Chicago History | Summer 1996 by Chicago History Museum

CHICAGO HISTORY

Su1nmer 1996

$3.50

CHICAGO HISTORY The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society

EDITOR

Summer 1996

R OSE MARY K. AnA. \,IS

Volume XXV, Number 2

ASSISTANT EDITOR L ESLEY A. M AR'fl N

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT PATrY M . M1 c 11A LS K1

CONTENTS

DESIGNER

BIL L VAN N !MWEGEN PHOTOGRAPHY

] O ll i\ ALDER ON

SYD NEY L EvVIS

J AY CRA WFO RD

Copyr ig ht 1996 by the Chicago H i;tor ical Soc iety Clar k Street a t North Ave nu e Chicago, IL 606 14-6099

Chicago's Hope

JunFujita's Chicago EIL EEN FL ANAGAN

ISSN 0272-85 10 Articles appeari n g in thi s journa l are ab~tractcd and indexed in l folonral Ab.,trac/5 an d ,·lmenca: I fotmy and Life. Footnoted manusc1ipts of th e ar u cle, appear ing in this i~sue are available from the Chicago I li;w rical Society's Pub licat io n; Ollice. Cover: Albert Ewslern. Photo1;raphhyj un Fujita.

DEPARTMENTS 3

From the Editor

Making History

Chicago Historical Society OFFICERS Philip W. Hummer, Chair Sharon Gist Gi lliam, Treasurer Richard M. Jaffee, Vice Chair R. Eden Martin, Secretary Cha rles T. Brumback, Vice Chair Philip D. Block III, hmnediate Past Chair Douglas Greenberg, President and Director Lerone Bennett Jr. Philip D. Block III Laurence Booth Char les T. Brumback Robert . Burt Michelle L. Coll in s Mrs. Gary C. Comer John W. Croghan Mrs. Owen Deutsch Stewart S. Dixon Michael H. Ebner

TRUSTEES Sharon Gist Gilliam M. Hill Hammock Amy R. Hecker Philip \V. Hummer Richard M. Jaffee Edgar D. Jannotta Barbara Levy Kipper W. Pa ul Krauss Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph H. Levy Jr. Mr . John]. Loui Jr. R. Eden Manin

Wayne A. McCoy Robert Meers Mrs. ewton . Minow Kathryn Mitche ll Potter Palmer Margarita Perez Arthur F. Quern Gordon I. Sega l Edward Byron Sm ith Jr. Mrs. Thomas J. Tausc h e James R. Thompson

LIFE TRUSTEES Bowen Blair Philip E. Kelley Mrs. Frank D. Mayer John McCutcheon Andrew McNally III Bryan S. Reid Jr. Gardner H. Stern Dempsey J. Travi HO 1ORARY TR STEES Richard M. Daley, Afoyor, City of Chicago John W. Rogers Jr. , President, ChicagoPark District The Chicago Historical Society is a private!) · endowed, independent institution devoted to collecting , interpreLing, and presenting the rich multicultural history of Chicago and Illin ois, as well as selected areas of American hisLOry,to Lhe public through exh ibitions, programs, research collections, and publications. IL must look to its members and friends for continuing financia l support. Contributions to the Historical Sociel) are taxdeduCLible, and appropriate recogniLion is accorded major gifts . The Chicago Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the Chicago Park Disu-ict's generous ~uppon of all of the Historical Society's activities.

Membership Benefits include free admission LOthe Historical ociel\, invitations LO special evem,, Clurngo HistOJJmagazine, Past Times, and discount on all special programs and Museum Store purchases . FamilrDual S50; tudenr/Senior Family 45; Individual 40 ; Studenr/Senioi - Individual 35. Hours The Museum is open daily from 9:30 A.11. to 4:30 P.'vt . ; Sunday from 12:00 NOOJ\ to 5:00 P . \1. The Library and the Archives and Manuscripts Collection are open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 A. \1. to 4:30 P.M. The Prints and Photographs Co llection is open from I :00 to 4:30 P.M. Tuesday thrnugh Thursday and on Saturday. All other re earch collect ions are open by appointment. The CHS is closed on Thanksgiv ing, Christmas, and New Year's days. Education and Public Programs Guided tours, lide lecture , ga llery talks , craft demonstratiom, of special programs for a ll ages, from pre chool through senior citizen, are offei-ed. Suggested Admission Fees for Nonmembers Adults, 3; tudent 2; Children (6-12), 1. Admission is free on Mondays. Chicago Historical Society

Clark Street at North Avenue

( 13-22) and

and a variety

enior Citi1ens (65 and older),

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From the Editor One of the most poignant artifacts on display at the Chicago Historical Society is a china doll whose owner, Harriet Peabody, carried it on her flight from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Despite her haste to flee the conflagration, Harriet brought her most precious belonging with her. It survives today as a relic of a great urban disaster, as well as a testament to the importance of dolls in the lives of children . My generation also treasured dolls. Among my friends, the indisputable queen of the lot was Barbie. Mattel introduced the teen fashion doll in 1959. Girls loved her, and Mattel's cash cow was born. Thirty-seven years later, Barbie is still going strong. She has weathered changing fashions and attitudes, parental disapproval, and charges that she is a bad role model for young girls. She has become one of America's most well known pop icons. Barbie has survived because she is no ordinary doll. The key to Barbie's longevity is her ability to keep pace with changing times. Barbie's early outfits-such as "Benefit Performance," "Debutante Ball," and "Easter Parade"-reflect a female role that changed as the 1960s came to an end . She has always been the perfect companion-a devoted sister (to Skipper), a dream date (to Ken), and a loyal friend (to Midge, PJ, and others). In recent years, she has also been a Gulf War soldier, an Olympic athlete, and a Baywatch babe. Despite her impressive wardrobe, strong social network, and varied professions, however, Barbie lacks a history and a personality of her own. This allows each girl to make Barbie into her own perfect companion. o matter how times change, Barbie is always of the present. She is only out of place when Mattel sends her back in time. Over the past few years, Barbie has appeared in a variety of historical guises, including Grecian goddess, medieval lady, pilgrim, and 1920s flapper. Mattel has created these personas partly in response to the growing interest among girls in historical dolls. In 1995, the company introduced the "American Stories" series, which includes Native American, pilgrim, colonial, pioneer, and Civil War dolls. These dolls are, according to a Mattel spokesperson, intended to teach children about history. The series is clearly modeled on the phenomenally successful "American Girls" dolls, produced by the Pleasant Company since 1986. There is, however, a key difference. Each "American Girl" represents an individual character, complete with her own history. "Felicity," for example, is a young colonial girl whose life, along with her family's, is changed forever when the American Revolution begins. Colonial Barbie, however, is simply the cheerful, 38-18-33 inch doll we know and love, dressed in a patriotic costume. Despite Mattel's assertion that the e dolls are educational, I wonder exactly what little girls learn about this country's indigenous people by playing with the curvaceous, buckskin-clad ative American Barbie. Mattel also produces hi torical Barbies for adult collectors. "Barbie as Empress Sissy" (scheduled for release in late 1996) reflects a new approach to teaching Americans about history. Unlike the other historical Barbies, this doll represents a real person: Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary, consort of FranL Joseph. The beautiful doll is exqui itely dressed. Given the circumstances of the monarch's life, however, this seems an odd role for carefree Barbie to assume. Although Elizabeth, fondly known as issy, was beautiful and beloved, she led a tragic life, marred by the early death of a daughter, her husband's infidelities, the suicide of her only son, and her own physical and mental illnesses. ln 1898, she was assassinated by an Italian anarchist. Sissy is not generally well known in the Lnitecl States, and many American will be introduced to her through this doll. Having the perennially perky Barbie represent thi sad woman trivializes her life. Imagination i~ crucial to understanding history. Barbie, however, belongs in the present, where the countless opponunitie he provides for girls to exercise their creativity may ultimately help them develop the en ibilities necessary to appreciate and interpret tl1e pa t.

RKA

Chicago's Hope By sharing their experiencesof Cook CountyHospital, a doctor;nurse, and patient revealthe ongoing questfor life at one of Chicago's most renownedmedicalinstitutions. Sydney Lewis

Editor's Note: What do you think when you hear the name Cook County Hospital? Many of us j1ict11rea va t, cold, bureaucratic hospital packed with desperate patients who have nowhereel e to go. Author Sydney Lewis discoveredthat there is much more to this West Side institution. In her riveting book Hospital: An Oral History of Cook County Hospital , Lewis interviewed doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff, as well as /1alients, past and present, who have been part of tfu, oft.entumultuous life at Cook County H ospital over the year.\. These individuals tell the history of one of Chicago's most controversial institutions. By telling her interviewees tell their storiesin their own words, Lewis provides the human aspect of life al Cook County.

An undated photograph of staff Jr01nthe hospital' early years. Photogra/1/zby ChicagoPhoto-Gravure Co. 4

The History of Cook County Hospital America's urban hospitals evolved from almshouses in the mid- l 800s. The growing poor population and inOux of immigrants swamped the small, hospice-like shelter . City hospitals built separate, larger wards , and in some cases separate buildings, and divided and cared for patients based on their ail men Lsand needs, buL the y maintained the role of charitable provider and re pile for th poor. Cook County boarded its indigents in similar aim houses until 1851. Although several local hospitals assisted the poor, Chicago's first city hospital was a small wooden building constructed in 1854 at Eighteenth and Arnold (now Wentworth) Streets to treat cholera patients. Torn clown in l 856, it was replaced by a three- tory brick building dubbed "Old County Hospital" or ''C ity Hospital," where six physicians and surgeons cared for the city's poor for three dollars per person , per week. From 1862 until 1865, the U.S. Government co mmandeered the building to treat Civil War olclier . The encl of the war brought the closing of the ho pita] , and it was turned over to surgeon and city health official Bro khol t Mc\ 'ickar , who aspired to restore it a a charitable public facility. With upport from city official , Dr. 8. F. Chase became head of the institution now called Cook County Hospital on January 1, 1866. Overcrowding wa already a prob lem by 1870, when a three-story wing was added to Reprinted with permissionfrom I-Io pital: An Oral History of Cook County Hospital by Sydney Lewi~ (New York: The New Press, 1994).

