers advised t11atthe movement should not defy an order that was not all t11at unreasonable, and after extensive discussion King agreed.

The injunction would not hinder the ongoing negotiations, and Sunday's protest plans would be altered to conform to the court's requirements.

One march would take place in the South Deering neighborhood, and two others would occur in suburbs that were not part of Chicago and hence not covered by the order-Ch icago Heights and Evergreen Park. However, King told newsmen, if the city did not meet the movement's demand at t11e next summit session on Friday, the marches would be intensified. ot only would they defy the court order, there would a lso be a Sunday procession into Cicero, where American Nazis were recruiting new supporters . "White power" sentiments were drawing an enthusiastic response in many all-white neighborhoods, and city officials worried that any movement trek into Cicero might result in a literal slaughter.

King decided to lead the Sunday march through South Deering, but first took time out to appear on an edition of Meet the Pressthat featured a ll tJ1e major civil rights leaders. He explained that the Chicago protesters would abide by the injunction even though it was unjust, and left the broadcast early to address a church rally p1ior to t11emarch.

A seventy-car caravan took King and five hundred other participants to Sout11Deering; four policemen flanked King at all times as the protesters marched tJ1rough the area and held a prayer vigil at one realty office . A steady rain soaked the marchers but also kept clown the number of hostile whites.

Some hoodlums tossed debris al the column as it moved along Ewing Avenue, but King told reporters that he believed mo t Ch icago whites supported the movement's efforts . "The people out here throwing rocks and tossing bottles at us represent only a minority. They are only a minority."

Monday morning King flew to Atlanta for a one-clay visit while the subcommittee negotiators resumed their discussions. The city representatives and Chairman Ayers were insistent that the movement not expand its demands beyond the initial two-page statement presented at the Wednesday summit conference, and the civil rights negotiators felt trapped. McDennott and Williams, t11e two white movement representatives, pressed for a comprehensive "open city" and open-ho using package tJ1at would provide "clear timetables and

37

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 targets for changes in population in every neighborhood and every suburb over a mea5ured period of time," but they ran into strong resistance. The city people, McDermott explained, were "not happy about our introducing new ideas in the course of the negotiations ," ideas that had not been spelled out in the initial demands. Bevel began to wonder whether a walkout might not be better, and at the conclusion of Monday 's session, an equally displeased Raby told the press that "whether something meaningful" would emerge "remains to be seen."

Official concern about the movement's plan to march into Cicero on Sunday increased as more reports came in about the likely white response.

Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie sent telegrams to movement leaders on Monday , asking that they cancel such a "suicidal act," but King told newsmen in Atlanta that the movement would not be clissuaclecl. "We fully intend to have the march.

We have talked with Ogilvie about this and announced our plans last Saturday . We gave more than the seven clays notice." Tuesday evening Ogilvie and Cicero town attorney Christy Berkos announced plans to ask Illinois Governor Otto Kerner for National Guard troops should the movement go fonvarcl. King returned to Chicago and reiterated the protesters ' intent. One column of marchers headed into the tough South Deering neighborhood that evening under heavy police protection.

A similar safeguard would have to be provided in Cicero, King declared, even if it did require mobilizing the National Guard.

Wednesday morning Governor Kerner announced that the Guard would be called up on Friday if the movement proceeded with the Sunday march. At the same time, the subcommittee reassembled for its third meeting , and movement negotiators renewed their effort to win acceptance of more fur-reaching demands. McDermott and Williams pressed for specific goals and timetables as part of the open-housing provisions, but found no receptivity. When Bevel also attempted to expand the list of demands, Chairman Ayers told him bluntly that the subcommittee's task wa limited to the movement's initial proposal. "We tried to get more," McDermott said, but they were unable to increase the demands in the race ¡ of the city's insistence . "We got stuck with them ," Williams explained, and "eventually we felt that we had to take what we could get." Bevel suggested tJiat a 38

break in negotiations and resumption of intensified protests might be better, but the CCCO representatives felt that would be futile. Any serious expansion of demonstrations would violate the injunction and would shift the issue from nondiscrimination in housing to "law and order," a shift that would not be in the movement's favor.

AltJ1ough Bevel was reluctant to accept that analysis, by midday Wednesday the movement's negotiators were committed to getting the best and most specific agreement they could within the scope of the initial demands.

With only twenty-four hours to go before the second scheduled summit session, the Ayers subcommittee met on Thursday for the fourth and final time to hammer out a written agreement, working from a draft that Ayers had prepared. A hue and cry about the threatened Cicero march and the scheduled ational Guard call-up dominated the Chicago press , and the drafting session took place amid an air of growing tension. Accord had been reached on the Real Estate Board's responsibility to tell realtors to obey the city ordinance, on expanded enforcement of the ordinance by the Human Relations Commission, on nondiscriminatory mortgage practices by Chicago lending institutions, and on the establishment of some ongoing forum for discussion of implementation.

By the end of Thursday's meeting a final draft had been agreed upon for submission to the full summit conference. Some movement activists believed it was a mistake Lo agree to an accord umil the city withdrew the court injunction, and everal "back channel" conversations took place about possibly trading a cancellation of the Cicero march fora withdrawal of the injunction. King vowed at a Thursday night mass meeting that the Sunday march would take place, but Raby told newsmen that no final decision would be made until after the Friday summit session. Subcommittee Chainnan Ayers, speaking carefully to tJ1epress , said there was "a high degree of consensus" on the draft agreement, but sentiments within the movement were divided despite the positive indications thatSCLC aides voiced to reporters. Overall, the situation was muddled, with many signals sugge ting that tJie Friday meeting might bring Martin Luther King.Jr. led 500 marchersthrough South Deering on August 21 and J1romisedlo step up the numbl'r of open-housing marchesto J1ressurethe city to develop a <ksegregationplan.

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Bcatt1 \ muddled remarks, ci\"il rights obsel"\ ·cr _john .\lcK11ight 11otcd. ··made c1cn hocl1 \"C:'r\" lllT\OLl'>.l'H'll \1,tior Daiei. I could sec that Daiei · \\·a, afraid 1ha1 he 1,·a, going lo biol\ · the deal. hccau,c it ,ou11decl after hi, statcme111 like 11othing 1,a, firnt."" Bi,lwp \lontgomcn 1·olu11tccrccl that cnT1011e k11c11 · hell\ dillicult things 11·oulcl he, and 11oulcl ,upport the hoard\ effort,. l ':\\ \ ' rcprc,cntatiH · Rolwrt .Joli11,011. ,,·horn the mmcmcnt 1ea1111ie1,,·cl ,l', a fcncc-,traclclling Daiei · ,1 mpa1Ii i1e1. ,tlso ofkred ,onw u pheat conrn1e11t ,.

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It ,hould rn1h he ,111 indication of sentiment. '" '\ 111,I 1111 111-..

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Despitetheir nonviolent actions, black marchersfrequently met a hail of bottlesand rockswhen they enteredwhite neighborhoodslike Belmont-Cragin (tofJ)or Gage Park (bottom). To quellfurther confrontations,Mayor Daley issuedan injunction order on August 19 drasticallylimiting the scale of future neighborhoodmarches. Top photograph by Bob Langer; bottomphotograph by Edmund Jarecki.

42

"I March Because I Must"

Jackson, citing Beatty's noncommittal utterings, renewed their contention that it would be a mistake to accept the agreement as it stood. Others argued that they needed more specific details about the future role of the ongoingsummitgroup called for by the subcommittee document. Concern about the injunction remained, but a majority favored acceptance, and King agreed.

When the movement leaders rejoined the other conferees, King explained their position:

gratuitous ofanyone to suggest that we sufJer this injunction for three years just to get a legal opinion, because legal opinions haven't clone us much good. The ame process, the process of legal opinion, got us twelve years ago a decision oft.he United States Supreme Court that we would have integrated schools, that segregation would be done away with. And the result of that legal opinion twelve years later is largely insignificant. We want from t.he city an answer and not a debate. I felt it was bad faith for the city on Wednesday to say that they would negotiate with us and then go out on Friday and seek an injunction against us.

We have decided that we are prepared to vote on the issue before us and we want. to agree that this is a most significam document. However, we have one or two questions that still remain.

First, while we recognize that this is not a matter involved in these negotiations, we are much concerned about the injunction we face. We feel that injunction is unjust and unconstitutional. .. . If we wanl to have a great march , only five hundred people can march and thousands of people will be denied their freedom of assembly. We are acting in good faith and since we are, we will agree to limit the demonstrations. And therefore, we want to know if t.he city will withdraw the injunction. We make the request of the city, "What will you do?"

Second , we are very concerned still about implementation. Maybe we are over-sensitive, but there have been so many promises that haven't materialized, that this is a great thing in our minds. We want to know if the continuing body that will be established to ham me~¡ out the specifics will be an action bod) ' or whet.her it will be just a forum. We want to know how soon it will be unclenvay , because ultimately we want to know how soon a Negro can go to a real estate office and feel reasonably sure that he will get fair treatment, that he will be served.

And we also want to know how we can deal with the Negro that is not served.

Richard Daley broke in heated ly: "People can make all the statements that they care to about bad faith ," but he had had no choice. "It was with heavy heart, yet firmness, that I soughtthat injunction. There was no other course for me." A long silence followed, and some wondered if a breach was at hand. Then King calmly spoke again:

Bishop Montgomery spoke up: "On Monday we hope to have the organizing body set up as an action group and ready to roll." A Presbyterian representative, Dr. Donald Zimmerman, volunteered that the injunction ought to be tested all the way to the Supreme Court, a comment that left many in the room stunned. King responded: 'Tm ,sure you're aware that this will take at least three years and $200,000 of the movement 's resources to get an answer to." Zimmerman backed off, saying "perhaps it could be at least a continuing item to be discussed on the agenda," but Al Raby was not about to let it drop: I am forced to respond here . I don 't see that the judicial process has reall y helped the Negro. I think it is very

I appreciate what Mayor Daley has said, and I know he made the decision with heavy heart. I don 't want to stress bad faith. I hope we are operating here by the law of life which is that reconciliation is always possible. But I think I've got to say that if that injunction tands, somewhere along the way we are going to have to break it. We are going to have to break it tomorrow, or in a week, or a month , or sometime as the movement proceeds.

Heineman tried to resolve the problem by asking if the injunction would limit a downtown rally or just the neighborhood marches, and might the city discuss this with the movement? "The city will sit down and talk over anything with anybody," Daley volunteered.

Movement representatives pressed the question, however . Wou ld Daley withdraw the injunction? Heineman answered for him: "I think that the Mayor is saying he will not at this time withdraw the injunction but he will discuss its amendment." Daley nodded vigorously and declared, "I call for a vote."

Once again, Al Raby objected. " o, let 's wait.

We want to discuss this more'.' Hurriedly, a number of movement representatives huddled around King and whispered to each other. After a few seconds, King ended the informal caucus and spoke up: "I don't think that we can accept a conference to modify the injunction because we are opposed to the injunction totally, but we wou ld accept a separate negotiation through the continuing body on this issue ." Raby remained silent, and the last obstacle to ratification of the agreement had been disposed of. Chainnan Heineman

43

Chicago Hi.story, Spring and Summer 1988 called for the formal vote, and the result was unanimous. Heineman and then Daley expressed their thanks to those present, and the chairman asked King for his parting words: I do want to express my appreciation for everybody's work and the appreciation of the Chicago Freedom Movement. l want to thank the ubcommittee. We read in the scripture, "Come, let us sit down and reason together, " and everyone here has met that spiritual mandate. There comes a time when we move from protest to reconciliation and we have been misinte1vrcted by the press and by the politjcal leaders of this town as Loour motives and our goals, but let me say once again that it is our purpose. our single purpose to create the beloved community. We seek only co make possible a city where men can live together as brothers.

I know this has been said many times today, but I wam to reiterate again that we must make this agreemem work. Our people's hopes have been shattered Loo many times, and an additional disillusionment will only spell catastrophe. Our summers ofriocs have been caused by our winters of delay. I want to stress the need for implementation and I want to recognize that we have a big job . Because I marched through Gage Park , I saw hatred in the faces of so many, a hatred born of fear, and chat fear came because people didn't know each other, and they don't know each other because they are separate from one another. So, we must auack that separation and those myths. There is a tremendous educational job ahead of us. ow, we don't want to threaten any additional marches, but if this agreemem does not work , marches would be a reality. We must now measure our words by our deeds, and it will be heard. I speak to e\'eryone on my side of the table now, and I say chat this must be interpreted, this agreement, as a victory for justice and not a victory over tJ1eChicago Real Estate Board or the city of Chicago.

I am as grateful LOMayor Daley as co anyone else here for his work. I tJ1ink now we can go on co make Chicago a beautiful city, a city of brotherhood.

Spontaneous applause rang out from all sides of the table. Heineman closed the meeting by declaring that the agreement was a tribute to the democratic process. As the group filed out, one CCCO activist turned to a friend . "Democratic process, shit. It was forced out of them."

Soon after the meeting broke up, King went before the press to describe the accord and to announce that Sunday's march through Cicero was being defe1Ted indefinitely. He praised the "far-reaching and creative commitments" in the agreement and labeled the fair-housing provisions "the most significant program ever conceived" for the pursuit of open occupancy. "The only ultimate justification of nonviolent conflict is the 44

achievement ofa higher integration of harmony," and this agreement promised to do that. "The total eradication of housing discrimination has been made possible, " and in exchange the movement would "halt neighborhood marches and demonstrations in Chicago on the issue of open housing, so long as these pledged programs are being canied out." King 's positive portrayal of the settlement was so strong that some wondered whether his rhetoric was overblown. One indication came when a reporter asked James Bevel if he was happy with the pact. "l don 't know. I'll have to tJ1ink about it."

A number oflocal black activists had no doubts about their opinions of the settlement. Chester Robinson of the West Side Organization told newsmen that "we feel the poor Negro has been sold out by this agreement." Robinson, as well as CORE Chapter President Robert Lucas, declared that the Sunday march into Cicero ought to g') fonvard because poor black Chicagoans "reject the terms of the agreement." Intensive private lobbying convinced Robinson and Lucas by midday Saturday to postpone their march one week, but angry expression of dissatisfaction with King's settlement percolated tJ1rough out the black comm unity. King spoke to a discordant Friday night mass meeting at Stone Temple Baptist Church on the west side before leaving the next day for Atlanta, but the local situation remained troubled. One Community Relations Service observer noted that the "ge neral feeling" was that tJ1e movement had '"sold out' to the city administration. There is much animosity in the Negro community."