Above: An early photograph of Cook County Hospital. Right: The cover of an 1874 book of governing regulations. Then and now, the hospital'soverall administration is overseen by a warden, or hosjJitaladministrator, who reportsto a CountyBoard of Commissioners,while medical careis directedby the hospital'smedicalsuperintendent.

ease congestion. Dr. Henry Lyman, pathologist and secretary of the Cook County Hospital Medical Board, described the conditions as "of the most primitive character .... The surgeons used their own instruments, and t.he physicians carried their own stethoscopes. There was a knife and a aw, a chisel and a mallet in the dead house [morgue]; and the int.ems contrived to keep a few test tubes and a little nitric acid in their rooms." Dr. E. Fletcher Ingals began his internship in 1871, and lat.er noted that "We had trouble in the Woman \\lard with the rat that would knock Lhe cod liver oil boules off of the tables on which they sLOodin order to break the bottle and get. the oil." Trained nurses from the Illinoi Training chool for urse began circulating Lhrough Cook County Hospital's wards in 1881. J\Jthough it. marked the beginning of profes ional mwes' training in Chicago, Ingals

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(toolt (!:01 nt!,l. fjospital, AR,'01.D

A:-.D EIGHTEENTH

STREETS,

CITY OF CHICAGO.

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Chicago Hi story, Summer 1996

recalled that, "usuall y a patient who had been compelled to remain in the hospit al for some time , would finally develop into a nurse ." In 1873, plans for a new hospital on the current West Side site were approved, and thre e years later , construction of two central pavilions and a boiler house with a kitchen , laundr y facilities , and mortuary were completed. Patients moved into the new Cook County Hospital on October 6, 1876. During the next twenty years, a clinical amphitheater, administration buildings , a building for tuburculosis patients , connecting corridors, and two additional medical pavilions were built, which completed construction on buildings deemed necessary for modern care. As early as 1912, however, the original pavilions had become obsolete, and , in 1932, th e American College of Surgeons d eclared th e hospital 's long wards "co mplet ely ant iqu a ted for modern hospital care." These would be only some of the is ues facing Dr. Karl Meyer, who became medi cal superintendent in 1914 , a position he held for fifty years. Durin g hi s tenure, Meyer saw the hospit al develop into the world 's largest general h osp ital and America's premier medical trainin g ground. But such renown often cam e at the expense of patients-thousands of disemp owered pe opl e who waited hours to be treated by ofte n un ympathetic hospital staff, trading their bodies and self-respect for free health care. Doctors, patients , and media coverage exposed these conditions in the 1960s and 1970s, and impro vement s in the quality of care have since followed. Today , while man y come be cause they till have nowhere else to go, man y will not go anywhere else. The system is not perfect-pati ents often wait in lines and medicin e is still practiced in turn-of-the-century buildings. But patients return to Cook County Hospit al because the y believe they will receive good health care and because the y know it still as the place where the y will not turn you away.

Dr . B. W. Sippy (center, in black) treats patients 011 Ward One. Cook County H ospital began as a general hospital treating the daily ailments, infections, and medical needs as well as more serious contagious diseases, wounds, mental illnesses, and emotional traumas of Chicago's medically indigent. 6

Chicago'sHope

Chicago History, Summer 1996

Chicago'sHope

Left: Cook County Hospital Administration Buildi ng, 1894. Above : Patients and doctors from Ward Seven. Below: A trio of interns from 1912 .

... •'

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Chicago History, Summer I 996 Below:A /1hotographof a 1912 bird's-eyerenderingof the Cook County Hos/1italbuildings within Han-Lwn, Wood, Polk, and Lincoln Streets. This block of land, originally purchasedfor $145,000, would have buildings and medical equipmentvalued at fourteen million dollarsby 1927.

Chicago's Hope

---di

Left: A /Jostcard of Cook County Hospital's main entrance facing Harrison Street, c. 1910. Taken by pojJularphotographer Charles R. Childs, the postcard attests to Cook County'srenown by the early twentiethcentury.

Chicago History, Sumrner 1996

Chicago's Hope

Dr. Quentin Young has for years applied his diagnostic skills to individuals as well as to the bodypolitic itself. Known nationaLL y for his antiwar activism during the Vietnam War, he is currently focusing his progressive and prodigious energies on efforts for a single-payer health plan for the nation. In a perfect and equitable world, one suspects, he would go mad-nothing tofix , no one tofinagle.

A group of ob.1e1w 11watch 111e diral procedures in a hospital am/Jhitheatn . . 1111 /Jhilheoter.111•e1-etllf fi rs/ da.1.\1'00 111 .1when Cook County 11(/.\ /Jital adopted Rmh Medical Collegesludenl:, afin-R11. 1h burned dozm in the G/'l'al ChicagoFi,-eo/ 187 1.

My first encounter with County Hospital was in the forties. I went to med school at orthwestern from '44 to '47-three years, army-type training. I had some clerkships at County as an undergraduate, and there was an opportunity to go there for an internship in July of'47. The requirement was we'd have to agree to a twoyear internship. The particularities were, after World War II, there was a huge influx of G . I. doctors who wanted to go into specialties . County , at that time , was one ofa handful of hospitals in the country, if not the world, that had a whole spectrum of specialty, simply because of its vastness and its history. It had over thirty-four hundred beds. But beds were different than now: now they have an official census which conforms to health rules and space rules. Then it was, you get another patient, you roll out another bed . It's still a very big hospital ; but, understand, the number was large , for two or three obvious reasons. One is, I'd venture as much as a third of the patients there-maybe as many as one thousand-were kept there because they'd just recovered from an illness, and they were essentially in nursing home state . The other thing is, the average stay was much longer. I'd venture it was in the high twenties ; today they probably have seven or eight days average stay. The resources were such that a good deal of care was just bed care and support-and we had the space , but the space was horrible. There were rooms in what was called then the "Men 's Building"-! think now it's called the "B Building. " It wa male medicine: it had eight floors, two wings on each , we would have ixty-five people on each wing. Now they have twenty beds on each wing , and they're not always filled . That means we had beds so close together you had to sidle through. 13

Chicago History, Summer 1996

The stories are almost unbelievable. There would be two interns on a floor taking care of about 120 patients, and you'd get twenty admissions every night you were on call. Call was twenty-four hours on, and you were on: if you had time to sleep, you slept, but you were on duty. You didn 't have a day off the next day, you worked twelve more hours . And there were serious consequences: there was a significant TB rate among the house staff-and occasional suicide. It was very trying. Very short staffed, doctors as well as nurses. I remember at night in that building with 120, 130 people on each of the eight floors, there would be one nurse available for injections of morphine or what have you. The interns in that day and age did such elementary things as mixing penicillin: you'd spend the first half hour of the morning mixing penicillin and things of that sort. It was very common for interns to push the patient to the X-ray or the other places they had to go: so patients would be sent to X-ray, but by the end of the day there would be scores of patients waiting to be returned. Somebody would eventually go get

them, but I want to give an idea of the very huge , almost battlefield conditions. Now, County was started, as I recall , in the 1860s as a place for people who suffered from this or that epidemic. There was typhoid , cholera, and so on. It moved several times, but ended up at its present site, in the early part of this century. At all times , it was a very important, politically connected place. The head of the institution had the title Warden-which conveys its ancient quality, its similarity to a penal institution. From the point of view of patronage and contracts, it was notorious. Certainly, all of the administrative personnel were beholden to the political system. By and large, jobs too were available on a patronage ba is, as were a good deal of the never-ending contracts for building, repairing, and o on. Of the doctors, two things can be said. It was a very competitive situation-a lot of people wanted to go there, and it was hard to get in. For quite a long time, you had to take an examination , which was atypical-interns in very few places in the country had to pass examinations. Also, even the attending phy icians took an

Old Cook County Hospital, c. 1900. Because it wasfounded as a charity ho pital that provided health carefor whatever costa patient could afford, Dr. Quentin Young said, "Count)'was always a /Jlacewhere the most recentpoverty group was taken care of," and thus was one offew hospitalsto have integratedwardsfrom its beginning. 14

Chicago'sHope

A doctor's diplomafrom 1946.

exam. Being an attending at County was a very valuable thing. It had no salary, none whatsoever, but an attending physician at County was worth a professorship in any of the five schools that used the place. It was like a feudal principality: the attending physician had control of his ward and his service, and therefore it could be used for teaching, for human experimentation, for patient care activities. The political was more than just structural, it wa in the persona of a particular person-Karl Meyer-who ran the hospital. He very cannily and successfully made the whole County Hospital and it environ his bailiwick, by an odd admixture of skills and personality . He was actually kind of a mean-spirited, almost embittered person, very few ocial kills. He was a surgeon-very arrogant and authoritative in the manner orsurgeon of the day. Everybody concedes he was a highly skilled surgeon , but he was not a nice person.

He very craftily used the hospital's resources in relation to the po litical power structure to guarantee his own enormous power. There was a whole ward at County-which is supposed to be a public hospital-that was essentially set aside for VIPs: people in the community, politicians occasionally, people with social and professional power. People like that would come in for surgery under him or other major surgeons. There's no denying that the hospital, broadly speaking, prospered. He protected it from the predations of the political; they got theirs, but at the same time, he preserved certain prerogatives. Another crucial point was his su-ategy, which I think was right, of never letting one school dominate County: there were always four or five schools competing, and by pitting them in com petition, he could get concessions. The schools wanted to use County as a teaching ground, o they paid for the junior staff that had to come in 15

ChicagoHisto1y, Summer 1996 A hospital postcard collected during World War I I cle/Jicls an aerialview of thesprawling CookCountyHospital. During the 1940s and 1950s, County was the wort.d's la,gestgeneral hos/Jilal.

and do things. It helped the schools, to be ure , but it maintained a certain kind of excellence al County that served it well for many decades. The schools, the big four, were Northwestern, Chicago Med , Illinois, and Loyola. So you get a scene, by the time I got there , of a huge, sprawling place. County was always a place where the most recent poverty group was taken care of. ·when I was there the first time you had to have a smattering of street Polish. Black English helped, but it wasn't the big issue ; Cow1ty was still majority white, albeit the Blacks were rapidly moving up, for obvious reasons. I would say in the forties, when I was there, County was sixty/forty White. You'd see all kinds of people there , it's the old American story: the most recent immigrants were the one who used the public facility. There were no Hispanics to speak of, but now it's substantially so. Then, of course, from that point onward there was an ever-larger use of the hospital by the Blacks, who weren't allowed to go anywhere else. They were Jim Crowed out of everywhere except Provident and County. By the mid-sixties eighty percent of the Blacks born in the city were born at County; fifty percent of Black deaths were in that one hospital-of the whole city! Beyond Provident -which at that time was a very tiny hospital, maybe three hundred beds-County was the one that really absorbed the Blacks and made it possible for breathtaking racial exclusion to be practiced every day in Chicago hospitals. 16

Doctors knew that if they were silly enough lo admit Black patients , they would not see their appointments renewed-they knew it. It was just one of those unspoken truths , like mo l racial compact . Granted, in the South they had "co lored only" and those sons of thing ; but Chicago was just as well segregated without any laws. That meant that not only poor Blacks, but Blacks of all social cla se , more or less, had to go to County. It look on a very ugly extortionate quality, because Black by and large were in the mass industries: packing, steel, auto, Pullman porters-all of which had these wonderful industrial union benefits. And they'd go lo County: Blue Cross would pay County five dollar a day as a nonparticipating hospital. Today, per diems are seven, eight hundred dollars a day; then it might have been as much as eighty or ninety dollars. It was a naked sub idy of the White population by the Blacks in the work force: obviously, if you have a work force that's half Black and half White, and the Blacks can only go to a five-dollar-a-day ho pita] and the rest wherever they want, the rate are kept down. That wa all dealt with in some civil rights complaints. During the forties, fifties, they had no place else to go. That was broken explicitly in 1955 by an ordinance that was passed in Chicago, the Harvey Campbell Ordinance, which outlawed-in Chicago, under Mayor Daley-di -crimination on the basis of race. In '57 there was another ordinance pas ed

Chicago' Hope which outlawed staff appointment denial on the basis ofrace. The hospital, during the forties and fifties, and to a large extent even now-though not nearly like then-was run by the house staff. The house staff was there-and attendings came, they'd make rounds. Some would be very conscientious: they'd see a few patients and make important contributions with their vast skills to understanding and treating the patient. But many didn't actually see patients; they'd review cases in conference and stuff. So it was the house staff that the gave care, and it was by and large very good. It wasn't a culture of "treat the patients nice," but there was a drive to give the patients good care. Why? Because the people giving the care were people in training, who were judged by their peers and by themselves, by how well their patients did. When you think a minute, a surgeon doesn't feel very good if half his patients die-but he feels very good if he saves the difficult cases. And, more to the point, the immediate peer group-which I would say is not the supervising doctors, but the fellow residents--could be very, very cruel if your patients didn't do well. So, out of tl1is quality of care, patients forged a really great affection. More than affection: when I came back as chairman of Medicine in the seventies, my service had 450 beds. It was the largest one. The best thing I thought I could do was to go to the Medical Admitting Ward. We literally had a ward for admissions: patients didn't come from the ER to the hospital room or bed, they went to a ward, essentially an inten ive care center, ince the typical admission was so sick that we bad to have all the support systems. It looked like any intensive care unit in any other hospital: there'd be twenty or thirty patients who had been admitted that day. They were upposed to be moved out in a day; occa ionally, some would be kept another day because they just couldn't be moved. I'd go there, becau e that was the concentrated es ence of what was happening and how the hospital was working. I would read the chart and make an effort to establish some rapport with the patient. I tell this story a lot, about this very old man \\ ho wa obviously in heart failure. I greeted

him and introduced myself and asked how' he doing, how's he feeling? At a certain point I'd say, "Why do you come here?" And he said, "I always come here." I said, "Well, but you know, why do you come here?" He said, "I been com ing here six years." "But why do you come here? You have to pass twenty hospitals to get here." He says, "I alwayscome here-this is my hospital." And I like to make the point that that old man, who probably lived in a housing project, did not believe that housing project he lived in was his, and he was right; or that the school where bis grandchildren went was theirs; or even that the little scratchy park that might have been outside their project was his park . But he'd come to believe-and, with him, most of the users of the hospital-that this was their hospital. That's an amazing thing. In tile fiftie and sixties, there was this kind of steady decline in tile size of the hospital's operation, in terms of numbers of people admitted. But in every other respect it increased. Those were the same years that every medical center was doing more-the age of antibiotics, of heart/lung preparation surgery. You could get 'I H•or They've Got A Pion To Solve This Overcrowding'

•

During the 1950s and 1960s, thepressr1'p- o1tedthe crowded conditionsof hospitalwards as illustratedltythis April 25, 1955, Sun-Times editorinlcaitoon. Cartoon/JyjacobBurck. 17

ChicagoHistory, Surnmer 1996 much bolder-and you could be sure that most things were done at County. Earlier in that period, like when I was there in the forties, human experimentation was really crass: all of the safeguards of informed consent and the patients feeling they could ay no weren 't in place. I did a master's degree there doing renal clearances on people with late-stage kidney disease. Renal clearances involve getting blood, you have a catheter in the bladder-it's a very carefully timed procedure. By and large, it would be annoying to the patient; occasionally, it could be quite gn1eling. My informed consent mainly was: "Here-sign here." I would try and explain it to them, but I can't honestly say that they really knew , for example, that they could say no. I just didn 't say it in as many words. If somebody was really resistant , I would probably ay no for them, or tell them, "If you don 't want to do this , you don't have to"-and

This 1896 Cook County Hospital admissionjJassgave its holder admissionto the hospitalat any time. 18

give them the right. But I would never claim that this had any of the modern standards of informed consent. And what I was involved in was pretty benign; I don't think I ever put people at risk. But the drug and surgical stuff ... I'm not condemning, it was the age. It was from that type of unacceptable arrangements that latter-day human experimentation protocols were developed. And, obviously, there 's no question that the reason that went on there, rather than al St. Luke 's, say, is because these were disempowered people. County could be looked at as a huge trough, a lot of people at the trough. \\/hen I was oriented as an intern in '47, there were a hundred of us. Now there are many more . Our orientation was very brief. The thenmedical director ... It 's not clear whether he ever finished medical school, he wasn't too hotnobody had any respect for him as a doctor. He was a paid political hack from the machine , and I'll prove it. At our orientation, we were told this is where the lockers, this and that, were, and he says, "I want to tell youse guys something. A lot of people will come into the Emergency Room, and they 'll have a liule slip of paper in their hand-from their precinct captain or ward committeeman, or even their congressman. ow, you and I know they don't need that slip of paper lo get in, but there 's no need to make a big thing about it-just tell them you know the congressman or you know the ward committeeman, and then do what you have to do. " That was disingenuous, but the vast number of people who used the hospital-whether once in a lifetime or every week-came to believe that they had to have that slip. Whether they did or not makes no difference-they believed it. It was part of the patronage system: that was part of the service that the party gave then, whether it was fixing tickets, or getting the roads repaired, or getting them medical care. And it was a very important prop, because you were dealing with thirty-three thousand admissions a year . The interns, we got very devil-may-care ... The work conditions were so oppressive that it was a kind of battlefront bravado. \Ve would tell them, even though it was perilous, "\Ve don 't need the damn slip!" Or if they did have the slip ... "Oh, what are we gonna do with Ma? We can't deal with her, she's been creaming all

Chicago'sHope night." "Take her to County." So they 'd bring her-or whoever-to County, but there was no medical thing wrong, so we'd say no. And , you could count on it , they 'd go up to the second floor, where the warden's office was, and the slip would come down: "Admit per Warden ." He didn't know what she had or nothing! That's how it was under th e political patron age system. And it worked: people believed that it was an entitlement, they had to get that sa nction , and they'd better be nice, meaning vote right and do what the y want. We lived with it, and by and large there was very little interference-none, really, with the work you did. There was this kind of symbiosis. But the politicians were at the trough for jobs , contracts , and appearing to be the benefactors for thousands of people . The peopl e who worked there were also at a trough. Man y of them treated the jobs like

Above: Although there are sometimes complaints today about overcrowding,this photograjJh of old Cook County Hospital makesclearthat this has beena longtime/Jroblem. Dr. Quentin Young recalledthat during his intemshijJ in th11late 1940s, "we had bedsso closetogetheryou had lo sidle through."

. lb01•e:Patie11t011 Ward Twelve and their 11i.1tors/Jose.Photographby ChicagoPhoto-GravureCo. 19

ChicagoHistory, Summer 1996

A turn-ofthe-cenl1t1) ' examining room.

patronage jobs: they either didn't show up or didn't do a full day's work, depending on their importance to the party, whether they were precinct captains or higher. There was every kind ofjob-all kind ofmaintenancejobs, all kind of ervice, food delivery, and so on. By and large the professionals didn't do that kind of thing, because the wages weren't so good that you couldn't do as well elsewhere. But we had enormously untrammeled-one might say "profligate"-acce s to patients, seeing them and all these diseases. We worked very hard to help them-but the experimental stuff and so on were what was and is placed in the trough: the patients were the food in the trough. The patients traded off their bodies and their illnesses in exchange for care. And that's what the model was-it' a very pejorative version, but I think it's accurate. And that

doesn 't mean ... I mean, if there were no County, there'd be a lot more people dead. And a lot of very good thing happened there. I used to say there was no room for any liberals at County. Only two world philosophies worked with what you saw before you, because you saw the wretched of the earth: alcoholic , drugusers, late-stage di ea e, people with wound infections with maggot in them-I mean , really bad. And so you could come up with one of two conclusion : One was a very consen ,ative, judgmental, almost religious view, that these were people who consistently violated God's law with fornication and alcohol and thievery, and they were the dregs of the earth and this was their retribution. But, in my opinion, it didn't keep these doctors from working hard to take care of them. They felt their mission was to cure the ailing-

Chicago'sHope and even though they had that terrible attitude toward their clients, they still worked hard. The other was obviously the one I-and many of us-embraced, that this was the distilled oppression of society. These were people on the bottom of the economic heap, of racial discrimination, who were born to lose, and their whole life is a testimony to privation and oppression, and what we're seeing is the physical expression of it. And that obviously implied a more compassionate concern for the patients before you. But, I'd say, on any given day you couldn't tell the difference between who adhered to which philosophy. And I would argue-as I recall-that both groups worked very hard, because the prize was how well your patient was. These doctors were guys who were paying dear for three,

five years of very hard work, under very unpleasant conditions, not a lot of support. It was only to be thought of as a rite of passage: at the end of the time, you came out with a lot of notches on your belt. You really felt very confident. And by and large it turned out a lot of great doctors. And its impact on the doctors ... I always summarize it like this: At conventions where County doctors are-and there are so many thousands of us-they tend to congregate. They don't talk about whatever the convention is about; usually, it's about the specialty you're in. The normal tendency of doctors would be to talk about the hernias they repaired or the diabetes they'd treated. Sure, there's some of that-but mostly they go back and reminisce about County.