To his Atlanta congregation, King 1-epeated his characterizations of the Chicago accord and talked about how discouraging the events of the summer had been. The settlement was only"a first step in a thousand mile journey," but it was also the "most significant and far reaching victory that has ever come about in a nortJ1ern community on the whole question of open housing .... The whole power structure was forced by the power of the nonviolent movement to sit down and negotiate and capitulate and make concessions that have never been made before." Although the negotiations had left him exhausted, King said, and even though the summer as a whole had been depressing, he would still struggle on: I choose to identify with the unde1 -privileged . I choose

... / am tirNIof demonstrating.I am timl of the threat of dmth. I want lo live. ... Bui the important thing is not how tired I am; the important thing i.1to get rid of the conditions that lead us to marrh.'"Photographby Stej Leinwohl.

to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry. I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity. I choose lo live for and with those who find themselves seeing life as a long and desolate co1Tidor with no exit sign. This is the way I'm going. If it means suffering a liule bit, I'm going that way. If it means sacrificing, I'm going that way. If it means dying for them, I'm going that way, because I heard a voice saying, "Do something for others."

IL was the voice he had heard in the kitchen 111 Montgomery ten years earlier, the voice that gave him the stamina to carry on when others were calling the Meredith March a failure, fulling victim to the ang1-y sentiments of"black powe1~"or castigating the Chicago settlement as a "sellout." Even when times were bad-and it was hard to remember when events had been more frustrating and debilitating than over the past three months-that voice sustained him. He was profoundly uncertain of what would come next, terribly vulnerable to doubts about where he and the movement were headed, but still he had the strengtl1 to go forward.

For Further Reading To establish the chronology of the complex negotiations of the August 17, I 966, summit meeting, the author relied on papers, published recollections, and interviews of the participants. Sources include the James Bevel Files in the Department of Special Co llections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; and the Claude A. Barnett Papers, Chicago Conference on Reli6iion & Race Papers, and Conference of Racial Equality (Chicago) Papers in the Archives and Manuscripts Collection, Chicago Historical Society. For a more comprehensive look at race and housing in Chicago, see Brian J. L. Berry, The Open Housing Question:Race and Housing in Chicago,1966-1976 (Camb1idge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1979).

Illustrations

25-27, 28 top, courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times; 28 bottom, UPI/Beumann Newsphoto, courtesy of the ChicagoSun-Times; 30-36, courtesy of the ChicagoSunTimes; 39, UPI/Beu.mann Newsphoto, courtesy of the ChicagoSun-Times; 40-42, courte y of the ChicagoSunTimes;45, Stef Leinwohl.

Excerptpp. 503-525 from Bearing the Cros by David).

Carrow. CopyrightŠ 1986 by DavidJ. Carrow. Reprintedby permissionof William ,Harrow and Company, Inc. 45

Staging the Avant-Garde

by Stuart]. Hecht

In the 1960s Hull House theater won acclaim for pioneering avant-garde theater in Chicago but lost touch with Jane Addams's original commitment to community theater.

ln 1.he 1960s an, like polit.ics, became self-consciously radical. Searching for greater freedom from 1.raditional social and artistic convemions, artists spawned a cou n1.ercul1.ure th al. trumpeted spontaneity, exper im entation, and freedom from inhibition as hallmarks of creativity. Centered in New York City, avant-garde theater groups brought these new ideals 1.01.he stage. The unstructured, anarchi c pe1-formances by the most radical groups , such as the Living Theater, were meant to erase 1.he distinction between art and life. Dedicated lo changing American society, the avant-garde sough 1.

1.he transformation of I.heal.er imo a powerful political force.

Although great ly influenced by the counterculture, 1.he rise ofavan1.-garcle I.heater in Chicago in the 1960s was a lso rooted in Jane Addams 's philosophy about an and social change. She believed 1.hat artistic creation would help form a health) ¡ individual and in turn, foster a healthy society. At 1.he turn of the century, she began practicing 1.his id ea at Hull House , emphasizing it through her theater work. Some sixty years la1.e1 ~it was embraced by a new generation of Hull House workers. Struggling to ease strained black-white relations, offer you ng people viable substitutes for drugs and gangs, and improve conditions of the poor, social workers resurrected the Hull House theater program to meel. the challenges of the sixties. Yet by the encl of the decade Hull House called the program a failure and closed its theaters after narrowly avoiding econom ic co llaps e. Although Hull House theater had evolved into a vasl., successful amateur organization and had won much critical accla im for its highly original productions and daring exper im enta l work, the set1.lement house's board evemua lly decided that this cultural program was in conflict with its larger social mission. The arts, though widely heralded

46

throughout the l960s as a savior for a crumb lin g societ), proved less effective than some had hoped.

The reemergence of theater at Hull House took place at a time when the sett lement was undergoing tremendous change. In 1962, am idst great controversy, Mayor Richard Daley ordered much of Hull House and its surrounding neighborhood torn clown to make wa)' for the niversity of Illinois 's Chicago campus . Only two of the settlement 's 1.welvebuildings were leftstandingas monuments to Jane Aclclams's work. This change caused much turmoil, but it also forced Hull House to reevaluate its purpose and methods , a process tl1at ultimately improved its effectiveness.

The Hull House Association board of trustees se lected Paul Jans as its executi\'e director in early 1962 and assigned him the task of O\'erseeing the settlement's reorganization. Hull I lou se faced se\'eral new challenges. Whereas Jane Addams emphasized 1.he problems of immi grant communities, Jans's work concentrated more on black-white re lat.ions.Addams placed the original settlement directly amidst the poor tenement neighborhoods it served, but by the 1960s poor communit.ies were so sca1.1.ered throughout Chicago 1.hatHull House needed new strategies to reach the downtrodden . Under Jans, Hull House decentralized, operating out of a number of mailer centers located tl1roughout Chicago so th a t the agency might address each neighborhood 's specific needs more effective ly.

Jans began by overseeing Hull House 's relocat.ion from Halsted Street to an o ld church on Broad way The Hull H ouse Sheridan P/ayhome was one of several neighborhood theaters located throughout the city. The Blood Knot, part of Hull House theater's inaugura l season, employed professional actors-a change effected by Robert Sickingn:

Stuart J. Hecht is a'iSislanlpro.fe.'iSorof theater al Boston College.

47

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 extensive studio an space, music and rehearsal rooms, and a state-of-the-an tJ1eater. Of all the arts, theater was most closely tied to Addams's social goals. With her support and advocacy, many dramatic groups emerged at the settlement, most led by Hull House's resident staff Various groups favored traditional ethnic dramas, light Shakespearean comedies, or popular fluff Theatricals also allowed children to get invo lved at the settlement. In Twenty lfiars at Hull-House, Jane Addams recalled that . long before the five-cent theater was even heard of, "¡e had accumulated much testimony as to the power of the drama, and we would have been dull indeed ifwe had not availed ourselves of the use of the play at Hull-House, not only as an agent of recreation and education, but as a vehicle of self-expression for the teeming young life all about us.

PaulJans becameexecutivedirectorof the Hull Ho11seAs;ociationin /962. LikeJane Addams.Jans believedthe arts in genaal mu/ th,,atn in partiwlar could help bridgeethnicgaps and providea positive011t/et for inner-cityyouth. ?holograph by Lan)' Nocerino.

just north of Belmont Avenue . It was renamed the Jane Addams Center.

Jans had come to Chicago after heading settlements in St. Louis and Philadelphia. As director of Philadelphia's Lighthouse Settlement,Jans made the arts an intrinsic part of that agency's social programming. Jans's experience convinced him that black and white families could "come together through the ans better than by means of any other vehicle." He also thought a decentralized Hull House needed to devise active methods to reach the less fortunate. Jans argued that the ans in general and the theater in particular could achieve this as well as provide a positive substitute for youth involvement in "gangs and drugs."

Jans's views were in keeping with the original goals of Jane Addams. One way Hull House might come to tenns with the changes imposed by Daley was to look back to Addams and attempt to apply her goals to the settlement's new conditions and situation. Hired to make this transition.Jans often referred to Addams when introducing programs or policies, such as his decision to revitalize Hull House arts.

The arts had flourished at Hull House under Addams. The settlement's original resident staff included gifted teachers in art, music, dance, and theate1: By 1900 tl1e Hull House complex featured

48

At its peak during the mid-l920s, participants in Hull Hou e dramatics numbered sevei-al hundred children and adults.

Of the many Hull House dramatics groups, the resident-directed Hull House Players earned special local and national attention for their early productions of works by Ibsen, Galsworthy, and Shaw. Here were immigrant tenement dwellers performing works then considered avant-garde that depicted their own harsh living conditions.

Addams fostered such theater because it was proof of the conditions Hull House sought to combat and, as demonstrated by their on-stage accomplishments, the immigrants' potential contribution to America.

By 1940 Addams and most of her original resident staff had passed away, replaced by more professionally trained social workers who emphasized treatment rather than the arts. As a 1-esult,by the late 1950 Hull House's theater activities had all but disappeared. However, coincidental to Hull House's reorganization, the 1960salso saw a stronger federal commitment to both urban renewal and Lo me arts. Paul Jans took advantage of this by rekindling Hull House theater in order to recapture the social benefits Jane Addams achieved through the dramatic ans.

Jans's first step in rebuilding Hull House's theater was to hire his fo1mercolleague Robert Sickinger as its artistic directo1: Sickinger had operated an experimental studio theater at Philadelphia's Lighthouse Settlement, then directed by Jans. His

At its pmk in the 1920s, I-fill/ I lou..1e dramatics involved s1'Urralhundred rhildren and ad11/L1 . By 19'10, lww1'Ver,profi'uionally trained social worken had 11'/Jlacedthraler with thera/JY.Photogm/Jhhy Dorothy Pinkham.

background included the founding of seyeral Philadelphia theaters, working with prominent New York directors Jose Quintero and Alan Schneider, and sen â&#x20AC;˘ing as casting director for the film David and Lisa. Accompanied by his wife Selma, a for.mer ballet student of Anthony Tudo1~ Sickinger came to Chicago to administer Hull House's theater program. ;\]though Sickinger had extensive background in the arts, he had little social work experience beyond his association with the Lighthouse Settlement. Sickinger did study Jane Addams's theories on the relationship between art and community, as his early statements about the Hull House theater's objectives indicate. But he e1Toneously crndited Addams with the concept "that the intellectual and cultural life of the nation should be centered in the neighborhoods. " In fact Addams did promote the introduction of cultural activities in helping to improve the quality of life in poor neighborhoods, but Sickinger twisted her belief to rationalize his own theo11¡ that the arts would inherent!)' benefit any community where they were placed. Addams actively tailored a theater that

responded to a specific neighborhood 's interests and needs; Sickinger did not. At the time this seemed a subtle distinction, but it would later have serious repercussions. Addams 's goals were ultimately social; Sickinger's , artistic.

Sickinger wanted the theater to draw other artists to Hull House and establish a cultural center for the city. He saw itas a place of experimentation and artistic innovation where individual creativity could be nurtured and developed. He paralleled this to Addams's encouragement of individual expression, overlooking her use ofarts to help the underprivileged rather than to support artists.

Sickinger also interpreted Addams's "neighborhood" to mean all of Chicago and hoped to build a theater on a grassroots basis, with each community center theater contributing to a centralized and coordinated citywide program.

As early asJ une 1962,Jans and Sickinger private ly outlined a bold plan forthe growth ol'Hull House theater. They proposed the construction of four theaters , located in settlement house centers throughout the city, "working to integrate educational , sociological, and cultural ad\'ancement witJ1

49

I

I Robert Sickingersaw f-111/1 ll o11Setheater as a place of experimrntation and arti_1tic innovation; through 1t, hr hoprd /11 1•1tabfohC/11rngoas an important cultural crnterfor drama. PhotographbJ Pete Petas.

neighborhood people of varied races , nationalities and financial backgrounds." T h e two a lso discussed a possible summer arts camp sponsored

by Hull House.

Sickinger began his work by building a theater program al Hull House and organizing community support for it. He enlisted an advisory board made up of local pau ·ons of the arts, cultural figures, and nationally recognized tJ1eater practitioners. Though Hull House rarely consulted tJ1is board, it gave Sickinger's work both attention and legitimacy. In tJ1e spring of 1963 Selma Sickinger recruited a volunt eer staff of Chicago tJ1eater practitioners who began teaching drama classes. Around lie same time, a workshop designed Lohelp fledgling playwrights opened at Hull House. Most significantly, Sickinger started me Hull House Chamber Theater, which presented staged readings of major experimenta l works in private homes tJ1roughout Chicago, often to audiences ofpayingguests. This served several functions: it helped raise funds for Hull House tJieater; it allied Sickinger's work with Chicago's innovativ e and elite arts world, making Hull House tJieater fashionable; and perhaps

50

most importantly, it built an affluent audience for experimental theater in Chicago. Such activ ities auracted attention to Hull House dramatics even as tJ1eJane Addams Center was building its 110-seat theater. Reinforcing the Hull House theater tradition , the new theater wa designed by William Deknatel, a former Hull House Playe1~ Formally named the Hauie Callner Theater at its leading conu-ibutor's request, the space was usually called the Jane Addams Theater.

Sickinger's Chicago directorial debut came in No\'ember 1963, \\'itJ1a production of Frank Gilroy's Who'll Save the Plowboy? Still u·ying Lo tie the revitalized Hull House theater program to that of the past, Sickinger cast Wilfred Clea11· and Dorothy Mittleman Sigel, who had both performed earlier at Hull House. But the casting effort went unnoticed, because theater critics concenu-ated on Sickinger's directorial work, which they praised. Richard Christiansen, then drama critic for the Chicago Daily News,j udged the production "the most exciting , significant and promising Chicago tJieatrical event in years," enthusiastically claiming that "th is theate1· is a Lowering tribute to the traditions and

Staging the Avant-Garde

Mike Nussbaum, who perfonnnl regularly in Sickingerf1roductiom, a/1pearedwith Pat Terry in The Typists during Hull House theater's first season.

high standards of service identified with . Hull House through the years." The ChicagoSun-Times's Glenna Syse was more moderate in her praise , acknowledging Sickinger's blatant salesmanship while conceding that such "practical" methods bore results. In both cases, critical attention was focused more on the man than on his production.

Though the theater was amateur, its work was assessed according to professional standards. The strong critical accla im awarded to the Gilroy play and subsequent productions is all the more remarkable given their nonprofessional casts and designers. That critics from Chicago's major newspapers attended and reviewed the play 's o p e ning indicates that from the start Sickinger wanted the theater a nd its work to be reg arded as much more than social activities addressing the needs of poor ne ighbors. Sickinger intended Hull House theater to demonstrate his own considerable artistry. Yet the attention and 1-espe ct h e ea rned enabled Hull Ho use to expand its theater progr amming , thereby a llowin g a n ex tr ao rdin a ry number of artists to deve lop.

The e nthusiasm for Hull House theater was

sparked not only by its high-quality productions, but also by Chicago's lack of serious local theater .

Most of the city's major houses, including the Blackstone, Shubert, and Studebaker , presented only commercial fare that usually meant substandard tours of Broadway shows. The Drury Lane Theatre presented celebrities in popular hits, and the Goodman featured them in otherwise studentacted classics. Community groups such as the Lincoln Park Players and the Last Stage flourished, but their work was infrequent and uneven in quality. Second City's improvisational comedy was just beginning to gain notice. But outside of the universities, no one was presenting serious, up-todate drama in a challenging and creative manner.

Hull House hoped to fill this theatrical void.

As Sickinger became the centerpiece of Hull House theater, his artistic success formed a base upon which Hull House could construct an elaborate theater program . The highlight of the theater 's inaugural season was its January 1964 production of Jack Gelber's The Connection,which portrayed a group of heroin addicts anxiously waiting for a friend to bring their "fix." Successfully produced in ew York in 1957, this was the play 's Chicago premiere. It also marked the Hull House debuts of Bill Terry and Mike Nussbaum, two actors who later perfonned regularly in Sickinger productions. All cast members were amateurs.

Sickinger hired "a reformed junkie" as production consultant, prompting critic Richard Christiansen to comment on the play's faithful re-creation of addiction "in horrible detail." Christiansen also praised the director's approach, which enabled one actor, Richard Lucas, almost to eliminate "the line between acting and being." Despite the play's rough subject matter and harshly realistic presentation , the production proved an enormous commercial success. Audiences flocked to see it. Critic Glenna Syse left the play at intermission because the crowding prevented her from seeing the stage.

Yet Syse acknowledged that such audience enthusiasm for theater was both special and rare, and that she "never left a theater more pleased. " Though ticket demand for the show remained high , Hull House closed The Connectionto make way for its next scheduled production. But Hull House rented a remodeled movie house located at 717 West Sheridan Road and in April moved The Connection there, naming the space the Hull House She1idan Playhouse. Next came a revival 51

HULLHOUSESHERIDAN

Jaclc Gefber's

THECONNECTION 52

Jaclt Celber'sThe Connection (left), which portrayeda group of heroin addicts waitingfor a fix, was the highlight of the 1963- 64 season. The following yem; Robert Benedelli of the University of Chicagodirectedthe criticallyacclaimedproduction of Samuel Beckell'sEndgame (above).

of Who'll Save the Plowboy?and later , Athol Fugard 's The Blood Knot. This play differed from the two previous productions in that it used professional actors, a change made by the Sickingers. Bob Sickinger argued that the opening of the Sheridan facility benefited Chicago by providing a muchneeded professional theater and was therefore consistent with Hull House 's stated social goals.

Howeve r, the not-for-profit Kate Maremont Foundation, an important benefactor to Hull House theater , disagreed and withdrew its key subsidy.

This loss, coupled with insufficient audience support, forced Sickinger to close the theater by year's end. onetheless, Hull House started Lo expand its theater programming beyond Sickinger 's work at the Jane Addams Center. In 1963 Hull House opened a theater in the Henry Booth House basement, part of the Chicago Housing Authority's Haro ld Ickes Homes.John McFadden, a Philadelphia associate ofSickinger's, managed the theater.

Though Hull House Henry Booth Theater was located in a black community, the most notable play of its first season was William Saroyan's Slaughter of the Inn ocents. By the fall of 1963 the Hull

House Playwrights ' Workshop was also in full swing, helping develop Chicago playwrights. The Hull House Chamber Theater continued to present readings in private homes, and in the summer of 1964 Paul Jans opened an art and music camp in Wisconsin, which he named the Bowen Country Club after an earlier camp operated by Hull House underJane Addams.

Hull House theater's 1964-65 season built upon the previous season's success. Unlike the first season, Sickinger did not direct every production, but his work continued to draw the greatest attention. Sickinger 's Hull House theater was introducing Chicago audiences to new works by the latest avant-garde playw1ights. Robert Benedetti of the University of Chicago directed and performed the role of Hamm in Samuel Beckett 's Endgame.

Chicago newspaperm a n Leo Lerner's reaction to the production is telling : ... "Endgame " seemed to us too long. I had the feeling that the principal actor a nd directo1~ Bob Benedetti, took himself too seriously and spoke Loo loudly as ifhe had a "message" he wan ted to deliver. We went home disenchanted with "Endgame" and swore off plays belonging to the theater of the absurd .... Something must

53

Selma Sickinger'sHull House Children'sTl1Pat er i1u/udedthe highlysuccessfulCaptain ~larbles Squad series, whirhfeatured a companyof adult actorswho peifonned a new play f!vel) ' otlu>rweek.

have happened du1¡ing the night. In the morning l had a sober second thought about "Endgame." I thought that it is a great play and should not be missed . It emphasizes the absurdity of the human condition, although Mr. Benedetti ought to get his voice down , not act as if he were delivering an oration.

Lerner's testimony shows how Chicago audiences learned to appreciate such works . Bob Sickinger directed all other productions that season except a one-act play directed by his wife Selma. He produced works by Benoit Brecht , Harold Pinter, and Lanford Wilson. His production of Kenneth Brown's The Brig, in which future playwright David Mamet was an understudy, drew praise, and his production oft.he Le Roi Jones play Dutchmen earned much acclaim. Sickinger cast veteran Hull House actor RobertCun-y as a young, well-mannered black man who is first seduced and then knifed by a provocative white woman.

Cun-y's performance in this shocking , powerful work was noteworthy. Audience demand was such that Hull House extended the play 's run (along with its two accompanying one-act plays) through the summer of 1965.

In 1965 the theater also earned national recognition. Producer David Susskind invited Sickinger to present a Hull House play for his television series, the Esso Repertory Theater. Hull House was the only nonprofessional company asked to participate. Sickinger directed Harold Pinter 's The Dumb Waiter, a production that Time magazine

54

pronounced "so stunningly effective as to be worth the series ' syndication price alone."

Hull House theater was booming. ot only did the Playwrights' Workshop begin producing its own plays, it also began issuing a Hull House theater and arts magazine entitled Intermission. Encouraged by the Henry Booth Theater's success, Hull House opened anotJ1er tJ1eater at tJ1eParkway Community Center in 1964 under the direction of Elaine Goldman. The members of this black company called themselves "The Skyloft Players " after Langston Hughes 's company that had performed during the 1940son the very same site. The growth of Selma Sickinger 's Hull House Children 's Theater began that same season with its highly successful Captain Marbles Squad series. Conceived and written by playwright John Stasey with music by Ricky (Rocco) Jans, Paul Jans's teenagecl son, its format resembled that of the commedia dell 'art e. Adult actors improvised a series of fantastic tales depicting the adventures of Captain Marbles and his fiiends, including characters such as Big Astronaut and Lovely Ballerina. The company performed a new play for children every other week in the Jane Addams Theater, using whatever set happened to be on tJ1estage. When Stasey was killed in an automobile accident in 1967,Jay Jans, Ricky's brother, took over writing the scripts.

In an interview at the encl of 1964, critic Peter Jacobi asked Bob Sickinger to sum up tJ1e social aspects of his work at Hull House. Sickinger

Stagi,ngthe Avant-Garde adm itted that "we don't attract many from the neighborhood with o ur fur-o ut plays;' but argued that by charging"s izeab le ptices" fora kind of theater unavailable e lsewh ere to Chicago's intellectual elite, Hull House was raising monies that wou ld eventua lly underwrite other Hull House theater programs serving the less fortunate. Paul Jans shared Sickinger's views. He wrote that the Henry Booth T h eater, loca ted in low- in come public housing, "alth ough highly successfu l in terms of participation, brings in almost no income an d is comp lete ly sub sidized by the profitable programs of our Oane Addams] theater ;' wh ich grossed an average of $40,000 a year.

The high point of the J ane Addams Theater's 1965-66 season was Sickin ger's production of Edward Albee's TinyAlice.Ch icago critics all praised the production , most noting that it was particularly successful given the p lay's difficulty. Glenna Syse stated that Tiny Alice proved that Hull House theater had "come of age;' and that from then on its product ions shou ld be 'j udged by on ly the highest standards'.' Meanwhil e, most of the Hull House theater program continued to prosper. In March of 1966 Hull House began a midwestern

touring theater, wh ich presented productions of works ranging from Martin Duberman's In White Americato a John Stasey adaptation of Mary Poppins.

The Henry Booth Theater continued to falter, despite Jans 's assertions to the contrary, but the Parkway Theater began to show signs oflife. Hull House appo inted twenty-five-year-old Mike Miller its permanent director. Miller directed a ser ies of plays that included LeRoi Jones 's The Slave and James Baldwin 's The Amen Corner. Many featured the act ing of Felton Perry and were designed to appea l more to black audiences. Second C ity cofounder Paul Sills also directed a Hull House Playwrights ' Workshop production that year. Sills's mother , Viola Spo lin, had developed most of her famous improvisational concepts from he r work with eva Boyd at Hull House during the late 1930s.

Bob Sickinger, at the center of this vast theatrica l network, attracted much public atte nti on for himself and the theater. Mayor Richard Daley proclaimed the week of October 15, 1965, "H ull House Theater Week in Chicago'.' Impr essed with the Hull House examp le, Daley proposed th e construction ofa permanent professional resident THESKYLOFT PlAYERS Of THEHULLHOUSE

INTERMISSION

PARKWAY THEATER 500

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"BLUES FORMISTER CHARLIE" byJAMES BALDWIN

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The mccess I-full I-louse theal,,,-achieved in lhe mid-1960s made Intermission magazi,u (above)and the ParkwayCommunity Center po.<1i ble.

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55

HULLHOUSE THE HENRY BOOTH HOUSE Ut,IDERCRQJHD THEATRE

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Blach direclorand playwright C. L. Halla ce mostlyproducedhis own playsal lhe 1-/enryBooth Theate,:In an attnnpt to appeal to supporters of avanl-garde drama, lhe theat/'r was renamed the "/-lull /-louse Underground Thealer"in 1967.

theater for the city, but the plan never materialized. In Ap1il 1966Sickinger was one of the Chicago Junior Chamber of Commerce and Industry's ten nominees for "Chicagoan of the Year'.' Though Sickinger lost, he was the only candidate drawn from the city's arts community. In terms of attention and respect, as well as in terms of growth, Hull House theater had reached its zenith.

The next season brought further triumphs, but it also brought the first sign of the events that would topple the entire Hull House theater program. ln September 1966 Hull House presented the Chicago premiere of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party,directed by Sickinger and featuring Hull House regulars Mike Nussbaum, Beaoice Fredman, Robert Kidder, and Wilfred Cleary. Reviewer Dan Zeff called it "a very neat wedding ofan intriguing play and a totally successful production'.' However, some critics began expressing dissatisfaction with Hull House's play selection, claiming that Sickinger's productions too often outstripped the quality of the plays themselves. That season the

56

complaint was leveled against both Venable Herndon 's When the Monkey Comes and John Whiting's The Devils. Some felt that Sickinger should direct a classic; others commended Hull House for attempt ing productions of new and largely untried works. The effect of these comments on Sickinger is unclea1~but that season the Jane Addams Theater offered four rather than the customary five productions, the last a revival. Sickinger a lso announced plans to film the Herndon work, showing interests beyond the management of the Hull House theater program.

The rest of the program began to experience simi lar ups and downs. The Hull House Touring Theater featured eight companies that presented more than 3,000 pe1fon11ances in schoo ls, churches, and civic clubs throughout the Midwest. After making Mike Miller his assistant, Sickinger named Dick Gaffield the Parkway Theater's new director , and the Parkway continued to offer its fare of black theater throughout the yeai~ Attempting to revitalize the Henry Booth Theate1~ Hull House renamed it the "Hull House Underground Theater" and placed black director and playwright Gerald Wallace in charge. Wallace largely produced his own plays, including Libertyville and If I Had a Hammer. The Hull House theater program won a matching grant of $30,000 from the National Co~ncil on the Arts, the first Chicago theater so honored. ln accepting the funds Sickinger again spoke in social rather than in artistic terms. He claimed that the grant demonstrated the government 's "interest in the cultural climate of the community" and pointed to the Henry Booth Theater as a model that others planning theaters in "underprivileged neighborhoods " might follow.

However, by early 1967 Hull House Touring Theater folded. Furthermore, the city's growing racial tension began to affect Hu 11House theater.

Mike Miller complained, "We're getting bottles in the head on our way in and out [of the Henry Booth Theater]'.' Simi larly, the provocative militancy of the Parkway Theater 's play selection caused representatives of the black community to protest to Hull House's board of trustees in March. Black community leaders were concerned because the plays performed there usually portrayed blacks as either the passive victims of white America or as those who could gain strengtJ1 and power through a sol id arity based upon violence, thereby provoking civil unrest in their neighborhoods. The board

Sickinger's 1965 JJrod11clio11 of l:'dwardAlbl'e:sTiny Al ice broughl high JJraifefrom Chicagocritics;one 1wled tlwl ii prov('(/ I l ull HollSetheater had "come of age."

ca uti ou sly not e d 111 its minut es th a t th e "tim es were ve ry co ntr ove rsial:' a nd J a ns app are ntly chose to placa te th e co n ce rn ed ne ighb o rs rath e r th a n temp e r th e Parkway's wo rk .

Still, Hull H o use tl1ea ter see med hea ltl1y e no ugh finan cially. Th e pr og ram boa ste d so me 4,5 00 subscrib e rs, re pr ese ntin g 80 pe rce nt o f ca pac ity. Its goa l was 6,000 m e mb e rs by th e follo wing year.

Two-third s o f th e th eate r's $ 150,000 op e rating cos ts came fro m bo x office rece ipt s, whil e th e rest cam e from gr a nt s a nd don atio ns. Th e Hull Ho use Association a lso qui e tly covered a pe rce nt age o f th e th eate r's e xp e nse.

If H u ll Ho use h ad ove rex te nd ed itse lf, thi s was no t a pp a re nt in th e full o f 1967. Amid st mu ch hoo pla Hull Ho use o pe ned th e Upt own Ce nt e r a t 4520 . Beaco n Stree t. It hou sed th e 144 -sea t Leo A. Lern e r Th ea te r, and Hull Ho use so ld mo re th an 500 sub scripti o n ticke ts befo re th e th ea te r eve n ope ned . Hull Ho use's inte nti o n to stage onl y mu sica ls th ere proba bl y ex pl a ins thi s ad vance int e res t..