Onlooke1J from the Cook County Hospital's College of Physicians and Smgeons, instmctors, and patientsposefor a picture /nior lo clrnicalprocedures. 21

ChicagoHistory, Summer 1996

Gertrude D'Anno a nurse, recentlyretired. When we rneetin the Nurses' Residencebuilding,she mentionsthat rarelydoes she return to the hospital. "I spent thirty-three of my .fifty-five years here, and it's tirnefor me to rnoveon and do otherthings-an d if I keep coming back it's just going to remind me of things that I know I'm not going to be ableto change. It 's somebodyelse'stime now . . . The hospitalwill go on. It will survive. It has to, because the peojJle of Chicagohave to have some place where they can come for care." I came in May of 1960. The deal was, you came as a registered nurse, you had to have a license. What you did was, you came here and you worked for six months. They gave you a room here in the nurses' residence . On the wall as you come in there was rack of cards, and that was your mealticket. And you punched it. You went and you got a meal , you didn't have to pay . And that was what you got for six months, there was no salary. I worked in the OR [operating room] as a staff nurse, and then I became the coordinator in '8 1. It was a whole different atmosphere: I think that people were friendlier, I think people in general were more willing to teach you. It was truly a learning experience. And it was really exciting-if you showed just the lea t little bit of interest there were so many opportunities for you to learn. The doctors were helpful and they were willing . If yo u were a sponge, you could not help-the opportunitie were there for you to learn. I'm not saying that that's not happening now, but I think now it's more technology. Medicine in general has changed so much, there are so many new kinds of techniques. When would we ever think , even in 1960, of being able to have your gall bladder removed through a little tube? When I tarted , everything was done by hand. There was a lot more camaraderie, up and down at all levels. It seemed like everybody worked together for the benefit of the patient; now it seems we've kind of alienated ourselves into, "That 's her job, not mine. " At that time, there was more teamwork, and nobody refused an assignment. "I don 't want to work with her," "I don't like her, " "I don't get along"-you didn't dare to say that.

Chicago'sHo/Je

ProfessorH. S. Turker demonstratesswgical techniques.Nurses, medicalstudents,and internshave trained in the hosj1ital's w11rd1 sinre iL1founding.

Chicago History, Sumrner 1996

Dr.John Ware, warden of Cook CountyHospital in 1890, ho ts a gro11f1 of nurses. At the time, 111me s and doclorshad separate living and diningfacilities.

It 's very, very difficult to get people who are poor performers out of this institution-you really have to work at it. Unfortunately, in the OR, when you're the manager-and at times I was the manager for the whole OR-you can't watch more than a hundred people and be on their attendance and their performance and every single thing every single minute. You need other people to help you. Unfortunately , when it goes to grievance and when it goes to reprimand and those kinds of things, you 're the one who's on the firing line: it's you again t the employee. And, of course, then, they have union representation and you have nobody. Sometimes I'd think, "Oh, there's so much red tape." It seemed as if, if you didn't document every little single thing, even though you knew what happened, if it wa n't written down ... To document, you just had to keep on it all the time. You'd get so frustrated. It's very time-consuming-you'd think, Is it worth it? And then you'd think, Where are the good nurses? Why don't they just give me good nurse , and then I won't have to worry about the bad ones-I won't have to worry about the paperwork. When I started, the nurses residence was strictly for nurses-it wasn't for offices, like it is now. It was like a dormitory. The nursing school was still being run. The place was 24

immaculate, very well kept. On the second floor was what they used to call the Blue Lounge, and it was blue: the walls were painted blue , and they had blue carpet on the floor and lovely settees and ofa and thing , chairs where you could sit. You could go there with a date and entertain. They had a grand piano . There were little rooms on the first floor-they used to call them "date room "-and they had a sofa with a couple of chairs and a lamp and you could sit there and socialize. There were a whole tream of people behind the de k. They sold meal books there, they took your telephone me sage , and if you got telegrams or flower or anything like that , it was all taken care of right there. The cafeteria was totally different: there were mall tables for four , and some for two. They had those rack with the cards, because you didn't have to pay. If you were an R and you needed to pay, they had coupon books. They erved breakfast and lunch, and in the afternoon snacks and things were available, and then they opened again for supper. If you worked night , you used to be able and come-I think lunches started at one in the morning-you could come at night and have a meal. This was all ladies. Karl Meyer Hall was a residence for the residents and the interns. And if you were lucky, if

Chicago'sHope you scrubbed for one of the doctors they'd say, "Come on, I'll take you to Karl Meyer for lunch. " The food there was better , but the food here was very, very good. They used to do all their own cooking: the y had kitchens in the back, and the y'd bring out these great big trays of food. And the food was good in the hospital , too, when I first came. They also had a bakery on the premises, and we used to get fresh-baked bread and butter . It was wonderfu l. The central supply, we used to make our own IV fluids too. There were a lot of things that they did. They had all their own maintenance . We had a mattress shop that used to repa ir the mattresses. They used to make their own uniforms.

Down in the basement of the nurses ' residence, there was a laundr y- you'd get a laundr y card. We used to bring our white uniforms over, you'd hand in so man y, they'd launder them free, and you'd go back in so many days and pick them up. They did all the laundry for the nurses ' residence : you'd get clean sheets once a week, and, I think, you got clean towels every three da ys. Once a week the maid would come in and clean your room. You wou ld never ever see peeling paint. The floors were shiny, tiles. This here [gesturing aro und the glass-walled room we sit in] was a beautiful sun porch . They had lawn furniture out there in the summer [points to outdoor roof terrace] and they had potted palms.

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Chicago Hist01y,Summer 1996

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The CookCounty Hospitallog bookof patient admissionsfrom April 2, 1885, to August 31, 1886. The hospitalrecord.edthe patients' place of bi1th,age, occupation,and length of time living in Chicagoas well as admissiondate, ward admitted to, length of stay, diagnosis,date of discha1geor death, attending physician, and remarks.Admissions due to bo111b and bullet wounds on this page are believed to befrom the May 5, 1886, Hay111arket Affair.

Chicago's Hope

There was a lot of overcrowding on the wards, especially in the wintertime because there were so many homeless people that came in. They'd come in with some chronic disease and just kind of bed down for the winter. There were beds in the middle of the halls ... But at the same time, I'd say the hospital probably was a little bit cleaner than what it is now. Of course, at that time too there was a lot of patronage. The environmental service workers, most of them were patronage workers. It depended on your precinct captain whether or not you got a job, and of course when there was an election you'd see all new faces. So if there was somebody who was a bad worker they'd go, and if it was somebody who was really good, unfortunately they would go too-you had no control. But I would say the majority of the staff that were hired were competent. Now they have affiliations at private hospitals, where they go out and learn how it is and how to talk to patients, how to treat patients. [lowers her voice conspiratorially] When patients are not paying, you have a tendency to say, 'Tm the doctor, you will do what I say." When you have a patient who's paying they can tell you, 'Tm not going to do that, I don't want that." They can say no. [normal voice] I think it's more well-rounded, I think it's better. There were always certain services, like the plastic surgeons and the orthopedic surgeons, that would come here and do a rotation. They might be from Northwestern or from the University of Illinois. Especially the ENT [ear, nose, and throat] and plastic surgeons: "Oh, I can't wait to go back to Northwestern." Go! The patients that we would have here, there were a lot of fractured mandibles, a lot of trauma surgeries that they wouldn't see in private practice. Some of them didn't want to deal with those kinds of things, with the clientele. One time I had a patient-I think it was at night-they had to put a tube in the nose and then in the mouth. They wanted to spray the patient's mouth and he wouldn't open hi mouth. The anesthesiologi t kept talking to him, but he had his mouth clenched. I went over and I took his hand and aid, "What's the malter? Are you afraid? How can I he lp you? Jusl tell me why won't you open your mouth?" He said, "I've got five dollars in there." I said,

"What?" He said, "I have five dollars." I said, "Is that all the money you have?" He said, "Yes." I said, ''I'll get a paper towel and I want you to take the money out of your mouth and give it to me and I'll hold it. When you wake up I'll give it back to you." He had a brand-new five-dollar bill way in the back-his teeth were imprinted on it. If you want a patient's cooperation, you have to talk to him.

Ida Milam is sixty-eight, and there is something both comforting and insjJiring about her-you wouldn't ever want to let her down. She worked for the Board of Education for twenty-one years. "I taught preschool fifteen years, and I hear the children are going on to higher education, most of them." Of course. I was born in Alabama, but I grew up here. Between my husband and I-with his children, I didn't birth them-we still have twelve chil dren between the two of us. I started going to the County around '49. A lot of people, we didn't have too much other choice but to go to the County at that particular time. We had two hospitals: the County and Provident . I knew better than to go to another hospital, and so I always went to the County. The first time was with my having children. We had some insurance then . I don't care what sort of insurance I had, I always went there. Once upon a time, between my first marriage and some separation time, if I had to go with my children I went when I didn't have insur ance, and I got the same treatment. They don't look at you because you got insurance, you know? As my mother always used to tell us, "You don't bite the hand that feeds you" - so I feel why not give it to them when you have insurance. Help them to help other peop le, like they helped me. Now, me, I haven't had no real bad experi ence, like I have heard some people say, 'Tm always sitting there, waiting." I really truly can't even say I ever really run into no real nasty person there. I've seen it happen now, please believe me, maybe to other people; but I also feel, looking at things on both sides, it was a twoway street. Those other people maybe could

Chicago History, Summer 1996

Childrenwerea priorityeven in 1895. This jJhotographshowsnursesgathering to entertain!hi'jJatientsof Ward Thirteen.

have caused some of it: they both was agitating each other. Maybe that's not the way the profe sionals should have handled it, but you're a human being, you know? You deal with a lot of people there. Like sometimes I go in there, I talk to Dr. Hoffman-I say, "Are you tired? How you feel?" You know? I say, "All work and no play, it's not good for you." There' too much pressure. They're hwnan beings. One day Dr. Hoffman pas ed me, he said, "Mrs. Milam, you know everybody, don't you?" I said, "Well, Dr. Hoffman, I tay here enough, I should." [laughs] My son-in-law told me, one time, "Mom, please don't talk to stranger ." Before he could get it out of his mouth I'm standing up there talking to another lady. He said, "Lord have mercy. I told her don't talk to strangers and here she is running her mouth." I just like to talk. Things have changed over the years. For one thing, the upkeep of the County, its cleanness. We ourselves have to help. We shouldn't let our children just go in there and throw things around. But once upon a time, if you'd

go in one of those bathrooms, it was terribleI've seen a lot of clean-up done around that hospital. And not having room for patients, patients out in the halls and beds everywhere. I was in there, beds any kind of anywhere, just push you out the way. You feel bad, but what could we do? Really and truly. With some people, I guess it was the best we could get. We couldn't even get in another hospital, o what you gonna do? Sometimes I sit up and hear people group and grumble and mumble, even now. I say, "You're sitting here grouping and grumbling. Why are you here? Go someplace else if you're that dis atisfied. You come here cause you can't do any better so sit here and keep your mouth closed." I have said that to them, but I don't say it a much now, because why make a scene? Some of them would make me feel real bad, you know? But the upport staff, they need a change. I'm serious, they really need a change. They've been there so long they have what we call a burn-out. But, then too, there' some that are

Chicago'sHope

Nursesfrom the Illinois Training Schoolfor Nurses tending to infants in 1925. A postcardfrom a medicalstudent to his family, c. 1915. "Enjoying my work fine," he wrote of his routine of daily clinic and dissectionclasses,up tofive lecturesa day, and work treating three /Jalients. He also notes on the front, "Co byhereon my way lo dissection."

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Chicago History, Summer 1996

Construction of Fantus Outpatient Clinic in 1959, named for Dr. Bernard Fan/us, founder of the firs/ blood bank. Photograph by Ruth Truebger.

as sweet as they want to be. You just have to balance things. But on the whole, I think some of them need a change-not a rest, now, just a change. They need their job , but take another position for a while. But I've even seen change with the clerks. Once upon a time you was purely dirt co some of those clerks. [tight-lipped] "You take any-

Chicago'sHope

thing we give you." If you run up on one of Lhem nasty clerk : "You ain't paying for it." I've seen a lot or LhaLchange. Dr. I IofTman is just like what I would like in a s011. IIc's a friend, he's my doclor, I can talk wiLh him. Dr. Warshaw was the ame way, she wa my friend. She caused me to have my ~aniLy today. [laughs] Reali)', I wenL through

some problems. She really, really helped me through it, and Dr. Hoffman finished it up. [laughs] I tell people how long I've had Dr. Warshaw and Dr. Hoffman and they say, "Al the County?" Because mostly vou have the interns that leave on and go to study more, and it's another doctor. I said I have been through that too at the County, and I was shocked too to have a doctor this long-but them two has been more like my family doctor. Even some of the nurses. That whole staff of nurses in that colon area, they all know me personal. I go back once a year to have a check-up, and they all say, "Mrs. Milam is here." It makes you feel good. It's a community there. I have a standing joke around this house: I say, "They know me so well at the County, instead of putting my whole name on my medicine, they just put Ida." [laughs] The worst wait is at the pharmacy. You have to look at it ... those people working it are under triple pressure, I think. Sometimes they have to send the patient back upstairs if the doctor forgot to put the signature on, or if the doctor forgot to put whether it's a cream or some kind of different thing. I'm saying what has happened to me. And you have to go back upstairs to try and catch your doctor to get this straightened out. But remember, they got your life in their hands. Sometimes we be tired from waiting upstairs, and you got to come down and be tired down there. But I've got to a place, by being a diabetic, I just stick me a lunch in my purse and take it with me, or I go around and get me a hot soup or someth ing out of the canteen. You have to look at it all different ways. People can aggravate you-the people there aggravates me standing up at the window. Standing up there, hollering at the people is not going to make them get your medicine no faster. I do agree we have to wait a long time, maybe too long-but I'd rather wait and get my medicine correct than give me something that's going to kill rne. I'm gonna str ike me up a conversation some where, somehow. And you get to talking and the time will pass. Up in the clinic I know people. I told Dr. Hoffman one day, "You like us old womens, don't you?" [laugh ] We may not talk too much, but I see them, know them by face. They're all elderly, like I am." 31

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Problemsat the hospitalbecamepopular topicsfor the press. Top: A Daily ews reporterposed as a patient to ex/Joseovercrowdingand long waits in 1962. Middle: An unidentified woman recalledher seven-dayconfinementin the Cook County Mental Health Clinicfor a Dail)' News reporterin 1962. Bottom: The Sun-Times covereda Cook County Board report requiringsixteen improvementsin order/or CookCounty HosjJitalto keep its national accreditationin 1963.

Chicago'sHope Once upon a time, a doctor-you were just in his office and out of his office, just another number. Now, the doctors they give you more of their time. Not only my doctor, I've seen other people talking about their doctors . My Dr. So-and-so, I tell my doctor this, that's my doctor. Once upon a time, you didn't hear that. I think there's more medicine in a doctor talking to you or telling you something sometimes than there is in their bottles and their pills. A lot of times, I go in and my blood pressure will be elevated, and he 'll say, "What 's wrong, Mrs. Milam?" He 's gotten to know me well enough to know most of the time; I've either had a little su·essful something here at the house or something. He'll say, 'T m going to go take care of this patient." I know how to meditate, so I'll just sit there awhile, and he 'll take my blood pressure and it'll be altogether different, and then he'll know whether it's serious enough for a change of medications or not. There's doctors here, once they get their training they could go somewhere else, but there are a whole lot of doctors I've seen for

years-I know them by sight. Got their training, but they stayed. Now, I feel that's a dedicated doctor. What you see in the newspapers about County doesn't really tell you .. . Oh, you know, I get rnad. They don't show the good part: some of them know it and just don't want to give you credit, neither. There's a whole political thing. I don 't know exactly how to explain it, but that's the way I feel.

ILLUSTRATIONS 4, CHS, ICHi-26190; 5 top , CHS Prints and Photographs; 5 bottom, from Rules and Regulations of CookCountyHospital (1874), CHS Library; 6-7, CHS, ICHi-26191; 8, CHS Prints and Photographs; 9 top, CHS, ICHi-26 I 92; 9 bottom, CHS, ICHi-26194; 10-11 , CHS, ICHi-26195; 11, CHS, ICHi-26196; 12-13 , Cook County Hospital Archives; 14, CHS, ICHi-22455; 15, Cook County Hospital Archives; 16, Cook County Hospital Archives; 17, Chicago SunTimes (April 25, 1955 ); 18, Cook County Hospital Archives; 19 top , CHS, ICHi-187 I 8; 19 bouom, CHS, ICHi-18720; 20, CHS, ICHi-21765; 21, CHS, ICHi-18722; 22-23, CHS, ICHi-18721; 24, CHS, Prints and Photographs; 25, Cook County Hosp ital Archives; 26, Cook County Hospital Archives; 28, CHS Prints and Photographs; 29 top, from Illinois Training School for urses 1925 yearbook from the Cook County Hospital Archives; 29 bottom, Cook County Hospital Archives; 30-31, CHS, ICHi-26193; 32 top, DailyNews (March 9, 1962); 32 middle, Daily News (April 21, 1962); 32 bottom, Chicago Sun-Times (Feb. 5, 1963); 33, Cook County Hospital Audio Visual Department

, 1 111od!'m blue awning on the hospital'sHarri.souStreet

entrancemasksthe originalfacadeof CookCountyHospital. 33

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JunFujita's Chicago EileenFlanagan

Arowofblack tombs - talland jagged

n 1964, the Chicago Historical Society The buildings stand indrizzly night. received an exceptional gift when With vacant stare theboulevard lamps inrain Florence Carr Fujita Amuse thegreen gleams they cast. donated a collection Beyond thelamps , among thetombs, of negatives and photographs taken Drip, anddrip, by her late husband Thehollow sound rises . Jun Fujita. This Japanese-born photographer worked in Chicago from around 1915 until his death in 1963 and left behind a body of work documenting a number of dramatic events in early twentieth-century Chicago history. The number of ··•· images in this collection is small, ;.. ~-:~-:~: ~-;r~but their historical and emo.......... _, tional impact is great. """ Unfortunately,little is known .,,, ..,... about the man who took the picII,:!!=~~=::~•;;,; tures on the followingpages. Jun .. : ~~~ :,:Fujitawas born in Hiroshimain :;::·· 1888. He emigrated to Canada when he was a teenager, where he got a job photographingthe Canadianlumber industry for a Japanese publication. By 1915, Fujita had moved to Chicagoand was working for EileenFlanaganis assistantcurator of prints and photographsat the the ChicagoEveningPost, photoChicagoHistoricalSociety. graphing the events of the day. • •·

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Thisgroupportraitof the ChicagoDailyNewsphotographers, takenin 1929,probablyincludesFujita,thirdfromthe right. Thedateof his movefromtheEveningPostto theDailyNews(whichabsorbedthePostin 1932)is unknown.Giventhe smallpopulationof peopleof Japaneseheritagein Chicagoat the time, however,it appearslikelythat this is he.

The photographs he took of the capsizedexcursion boat, the Eastland, on July 24, 1915, remain as horrifyingand movingas they were on the day they were taken. In 1919, he coveredthe race riots on Chicago'sSouth Side and took a remarkableseries of photographsdocumentinga mob of youngwhite men chasingdown and stoninga blackman to death. Other photographsshow the riot damageand the flight of familiesfrom ruined homes. As one of a very few Japanese in Chicagoat the time, he must havebeen in a perilous position himselfwhile coveringthe riots. It was an act of courageto witness and record these tragic events. In other news photography, Fujitacreated vividimages of the aftermath of the St. Valentine's Daymassacre at the garage on North Clark Street, as well as portraits of the famous and infamousof his day, including Al Capone, Carl Sandburg, Frank LloydWright,and Albert Einstein. He started a commercialphotographybusiness in the 1930s, initiallylocated on Harper Street, in one of the old World's Colum-

bian Expositionbuildings.He later moved to North LaSalle Street. Amonghis clients were Sears, Roebuck;Johnson Motors; and Stark Nurseries. Not all Fujita's photography documents urban scenes. Some of his photographs depict cloudy skies and the countrysidewhere he spent much of his time. Fujita designed and built a log cabin on RainyLakein VoyageursNational Park in northeastern Minnesota. He set his cabin in the dramatic landscape of a rocky island filled with pine trees and wildflowers, perhaps in an attempt to bring his memories of Japan to life in this solitarysetting. His cabin has since been nominated for the National Registerof Historical Places. He also owned property in the Indiana dunes, which later became part of the national lakeshore. In an article for Home & Highway,an Allstate Insurance Companypublication,he writes of Sunday drives in the country, exploringthe fresh wonders of spring. The color photographs that illustrated the piece are part of the photographycollection at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Fujitawas a multifaceted man whose other artistic outlets were of a more contemplativenature. He painted watercolors and wrote poetry, some of which was published in Harriet Monroe's Poetry: A Magazineof Verse.In 1923, the famous Chicagoprinter Will Ransompublished a smallvolume of Fujita's poems called Tanka: Poemsin Exile.A tanka is a fiveline, thirty-one-syllablepoem that has historicallybeen the basic form of Japanese poetry. The images in these poems, written with a clear, unflinching vision and an attention to physicaldetail, echo the feeling of his black and white photography. In this short poem, "Diminuendo," Fujita creates an image in the mind's eye almost as clear as the photographsyou will see on the followingpages.