In a Chicago Daily News int e rview with No rm a n Mark , Sickin ge r ratio na lize d:

"Wh )' mu sicals he re? i\lu sica ls co mbin e a ll th e ta le nt s in Hull Ho use . Th e re's lo ts o f und eve lo ped mu sical tale nt in thi s city, you kno w. All Hull H o uses h ave mu sic and d a nce instru ction. Thi s will give th e stud e nt s m o tivatio n . Le t th e m a im at pe rformin g. Our th ea te rs a re beco min g m o re spec ia lized . J ane Add a ms has cu1Te nt dr a ma, Pa rkway focuses o n Neg ro life. Why no t musica ls in Uptow n ?"

Sickin ge r neve r pa used to co nsid e r wh e th e r a soc ia l work age ncy such as Hull Ho use o ught to be und e rnTitin g such a ventur e.

Sickinger a ltern ated pr odu ctio ns eve nly be twee n th e J a ne Add ams Th ea te r and th e new Upt own th ea te r for th e 1967- 68 seas on. Fortune and J'vleÂľ's Eyes o pe ne d a t th e J a ne Add a ms Th e at e r in No ve mb e r, and th e Uptown d ebut ed in Dece mbe r with th e mu sica l Take /\le Along, featming Hull Ho use regu lar Pat Terry and newcom er Jim Jacobs , who later coa uth o red th e musi cal Grease. Sickinger dir ec ted every sh ow th at sea so n a nd see m ed to be ga inin g new life. H e a nswe red ea rli e r criti cisms by dir ec tin g a hi ghl y su cces sful produ ctio n o f a classic, Soph o cles' Electra, whi ch he e legantl y set in

57

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 a nineteenth-century funeral home. The cnucs proved lyric in their praise. Richard Christiansen wrote of the "stunning tableaux in which the drape ofa costume and the grouping of figures is used to ravishing effect'.' Glenna Syse favored the production's "earnest intimacy'.' Unlike the usually grand production of Greek plays, she found Sickinger's "perhaps even more compelling, its passion more personal, its anguish more touching'.'

As Sickinger's artistry improved, the Hull House program deteriorated. The Underground Theater closed its doors in April 1968; the Parkway closed in July. Hull House blamed the closings on the changing climate in the black neighborhoods caused by Martin Luther King's assassination.

Sickinger claimed that the Parkway closed because white audiences would no longer come to the black neighborhood, and he chastised them for not mailing in donations . He said the Parkway had been losing about $25,000 a year as a result.

Sickinger made no mention of why the black community failed to support the Parkway. However, the Daily Defender, a black Chicago newspaper , lamented the closing of both Hull House theaters, blaming lack oflocal audience support. The newspaper voiced bitter regret at the loss of"an opportunity to learn the craft of the stage, without regard to the economic basis of the actor or actress, playwright or set designer. Not enough interest'. ' Hull House theater's most difficult problems lay just ahead. A 1968-69 season began at both the Jane Addams and Uptown theaters, but the program showed signs of collapse. In November 1968 Hull House sent its theatergoers a written plea signed by Bob Sickinger and Hull House Association board president Muriel Smith, stating that its theater program needed immediate and substantial financial assistance. The letter blamed a series of unforeseen events for causing the crisis: a big snowstorm in late 1967 which cost the theater $5,000, followed by "spring riots and two assassinations" (Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy) which also discouraged attendance.

The plea hoped to draw $50,000 over the next two years. Not only did this letter reveal the theater's instability, it also signaled trouble within the Hull House Association.

Hull House itself was in danger of financial ruin, and blame for the social agency 's economic troubles fell squarely upon Jans and Sickinger.

The extraordinary expansion of the Hull House 58

theater program during the 1960s could only have happened witJ1 subsidies from Hull House itself.

Box office profits failed to support annual operating expenses, let alone accommodate such rapid growth. During the early 1960s Hull House had received much federal funding as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty campaign, which had enabled the social work agency to expand greatly. But by 1968 Hull House was trying to account for its loss of funding. Rumors spread that monies intended specifically for social work were being rechannelecl to cover the theater 's losses, reflecting a growing resentment within Hull House. Because so much money and media attention went to cult.ural programming, especially the theater , more conventional professional social work projects and programs were neglected. When some suggested that Hull House had no business operating a the a ter, Jans immediately jumped to its defense: The Hull House theat e rs do crea tive, artistic a nd highl y qualitative work. The plays deliv er a message peninent to our clay, react ing to tod ay's society in the framework of' Hull House 's goals and history . It was Jan e Addams who said that we must bring together the ex tremes of'society and one of the best vehicles for this is the th ea ter.

But was Hull House theater really serving neighborhood ne eds? Jans's argument again echoed Addams: the theater often did portray issues "pertinent to our clay:' specifically depicting the downu -odclen and tJ1eir alienation from society.

Jans 's opponents charged that Hull House theater failed to address the needs of the immediate neighborhoods, and that Sickinger did not produce works that might attract neighborhood audiences.

Jans argued tJ1atin esse nce tJ1emoney earned from aflluentaucliences auending tJ1eJane Addams and Uptown theaters helped pay for arts programs for the poor. This enabled Hull House to operate both tJ1e Henry Booth and Parkway theaters at a loss. Furthermore, a substantial number of those working for Hull House theater did in fact come from poor Chicago neighborhoods.

Paul Jans believed the arts essential to social improvement , but most of those working at Hull House did not. Jans also till thought that Hull House needed to continue to expand in order to erve Chicago properly. This disregard for the agency's economic plight lost Jans the support of the board of u-ustees, and he resigned in April

Staging the Avant -Garde

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59

Bythe dost' of the decade, the /-lull /-louse Associalio11 ,ix-,snearfinancial ruin. /-/ere, volu11teen at the J ane Addams Cmter j)(linl1ignsji1rabenefitdance and theater pnjorma11cein ,\ 'ovembt'J¡ /969 to rai.5e J,mdJfor thPtroubled social agenry.

1969. The Hull House Association had to cut $200,000 from its 1969 budget or face bankruptcy.

The board decided that , with Hull House's survival at stake, ans programs were expendable.

Hull House cut back some of its social work services and eliminated most of its ans programming.

Howeve1~ the board planned to continue the theater program, probably because of its popularit y and success. In order to keep a close watch on future spending, the association placed co ntrol of th e theater program in the hands of a theater board.

In early May 1969 the theater board announced that Bob Sickinger was "working out his witJ1clrawal" from Hull House a nd that a search had begun for his successor. At month 's encl Hull House announced Sickinger 's formal resignation and named Robert Benedetti to replac e him. Controversy erupted. Angry tJ1at his wife Selma was not named his successor, Sickinger he ld a press conference , charging that tJ,e theater board had "illegally maneuvered" him out of a job and threatening legal action. Hull House countered that Sickinger had abandoned the program to make movies , even tJ10ugh he was "paid the highest salary in Hull House'. ' Neither party mentioned the social value of tJ,eater . The Hull House Association seemed concerned only with cost, and Sickinger 60

only with job security. lnJune Hull House awarded Sickinger an "undisclosed settlement'.'

Paul Jans favored a n interdependent theater network because it e nabled Hull House to maintain a far-reaching program. However , the system proved too costly for Hull Hous e . Inst ea d of building new theaters only afte r existing ones proved financiall y sound, as originally promised by Sickinger and Jans , the Hull House theater program expanded regard le s of cost. Furthermore, because of centralization, the individual theaters existed o nly as pan of Sickinger's total a rtisti ca lly coordinated theater program. Neighborhoods served by Hull House co mmunit y centers complained th at the theater program neglected community needs. Their complaints reached receptive ears. Comm unit y ce nter social workers had increasingly rese nted tJ,e Hull House Association's devotion of funds and facilities to what they considered only an activity, one mat failed to address more basic social needs.

When the Hull House Association board of trustees met in late May 1969, it considered a resolution proposed by the Uptown Center's director. This resolution stated that the center's " primary function" was as a "neighborhood center;' and therefore asked approval to wimdraw

Stagi,ng the Avant-Garde from Hull House's "central theater program'.'They wanted all artistic decisions to be made by the Uptown Center's directors and staff. By the end of the meeting, the board granted the same aut0nomous artistic control to each of it centers. When Robert Benedetti arrived in Chicago to assume leadership of the Hull House theater progr am , he found that he could only work at the discretion ofancl under conditions imposed by each center's director. Without the permanent theater facility promised in his contract, Benedetti resigned after reaching a settlement with Hull House.

By 1970 little remained oftJ1e multifaceted Hull House theater program that had peaked three years earlier. Of all its programs only the Old Town-based Playwrights' Workshop continued to operate, though as a separate organization. Hull House had successfully withdrawn from its theatrical commitments. However , individual centers soon discovered that without formal theater programming their facilities went unused. Within a few years Hull House began renting out its spaces to professional theater companies. Among the Jane Addams Theater's tenants was tJ1eSteppenwolf Theater Company ( 1979-82), and one of the Uptown Center's tenants was the Organic Theater Company ( 1973-77). one of the professional companies provided any significant social services to the neighboring communities or even professed s_uch a commiunenL However, in recent years Hull House has encouraged and supported some community tJ1eater activities thrnugh its centers. The Parkway Center's theater in particular has regularly housed a number of black theater groups, and the Uptown Center has sponsored some children's theater programming. But these activities were not considered integral LO the agency's primary concern of providing professional social work services.

Although theater fell from favor a a valid tool for social workers after Bob Sickinger resigned, the artistic program he created was rich. In addition to providing Chicago artists with several heavily used theaterspaces, Hull House built tJ1e foundation for the. Chicago theater renaissance of the 1970s that continues to this clay.Hull House theater provided ate ¡ting ground for young actors, designers, and directors who later helped contribute much to the city's th ea trical growth. Mike Nussbaum, in addition to becoming one of Chicago's most successful professional actors, helped found the 1orth Light Theater in Evan ton in 1975. David Mamet, who

became Chicago's foremost playwdght, also helped found the now-defunct St. Nicholas Theatet ~ Beyond individual achievement, Hull House theater also introduced Chicago audiences to new works by the era's most important playwright , including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee. In addition, Sickinger directed in a highly emotional and grittily realistic manner, blending strong theatrical ism with an al most cinematic intensity . This style later became Chicago's theatrical trademark , practiced with great effect by directors like Robert Falls and companies such as Steppenwolf.

Finally , and perhaps most importantly, Hull House theater developed an audience in Chicago for expe1-imental theater . Before Sickinger arrived at Hull House , Chicago offered little serious theater of any quality. By the time Sickinger left Chicago in 1969, Paul Sills and two others were ready to establish the Body Politic Theater, followed shortly by the founding of the Organic Theater Company.

Hull House theater spearheaded this transition.

It proved that Chicago would and could support challenging, provocative plays if creative and well done. This audience enabled Chicago tl1eater to blossom in the years after Sickinger left and Hull House closed its theaters ' doors.

For Further Reading For more on Hull House theater in both the early twentieth century and the 1960s, see Allen F. Davis and Mary Lynn McC ree , Eighty Yearsat Hull-House (Chicago: Quadrangle Book , 1969). The growth of regional theater is explored in Gerald M. Berkowitz, New Broadways: Theatre AcrossAmerica, 1950-1980 (Totowa, NJ:Roman and Littlefield , 1982). Christopher Innes, Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant-Garde(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Arthur Sainer, The Radical Theatre Notebook (New York: Avon Books, 1975); and Howard S. Becker , Art Worlds(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1982) discuss avant-garde theater in greater depth.

Illustrations 47, CHS Library; 48-51 , courtesr of the Chicago SunTimes;52, CHS Library ; 53-54, courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times;55, CHS Library; 56,Jane Addams Me morial Collection, University of lllinois at Chicago Lib1-a1-y;57, co urteS)' of th e Chicago Sun-Times; 59, Jane Addams ;\lemoria l Co llect ion , lJni\'ersity of Illinois at Chicago Library; 60, courtesy of the ChicagoSun-Times.

61

Editor's note: The violencethat marked the breakdown of America'ssocial and political orderin the late 1960s left its people shaken and confused. A small but.highly vocal segment of young radicals had challenged the country's sacred values and morals, and they sought to restructureAmerican democracy.They saw American involvement in the Vietnam War as the most visible sign that the people had lost control of their political system; hence, they threw much of their energy into protestingthe war:Some of the protesterswere "Yippies," membersof the playfully conceivedYouthInternational Party;othersbewngedto themoreserious-minded National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (MOBÂŁ) .

Many, not tied to any particular organiz.ation, joined the national movementagainstthe establishment.They chose Chicago, host city of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as the place to convey their messageto the Americanpublic, knowing theycould count on extensive media coverage.

No one /mew exactly how many protesters would convergeon Chicagoin August of 1968. MOBE leaders warned that the conventionand relatedactivitiesmight attracttwo or threehundred tlwumnd people. Although only about 10,000 actually took part in the demonstrations, Chicago mayor Richard Daley took no chances in mobilizingforces to keep order during convention week. On hand were IJ,500policemen, 5,600 National Guardsmen, and 1,000 federal agents. An additional 7,500 soldierstrainedin riotcontrolstoodbyat Ft. Hood, Texas,should Daley decide to call in additional troops.

At the Amphitheatreon the Near South Side, where/he conventionwouldtakepl.ace,citywor//ersinstalledbarbed wire around the parking lot and securedevery manhole cover in the area. Inside the hall, nearly 450 ushers and securityguards patrolled thefloor: But these elaboratepreparationsJailed to insure a peaceful convention. On Sunday, August 25, the night beforethe conventionopened,a crowdof severalthousand young people clashedwith about 200 police in Lincoln Parkjust northeastof the ChicagoHistoricalSociety.Many demonstratorswere Maced, clubbed, and tear-gassed as theyfled into the surrounding side streetsof the Old Townneighborhood.This was thefirst in a seriesoffour separateconfrontations,eachworsethan theprevious,that climaxedWednesdaynight with what becameknoumas the "Battleon Michigan Avenue."As delegateswatchedfrom hotel windows,fighting broke out when police ordered 7,000 protestersat the intersectionof Michigan Avenue David Farberis assistantprofessorof historyat the Universityof Kansas.

62

and Balbo Drive lo leave the streets. 71iedemonstrators chanted obsceneslogans;some threw bottles,rocks, and garbage at the officersand taunted them. In response, some of the police began clubbing people and spraying Mace at the crowd.By midnight the National Guard had cleared the streets of protestersand contained them in GrantPark, but not beforehundredsofpeople,someinnocent bystanders, had been injured. Almost 700 were arrested in connection with the convention week riots; nearly half of them werefrom Chicago.

"Welcome to Chicago"

by David Farber

,,-

Todemonstrators,Chicagoin 1968 was a symbol,a placefrom which to make their voicesheard. ToMayor Daley, the city was home,where things had to work. Whenpolice and protestersclashedin the streetsand parks, \ bothsidesstruggf,edto use Chicagofor tlzeirown ends.

The violenceended on August 28, but the debateover who and what had caused it continued for months ciftl!:lward.

Daleyclaimedhe and thepoliceactedcorrectly in preventing a "lawless, violentgroup of terrorists. . . [from taking] over the streetsof Chicago."Mot Americansand mostChicagoanssupportedDaley:Sactions,but the coalitionof protestmovementsviewed the eventsm a victoryfor freedom of speechandfor their antiwar cause.

Forthem, the convention had been a chance to directly corifront what they saw as an ineffectiveand unjust

Drmonstratorsin Chicagofor the 1968 Democratic,\ 'alional (.,onwnlionmisea No1th \ 'ielnÂŁLmeSP flag in a gestureof /Jrotest.

jJoliticalsystem. Daley saw only a very real threat to the safetyand welt-beingof his city and its residentsby what he termed "outsideagitators."

In this excerptfrom David Farber:Sbook Chicago '68, publishedby The Universityof ChicagoPresstwenty years after the convention riots, the author analyz.esthe opposingsides'perceptionsof the events.

63

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 The demonstrators who came to Chicago did so in order to confront a national symbol. They came in order to use the Democratic ational Convention, which happened to be located in Chicago, as a local marker in the national moral challenge tJ1ey saw themselves waging. They were, as they said over and over, not interested in influencing the convention; they were in Chicago to de monstrate tJ1eir refusal to accept the American politi cal system. Their concerns were abstract and long-range. For them, the particular configuration of the Democratic Convention in Chicago only mattered insomuch as it interfered with their plans for a symbolic protest. Their Chicago shared little with the Chicago the Mayor and his people sought to protect.

For those who felt charged with maintaining order, the Chicago confrontation felt completely different. For them , the well-functioning system of political control and public order tJ1at maintained a stable life came before all else, and so came before discussion or consideration. Politics was what made sure tl1at tl1ings stayed about me same.

In Chicago, such politics, naturally enough, was known as "machine" politics.

All dUJing the campaign of 1968, Richard ixon tried to find the words that would express his constituents' feelings. He knew that me turmoil of the 1960s-tJ1e rioting and burning and Black Power Negroes, the student storming around tl1eir universities telling everybody what was right and wrong, the protest marchers carrying Viet Cong flags and saying tl1at American boys were dying in vain-was making the "silent majority " of good Americans angry and afraid. In a position paper he wrote for the 1968 Republican Platform Committee, ixon reached for t11isfeeling: "The first right of every American, to be free from domestic violence, has become the forgotten civil right of the American people. " The state, ixon is suggesting, was formed to protect individuals from tl1e unwelcome violent attentions of otl1ers. The state was invented (he is implying mythically with his call on the preambl e to the Constitution) to insure that citizens' right to domestic tranquillity remained inviolate. The national Democratic party 's welfare state, Nixon is saying, has forgotten that it is obliged to protect an individual's right to be left alone. Instead , that state has pledged itself to a policy of inclusion , a policy that insists that the state has the right to

intrude in local affairs and order private citizens to accept the right of other citizens-tJ1e blacks, the Latinos , me poor, me protesters-to intrude on meir privacy. Such a policy, Nixon is implying , naturally leads to a situation in which certain citizens would intrude violently into other people's lives, marching and sitting in and taking over streets and even burning and destroying private property. Americans' most important right, the right to "domestic tranquillity "- the right to be left alone-Nixon is telling his followers, has been overridden by secondary concerns.

Nixon believed that when he spoke of such feelings he was reaching the "silent majority "; and when Nixon used tJ1e term "silent majority " it had resonance for many Americans. In terms of Chicago '68 though , Nixon's phrase , "free from domestic violence," is still too removed from concrete experience to explain what me Mayor and his people felt.

Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko, in an interview he gave on 1BC tJ1e clay after the convention closed, comes much closer. The Mayor, Royko says, believes in "the fantasy that we are the middle of everything." Perhaps Royko is right to call such a feeling a fantasy but most of me time tJ1e feeling worked for the Mayor and his people .

First and foremost, the Mayor and his people thought about the convention, tl1e protests, the TV cameras, "everything" in terms of the city; by which tl1ey meant themselves, mose they owed and those they knew or cared about. While the protesters saw the city government and police only as a problem that tood between th e m and meaningful action, only a an obstacle in the way of their symbolic protest, we local authorities saw only tJ1eir obligations, their streets and tl1eir hou es and their parks. To the degree that we Mayor and his men did embrace and were embraced by symbolic politics-both as represented by the flag and labels like hippie and commie-they did so only inasmuch as they represented tJ1e conflict between local order and external threats. For the city what was most immediate was most real. What was plainly ideological, symbolic, and abstract to the demonstrators was only fantasy and without the weight of real concern to the Chicago auworities.

The image of slain senator Robert F. Kennedy W(IS invoked by both delegates and demonstrators at the convention. Photograph by H enry Gill.

64

â&#x20AC;˘

7

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988

Chicagorolledoul tllRwelcomematJar delRgatesto the 1968 convention, some of whom, like this Kansan, showed their affiliatiom in exceptionallycreativeways.

Again, Richard Nixon , in his position paper for the Republican Platform Committee, aimed to voice the same concern. He wrote, "We must cease ... the granting of special immunities and moral sanctions to those who deliberately violate the public laws-even when those violations are done in the name of peace or civil rights or anti-poverty or academic reform." Only days before the Chicago convention the presidents of both the Chicago and New York City Patrol men's Benevolent Associations said almost the same thing.

Acts, Nixon is saying, are always only acts. Their context, their symbolic freight , their situational frame are iITelevant to the fuct that they interfere with the laws that keep us all safe.

In Chicago, the question of the law and its relation to order came to be raised most explicitly around the issue of the protesters' right to sleep in the parks. The subtlety of the Mayor's feelings on the issue is stated most succinctly in his August 22 66

statement: "We don't permit our own people to sleep in the park, so why should we let anyone from outside the city sleep in the park. We don 't permit our own people to march at night, so why should we let a lot of people do snake dances at night thru the neighborhoods." What makes the statement so subtle is the fuct that the Mayor knew full well that some Chicagoans did sleep in the parks on hOLsummer nights and that the National Guard and the Boy Scouts had been allowed to camp out in the parks. Indeed, before, during, and after the convention many of the Mayor's critics took him to task over that very fact. But from the Mayor's per pective such critics were missing the point.

The poor Chicagoans who slept along the lakefront on hot summer nights were not permitted to do so; they asked no one for permission and they had none. They acted sub rosa; their presence in the park was not "real" because they had

Crucialto MayorRichard Daley'.

5plan lo preumt vwlencein thecityduring thecmwention werelilP5,600 National G1wrdsme11 who campedin Chicago.

not been , up until the convention, in a space where they could be noticed. Public laws had not been invoked. The Mayor believed in privacy , even on public land, just so long as it stayed private . For it-the act-to remain private, however, the actors must remember to stay out of public notice and to avoid turning an immediate response to concrete conditions (the weather) into an abstract stalemelll about power relations (the parks be long Lo the people) . As long as people respected the public laws when the public authoritie~ needed to invoke them, then people had not broken city ordinances a nd thus had not formally, declaratively slept in the city parks after curfew. It was just a practical response, on both sides, to particular concrete problems.

The fact that the ational Guard and the Boy Scouts slept in the parks also had for the Mayor little to do with people ' right to sleep in the park.

The Na1ional Guard and the Boy Scouts were not

individuals seeking public property for symbolic stands against other individuals. They were clearly public institutions acting in accordance with authorized activities. To compare the demonstrators to the public institutions was to confuse categories and to deal with abstractions.

Forthe Mayor and his people, the issue of space as a concrete sphere of activity-for which the parks stood as synecdoche-and not as a realm in which symbolic confrontation could occur with legitimacy relates to the problem of indigenousness. No cry was more common after a ghetto riot or student demonstration than that of "Outside Agitator!" Studem protests, governors and college presidents always said, were caused by "nonstudents." This was always a critical fact in the minds of the besieged. Over and over, before, during, and after the convention, the Mayor said th at any and all trouble was or would be caused by ou Lsiders, non-Chicagoans.

67

-

Mayor Daley (right, photograph by Dave /iom ell) glowersal Senator Abraham Ribicojf of Connecticut (above, at podium) as the senator crilicius Daley'sllSeof force during the conventio11.

Certainly, such a concern with indigenousness relates to the earlier cry of the forces of law and order that all domestic troubles were caused by Communist agents who take orders from the Soviet Union. Evil is always a product of the Other . And certainly the FBI during the 1960s continued to inform presidents, newspaper publishers, and all who would listen that black leaders and New Leftists were either dupes or agents of international Communism. Mayor Daley's people, too, tried this line of reasoning. Somehow it made all the difference if the obviously American protesters were or were not linked to another nation.

But even more , the Mayor of Chicago and so many other local officials had something else in mind when they exclaimed, "outside agitators:' They meant to suggest that problems ofa national or international or even regional nature had no jurisdiction over their locality. They meant to suggest that issues that assembled constituencies by virtue of race or class or ideology had no place , literally , to operate in their space. The city or the university was not the place for such activities.

The city or the university, they would .say, quite simply served other purposes. Thus, the Mayor to Senator Abe Ribicoffwhen the Connecticut senator challenged the Mayor's use of force during the

68

convention: "F-- you, you Jews-o-- b--, you lousy m-- go home. " ot, you lie, or you're wrong , but "go home ." The Jew part too-sworn out at a time of extreme visceral anger-with its medieval sense of condemning the stateless, wandering heretic who cringingly claims allegiance to a God before any particular spot of ground . What's a~ stake, the Mayor rages , is not tight or wrong, but jurisdiction.

This same feeling underlies the police and city response to the mass media coverage of the convention protests. One policeman said so very straightforwardly. When asked why the police treated reporters so harshly, he sneered, "The reporters act like they own the streets." For the policeman , it was enough ofan explanation. The streets, the policeman might almost have been saying, belong to the people. And the policemen are those people. They walk and drive those streets.

They act in those streets, enforcing the law. Unlike the reporters who claim only to observe, who claim only to be reporting on what they see, the police are there day in and day out, living with the crime and the victims. They see the results of violence as it affects other people and not just as it affects the abstract manipulations of policy or as it fonns itself into a genre suitable for a news hole.

As the demonstrators stormed onto Michigan Avenue, one police officer said to another, "If they 'd get the hell out of Chicago with those f--

"Welcometo Chicago"

Potierstniggle to control dnnonstratorsstonni11gMichigan Avmue on Wednesdaynight of convention week.

69

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 cameras this wouldn't be happening." The police and city authorities, when they said that the mass media created the confrontational, symbolic national protest that put them into twelve-hour shifts and frightening, disgusting situations, are not far from being absolutely right. Indeed, during Chicago '68, both the mass media and most of the protest movement operated according to the rules of newsworthiness.

The Chicago demonstrators reveled in tJ1e simulated world of the mass media. Their efforts were aimed not at concrete changes so much as they were toward changing people's images and understandings-somehow those ideological changes would produce something bettec The SDS didn 't accept such a nebulous plan but most of the Mobe and Yippie leaders, at least for the Chicago action, did. Their goal was to create a visual image of the State in action, a kinetic image that would be useful to their purposes. The protesters were interested in shaping information to their own purposes. As Mayor Da ley observed, in the main accurately, the demonstrator came to Chicago to "assault, harass and taunt the police into reacting before the television cameras." But for the Mayor and the police, the main problem was not that the press recorded such a reaction; it was that the networks, in particula1~ refused to show or state why the police had to react.

"This adminiso-ation and the people of Chicago," the Mayor stated the day after the Michigan Avenue confrontation, "will never permit a lawless, violent group of terrorists to menace tJ1e lives of millions of people, destroy the purpose ofa national political Convention and take over the streets." For the Mayor, the protesters were not dealing in massmediated images, suitable for ideological battle.

The protesters were pushing their bodies into spaces in which they did not belong. But the mass media, rather than explain that (as the President of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police said) "the police could never let a mob take over," accepted the demonstration and even promulgated the demonstration as a symbolic act. In essence, the Mayor and the police were right when they declared that many members of the mass media were a part of the movement. But it wasn't exactly the same movement to which the demonstrators would have tJ1ought they belonged.

Both the mass media and the demonstrators were more interested in the configurations ofinfor-

70

mation than they were in the traditional work of American politics , especially traditional municipal politics. This feeling was stated by tJ1e protest leaders who denied that they were in Chicago to affect the convention in any way. They were, they aid, in Chicago to rip away the mask the Democratic party hid under . The television networks exp1-essed a similar feeling in a very diflerent way.

Among the networks NBC did so in the most brazen mannec The main feature of the August 29 BC Morning ews was a poetic montage of tJ1e previous day's convention "high lights." Back and forth NBC cut from the convention hall celebrations that followed Hubert Humphrey's first-ballot victory Lo footage of protesters being beaten, clubbed, Maced , and gassed by hordes of clearly enraged , out-of-control policemen. They showed this while tJ1e conventioners cheered and paraded and sang.

They showed the "kids" being knocked to the ground, kicked in tJ1e face while the delegates whooped and hollered with joy. NBC cut back and forth, back and forth, from the terror in the streets to the festivities that followed Hubert Humphrey 's victory.

The events were not going on at the same time.

NBC superimposed them. NBC liked the dramatic effect. Indeed, it made for powerful television and, indeed, it certainly was how the demonstrators would have seen the situation. But it wasn't literally, physically happening like that.

For NBC and for those viewers who did not perceive news information as only a chronicle of objective facts but instead as a synthesis of information carefully edited to provide tlle most impressive images, reordering the chronology of events to supply the symbolic thrust of the convention was a meaningful act. The networks, bound by time and structure to an encapsulation rather Ulan a mirroring of reality, looked for those images tJ1at would represent ratller than merely replay the totality of what tl1ey were observing. For them, trained in tJ1e art of the forty-five- econd piece, distance would always have to lend enchantment.

For the Mayor, such coverage was only a "distorted and twisted picture." He said that the network 's manipulation of the convention was a dangerous failure to provide the trutll. He and a number of Democratic congressmen called for and got an FCC investigation .