Into the evening haze, Out of the giant stacks, the smoke Windsand fades. Din and whistles have dwindled away And stillness chants an empty echo.

Thesepowerfulscenesof the constructionof the MichiganAvenuebridge,circa 1926,documentthe burgeoning growth of the city's infrastructure.Thenew TribuneTowerstandsin the background. 36 Chicago

History,

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1996

JUN

FUJITA

From thecleardepth, inlaid withstars, Anechooftheglittering snow. Afleeting songandbell, overtheicyhorizon , Have lefta vibrant void .

Below: Hundredsof railroadtracks suchas thesedisappearedinto the flat Midwesternlandscape. Thepatternof the tracks might haveremindedFujitaof the patterns rakedinto the sandin JapaneseZengardens.

38 C hi cago Hi story,

Su mm er I 996

Fujita recordedCarl Sandburg 's crisp white collarand boyishshockof hair.

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40 Chicago

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1996

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Duringthe race riots of 1919, Jun Fujitarecordedthe violence andits aftermath. Opposite: Residentsremovebelongings fromtheir damagedhomeunder policeprotection. Above:The IllinoisNationalGuardpatrolled the streetsto preventfurther mobformationandactivity. Right:As this vandalizedhome illustrates,the policeoften arrivedtoo late.

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This seriesof photographsrevealsthe true horrorof racial hatredand violence.Opposite,top and bottom: A white mob chasesdown a young black man and brutallystoneshim. Above:Thevictim seemslittle more than a curiosityto the two policemen,who arrivedtoo late to preventthe violence.Fujita'sphotographswere usedin TheNegroin Chicago,a report on the originsof the riots and the police response.

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Fujitaoften photographedthe animalsin LincolnParkZoo. His empathywith this captive lion and mandrillbaboonis evident.

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OnJuly 24, 1915,the excursion boatEastlandcapsizedin the ChicagoRiver,the worst marine disasterin the city's history. Fujita's photographsof the task of rescuingthe survivorsand retrievingthe dead,the anxiety of the victims' families,andthe gawkingcrowds providesa poignantrecordof that day. Thoughalmostone hundred yearsold, the imageof a griefstrickenmancarryingthe body of a child continuesto moveus with its echoesof similar,more recent,tragedies.

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Victims of the Eastlanddisaster were laid out in the Second RegimentArmory on Washington Boulevardfor the gruesomejob of identification. Familymembers as well as curiosity-seekersfiled by row after row of bodies. Eight hundredandtwelve peopledied; twenty-two familieswere wiped out completely.

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Fujitacapturedthe essence of peopleat work. Opposite: FrankLloydWright sketches a plan. Above: A fisherman winds his nets.

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Right:Fujita photographed Chicago'smost notorious citizen, Al Capone,at the Cook Countycourthouse,talking with attorneyWilliam F. Waugh. Notethe calendaron the wall, datingthe photographto March 1929,shortly after the infamous St. Valentine'sDay massacre. Fujitaalso coveredthat scene of violenceand carnage(above).

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Asudden caw,lostintheair, Leaves thehillside totheautumn sun ; Save aleafortwocurling Notasound ishere.

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MAKING HISTORY Quarks, Neutrinos, and Virtual Perfection: Interviews with Robert W Galvin and Leon M. Lederman Timothy J. Gilfoy le

Editor'sNote: In Jun e 1995, the ChicagoHistoricalSocietybestowedits first annual Making HistoryAwards on a group of Chicagoanswho have made historic contributions to the city. The inaugural group included GwendolynBrooks,John HojJeFranklin, Robert W. Galvin, Leon Lederrnan,judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, and Studs Terkel. Historian TimothyGilfoylehas beenconductinginterviewswith eachof the honorees and, in thefirst of a seriesof articles,he exploresthe lives and careersof businessmanRobert W. Galvin,former chairman of Motorola,Inc., and ProfessorLeon Lederman. At first glance, Leon M. Lederman and Robert W. Galvin have little in common. Lederman-a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, raised in the Bronx by Russian immigrants, educated at Columbia University-has devoted the entirety of his professional life to the academy as a research scientist, laboratory director , and university professor. Robert Galvin, in contrast, was born and bred in the Midwest, the scion and heir-apparent of the founder of Motorola , Inc. As a seven-year-old, Galvin accompanied his father to company meetings and business trips across the country. If anyone ever was, Robert Galvin was "born" to be a corporate president. A closer examination, however, uncovers common ground in these seemingly disparate careers in science and industry. As youths, for instance, both were born into devoted families of modest means. Paul Galvin's later success in manufacturing was not so apparent when his only child was born in 1922. "My father and mother [Lillian Galvin] moved to a little town in Wisconsin where I was born," remember Robert Galvin. "In that community, he had gone to work with one of his boyhood acquaintances, ... but that company went bankrupt in the course of the early months of my life in that little town. So my fatl1er and mother had to motor pennilessly to an aunt and uncle on the South Side [of Chicago], and that's where they kind of established our family, and gradually he caught on to having a means of taking care of my mother and myself." TimothyJ. Gilfoyle is an associateprofessorof hist01yat Loyola University Chicago,a scholar-in-residence at the Newbeny Libra1y,and the author of Cicy of Eros: ew York Cicy, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790- 1920 (W. W. Norton, 1992). 56

Above: Paul Galvin holding his twoyear-oldson Robert, 1924. Below: Undated plwtogra/Jhof Paul and Robert Galvin. As a youngster, Robert often accompanied his father on businesstrips.

Galvin describes his father's entrepreneurial sensibility as "almost genetic-he always knew he wanted to be in business." When Paul Galvin's partner elected to restart the company in Chicago, he joined him again. "And in not too many early years, the man's company went bankrupt," recalls Galvin. "On this occasion, however, there was a ... product line of that company that had very inexpensive tools .... And my father acquired the tools at auction, walked across the street, literally, with about a half a dozen people, ... and started a little company to make the battery eliminators." So began Motorola. Lederman endured few of the economic insecurities and early failures that beset the Galvins. The Bronx, he remembers, "was a great place. It was a good place to grow up. I had schools within a few blocks of the house, a public school and a high school [were] nearby. I had friend . We had a wonderful city [New York] we could wander around in. There wa no problem about traveling around the city, going into the subway and trying to get lost and coming out some unknown place and finding out it was a province called Brooklyn .... The schools were excellent. The teachers were very well educated and dedicated, and I remember many of them as being stimulating, exciting. That was a wonderful time to grow up."

Above left: Robert and Paul Galvin, c. 1950 . By 1956, the younger Galvin was president of Motorola. Above: Robert presented Motorola's "Twenty-Five-Year Service Pin" to his father on October24, 1953 .

Chicago H istory, Summ er 1996

Robert Galvin was only six when, in 1928, his father founded the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation at 84 7 West Harrison Street. The market for battery eliminators , however, was quickl y evaporating, as their main application for use in battery-operated home radios became obsolete. So Paul Galvin moved the compan y into an entirely new product line-the car radio . What was an unheard of and high-risk innovation in 1930 soon became commonplace in the expanding car culture sweeping the United States . The "first commercial auto radio " was the "Motorola, " a name signifying both motion and the radio. The Motorola 's popularity convinced Paul Galvin to rename the company after it in 1947. After growing up in Rogers Park and Evanston , Robert Galvin attended the University of Notre Dame for two years before j oining the Army Signal Corps in 1942. At the end of World War II , he returned to his father 's company , working first as a stock boy and eventually as a production- line troub leshooter. Galvin quickly advanced within the ranks before being promoted to executive vice president in 1948 and president in 1956, onl y three years before his father died . When Robert Galvin assumed control, Motoro la was a $227 -mi llion-a-year compan y manufacturing car radios, walkie-talkies , solid-state color televisions , and phonographs. Over the ensuing three decades , he transformed Mo58

A bove left: Father and son share lu nch in the M otorola caf eteria, 1954. Above: Robert Galv in with one of his teammates 011 an Evans ton s~fibalf tea m, 1957. Galvi n jJfayed second base. Below: Pau l and R obrrt Galvin discussing p ortable radio and chassis, c. 1955.

Making History torola into an $11-billion-a-year giant in electronics, employing over one hundred thousand people. Like his father more than a half-century earlier, Galvin completely abandoned several product lines for others. By 1990, Motorola had jettisoned its television business and was the leading manufacturer of two-way radios, cellular phones, pagers, and advanced dispatch systems for commercial fleets. It was the fourth-largest maker of semiconductors. Unlike IBM, which faltered upon entering a new technological phase (moving from mainframe computers to personal computers), Motorola nimbly moved from conventional two-way radios and TVs to cellular radios and pagers. Motorola's success generated political appointments for Galvin. In 1970, he served on the President's Commission for International Trade and Investment. From 1982 to 1985, Galvin chaired the Industry Policy Advisory Committee to the U .S. Special Representative to the Multilateral Trade egotiations. During that time, Motorola attacked J apanese producers for "dumping" cellular phones in the United States, a charge later upheld by the International Trade Commission. Galvin was later credited as a key architect in opening up the Japanese semiconductor market in 1986. In 1990, Galvin retired as Motorola's chairman, but remains involved in long-term corporate planning as the head of Motorola's executive committee. Since then, he has been inducted into the ational Busines Hall of Fame and received the National Medal ofTechnology. Just prior to his retirement as chairman, Galvin was named one of the firsl recipients of the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award from the Department of Commerce ( 1989), specifically for making products with zero imperfections. Indeed, future historians will most likely equate Galvin's tenure at Motorola with "virtual perfection." In 1978, after general sales manager Art Sundry pointed out numerous poor features in Motorola's product line, Galvin began emphasizing "total quality." In his words, Motorola adopted "a culture of intending that we never do anything that would dissatisfy the customer." Proponents sometimes referred to this as the "six sigma" philosophy. According to Galvin, "a sigma is a standard deviation from norm, and in statistical quality control parlance, if you can ... build ... a product or a service to where all the variations stay within six standard deviations from norm and fit your specifications, you will

Carl Lindholm, Robert Galvin , and Bo Yibo, Vice Chairman of the Central Advisory Committee of the People's Republic of China, October 1986.