As the Mayor saw it, "The television industry is

The Iheme of war-both at home and abroad-/Jeroaded Chicago during the convention. Outsidr on thestrrrts, theproteststook different jo,1ns:some becameironic parodies, while othersmed unconventional pro/JS.Supporters of peace candidate Eugene McCarthy show their disa/Jprovalof the cityssiegeliheappearance,and a K,mnedyfollower 11wurns hisslain leadn: TiJ/J and centerphotogra/Jhsby Paul Sequeira: bottomleft photogra/Jhbyjohn Tiveedle.

kEHNEDY

Chicago History, Spnng and Summer 1988 approach to the national and the int ernationa l political arenas. During the 1950s and 1960s, hosts of historians and political scientists, many of them a part of the "non-Communist left," were extollin g the "pragmatism" of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and even Boss Tweed. An impr essive affay of intellectuals ce lebrated the arm-twisting "pragmatism" of John f Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. They believed that in the face of the Soviet threat, domestic reactionaries, and the chaotic thrust of the wayward, modern State, a pragmatic, forceful governmental presence was a necessity.

The Mayor, the voters, and thee tablished intellectuals all seemed to agree: political id eo logy was less important than practical considerations. The protesters in Chicago disagreed; they said that ideo logy detennined practical considerations. The battles of the 1960s-and Vietnam more than anything else represented this-revolved around this question of how to define the relationship of ideology and pragmatic considerations.

Mayor Daley's understanding of what constituted realistic responses to practical problems also played a c1itical part in how the forces of law and orderju tified the policeman's role in the convention confrontations. The Mayor's logic was simpl e: "If someone walks into you and shoves ya and spits in your face or calls you a four letter word, what would you do or what would anyone do?" Or put another way, "What would you do if someone was throwing human excrement in your face, would you be the calm, collected people you think you are? What would you do if someone was biting you .... What do you think they [the police] were supposed to do?" Speaking directly to his fellow citizens and then to reporters, the Mayor tried to make people understand what it was really like to be standing there facing a swarm of angry, crazy protesters. It was only reasonable , the Mayor was impl ying, to react to such immediate provocation with anger and with force.

The Mayor was saying that the policeman was no different from anybody e lse-"What would you do ... what would you do ... would you .. . would you?" An abstract notion like police professionalism was not as important as the concrete experience of being provoked, being sworn at, having your mother ca lled a nasty name: "the foulest language that you wouldn't hear in a brothel hall:'

74

J. Edgar Hoover, the nation's number one police professional , when he testified before the ational Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in regard to the behavior of the Chicago police, said the same thing: "The police are human. They are supposed to be both lawyers and socio logists, as I said, but they are still human.

I don't think any of us in this room wou ld be restrained if we had been hit with some of the things they have been hit with." Of course, most of the police who attacked demonstrators had not been literally hit with anything. But as the judge who presided at the trial of three policemen who had brutally beaten a new paper photographer said, "The language that Mr. Linstead used ... was vile and degrading to the officers .. . gutter language which I suggest would be provoking in such a manner that any red-blooded American would flare up. " A New York police officer,just after the spring 1968 Yip-In at Grand Central Station, goes even further. He speaks for many of his fellow officers when he explains why he and the other police attacked the Yip-In: Here 's a bunch or animals who call Lhemselves Lhe next leaders of Lhe co untry . ... I almost had to vomit. ...

It's like dealing with any queer pervert , mother raper, or any of those other bedbugs we've got crawling around the Village . As a nonnal hwna11being, you feel like knocking every one of their teeth out. It's a normal reaction (emphasis ad ded).

In a sense, the Mayor, the police, and the other police defenders have joined hands with the demonstrators. The demonstrators , too, were saying that ideas Iike professional ism were just screens to hide behind , that social scientists and bureaucrats who claimed they were just doing their jobs were not facing up to the human , existential task they were performing. The Mayor asked, "What would you do?" ot what does the job, the profession, or the boss insist you do. The Mayor, in his defense of his police , rejects the professional training that told them not to react to provocation. The police, the Mayor said, had the right to act like men and not like some abstract figure-a "professional." And men, as the judge and the others insist, have the right to react "normally " to outrages .

Certainly, during much of the 1960s, the police acted "normally." The behavior of the Ch icago police-clubbing and gassing white protesters-was

Demonstratorsandjournalists weresprayedwith Mace and brntallybeatenduring conventionweek;in later accounts,Chicagopoliceclaimedtheyhad beenprovoked into a/lacking the crowds. Top photograph by Paul Sequeira.

far fro m exce pti o nal. Po lice in Berke ley, Los Ange les, San Francisco, and ew York , as we ll as a goo d many less "sophi sticated" cities, bo th be fore and ' after th e De moc ratic Co nventi o n, acted in almost exactly th e same way as th e Chi cago po lice .

Wh at was differe nt abo ut C hi cago was th at tJ1e mass medi a we re pr ese nt in unpr ece d ented num bers to witness th e beat ing, and , mu ch more imp ortant, th e pr ess was unmi stakenly be ing singled o ut by the po lice for th e same so n o f trea tm ent as the d emo nstrators.

Th e two fee lin gs-th at th e mass m edi a paid too mu ch respec tful attenti on to prote sters and advocates o f change and th at the polic eman had as mu ch 1igh tas anybod y else to react to pro vocationsare ce rt ainl y link ed. Both stem fro m a mistrust of dise mb odi ed auth orit y. Both fee lings co me from a suspi cio n tJ1at so me outside, elit e power has taken co nt ro l o f what sh o uld be co mm o nsensical and loca l.

Mayor Daley co uld never quit e und erstand what right th e mass medi a had to co me int o his city and 75

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 frame reality. Frank Sullivan, the official police spokesman, came out and said it: "The intellectuals of America hate Mayor Daley because he was elected by the people, unlike Walter Cronkite."

The Mayor~ in a more politic fashion, made a similar statement to members of the Democratic National Committee shortly before the convention began. In private, as they all prepared to face a large assemblage of reporters, Daley explained to the DNC officials that they, not tl1e press, were the representatives of the people and that, quite simply, "you just don't have to answer every question they [the press] ask."

The Mayor's politics was built around public works, patronage, precinct workers, and the exchange of public service for support. The Mayor's politics was not organized with mirrors or simulated with photo opportunities and paid political advertisements. What national political influence the Mayor exerted was not based on his grasp of i sues-though he was respected for- his views on urban problems-but on his ability to conu-ol his political territory. When the federal government, in the form of the Justice Deparunent, tried to intervene in Chicago and told the Mayor that he should compromise with the demonstrators, he made it clear that he would decide what needed to be clone in his city. What Mike Royko clescr-ibed as "the fantasy that we are tl1e middle of everytl1ing" prevailed over the justice Department's belief that conflicting perspectives could be reconciled.

As Royko implies, the Mayor and his people did not believe that Chicagoans had to share tl1eir streets with intruders. For the Mayor~ the fact that the nation was being torn apart by an unpopular war and racial conflict was simply irrelevant to Chicago politics. Even more, these issues were not as important as local concerns: it was far more important to keep Michigan Avenue free of demonstrators than it was to allow a group of outsiders to protest in a clisn.rptive way. Similarly , it was far more important to keep the demonstrators from marching tl1rough the ghettos and possibly igniting a riot than it was to allow such people their right to protest a distant war. It was even more important to the Mayor to keep the "outside agitators" out of the city parks and out of the city streets than it was to maintain as placid an environment as he could for the Democratic National Convention. For the Mayor, the state of his streets and his parks and his neighborhoods was far more impor76

tanl than abstract ideas about free speech , free assembly , or even national stability and calm. For tl1e Mayor~the world was Chicago, and those forcesthe Justice Department , the national mass media, the antiwar movement-tl1at sought to subordinate the city of Chicago to larger concerns or issues or jurisdictions were simply trying to undermine that life-sustaining vision.

Richard Nixon , throughout his 1968and 1972 campaigns, called on this vision. His political brilliance allowed him to relate such a vision to national politics by imbuing national symbols like the Oag with the desperate pride of local satisfaction and the certainty of unchallengeable American integrity. In his speeches and advertisements Nixon created a land of endless local pride and loving community. The place was called Middle America and it was populated with people called tl1e "silent majority:' Nixon, like Reagan after him, understood that most Americans were proud of the lives they had produced and wanted above all else to be free to enjoy both the bounty and strength of the American dream they felt they lived within.

Hubert Humphrey, too, during the crisis of national faith that polarized many Americans, tried to call up such associations. But he had to overcome the frightening convention images of confrontation that belied a rhetoric of national pride based on success and glory. And perhaps more important, he had to overcome the Democratic war that more and more found unwinnable.

Very few of the young protesters who came to Chicago believed that tl1e United States really consisted of satisfied Americans whose communities offered each and every one of them opportunities for rich and rewarding lives. Paradoxically, perhaps, they wanted to believe in that vision; they wanted a nation made up of workable, highly autonomous communities, governed by proud and active citizens. But while hoping to reclaim this familiar American tenitory they had to wrestle with the fact that the most intellectually gifted and /or economically advantaged of them had been brought up to assume a national, even international, outlook. National culture, national politics, and national celebrities were their frame of reference, their reality. "Viernam" was,by and large, more real to them than the lives of their neighbors. In unprecedented numbers they had been trained at colleges and universities, taught by tele-

"Welcometo Chicago" of communities in which people were struggling to make a living and a life. Others fled their formally constructed community-school-for ones more of tJ1eir own making-Haight-Ash bury, the Lower East Side, underground press collectives, draft-resister and antiwar organizations.

In their struggles to find free spaces from which to build a new political consciousness, those members of the generation that came ofage protesting in the 1960s were caught between the imperfect reality of community men like Mayor Daley sustained and the simulated world of technocratic internationalism they had been raised to manage.

Neither possibility seemed to offer them an opportunity to create a sustainable public life. In Chicago, August 1968, a few thousand came to seek an answer to their bind. "Ride, boldly ride the Shade replied, if you seek for Eldorado."

Before the ronventi on ended, more than 700 people- nearly half of them Chicagoans- were arrested in connection with the riots.

vision, and even given the experiences via a transportation revolution, youth fares, and their parents' wealth to understand that tJ1ey lived in a world in which global and national interconnectedness were the immediate facts of life. The information age they grew up experiencing demonstrated daily that the abstractions that allowed for the management of state and corporate control were as real as the concrete streets they protested on or the transparent windows they managed to smash.

For some, college , with its easy homogeneity and emphasis on self and social discovery, presented a middle grounr! between their vague dream of "beloved community " and the fixed pre ence of a corporatized America. It was an opening where the physical intimacy of a latenight rap session could compete with and sometimes even triumph over the society-wide intimacy offered by presidents and name brand products.

But college was also , as many knew, the last stop in tJ1e social process that moved tJ1em from the protection of family life to the vagaries of the corporate world-from the singular realm of the private to the conscious and conscientious bifurcation of life into public and private spheres.

A few-SDS-ERAP [Students for a Democratic Society-Economic Research and Action Project]left the "false security" of the university in order to engage themselves politically in the "real world "

For FurtJ1er Reading You'll find many accounts of the 1968 convention in the CHS Library. See Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict: Convention Weekin Chicago, August 25-29 , 1968. A Report (New York: Dutton, 1968); Norman Mailer , Miami and the Siege of Chicago:An Informal History of the Republican and DemocraticConventions of 1968 (New York: World Publishing Co., 1968); Donald Myrus, ed., Law and Disorder:The ChicagoConventionand its Aftermath(Chicago: Donald Myrus and Burton Joseph, 1968); Thomas Hayden , Reunion: A Memoir(New York: Random House, 1987); Chicago Law Department, The Strategyof Confrontation (Chicago: Chicago Law Department , 1968). For a fictional account of convention week, see Al Morgan, The Whole World is Watching: A Novel (New York: Stein & Day, 1972).

Illustrations 62-63, 65, courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times; 66 left, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 66 right, AP/Wide World, courtesy of the ChicagoSun-Times;67, 68 right, courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times; 68 left, AP/Wide World , courtesy of the ChicagoSun-Times; 69, CHS, ICHi-20781; 71 top and cente1; Paul Sequeira; 71 bottom right and left, courtesy of the ChicagoSun-Times; 72, UPl/Bettmann Newsphoto, courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times; 73, 75 top, Paul Seq ¡ueira; 75 bottom, 77, courtesy of the ChicagoSun-Times.

This article is excerpted from Chicago '68 by David Farber.

Copyright Š 1988 by The Universityof Chicago, all rights reserved.

77

AUGUST196B

by Stet

Leinwohl

A Chicago photographer recalls the events of August 1968 in a review of his work from that year.

During the last week of August 1868, I shot approximately 2,700 photographs of demonstrators, marches, assemblies, and delegates in Chicago from every conceivable angle both inside and outside the Democratic National Convention . My aim was to apply the vision I had developed while studying with Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Cosmo Campoli , Misch Kohn, and others at the Institute of Design in Chicago from 1858 to 1863 . My main interest was to seek out unique angles that would communicate the essence and emotional spirit of each particular event . I often utilized extreme wide-angle lenses that enabled me, from the very thick of the action , to convey a dynamic of the moment that news photographers would miss. I was not interested as much in personalities as I was in each participant's role in the democratic process.

I was after a vision with content, not unlike the compelling documentary photographs of the Great Depression made

by Farm Security Administration photographers, especially Ben Shahn and Walker Evans.

The emerging young photographers of the sixties - Robert Frank,

Stef Leinwohl is a professional photographer working and teaching in Chicago .

Danny William

Lyon , Bruce Klein -also

Davidson, influenced

and me.

The turbulence and contrasts of the 1860s provided rich opportuni ties for photojournalists . I covered as many events as I could , docu ment i ng the progress of the civil rights and antiwar movements as a freelance photojournalist for alter native and academic journals and book publishers . By 1868 my profes sional direction was changing from photojournalism to more commercial work : annual reports , creative experimental darkroom techniques, and more conventional studio illustrative work . I continued to attempt to cover as many of the important events of the year as possible.

I traveled to Cincinnati and Washington, D .C., for the march on the Pentagon . In Chicago marchers rallied around national , local, and school issues.

Martin Luther King 's voter registration drive was in full swing, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities came to town for local hearings .

In August , when Democratic delegates and demonstrators descended upon Chicago, I documented their activities.

The week before the convention, Jerry Rubin had invited me to accompany the Yippie " presidential selection committee " to a farm .

I photographed the group selecting

78

its presidential candidate, " Pigasus " the pig, and transporting him back to the city. I developed the film overnight and gave a series of B x 10 prints to a character who used the alias " Peter Rabbit:¡ He is holding one of these prints in a photo I took at the Civic Center later during the nomination of the "candidate. " This hilarious event was a giant put-on

by Rubin, the master media manipulator, who had been a sportswriter in Cincinnati and knew how to stage events early enough to make the newspapers and evening news broadcasts the same day .