ChicagoHistory, Summer 1996

In I 988, President R onald R eagan pr esented Galv in with the Ma lcolm Baldridge Na tiona l Quality Award (below). Left: Galvin addres es the U.S . Dep artment of Commerce audience after the presentation.

have only 3.4 items outside the range of ever y million of something you do. This translates into, when you finally work the system right , a quality level of 3.4 defects per million . And we call that 'virtual perfection."' Galvin admits that Motorola examined the ideas of W. Edwards Deming and oth er postwar industrial theorists, but in the end "we finally cam e up with . .. our own system. We were just either screwy enough or diff erent enough [to] .. . let ourselves develop our own system. " Virtual perfection departed dramaticall y from the scientifi c management techniques developed by Frederick Winslow Ta ylor early in the twentieth century. According to Galvin , "the six sigma systems .. . are quite different from the Ta ylor advoca cy. ... An overly simplified way of characterizing the Ta ylor approach was that it was a top-down phenomenon . If I measured your time , I could figure out how to tell you how to use your time bett er , and I would think of a system , and then I'd ask-I'd require- you to use my system. " Whereas Taylorism broke down and measured factor y floor production to the individual worker, Motorola organized worker s into independent "self-directed teams." According to Galvin , the teams "have no supervis o r. Somewh er e along th e line there 's somebody in the building that has som e authority, and the y see that person in terms of human interr elationships from time to time , but they ma y never get an order from that person ." In contrast to Ta ylor 's system , which imposed manag ement dir ective s on workers , Galvin asked : "Wh y don 't we trust our pe ople to determine from the bottom up what needs to be don e? Once we've decided what needs to be done , we very often institutionalize that for a temporary period of time .... And we teach ourselves to follow that process so that we have a 'no mistakes ' methodology of getting a function done, but in the meantime we're stud ying how to improve it, and the people who do the job are figuring out the improvements."

Making History Galvin insists that virtual perfection not only rejected the principles of Taylorism, but actually saved immense amounts of time. "We now know that ifwe perform a function perfectly, we do it faster, or ifwe aim to do a function faster, we have to figure out how to get rid of the parts that cause the mistakes or the delays ... and then we end up with better quality, " claims Galvin. "You can almost start from either end of that pole and come to a very satisfactory result, but it depends on Mr. and Mrs. Everyman being the authors of what happens versus Mr. Taylor's plan prescribing for the rest ofus." Characteristically, there is not a single time clock in any Motorola plant. A major ingredient in Motorola's success and longevity has been its ability to adapt to changing conditions in the American economy. Consider the invention of the transistor in 1948, remarks Galvin. "We didn't know that was coming in 1947. The laser is a surprise. The computer is a surprise. In 1940, I didn't know that there would be a computer. ... Now, those things are historical facts. They are events that took place, and they can be aggregated under the rubric of a surprise. The consequence of that is, that none of the companies that my father looked up to when I started here as a stock boy in 1940, are in any of the businesses that we're in today. Historically, most institutions do not adapt to the next surprises. That's a lesson about human beings. It happens to be an historical fact of the last fifty years. I believe you could find the same history the prior fifty years and the prior fifty years. We did adapt. I think there's something special about that. I

Galvin visi ts employees on the assemblyline, 1959.

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Above: Al lhe 197 1 Chicago Public Schools Math and Science Conference, Galvin la/ks with a student and a schoolofficial. Leji:Galvin testifies beforPthe U. . Senate Foreign Relaliom Commillel'.

Making Hislo1y

think that we had an orientation to 'renewal,' and every time someth ing new happens, why can't we do it? It's a 'why not' versus 'why would anybody do that' or 'we're so satisfied."' While Galvin was searching for perfection in the workplace, Leon Lederman was looking for the same in his laboratories. After attending James Monroe High School, Lederman received his bachelor of science degree from the City College of New York in 1943 and his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in 1951. He spent the next twenty-eight years as a professor at Columbia, simultaneously serving as director of Nevis Labs from 1962 to 1979 and occupying the Higgins Chair in Physics from 1972 to 1979. Lederman then moved to Chicago to assume the directorship of the Enrico Fermi ational Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. Lederman remains one of the most prolific and honored scientists of his generation, authoring more than two hundred publications on the properties and interactions of elementary particles. His most noted discoveries include the neutral K-meson particle (1956) and a new elementary particle called the "bottom quark" or "B Quark" (I 977). Lederman was even involved in researcl1 leading to the invention of Doppler Radar. His numerous awards and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1958-59), the Ford Foundation (1958-59), the Ernest Kempton Adams Foundation ( 1961 ), and the ational Science Foundation ( 1967), as well as the National Medal of Science (1965), the Wolf Prize in Physics (1982), the Enrico Fermi Award (1992), and the presidency of American Association for the Advancement of Science ( 1991-93). The capstone of Lederman's scientific career came in 1988 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of the muon neutrino while working in 1961 and 1962 at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island . Subatomic particles with essentially no mass, neutrinos pass effortlessly through objects, including the earth. Although the existence of neutrinos was suggested as early a 1931, Lederman was among the first to produce and tudy the particles in a laboratory. The research led to the use of neutrino beams to probe the structure of matter and helped demonstrate that there were fundamental symmetries among subatomic particles. In recent years, physicists have relied on neutrinos to develop theories uniting some of the basic forces of nature. Upon assuming the directorship ofFermilab in 1979, Lederman remembers that "my first task ... was to build that machine." "That machine " was the Tevatron-the world's first superconducting synchrotron and the most powerful particle accelerator. Sometimes called an "atom smasher," Tevatron is a superconducting magnet system contained within a 6.3 kilometer circular tunnel called the "main ring ." Unlike other accelerators, Tevatron had the capability of "cap turing " antiprotons in a storage ring. This allowed scientists to "gradual ly build up the number of anti protons and squeeze them together-a very, very elaborate choreography of many rings and many technologies," ay Lederman.

Leon Ledennan as a child.

Chicago History, Summer 1996

The Tevatron produced different kinds of anti protons. Once inserted into the main ring, they ran in opposite directions from the protons. Circling each other in clockwise and counterclockwise directions, the protons and antiprotons were accelerated to high energy speeds. "Then you make head-on collisions," states Lederman. "A head-on collision is much more violent than the standard collisions of a particle with somet hing at rest. In other words, if a Mack truck hits a Ping-Pong ball, not much happens to the Ping-Pong ball ; it just flies off, and nothing much happens to the truck. But if two Mack trucks collide headon, then you get CB radios and horns and fenders ... flying off in all directions . And violent collisions are the things we want to learn about, because they teach us more about physics." The Tevatron quickly surpassed its major competitor, the acce lerator at CERN in Switzerland, playfully described by Lederman as "t he laboratory we love to hate. " CER had successfuily experimented with head-on collisions of anti protons, "but the energy [at CERN] was a lot lower ," remembers Lederman. So in the late 1980s, the Tevatron and CER program were competing to discover the "top quark." "At that point, the race was a draw, " says Lederman. " either laboratory had found the top, but CER had exhausted its possibilities, and Fermilab was just getting started. Because our energy was 2.5 times higher , . .. our possibilities were much higher. And in fact, in 1994, the Fermilab group published the first evidence for the top quark. In 1995 it was confirmed, so now we have a top quark, also found at Fermilab." By some measures, the Tevatron epitomizes the vigor and vitality of American science in the Cold War era. ince 1991, Tevatron has been the world's most powerful source of data on elementary particles, "the workhorse of American physic and the most powerful machine in the world, especially now that we've lost the Superconducting Super Collider [in Texas]," argues Lederman. The Tevatron confirmed many predictions of the Standard Model, the central theory of elementary particles, allowing investigators to explore a domain where "no human eyeball has ever set foot," according to one mixed metaphor. These specialized pursuits for "top quarks " and "virtual perfection" reverberated beyond the confines ofFermilab and Motorola. Both proved critical to the emergence of metropolitan Chicago's most significant "technoburbs" or "edge cities"-Naperville and Schaumburg. Since 1945, the combination of retail shopping 64

Above: The "two neutrino"experiment lea111, c. 1961. Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York. Opposite: Leon Lederman as a graduate student, c. 1946, with a cloud chamber, an apparatus w,ed to seepmticles.

Making HL tory

ChicagoHist01y,Summer 1996

Making History malls, industrial parks , and professional office centers on the outskirts of cities-all linked together by interstate highways-have produced a new form of suburbanization. By 1994 , for example, Schaumburg's 193 ,396 employees doubled the number found in individual downtowns such as Atlanta and Minneapolis. Furthermore, Schaumburg had more eating and drinking establishments than Portland , more Asian residents than lower Manhattan, and more professional corporations than downtown Houston. The construction of Motorola's new, 325-acre international headquarters in the 1970s was fundamental to Schaumburg's growth. Naperville, thirty miles west of Chicago's Loop and a short distance from Fermilab, more than doubled its population during the 1980s , reaching 85,351. Established in 1831 (making it DuPage County's oldest community), by 1990, Naperville's employment base was supported by AT&T, Amoco, Dow Jones, Nalco Chemical, and orthern Illinois Gas. Much of this is centered along the seventeen-mile stretch of the East-West Tollway (Interstate 88; opened in 1958) , sometimes called the Illinois Research and Development Corridor. Argonne National Laboratory, an outgrowth of the Manhattan Project research at the University of Chicago during World War II , was established southeast of aperville in 1947 by the Atomic Energy Commission. Fermilab, along with Bell Telephone Laboratories and the Amoco Research Center, was a key ingredient to the economic growth of the Naperville area after 1960. One hundred twentyfive proposals suggesting more than two hundred sites in forty-six states lobbied for the first "truly national laboratory" in the 1960s. Lederman notes that "the Chicago area proposal was considered the best. And it had the usual things in it: nearby major airport; people could get to it. ... The climate was . .. satisfactory. The area had ... a well-trained workforce, with the possibility of the existence of some local companies of high technology, ... and the state was very good at saying, 'We will acquire the land. We'll pick up the land .' The land was very flat, and the geology was very good, and so there was no problem in having the site ... thirty or forty feet underground." In the end, Fermilab ''.just outweighed all the other proposals," argues Ledern1an. "It was taken seriously by the state and by a community that wa very pro getting this machine there." Indeed , the tate and loca l communitie donated approximately sixty-eight hundred acres ofland. ot surprisingly, when Fermilab opened, "it almost doubled the mone y- federal mone y-spent in this area, ...

On his sixtieth birthday, Professor Lederman delivered the lecture "Jnn erspace, Outerspace" at Fermilab. Opposite:King Charles XVI of Sweden presents the Nobel Prize to Ledennan.