The events of convention week were difficult to follow because there seemed little organization, plan, or structure.

I kept posted through my contacts and by listening constantly to WBBM news radio, whose correspondents broadcast live from the field. If my work schedule permitted , I'd head for the Loop or Lincoln Park .

During the August 28 march from Grant Park to the Amphitheatre, I almost stepped on a demonstrator who had lain down on Michigan Avenue in front of jeeps covered with barbed wire . I looked down and recognized Abbie Hoffman . I dropped flat on the street as well and wriggled around to get a good angle with my 20mm wide-angle lens. In the resulting photograph, Dick Gregory, speaking into a portable public address system, seems to tower above Hoffman like a soaring monument.

I photographed the National Guard at the all-night rally on Wednesday in front of the Hilton on Michigan Avenue at which Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers sang " This Land is Your Land" using portable public address systems . At first it seemed a symbolic confrontation with the establishment residing at the Hilton , but it became very real when National Guardsmen appeared , placing bayonets on their

79

M - 1 rifles. To see my own countrymen confronting people who had the right of free assembly and speech was a shook, an unforgettable feeling to experience . In an instant, the specter of fascism , something portrayed in films and textbooks, became very real.

I would have preferred to believe it was some absurdist drama played out across th ¡e ocean, but it wasn't; it was happening on Michigan Avenue in Chicago , Illinois, U.S.A. On Thursday , August 28, I was able to get a credential from the McCarthy staff to get into the Amphitheatre.

I spent the better part of the afternoon there.

I had looked forward to this opportunity, but found it slow and boring.

I was lucky, however, to catch a vehement debate on the floor directly below me in the Wisconsin and New York delegations . In my photograph, Dan Rather, wearing headphones, stands in the midst of the New York fray. Another photo graph shows Wisconsin delegate Sandi Utech wearing a McCarthy scarf, but more interesting are the people listening to radio reports of activity on the streets with earphones . Later that day Don Petersen of the Wisconsin delegation led delegates in a march from the Hilton to the Amphitheatre .

As I review these photographs for the first time in years, many details escape my memory . I am overwhelmed by my impressions of those times . The photographs tell me things I didn 't notice when I was involved in making them.

Through the lens of twenty years they take on interpretations I couldn 't have predicted.

I selected the images included here because they are as strong as ever .

I didn't comprehend the full historic impact of the events at the time, but I did sense the power they had over our spirits . This is what I tried to record.

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YESTERDAY'S CITY BY PERRY R. DUIS The Lakefront: Chicago's Selling Point

106

McConnir/1Place was designedto house the exhibitions lhal civic and businessleadershopedwould make Chicagoan internationalcenlerfor commerceand tmde. Cl IS, ICHi-20782.

Few buildings in twentieth-century Chicago have generated as much controversy as did the original McCormick Place, destro yed by fire on Janu ary 16, 1967. To critics, Alfred Shaw's "totalitarian-style " building was a glaring scar on the precious lakefront , a giant concrete block with little grace.

Architectural writers decried the rejection of Ludwig Mies van der Robe 's innovative international-style design . To city officials these criticisms were no more than the whines of e ffete snobs. The new structure was a practical a nd e legant solution to a critical shortage of convention facilities. The ChicagoTribune'sWill Leonard even found a superlative to describe it: the biggest sculptured building in the world . McCom1ick Place boasted 152,000 square feet of exterior sculpture, wh ile the former title holder; the ancient Egyptian Te mple of Karnak, had only 120,000 square feet. Moreove1~ sculptor Constantino Nivo la of Sardinia had created the molds for rhe 2,010 pr ecas t concrete wall panel sections in a unique way: with his feet in wet sand.

The story of McCormick Place, howev e 1~ began long before the debate about design . The building at 23rd Street a nd the lake was act ually the result ofa century-long evolution. The lure ofa lakefront site for expositions and conventions dates back to the nineteenth century, when Chicagoans discovered that ne arby transportation facilities, the public 's quest for the new and exciting, and Lake Michigan breezes could attract millions. The reasons why Chicagoans staged these special events reflected their optimism for the future of their city.

The lakefront has always played a specia l role in Chicago's self-image as an economic center and meeting place. The 1847 River and Harbor Convention, which focused pressure on the federal government to fund the construction of internal improvem e nts , was he ld in Dearborn Park , where the public librar y's Cultural Center now stands.

In 1873 tJ1e Interstate Industrial Exposition, which heralded Chicago's po tfire rebuilding , was staged in a "te mporary " exhibition building that would ultimately stand for nearly two decades at the site o f today's Art Institute . And in 1890 Jackson Park was chosen as the site of the World 's Columbian Exposition over shorel ine locations in Rogers Park

PerryR. Duis is associateprofessorof historyat the University of Illinois al Chicagoand a frequent contributor lo Chicago History.

107

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 and Grant Park. Indeed, among the principal arguments in favor of Chicago hosting the fair were the advantages of the cool air and the space for expansion that a Lake Michigan site offered. As it was finally constructed, the 1893 fair included a long pier into the lake, a large maritime exhibit, and docking facilities fm¡ commuter craft from the Loop. The Coliseum, a large convention hall built at 63rd Street and the lake, burned a few year after it opened in the winter of 1893-94, and a severe economic depression halted most building plans for the rest of the decade.

But in 1900 a group of North Side businessmen publicly lamented Chicago's lack ofa large hall like Philadelphia's Export Exposition Building, the St. Louis Exposition Building, or New York's Madison Square Garden. They proposed construction of a 1,050-by-400-foot building at the east end of Ohio Street. It would feature a large amphitheater, banquet hall , and a roof garden. othing came of the plan, but in 1917 the North-West Side Commercial Association of Chicago and the Chicago Association of Commerce produced competing plans fora municipal convention hall. Both groups noted that Chicago's convention business had blossomed from 201 events with 165,000 attendees in 1906 to 625 events with 550,000 attendees in 1917-despite inadequate meeting facilities. Large trade shows were forced to go to other cities because the Chicago Coliseum, the International Amphitheatre, and the First Regiment Am1ory could not handle them. With delegates spending an average of$8 per day, the economic impact of the convention business was obvious. The NorthWest group stated that Chicago lacked a great municipal forum to bring together tl1e diverse peoples of tl,e city in common civic celebrations and discussions. They proposed an elaborate structure at Lake Street and Ashland Avenue on the Near West Side that would seat 48,000. The Chicago Association of Commerce suggested a lakefront spot adjacent to Municipal (now Navy) Pier. World War I dashed both plans.

The Iure of a lakefront fair returned after the war. In November 1919, J. Scott Matthews of the county recorder's office proposed that a "permanent world's fair" occupy the district bounded by 12th and 29th streets, Wentworth Avenue, and the lake.

The feasibility of uprooting rail yards, 'i\utomobile Row" along Michigan Avenue, and the emerging Black Belt killed that idea, but by the mid-1920s 108

Chicagoans had begun to plan what would become tJ1e 1933 A Century of Prog, ¡ess International Exposition. The event was staged, at least in part, in a genuine spirit of historical commemoration for the centennial of the town charter; but local business leaders were also anxious to substitute an image of economic progress for one of crime and Capone. The lakefront became tl1e logical site.

The land was publicly owned, free, and available for reshaping to exposition specifications. Exposition planners used Daniel Burnham 's Plan of Chicago, which had called for a string of park islands separated from the South Side shoreline by a lagoon, as a pretext for incorporating Northerly Island into tl1e Near Soutl, Side fair site, and they viewed this as critical to the fair's success. The Field Museum , Shedd Aquarium, and Adler Planetarium had familiarized millions of Americans witl1 the area, and the lake provided an everchanging backdrop Lotl,e buildings and activities.

Besides providing "natural air conditioning, " the lake played an integral role in tl1e design of A Cen Lury of Progress. Changing wave patterns created an image of untamed nature tl1at contrasted with tJ1egeometric, machinelike international-style buildings. Bright colors, especially the extensive use of neon , provided breathtaking reflections across the large lagoon around which the fair was arTanged. Colored spotlights played on tall fountain sprays, and over it all loomed the centerpiece, the Sky-Ride. Pas engers suspended between twin 628-foot towers rode 1,850 feet across the lagoon.

The lake shore skyline dominated the view.

Despite the grinding poverty of the Great Depression , 27 million visitors made A Century of Progress such a success that it was extended for a second season. For years aftenvard Chicagoans remembered this triumph. When promoters, principally tl1e Tribune, suggested holding an exposition to commemorate tJ1ecentennial of railroading in Chicago , prominent businessman Lenox Lohr was asked to take over tJ1edirectorship. He quickly found thirty-eight railroads that were willing Lo invest$3 million in a nonprofit corporation. Once again, tl1e lakefront provided an excellent location.

The plot between 20th and 30th streets was only one-fourtJ1 the size of the Century of Progress grounds, but its linear shape was ideal for the The lakefront played an integral role in the design of the 1933 A Cenlw)' of Progress lnl ernatio,wl Exposition. CHS, ICHi-17545.

Yesterday'sCity

109

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display of trains. The location of the railroad expos ition's main gate portended the role 23rd Street would play as gateway to Chicago expositions.

Like A Century of Progress , the Railroad Fair of 1948 was a curious mixture of uplifting exhibits and pure amusement. A narrow-gauge railroad wound its way around hundreds of cars and locomotives on display, and dances , a pageant, dioramas, and reproductions of Indian villages provided entertainment. Underlying it all was an effort to dispel the railroad's image of stodginess and to make ex-Gls forget the uncomfortable military "troop sleepers" of World War II. In an obvious effort to divert interest away from automobile travel, the fair showed how easy it was to journey by train to exotic places in the West and South . The 1948 fair, which opened July 20, drew 2.5 million visitors in just seventy-six clays,arousing eno ugh interest to revive it the next year. Most of the attractions returned, and an ice skating show, as well as clog, puppet, and ventriloquist acts, bolstered the entertainment.

By 1950 Chicago's role as an exposition center was reaching a turning point. Much of the civic leadership had become convinced that limit ed-

llO

The Railroad Fairof 19-18wasone of Chicagoslast/airsto successfully combine educational exhibits and popular attractions. CHS, JCHi20786.

run "fun fairs" should be replaced by a permanent annual event that would continue to attract millions of visitors. Chicago was still the nation's rail passenger hub, and Midway Airport was the wor ld's busiest. The city continued to reach out to the Midwe t as a mail order and agricu ltur al marketing center, and to broadcast farm-oriented radio programs on WLS and WC . And the nation still had vivid memories of past fairs . "In fact," noted exposition director Crosby Kelly, "there are millions of Americans who , when you use the word 'fair' to induce some mammoth spectacle, almost unconsciousl y connect it with Chicago."

The Chicago Fair of 1950 differed from its forerunners in its shift from sing le- to multi-inclusn-y backing. The theme was broadened from a Chicago focus to a national one. It was a ce lebration of the postwar era of consumer goods and the way that American industry was raising the standard of living-mixed with generous overtones of anticommunist patriotism that befitted the Korean War years. As the official symbo l, fair offic ials

YesterdaysCity

The 1st US. International Trade Fair at Nauy Pi.er (above) drew attention away from the concummt Chicago Fair of 1950, despite "amazing science" exhibits such as the atom smasher (right) and an atom model (below) in the Westinghouse Theater of the Atom. The disappointing attendance signaled that mass amusement expositions were obsolete. CHS , ICl-ii-20787; courtesy of the Chicago SunTimes; photograph by Reporto, courtesyof the Chicago Sun-Times.

ll1

ChicagoHi.story,Spring and Summer 1988 adopted Ch icago artist Charles Bracken 's Spiramid, an elon gated spiraling pyramid. Kelly explained that the pyramid represented the solid base of the American economy; the spiral, freedom to achieve and advance.

Once more, the lakefrontsite between 20th and 30th streets was festooned with rides and buildings, twenty-five of them rebuilt from the 1948-49 fair. The focus continued to downplay educat ional exhibits in favor of visually sensational displays and what publicists called "spectacu lar entertainment." Visitors walked down the Avenue of American Homes, seven new houses in vary ing price ranges, eac h with a new car in the driveway. The Westinghouse Theater of the Atom used spectacular colors to simulate a cha in reaction. The Bell Telephone exhibit ce lebrated the marvels of long-dist ance telephony, and the "Wonder Worker," cosponsored by gas and electric utilities, featured the world's largest light bulb and demonstrations of ultraviolet light. Other exhibits explained the contributions of the petroleum industry, agr iculture, and food processing to e\'eryclay life. Elsie the Cow, Elmer the Bull, and Beauregard the Ca lf, the huge an im ated figures that were the hit of the New York World's Fair, were install ed in the Borden exh ibit. The educat iona l exhibits included a display of the Oliver BaJTett co llection of Lincolniana, a children's book fair. and a pageant of American history ca lled "Frontiers of Freedom:' The rest of the grounds was filled with amusements ranging from a theater-in-the-round, then an exciting new idea in stagecraft, to ice shows and a circus. A "co unty fair" and Di,xie/,and,an Old South theater and showboat, continued the themes of vicarious travel and ersatz experience that had been staples of previous fairs.

Despite the carefu l planning and updating of the successful formula of the 1948-49 fair, the Chicago Fair of 1950 was a disappointment. The rained-out opening day foreshadowed the dismally cold weather that followed. Fair officials also blamed the Korean War for low attendance figures, noting that "war and pleasure don't mix ."

Others believed that rather than spending their money to travel across the Midwest to see appliance displays, Americans were more interested in staying home and spending their money on actua l appliances. Only about 1.5million people attended the fair in sixty-seven days¡. In either case, the failure of the Chicago Fair of 1950 prompted the ll2

Chicago Park District to terminate plans for 195], making a vague promise about a "mi litary show of some kind" that failed to materialize.

Wartime building material shortages and disinterest on the part of indu str ial sponsors killed plans for a 1952 faic In ear ly April of that year the park district destroyed the remaining ]950 fair structure, capping the underground utility lin es for future use. Almost simult aneously, George Halas and other business and civic leaders incorporated the nonprofit Chicago Park Fair, Inc. The company's announced purpose was to establish a "pennanent world's fair" in 1953. "We'll have no cheap Coney Island type of thing," announced park board president James Gately, who promised that the 1953 fair wou ld be 75 percent educational and 25 percent amusement, and that it wou ld help make Ch icago "more of a national summer vacationland than it already is."

Ch icagoans of the time did not realize that despite the optimism generated by the Chicago Park Fair announcements, the fuilur e of the 1950 Chicago Fair had effectively made obsolete the mass amusement type of expos ition first produced in 1933-34 and 1948-50. Instead, Chicago's business and civic leadership was moving toward an alternative model that stressed the city as a trade and manufacturing center, a place where buyer and seller made deals over products. Ultimately, business would be the centra l focus of fairs, and amusement and educational exhibits would become secondary. At the same time that visitin g Iowans were being "menaced by riverboat gamblers" under the shadow of the Spiramid, Ch icago was playing ho t to the 1st U.S. International Tracie Fair a few miles up the lakefront at Navy Pier.

Between August 7 and 20, 1950, forty- even nations sent tons of merchandise and hundreds of sales representatives to what fair promoters hoped would be an annual exchange.

The International Tracie Fair was controversial from the start. The Association of Commerce and Industry refused to support it, apparently because it would compete with the Chicago Fair of 1950.

The entire production was organized by the independent Chicago Convention Bureau, hotel owners, and travel agents. And though the U.S. State Department welcomed the idea of increasing trade with Marshall Plan countries, there wa great resistance to the idea of welcoming imported goods that might threaten American industr y.

Yesterday:SCity Despite these problems and the exclusion of the general public during official trading hours, more than 350,000 Chicagoans passed through the turnstiles.

UnsettJed world conditions halted plans for additional trade fairs during the early 1950s, but by the encl of the decade a new amalgam of fun fair and trade fair was beginning to emerge on the lakefront.

Business and trade would play the dominant role, but enough popular attTactions would draw crowds and justify the use of public facilities and funding.

The major impediment to further planning was lack of adequate hall facilities. ¡avy Pier had never been the ideal place for a trade fair. Built in 1914 (as Municipal Pier) and used as a warehouse during World War II, it had been allowed to dete1iorate so much tl1at by 1954, tl1e popular 2,340-foot boardwalks had to be removed. Its elongated shape made a tour of exhibits a major exertion and also funneled entrance and exit crowds through a narrow space at the west end. It lacked adequate parking and was used by other tenants. The University of Illinois-Chicago Undergraduate Division occupied the first floor of the north building; the Fifth Army, much oftl1e south pier; and shipping companies and the city parking violations bureau, the rest. Despite these problems, it was still the only place big enough to house major conventions such as tl1e National Housewares Shmv, the American Restaurant Association, and the American Medical Association. Navy Pier's competitors also suffered from drawbacks. The Coliseum at 15th Street and Wabash Avenue, a cwious so-ucture built using the boulder walls of the old Guntl1er Museum (Libby prison, imported from Virginia and reassembled in Chicago to exploit the 1893 exposition trade), was too small. The International Amphitheatre, reconstructed after the 1934 stockyards fire, was too far from the Loop, and the Chicago Stadium was better suited to sporting events.

The lack of suitable facilities nearly killed the industrial fair idea during the mid-J950s, with only one curious exception. In 1954 General Motors Corporation held its popular Motorama display of products at the Amphitheatre. Retitled the Powerarna the following year, it moved to an outdoor site adjacent to Soldier Field. Visitors milled around model automobiles, sparkling new kitchens, military equipment, ships of va1ious types, and trains ofto11101Tow.The crowd-pleasing main attraction was a 50-ton truck transformed into a

Navy Pier (tctp), the Coliseum (center), and the Stadium (bottom) alt proved unsuitable for major conventions. CHS, fCHi-20785; fCHi-20784; DN 99,806.

swimming pool. As in past expositions, technology that emphasized the new, the enormous, and the othenvise bizarre still drew crowds. People enjoyed the contact with earthmoving equipment, submarines, rock crushers, and other machinery tl1at they could never experience in their daily lives. Powerama attendance soared past 2.2 million, but its outdoor location underscored the temporary nature of expositions in Chicago.

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While thefocus of thÂŁ 1959-63 International TradeFairS'lvascommercial, expositionplanners werenot abovebolstering public auendance by staging popular feats-of-skill acts (left) and promoting a camivalesq11ÂŁatmosplu!re(above). Left photograph by Bob Kotalik, photograph above by Ralph Walte,:s , cowtesy of the Ch icago Sun-T imes.

T h e lac k o f a suit ab le co nventio n facility was ma in ly d u e Lo lac k o f fundin g. In 195 1 a de lega tio n fro m C hi cago pro p ose d th a t fund s ge n e rated by a race trac k Lax be use d Lo finance a n ex pos itio n hall, a nd th e pr o posa l beca m e ca ught in th e Illino is leg islat ive pip e lin es for seve n years. Opp os itio n to th e b ill was led by d ow nsta te farm ers, wh o he ld h o rseraces at th e ir co unt y fairs and fe lt th at they were be ing taxed unfa irl y to th e be nefit of urban C hi cago. In 1953 th e ow ne rs of pri vate convention facilities began the ir own lob by, charging th at a muni cip ally ow ned ha ll was soc ia listic.

T he pro-ex pos itio n ha ll de lega tion con tinu ed to tr y to p ush th e ir pl an thr o ugh th e lllin o is leg isla tur e. T h e Me tro p o lita n Fair a nd Ex pos itio n Auth o rit y was form ed to b uil d a nd o pe rate th e ha ll. T h ey dec ided th at proceeds from th e racetrac k tax woul d st.ill not be eno ugh Lobuil d th e hall and chose to fund it th ro ugh the sa le of revenue bond . T h e fastes t and eas iest way LO se ll th e bonds

would be for th e State o f Illin o is to pur chase th e m , b ut legislative o pp o ne nts filibu ste red aga inst laws tha t wo ul d allow it. Opp o ne nt s a lso ma nage d to slow d own passage o f stat e laws e nablin g th e Chi cago Park Distri ct to lea se o ut th e land under th e pro pose d ex pos itio n buildin g o r to pe rmit th e sa le of bee r. Afte r th e Chi cago de lega tio n had won a ll of the battles in Springfi e ld , th ey found eac h piece of e nablin g legis lat ion ch a lle nge d in the co urt s. Cons tru ctio n would no t begi n until Se pt embe r 1958, b ut , in th e m ea ntim e, Chi cago busin ess a nd civic lea d ers th o u ght it prud e nt to stage some so rt o f fair to bo lste r publi c supp o rt.

T he res ul t was th e Chi cago la nd Fair o f 1957 . lt was, first of a ll, a mo num e nt to th e o ptimism ge nera ted by th e co nstr u ctio n o f th e St. Lawre n ce Seaway. Se ldo m in th e city's hi sto r y had th e re bee n as mu ch exc ite m e n t a nd a nti cipa tio n of eco no mi c grow th . T h e p roj ec t, whi ch wid e ned and deepened th e ro ut e of ocea n vesse ls to th e 115

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988 Great Lakes, generated predictions that the "fourth seacoast of America" would draw away the business of shippers who wanted to avoid both busy eastern ports and the costs of rail shipment to the Midwest. Simultaneous improvements on the CalSag Channel and the Illinois Waterway would open new routes for ocean-going vessels to reach the Mississippi River. The Association of Commerce and Industry decided it most essential that Chicago remain the major funnel through which trade from a fifteen-state tributary area would pass. The result would be as many as halfa million new jobs, millions of dollars in clock rents and warehouse fees, and even direct passenger liner service to Europe.

The Chicagolancl Fair of 1957 was a combination fun fair and trade show. Entertainment similar to that at the Chicago Fair of 1950-Swiss bell-ringers, a Florida water-ski show, an open-air ice show, and similar amusements-drew one type of visitor, while "amazing science" displays that explained cosmic rays, space travel, and chemical reactions attracted those seeking more educational amusements . Other sections of the fair displayed the myriad of products manufactured in Chicago and offered manufacturers a less-than-subtle invitation to join the list. Finally, the show drove home tl1e point that "Chicagoland" was the place to pursue the American dream of a secure job, a home, and a "good living." Despite complaints about the lack ofair conditioning, the Chicagoland Fair of 1957 attracted 613,000 visitors, as many as Navy Pier could accommodate.

No fair was held in 1958, but the following year saw the first of what would prove to be a final series of five Chicago lakefront expositions. The Chicago International Trade Fairs of 1959-63 reflected yet another phase in the city's economic self-image: a shift still furtl1er away from the fun fair idea to a new and concerted effort to make Chicago America's leading trade center. The idea had come, in part, from the International Trade Fair of 1950, but principally from the recommendations made in 1956 by planning and transportation expert Miller McClintock. He noted that America lacked anything resembling the annual trade fairs in Brussels, Paris, and Milan. Chicago could supply just such a need if it shifted the focus of its promotional efforts from the Midwest to the world.

The 1959 fair at Navy Pier established the new 116

pattern. Each of the forty-seven participating nations occupied a pavilion where it exhibited goods for sale . Wholesalers and retailers were the primary customers, but some smaller items were available to the general public. City officials and the Association of Commerce and Industry still wanted to bolster public attendance figures with entertainment spectaculars such as acrobats, water-skiers, and other feats-of-skill acts. But all of this was considerably overshadowed by the foreign commercial displays that invited visitors to "walk around the world at Navy Pier." Perhaps the two most memorable highlights of the 1959 fair were the intense heat in the un-air conditioned buildings and the brief appearance of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip of England.

The next four Chicago International Trade Fairs fit the general pattern of 1959,but they also reflected subtle shifts in emphasis. First, it became clear that large crowds only got in the way of serious trade negotiations. Beginning in 1960, the days and hours when the halls were open to the public were curtailed so that the 30,000 or so professional traders could negotiate without outshouting tourists. Those cutbacks, along with memories of the searing heat of 1959, brought a sharp decline in total attendance. The establishmentofan international bazaar helped isolate casual visitors from professionals by placing most retail sales in an area away from the other exhibits.

Each year, the content of the exhibits evolved steadily.Japan, which sponsored a modest display of inexpensive goods at first, became the largest exhibitor of cameras and other expensive items.

At the same time, growing sensitivity to the invasion of imported goods influenced the creation of a United States pavilion and a related effort to sell American-made items to foreign buyers. As one fair official put it, tl1e 1959 and 1960 fair had been import-oriented; 1961 and subsequent fairs would attempt to create a balance.

The elf-image that Chicagoans were trying to promote also changed. The seaway theme grndually faded , perhaps after a realization that ocean trade was not rebuilding the local economy. A new tl1eme emerged to present Chicago as an innovative place deserving a growing share of government contracts. With 19,668 researchers working in 468 laboratories, the Chicago area in 1962 was ranked as the nation 's leading research and development center by the National Research Council, yet fewer

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Yesterday'.5City federa l con tr ac t d o llars were co min g to Illi no is eac h year. Chi cago firm s d omin ate d th e ew Pro d ucts Pavilio n th at sh owcase d Ame rica n inn ovation , with ma ny of th e co mp ani es in sea rch of lu crative work in th e e m erging space pro g ram. A seco nd a nd m o re subtl e th e me arose: th a t of Richard Da ley, a n Irish boss fro m Brid ge por t, lea d ing hi s city to world eco n o mi c p rom ine nce a nd min gling eas ily with amb assadors, prim e mini sters -e ve n th e Qu ee n o f Engla nd .

T he mos t imp ort ant change 111 th e Chi cago Int e rn at io na l Trad e Fair durin g its five-year run was th e m ove to a new loca tio n. In 196 1 th e n ew McCo rmi ck Place was fin a lly rea d y for th e eve nt th at had, indir ect ly a t leas t, bee n th e reaso n for th e ha ll's constru ctio n. In recog nitio n o f th e Chicago Tribune'sun tirin g e ffort s to j o in with Chi cago De moc rats to pu sh th e co n venti o n ha ll b ills th ro ugh th e Ge ne ra l Assembl y, th e facility was na med afte r Co l. Robe rt R. McCo rmi ck, the Tribune's edit or and publi she r, wh o h ad di e d in 1955. O n Jul y 25, 1961, Mayor Da ley too k spec ia l pri de in o pe nin g th e third Int e rn atio na l Trade Fair in th e buildin g uniqu e ly suit ed for it. Alth o ugh McCo rmi ck Place

Constntctionworkersbalanceon girders in tllPskeletonof McConnick Place in /960 (below). Officialsworked hard to obtain 1111' lakefront locationco11Sidered key to the successof expositions(above),but ironically, Alfred Shaws design almostcompletely blockedout the beauty of the Lake Michigan shoreline. Courtesyof the Chicago Sun -Times; CHS, ICHi-20783.

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Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1988

Thefirst McConnick Place,Chicago'smonument to tlw optimistic"Cmnelot"Pra,wasdestroyedbyfirnm/anumy 16, 1967. Plwlogmph by Bob Langer, courtesyof the Chicago Sun-Times.

provided only 25 percent more exhibit space than avy Pier, the building layout and support facilities were vastly superior. Trucks could deliver the heaviest displays directly to the exhibit floor. The towering ceiling of the main hall added a sense of drama to any show, while tJ1e windowless walls allowed total control over lighting. Many critics pointed out that the new building, although intended to continue the tradition of lakefront fairs, almost totally shut out tJ1e beautiful vistas of that setting. Everyone appreciated the air conditioning, which removed tJ1eword "sweltering" from its usual prominence in descriptions of Chicago's lakefront fairs.

Even the first McCormick Place, which burned not long after its sixth birthday, outJasted the trade fairs. The exact reasons for their cancellation after the 1963 exhibition remain unclear. The Association of Commerce and Industry claimed that they had achieved their goal of making Chicago a world trade center. But such statements undercut earlier promises of permanence (as found in European counterparts) and of the establishment of associated offices that would promote trade year round.

Perhaps the demise of the trade fairs-and the lakefront fair tradition-was a realization that an era had ended, perhaps permanently. Diminishing numbers of out-of-town fairgoers indicated that Chicago's ability to lure millions ofmidwesterners llS

to a special event was waning. The days of A Century of Progress and the Railroad Fair were gone for good. The eventual termination of such venerable institutions as the International Livestock Exposition, the WLS Barndance, and the Montgomery Ward mail-order catalog were simultaneous signs that Chicago was losing at lea t some of its regional leadership.

The end of the lakefront fair tradition can be placed in a larger context, for the world changed in the fall of 1963. The assassination of President John F Kennedy and growing involvement in Vietnam brought an end to the "Camelot" era, the name later given to the early 1960s when Americans thought they could conquer all problems.

So, too, ended the local business and civic community's belief that Chicago completely controlled its own economic destiny and that the announcement of an exposition would automatically draw vacationers from every hamlet in mid-America. If the era really was Camelot, then McCormick Place was its castle. The rest of the 1960s would, of course, cast a deep sense of gloom across Chicago and the nation. Racial conflict, environmental concerns, urban decay, and tJ1eevents of the tumultuous year of 1968 were a harsh ending to Chicago's exposition fairy tale. In this context, the fire that consumed tJ1e first McCormick Place in 1967 was as symbolic as it was catastrophic.