Chicago Hist01y,Summer 1996

and lots of little high-tech companies sprang up around Fermilab. Certainly when I got there, we began a very close collaboration. We were used to each other and ... this acted as an attractive feature for bringing government people in, because they could visit two labs with one blow. And so I think that was very positive, certainly very positive for the Chicago area, because some huge fraction , ... 50, 60, 70 percent of the [federal] funds are spent locally, both for salaries of people who live there and for local contractors and local suppliers of various materials. " Fermilab, in fact, engaged in industrial production during Lederman's tenure. The Tevatron required over one thousand magnets, each twenty feet long. o manufacturer anywhere in the world produced such a product. "So we needed a factory," remembers Lederman. "We didn 't really know how to make magnets, so the factory was an assembly line. That's what a factory is. And the assembly line would produce some tenible magnets , and we'd try to find out why they were so terrible , and we'd find out that we have to change this and that. We made the change in the tooling of the assembly line , and we kept going this way, hoping that at some point, a good magnet would be produced. And then we'd have two things: one good magnet and a mass production capability. . . . [W]hat fed the factory were materials from industry-the wires, the cables, the clamps, the stainless steel devices-all the things that were needed from industry , but we decided that this factory had to have intimate control ... of it. " When working at full capacity, the factory employed about two hundred to three hundred workers. "And it produced the thousand magnets and probably another two hundred or three hundred other kinds of superconducting kinds of devices that were needed for this thing. And most of the workers were people who were moonlighting. They were housewives and taxi drivers and off-duty policemen." In the latter years of their careers, Galvin and Lederman became strong advocates of new and innovative forms of education. Beginning with the Motorola Training and Education Center, a corporate-training department that opened in 1981, Galvin was one of the first to introduce continuous training programs for employees in his American factories. Along with Motorola University and the Galvin Center for Continuing Education (e tablishecl in 1986), Motorola employee! new delivery technologies such as computer-based training, electronic publishing, satellite communications, and other interactive training systems to serve as both classroom training facilities and electronic distribution points. The system enabled Motorola employees to attend in-depth seminars without leaving their work locations. Satellite-transmitted seminars soon replaced business trips. By 1985, Motorola devoted more than one million hours to training twenty-five thousand of its ninety thousand employees worldwide, an investment of forty-four million dollars.

Making History

Galvin envisioned Motorola University supplementing the existing system of higher education. "We couldn't expect the general system to provide us with the particular things that we needed to have. To the extent that we also need the general system, we go out and use that. To the extent that we duplicate a little bit of what the general system does , it's because it fits compatibly with all these specialty things that we just have to have for ourselves. We had to train every employee. We have to train currently, every employee in the company, statistical quality-control principles. Well, ifwe went to the professor at [a] university, he would have, probably , a wonderful course in statistical quality control. We just want these nine pieces of that course, and we want it in four days, because that's what we need to be on one of these teams." In 1986, Leon Lederman helped establish the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, one of the nation 's first residential secondary schools created specifically for gifted students in the sciences. "Kids hate to be different," Lederman recognizes, "and very bright kids know they're different when they're in normal schools, and they react to that differentness in many different ways. But here, they're all the same. They're all ... academically gifted and work together and collaborate and ... have excellent teachers. While the building was a hand-me-down from the overbuilding of schools in the early '70s, it works, and it's a very splendid school."

Below: Lederman created Fennilab's Children's Center, a daycare facility for employee use, in 1981. H ere he visits the center on his sixtie th bi11hday.

Chicago Hist01y,Summer 1996

Lederman left Fermilab in 1989, first becoming the Frank E. Sulzberger Professor at University of Chicago and later the Pritzker Professor of Science at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). During that time, he founded the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science (TAMS) at IIT. TAMS had a goal of enrolling the seventeen thousand math and science teachers in Chicago's 550 public schools over a seven-year period for a sixteenweek intensive course introducing new and innovative ways of teaching science and math. If successful, Lederman hoped to duplicate the program in other U.S. cities. TAMS, Lederman acknowledges, was an outgrowth of the school reform movement of the late 1980s. In 1989, there was "a lot of excitement about fixing the Chicago public schools. And one of the issues that was raised at some of the many meetings I attended was the fact that elementary teachers don't know how to teach math and science. And so that gave rise to the notion that we might try to help them as university people." With support from the Council of Presidents of local universities , the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the state of Illinois, TAMS sought to "retool" elementary education instructors teaching math and science. "[T]he vast majority," claims Lederman, "have no training in math and science, and too often approach the subject with the same fear and loathing as anyone else and transmit that to the kids , and that's terrible." Lederman admits the program had a "rocky" start. By beginning on a large scale, he believed, they hoped to quickly adapt to the demands to improve science education in the entire city of Chicago, "because we wanted to fix the whole city. This is the megalomania of the physicist, perhaps .... The federal government's getting harder and harder to count on, and so we're trying to switch over to state and local sources of money. That's where we are at the moment." Both Lederman and Galvin express frustration regarding the failure of Congress to support ongoing, scientific research , specifically the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas. Designed to be the ·world's largest and most sophisticated machine in the h istory of experimental physics, construction of the SSC began in the 1980s. But in 1993 , fears of cost overruns and federal deficits induced Congress to abruptly halt funding. Virtually overnight, construction of the SSC stopped. Ba ed upon his experiences as an evaluator of the National Science Foundation and other scientific enterprises, Galvin simply describes it as "a tragedy." Ultimately, "we will fail to learn on the early side some surprising revelations that science would likely have provided us, and we don 't know what they are .... Discoveries are discoveries, and there is so much about thi creation that we don 't yet know .... But every four or five years we say, 'Wow! Wasn't that a great discovery that we made. I guess we know everything.' And then four years later we discover something else we were so surprised to learn. But people have their hearts in a different place . . . . Someday we'll have another tool, and we'll finally discover what might have been discovered in 1999 or 2002, and we'll dis70

Making History cover it in 2022 or 2032. Too bad. A whole generation will have lost whatever the social, medica l, economic benefits that would have been." For Lederman, the rejecLion of the SSC had a more ominous meaning. "When it happened in 1993, the message wasn't clear," he concedes. Admittedly, the federal government needed "to rein in the budgeL and to solve the deficit. ... But by now it's 1995, [and] we realize that was the first shot in a war that the government, but mostly Lhe new Congress [elected in 1994], is waging against science. I think that science is now under tremendous stress across the board. It's not only particle physics; it's all physics and chemistry and biology ." According to Lederman, the long-term impact of this and related congressional decisions has catastrophic implications . "[W]e're damaging the future prospects of our children and grandchildren. o question about it. We have a certain capital of basic knowledge that we're running through in applying this to industry and Lechnology. That's going to run out." Ironically , these negative forbodings harken back to the education of Lederman and Galvin alike. The former readily admits he profited from free public schools from kindergarten through college and later with graduate school and postdoctoral fellowships. "[A]t some point, ... somebody made it easy for me. I had good schools. Who did that? Somebody did that. I had plenty of money to do my research. Who did that? How did that come about? Somebody did that." In Lederman 's mind, the older generation of scientists are responsible for the next. Indeed, "at some point, you have to Lake your turn and see if you can do that for others, and I'll tell you, it's not easy," he admits. "I mean, those guys who did it all for me must [not] have had it easy, because this is very hard. " Galvin even attributes the origins of virtual perfection to his elementary education at St. Jerome 's School in Rogers Park. "On a given occasion, whatever the grade was-fourth, fifth, or sixth, and I think the nun 's name was Sister Mary Norberdette-the assignment ... was announced that on Friday there would be a tesL on fractions to decimals , decimals to fractions .... And she said there was only one grade acceptable, and that was 100 percenl. Well, of course, we all went home to our parents and raised Cain about thaL. ... My recollection is about a third of the kids in the class got a hundred , and the rest of them all survived .... But the inLercsting Lhing about Lhat [is] that here was a nun Lhat was generating a standard, a level of expectation of perfection. And

Leon LedermanjJosesfor the press on October19, 1988, the day the Nobel Prize announcementwas made.

ChicagoHistory, Surnrner1996 ... isn't it interesting that I was given the introduction to the right standard in fourth, fifth, or sixth grade when this nun said, 'There's only one acceptable answer-100 percent.' And now, finally, when I'm about fifty-five or sixty years of age, I've finally come to the realization, it's doable and it better be done. And so we set much higher standards in our [Motorola] corporation." Both are distressed by the possibility that American society i unwittingly abdicating its historic commitment to scientific excellence. Galvin criticizes "those who would act rashly with regard to what funds are being allowed and afforded by the federal government, which for the most part, end up being applied in univer ities where the greatest research is done in our society." For Galvin, the question is clear-cut: "Will there be enough re earch being done in government laboratories? I am of the side that I would err on the side of doing more, because I think science finally seeds the next economic development. " Lederman passionately argues that American society is beleaguered by an educational crisis. "At the moment, " he contends, "the American public is not terribly interested in schools." Lederman concurs with recent education critics who contend that the poor quality of public education has made the United States "a nation at risk." He admits that "although there are a lot of nice stories about successes here and there, the center of mass hasn 't moved very much." Equally ominous is the public's ignorance about science. By one measure, 97 percent of the American public is illiterate in science. Lederman reminds Americans that "illiteracy is a shame of nations," a catastrophe in the making. For science to remain a positive force in American society, "we've got to raise that understanding so that we can preserve a democratic process, and maybe send some wiser and more knowledgeable people to Washington." FOR FURTHER

READI G

The most accessible sources on the ideas of Robert W. Galvin and Leon M. Lederman are in Robert W. Galvin, The Idea of Ideas (Schaumburg, Illinois: Motorola University Press, 1991); Kenneth R. Thompson, "A Conversation with Robert W. Galvin," 01ganizational Dynamics, 20 (Spring 1992); Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle:If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question (New York: Houghton Millin, 1993); Leon M. Lederman (with David N. Schramm), From Quarks to the Cosmos:Tools of Discovery ( ew York: W.H. Freeman, 1988) ; Leon M. Ledennan, "T he Tevatron," ScientificAmerican (March I 991), 48-55; Leon M. Lederman. "Blackboard Bungle ," The SciencesQan.-Feb. 1995), 16-20. Robert Galvin and Leon Lederman await their biographers. ILLU

TRATIONS

56-62, courtesy of the Robert W. Galvin family and Motorola Museum of Electronics; 63, courtesy of Ferrnilab Archives; 64, courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory; 65, courtesy of Nevis Laboratories , Columbia University; 66, AP/Wide World Photo; 67, 69, 71, courtesy of Fermilab Archives; 72, Photographs by Linda Schwartz. 72

Above: Robert Galvin addresses the audienceajler receiving the Marshall Field History Maker Award at the ChicagoHistoricalSociety. Below: Professor Leon Lederman accepts the Enrico Fenni History Makn Award from R. Eden Martin, ChicagoHistoricalSocietytrustee.